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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@aol.com href="mailto:tanstl@aol.com">David Sladky</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=undisclosed-recipients:
href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, April 26, 2010 9:55 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Good Riddance, Daryl Gates </DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><FONT face=arial color=black size=2><FONT
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></FONT><BR><BR>
<DIV style="CLEAR: both"><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" color=#800000 size=2><FONT
face="Verdana, Arial" color=#800000 size=2><FONT face="Verdana, Arial"
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<DIV align=right>April 19, 2010</DIV></FONT></FONT></FONT><I><FONT size=4>
<H1>The Scourge of South Central </H1></I></FONT><FONT color=#800000
size=5><FONT color=#800000 size=5>
<H1>Good Riddance, Daryl Gates </H1></FONT></FONT><FONT size=4>
<DIV>By DAVE LINDORFF </DIV></FONT><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" color=#800000
size=6><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" color=#800000 size=6><FONT
face="Verdana, Arial" color=#800000 size=6>
<DIV>T</FONT></FONT></FONT><FONT size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman">he former
Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, who died last Friday of cancer at his
home in California, is being widely credited in mostly laudatory newspaper
obituaries as the man who developed the idea of Special Weapons And Tactics
(SWAT)units--those paramilitary police teams so loved by Hollywood
filmmakers--who bring the art and weaponry of modern warfare into communities,
breaking into houses with faces covered in ski masks, and carrying assault
weapons in order to make arrests for often minor offenses, or blowing away
people--often innocent people--in what the modern military calls "force
escalation incidents."</FONT></DIV>
<DIV>But Gates was more than just the Sultan of SWAT. </DIV>
<DIV>He was also a proponent of the police-state tactic of massive surveillance
and spying. Not that he invented it. As a deputy chief under Chief Ed Davis, and
later as chief of police, Gates inherited the LAPD’s notorious "Red Squad,"
known as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), which had a sordid
history going back into the 1920s, but he certainly expanded it
dramatically.</DIV>
<DIV>I had my own experience with the PDID when I was an editor of the little
alternative news weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, founded by myself and several
other Los Angeles journalists in 1976, after the demise of the venerable Los
Angeles Free Press. Our publication, which took on the issue of police brutality
and especially the all-to-frequent shooting of unarmed citizens, very quickly
became a special focus of the PDID. We learned, years after our publication had
folded, that our volunteer staff had been infiltrated by a young PDID officer
named Connie Milazzo, a woman just out of the Police Academy, who came to us
posing as a journalist wannabe. </DIV>
<DIV>In a depositions taken by attorneys with the Southern California American
Civil LIberties Union as part of a class action suit against the LAPD and the
City of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, after Milazzo and other equally young
Red Squad spies had been discovered infiltrating over 200 peaceful organizations
in Los Angeles ranging from our newspaper to the local chapters of NOW, the
Peace & Freedom Party, and even the office of City Councillor Zev
Yaroslavsky, we learned that the PDID was gathering dossiers on literally
thousands of local political activists, infiltrating and spying on protected
political activities like peace demonstrations, anti-nuclear demonstrations and
even political campaigns, and also engaging in provocateur activities, trying to
encourage peaceful groups to cross the line into criminal actions.</DIV>
<DIV>We learned too that our paper was actually sabotaged by the PDID, which
operated under Gates’ authority. We had, after about six months’ operation,
hired a person at a considerable cost to sell advertising space in the paper. We
learned from this person, only much later after the paper had to shut down, that
she had been told by her boss, an advertizing agency executive, to only pretend
to try and sell ads. It turns out that the executive had a son who had been
busted by the LAPD for drugs, and the police had extorted the father, saying if
he prevented our paper from getting advertising, they’d get the charges dropped
against his son.</DIV>
<DIV>Gates is hailed too, for being the first police chief to add helicopters to
the police department’s arsenal. It was a logical move. The LAPD already was
widely seen as essentially a military organization, so why not have an air force
too? But in fact, the helicopters were mostly a huge waste of department money.
They gave the department, and its chief, great bragging rights at tony Los
Angeles parties and police conventions, but did little to reduce crime.</DIV>
<DIV>I remember how back then, when I lived on a hill across Alvarado Boulevard
from Dodger Stadium in the Echo Park section of L.A., when I would come home
from Vanguard Office, how often a police helicopter would be secretly following
my car. When I’d park and start walking up the steps towards my house, I’d
suddenly be bathed in a light as bright as day, as the helicopter would turn on
its searchlight. It was a clear attempt at intimidation and harassment, as were
the helicopters that, during the day, often came to buzz over our office in the
Crenshaw District, just to let us know they were watching.</DIV>
<DIV>Connie tried to get our sources. Her technique was simple. She would
volunteer to stay in the office and answer the phone while the three or four
editors went out to lunch. I kept all my files in those pre-computer days in a
metal recipe box on index cards. Fortunately I kept my best sources hidden by
using false names and carefully rearranged phone numbers, so my inside sources
in the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department were never uncovered by Millazzo. But
it wasn’t for lack of her trying, I’m sure.</DIV>
<DIV>The lawsuit brought against Gates and the PDID, settled out of court
because the PDID didn’t want to have to disclose any more of its nefarious
activities, which it turns out included selling much of the collected data on
local activists to a right-wing organization called Western Goals that had links
to the John Birch Society, ultimately cost the City of Los Angeles $1.8 million,
of which I received $2000.</DIV>
<DIV>So I guess I owe Chief Gates a small word of thanks. The money came at a
point when my wife and I, by then living and working as freelancers in New York,
were low on cash (and expecting a baby). But that check hardly compensates for
his role in helping to undermine and destroy an award-winning but financially
fragile investigative newspaper that was for the first time exposing the LAPD’s
role in killing unarmed citizens through excessive use of force and an official,
but secret, department policy of shoot-to-kill.</DIV>
<DIV>Gates’ obsession with violence and his policy of using the police in Los
Angeles as an occupying army in poor minority communities ultimately led to his
undoing. His defense of the officers filmed beating the unarmed and defenseless
Rodney King, and his inept handling of the days of wide-spread rioting that
followed the aquittal of those officers by an all-white jury, led to his being
forced to resign as chief in 1992.</DIV>
<DIV>Chief Gates represented all that is wrong with police and law-enforcement
in America. Thanks to him, my little town of Upper Dublin, a mostly
upper-middle-class exuburb just north of Philadelphia where crime mostly
consists of breaking and entering, or an occasional case of drunkenness or
disorderly conduct, boasts a big gray SWAT panel truck, equipped with assault
weapons and god knows what else that never gets used, but that gets shown off
every year at an annual police and fire department show-and-tell day. And
surely, his PDID, and the spying it engaged in, was a harbinger of and even
pioneer for the almost universal surveillance state that we now live in, with
cameras popping up everywhere, our electronic communications constantly
monitored, and police acting like the gestapo, instead of the civil servants
they are supposed to be. </DIV>
<DIV>Indeed, Gates profited handily off the trend towards increased surveillance
that he helped encourage, moving from his disgraced resignation from the LAPD to
a lucrative post as chief executive of Global ePoint, a maker of digital video
surveillance systems.</DIV>
<DIV>I, for one, will not miss him.</DIV></FONT><B><FONT face="Verdana, Arial"
size=2><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" size=2>
<DIV>Dave Lindorff</B> is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "</FONT></FONT><U><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" color=#0000ff
size=2><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" color=#0000ff size=2><FONT
face="Verdana, Arial" color=#0000ff size=2>The Case for
Impeachment</U></FONT></FONT></FONT><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" size=2><FONT
face="Verdana, Arial" size=2>" (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in
paperback). He can be reached at </FONT></FONT><U><FONT face="Verdana, Arial"
color=#0000ff size=2><FONT face="Verdana, Arial" color=#0000ff size=2><FONT
face="Verdana, Arial" color=#0000ff
size=2>dlindorff@mindspring.com</DIV></U></FONT></FONT></FONT></DIV></FONT><br />--
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