Abstract

Police Spies in the City of the Angels

One morning in March 1984, the author got a check for $2,600 in the mail. It was made out by the organization American Civil Liberties Union's Southern California affiliate, but the money actually came from the Los Angeles city treasury. It was the author's share of a court settlement for damages resulting from years of spying by the Los Angeles Police Department's ubiquitous and once-invisible Red squad. On February 22, 1984, the police, represented by attorney general William French Smith's old law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, agreed to settle the six-year-old case out of court. The controls set out in the Los Angeles agreement require the police to obtain advance approval for any future intelligence activity from a five-member civilian police commission appointed by the mayor.