For those who believe that the New York Police Department’s crackdown on dissent and targeting of protesters exercising their constitutional rights is a newborn response to the Black Lives Matter movement or an anti-Muslim aftereffect of the 9/11 attacks, Metrograph is here with a corrective. On its Web site, through its virtual-cinema program, the New York movie theatre will be showing (on Monday night, to members, and this Tuesday through Thursday, to the general public) the 1972 documentary “Red Squad,” which reveals the extraordinary and brazen surveillance of protests against the Vietnam War—and the aggressive, intrusive targeting of individual protesters by the N.Y.P.D. in the early nineteen-seventies.
The film, made by the Brooklyn-based Pacific Street Film Collective (consisting of Howard Blatt, Steven Fischler, Francis Freedland, and Joel Sucher), is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, in which the filmmakers themselves and their process become part of the story—in fact, become more of the story than they had intended or hoped. (Full disclosure: in the mid-eighties, I briefly worked for the company, then called Pacific Street Films.) In “Red Squad,” the four filmmakers, sitting at a table in their office, discuss the background to their project—the prevalence of surveillance of protesters at all levels of government and, particularly, by the N.Y.P.D. The surveillance was largely conducted by a special bureau that, in the course of filming, changed its name from one bureaucratic deadener to another (Bureau of Special Services, Special Services Division, Security Investigation Squad) but that was widely known as the Red Squad, because its roots were in the surveillance of suspected Communists.
The Squad was already the subject of lawsuits (the filmmakers interview the attorney Martin Stolar, who had filed one) and of newspaper reports (the movie shows clippings from the Times and other publications), but Pacific Street decides to find out for itself and photographs the unmarked downtown Manhattan building where the Squad was headquartered. They’d driven there in a car registered to Blatt’s mother, and the next day two police officers showed up at Blatt’s parents’ house and spoke to his father, under the pretense of a hit-and-run accident, then disclosed that they wanted to speak to Blatt. Blatt agreed to meet the officers—but only in public—and he and the Collective used the occasion to surveil the surveillers, covertly filming and recording the rendezvous, which took place on the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Broadway. (Fischler was spotted with the camera, arrested, but released without charges.)
Then the group decided to extend its investigation to the F.B.I.—then headquartered at Third Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street—and conceived a set of schemes, with one camera (operated by Blatt, wearing a hidden microphone) placed conspicuously in front of the building to attract agents’ attention while other Collective members, working in a van at some remove, covertly filmed the interactions. In another such setup, the filmmakers recorded from the window of a building across the street. (Spoiler alert: the agents noticed.) As a result, F.B.I. agents questioned Blatt’s parents about his activities—and also interrogated the neighbors about the family. Throughout the forty-one-minute film, the filmmakers, attending a variety of protests taking place in the city, notice the presence of the same plainclothes officers whom they’d met and filmed, as well as others whom they recognized by their attire (including a special lapel pin), their demeanor, their placement, and their cameras (which had no identifying logos of any news-gathering organization). The filmmakers pursue and film these officers, seeking interviews that, for the most part, highlight the tragic absurdism of authoritarian menace. (The filmmakers also interview a member of Congress named Ed Koch—later, the mayor of New York, from 1978 to 1989—who rails against the police surveillance of protesters as an illegal effort at deterring dissent and calls on the City Council to vote to end it.)
Then the filmmakers raise the stakes. They interview protesters who were the victims of physical violence committed or supervised by members of the Red Squad and, with careful visual analysis of photos and film footage taken at protests, show undercover officers attacking protesters. The filmmakers also interview a protester who says that she saw one particularly prominent Red Squad officer posing as a TV news reporter at a protest where a group of construction workers (“alleged construction workers,” she adds) attacked antiwar demonstrators. Sucher offers a sharply insightful parsing of that officer’s conspicuous exertions (he’s seen in action throughout the film). Then, following up on press reports, the filmmakers manage to interview officers who were involved in infiltrating political groups. The series of sequences is a micro-masterwork of political psychology. The film suggests that the police put special emphasis on the infiltration and disruption of Black activist groups. The filmmakers, who are white, present an extended interview with a Black officer who worked as an infiltrator (and he expresses a particular animus toward the Black Panthers); their extended discussion reveals a vertiginous vortex of motives and conflicts. The filmmakers’ analysis suggests that, far from dispassionately discharging their duties, many Red Squad officers appear to be acting on the basis of personal political commitments that the city government tacitly endorses—and that, far from protecting the civil rights of protesters, the police and the government both seek to delegitimize dissent and to legitimize repression of it. Plus ça change.
