Cops' Co-Op

Civil libertarians fear police data exchange

What have you got on this guy?" Police departments have always asked this question of each other, and very often of the FBI, as they look for information that will help an investigation. In 1956 some departments, frustrated by their inability to get data from the cautious FBI, began setting up an organization known as the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit to share their files on a more systematic basis. Almost unknown to outsiders, L.E.I.U. has since acquired a membership of 227 state and local police departments in the U.S. and Canada. Now, like the FBI a few years ago, L.E.I.U. is being criticized by civil libertarians who suspect it of spreading vague suspicions about citizens who may have done nothing worse than champion unpopular political causes.

In theory, L.E.I.U. is a private fraternal association of police officials who keep tabs on organized-crime figures and their associates. But the organization is supported entirely by public funds, including $36,000 from California and $2 million contributed in the past by the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The man behind the founding of the cooperative was former Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, who feuded with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and its headquarters are in California's department of justice. There L.E.I.U. keeps computerized card files on 4,000 people. For $350 in annual fees, a police department can ask for information on any of the 4,000; for an extra $300, it can get copies of all the cards.

Hugh Allen, the L.E.I.U. coordinator in the state's department of justice, can cite no convictions of major organized crime figures as a result of the agency's activities. He maintains, however, that information obtained by L.E.I.U. helped federal authorities return Mafia figures Salvatore and Joseph Bonanno Jr. to prison for parole violations in 1978. Allen justifies the organization's activities by saying that it concentrates on preventing crime by alerting local police to watch the activities of organized-crime figures closely.

Though L.E.I.U. may focus on the Mafia, it has a disturbingly casual approach to what constitutes dangerous or suspicious activity, as shown by some of its file cards that have become public. Under the heading of "criminal activities," one card noted that a subject "travels extensively." Another card listed former California State Senator Nathan Holden as an "associate" of a member of the Black Panther Party. The only association was that Holden had once been the landlord of a Black Panther.

Some 400 of L.E.l.U.'s cards have been obtained by Chicago Civil Rights Lawyer Richard Gutman as a result of a still pending class-action suit he filed against the Chicago police department in 1974, charging the force with politically motivated surveillance and harassment that was unconstitutional. Gutman admits that most of the cards cover the activities of suspected criminals, but he says that 64 bear information that is basically political. One card described a former University of Washington professor as a "Marxist scholar . . . present at many demonstrations in Seattle," none of which has anything to do with the Mafia.

Charles Casey, an official of the California department of justice, concedes that L.E.I.U. once collected political intelligence but says it has stopped and is trying to purge its files of those cards. Indeed, L.E.I.U. virtuously maintains that it kicked out the Houston police department for political spying. The Houston version is that it dropped out because it wanted no part of the political intelligence gathering requested by L.E.I.U.

Civil libertarians have other gripes about L.E.I.U. Linda Valentino, who has investigated the network for the American Friends Service Committee, points out that L.E.I.U. cards are based on arrest records, with no notation of the disposition of the case; thus a card might state that a subject had been arrested but fail to note that the case against him had been dropped or the person acquitted. Worse, if L.E.I.U. receives a query about someone on whom it has no information, it will automatically start a file on that person.

Casey claims that files are scrapped if no solid information shows up in a year.

Just what does go on in L.E.I.U. is difficult to pin down because of one important and disturbing point: although L.E.I.U. is financed by public funds, it is not now subject to any kind of public check on its activities.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.