Cops spy on political activists, spread lies far and wide

http://Mediafilter.org/guest/Pages/June.15.1996.01.06.54

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  • This Event Happened in Portland, OR
    ip-pdx05-44.teleport.com.

    • In December 1995 an amazing thing happened in Portland, OR - a well-respected local judge, after a balanced and fair trial, called the Portland Police Bureau on the carpet for spying on political activists in defiance of our excellent state Constitution, keeping illegal "Red Squad"-style files on dozens of groups and generally wasting the public's money and time on anti-lefty crusades. It should be noted that although this case concerned spying on an anarchist and on left groups in general, the same Criminal Intelligence Division guys were also spying on assorted right-wingers. In both cases, we are generally talking about people who are not wanted for actual crimes.

    What's worse is that evidence indicates that these CID officers are sharing their information with and in some cases getting information from private sources, including paid informants or informants with political axes to grind - including freelancers, corporate security types and many other very suspect sources. On top of all that, since CID was spending its time chasing around a guy that they eventually had to admit in court they had never observed doing anything illegal other than jaywalking (four years ago), its actual duties went undone. CID is supposed to proactively investigate to prevent Mafia and gang style groups from spreading. During the early 90s it was so busy looking under beds for Reds and other politically incorrect types that it missed the boat on the spread of criminal gangs from California, Asian gang killings, even some actual political crimes (the Shelly Shannon clinic arsons, the skinhead gangs that committed at least 2 murders, a guy who is probably their informant who tried to torch some parked cop cars to prove his street cred and entrap his roommate, anti-landlord arsons, etc.)

    I wrote a series of 3 stories about the case and its implications for a local paper called PDXS and hope people will read them - see my Web site at http://www.teleport.com/~infobahn. Let me know if you have similar tales from _your_ town - I9m doing a national follow-up story for MoJo Wire.

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    PDXS stories

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