Police: Tales of Three Cities

Policemen do society's dirty and dangerous jobs for modest remuneration and less gratitude. In this troubled time particularly, they are trapped in a crossfire of contending factions, vulnerable to criticism for being too harsh or too easy. They have also become the targets of physical attack, and behind their badges they fear and bleed as anyone else would. The difference is that for them there is no escape from combat. Last week, New York City's police headquarters was bombed. Though only 13 people were hurt, none seriously, the incident could easily have been a major tragedy. Yet police reaction is not always rational, either. Underpressure, law enforcement sometimes takes dubious forms, and order is fractured by those assigned to keep it, as the following three stories of events in New York, California and Chicago demonstrate.

New York: Tommy the Traveler

A year ago, a handsome, tense, slender youth known only as "Tommy the Traveler" appeared at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., and began to preach revolution to anyone who would listen. He claimed to be an S.D.S. organizer, and his principal converts were two freshmen, would-be revolutionaries who were fascinated by his violent rhetoric. To them he taught the uses of the Ml carbine and demonstrated the construction of various types of fire bombs.

Last month his efforts seemed to have come to fruition when two of the students were arrested for allegedly fire-bombing the campus ROTC office, located in a dormitory where 120 students were sleeping. The fire was put out without any injuries. That was fortunate because Tommy the Traveler, the zealous revolutionary, was in fact an undercover policeman.

Harassment. After the ROTC fire.

Tommy came under increasing pressure from his immediate employer, the Ontario County sheriff's office, to "produce some results" on campus. His answer was to lead an on-campus marijuana bust on June 5 in a sheriff's car, carrying a side arm and accompanied by a sheriff's deputy, several Geneva city policemen and, waiting off campus, two dozen riot police. The raid blew Tommy's cover, and when it was over, he retired to his Geneva apartment, presumably to prepare for his next undercover assignment.

The incident probably would have ended there had not angered students seized on the fact that the month before, Tommy had struck Hobart's assistant dean of students, Ted Theismeyer, and threatened a student's life. Soon after a John Doe complaint charging him with harassment was filed. Why, the students now demanded, had the complaint never been served? In an interview broadcast last week on Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News, Ontario County Sheriff Ray Morrow replied: because he was only doing the job he was hired to do. Morrow defended Tommy's actions as necessary to build up his credibility to radical students. As for instructing students on how to build bombs, then urging them to use them, said Morrow, "There's a lot of difference between showing how to build a bomb and building one." What that difference was, he never made clear, although the former, he indicated, was perfectly proper behavior for a police agent attempting to infiltrate student radicals. He did, however, finally have

Tommy delivered to court, where he was charged with harassment and released on $25 bail.

By this time, word of Tommy's activities had spread to neighboring universities, and tales of similar exploits began to filter back to Hobart. Tommy the Traveler, it seemed, had been a familiar figure among radicals in upstate New York colleges since 1967.

His presence had been rumored at Cornell, Syracuse University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Alfred University and Keuka College, and, most recently, Hobart. He invariably identified himself as an S.D.S. organizer, and wherever he went, violence seemed to follow. He was also said to have been at the head of the assault force that marched on the South Vietnamese embassy during last fall's demonstrations in Washington. His true identity was uncertain. The harassment complaint listed him either as Thomas M.L.S. Tongyai or Singkata P. Tongyai, 26, of Warrington, Pa.

If Tommy the Traveler was indeed so well traveled, the question arises whether he was an employee of the Ontario County sheriff's office the entire time. TIME Correspondent Frank Mc-Culloch spoke with Sheriff Morrow in an effort to find out.

Q. How long has Tommy worked for you?

A. Two and one-half months.

Q. Where did he come to you from?

A. I can't say that. But he did come highly recommended.

Q. Can you tell us by whom?

A. No, I really can't.

Q. Was it another law-enforcement agency? Was Tommy actually a police officer for the last two or three years?

A. I can't tell you because I promised those people--the ones who sent him to me--I would never tell who they were or anything else about it.

Thus the question remains: Who sent Tommy to Sheriff Morrow? The FBI? Some other national or state law-enforcement agency concerned with radicals? Whoever were Tommy's employers, the incident will reinforce a belief already widely held among the young that much seemingly radical violence is in fact the work of police agencies out to discredit the radical movement.

The use of undercover agents to infiltrate subversive or otherwise dangerous organizations is not new in the U.S.; it is a defensible practice. But what happens to such agents who actually get involved in illegal activities? Tommy's fire-bomb lessons to young, malleable students seem to represent a serious breach of law-enforcement responsibility. The fire-bombing of the Hobart ROTC building might never have happened had Tommy not instigated it.

California: The Besieged

This February, when radical students from the University of California, Santa Barbara, burned down the Bank of America branch office at Isla Vista, the New Left suffered a significant moral setback. A majority of moderates, on and off campus, condemned the act and the ideology that sparked it as outrageous. In the weeks that followed, most moderates denied that police and public officials were overreacting to the community's small radical faction, despite the accidental police shooting of Student Kevin Moran (TIME, May 4).

Then two weeks ago a grand jury indicted 17 youths in connection with the burning, although some seemed clearly innocent (two of the accused were actually in jail at the time of the incident). When radicals predictably took to the streets to protest the indictment, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors slapped a 7:30 p.m. curfew on the entire community and called in the Los Angeles County sheriff's riot squad to help enforce it. By this week there had been 667 arrests, many involving faculty and local residents, and numerous reports of police brutality. As the complaints mounted, the moderates' disgust with the police approached their feelings for the radicals. TIME Correspondent Jon Larsen went to Isla Vista last week and talked with many of its angry residents. His report:

Jeff Stewart, 25, an electronics technician who is leaving home this week to report to the Marines, sums up the attitude of many in Isla Vista: "The only time you ever saw police around here was when they were making busts. But these latest police actions have gotten more people like me mad at the cops. They stopped my wife the other night, made her get out of the car and walk a mile and a half back to our apartment with our eleven-month-old baby.

I'm not so much in sympathy with the students as I am anti-cop."

Among those most upset are apartment-building managers. Claiming they were in "hot pursuit" of rock-and bottle-throwing students, police broke into apartments throughout the week, sometimes kicking in doors, throwing furniture, and breaking personal property and bones in the process. "I think the police have gotten out of hand," says Jean Harlan, manager of the House of Lords apartment complex, where many students live. "1 have respect for the police, but 1 don't see any point in these unnecessary beatings. They took one boy and kept jabbing him in the throat with a nightstick, asking him, 'Did you throw a rock?' "

Like Trash. The police sweeps were so indiscriminate that one night they arrested Deputy District Attorney Patrick

McKinley, 26, by mistake. He was not allowed to make a phone call and spent the night in jail before he was released. "I suspect there is some police brutality going on," McKinley said afterward. "In jail, I heard complaints from dozens of kids. There have been too many complaints for some not to be true."

Thurmond Clayton, 38, a tool and die maker and staunch Nixon man, was among the many citizens arrested. The first night of the curfew, Clayton was standing outside his front door with a 15-year-old friend of his wife's nephew when they were jumped from behind by two policemen. "I told them I lived a few feet away and that my wife and three-year-old daughter were right behind that door," he said, "but they just wouldn't listen. They told me to shut my mouth or they'd beat my head in. Before this happened, I had a negative attitude toward the students and sympathy for the police. But I just didn't know how bad it was. These cops treat you like trash. I think they have created the whole problem here."

Toss-Up. If some, like Thurmond Clayton, were outraged, many others were radicalized by the police action. Harry Ansleigh, 23, was one of the moderates who protected the bank from student radicals. Last week he was participating in the peaceful sit-in protest of the curfew when the police gassed him and beat him with clubs, opening a head wound that took five stitches to close. "I've always maintained that there were a few pigs and lots of cops," he said. "Now it seems there are more pigs than I thought. When the gentlest cop is the one who beats you on the shins instead of the head, you've got to figure something is wrong."

The curfew was dropped last Friday, but such was the disgust for both police and radicals following the outbreak that some residents are considering leaving Isla Vista. Patricia Thompson, 25, the mother of two preschoolers, is one of them. "I work at the bank and my husband works in the ROTC office on campus," she said. "We want to move out of Isla Vista. The problem is, the only transfer my husband could get would be to go back to Viet Nam. Right now it looks like a toss-up."

Chicago: Truth and Elrod

During last October's Weatherman rampage, Chicago Assistant Corporation Counsel Richard Elrod was paralyzed from the neck down. Police lost no time arresting his alleged assailant, Brian Flanagan, 22. and charging him with attempted murder. Since then, however, neither the authorities nor Elrod has shown much interest in prosecuting the case. After a grand jury reduced the charge against Flanagan to aggravated battery, the prosecution consented to three continuances. The reason for their reluctance seems political, not judicial. Campaigning in a wheelchair, Elrod is running for sheriff, and the trial can only hurt his campaign.

According to police and newspaper reports at the time, Flanagan attacked Elrod with a pipe, breaking his neck. But according to two witnesses, Elrod's injuries are the result of his own actions, not Flanagan's. Richard Hinchion, 43, an insulating contractor from Munster, Ind., says that Flanagan was running from the police when Elrod, apparently responding to a cry of "Stop that man!" joined the chase. Attempting a football-style block, he bowled Flanagan over, then crashed headfirst into the wall of a restaurant. Michael Rollins, 35, a reporter for Chicago radio station WCFL, confirms Hinchion's story. He was conducting a running interview with Elrod when Elrod broke away to tackle the fleeing Flanagan. Rollins told police what he saw, then told his story to investigators from the office of the state's attorney. He was not asked to tell it to the grand jury.

Acknowledging the accuracy of the witnesses' statements, the prosecution admits that its case against Flanagan is shaky. Still, it has no intention of dropping the charge against the Weatherman. Police claim that Flanagan kicked Elrod after the tackle. The prosecution is prepared to argue that Elrod was only obeying an obscure Illinois law when he responded to the police call to stop Flanagan, and that Flanagan, "knowing Elrod to be a person summoned and directed by a peace officer," committed an aggravated battery simply by colliding with him. But the prosecution would rather not argue the case at all at this time. It hopes instead to continue it, possibly until after the November election.

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