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26 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 658 (1991)
Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America

handle is hein.journals/hcrcl26 and id is 664 raw text is: 658 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. Frank Donner. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cal.: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. xiv, 503. $34.95, cloth. For those who maintain an abiding faith in the integrity and discretion of the nation's police forces, the pictures that came across their television screens on the evening of March 5, 1991 must have been shocking indeed. Two days earlier an amateur photographer had videotaped a group of Los Angeles police offi- cers beating and kicking a young black suspect in open view of numerous onlookers.' This violent image was broadcast nation- wide and produced an immediate public outcry.2 Polls conducted in the days following the incident revealed widespread belief that the beating was racially motivated and that police brutality was commonplace in Los Angeles and elsewhere.3 Growing outrage at police brutality sparked a United States Department of Justice investigatiQn into potential patterns of physical abuse by metro- politan police officers.4 For those wondering whether systematic police misconduct exists, a perusal of Frank Donner's recent book, Protectors of Privilege, may resolve their doubts more quickly than will the Department of Justice inquiry. Donner, a prominent civil liberties attorney, chronicles a par- ticular history of power abuse and discrimination by police offi- cers: improper surveillance and repression techniques aimed at left-wing organizations. By documenting this abuse Donner hopes to lend support to the thesis that the privileged class of our society enlists public police forces for its own protection. Donner traces the history of surveillance and repression by countersubversive urban police units (also called red squads) from their genesis in the 1880s through their demise in the mid 1970s. Countersubversive units were essentially local police spy networks-metropolitan CIAs. They developed in response to la- bor unrest around the turn of the century and by the 1960s were monitoring a wide range of protest activities, including civil rights and Vietnam war protests. Donner divides the account of these units into three historical periods. He devotes brief chapters to I L.A. Times, Mar. 6, 1991, at 1, col. 5. 2,Id. 3 L.A. Times, Mar. 10, 1991, at 1, col. 2. 4 L.A. Times, Mar. 15, 1991, at 3, col. 1. (Vol. 26

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