Decades-old surveillance files surface

MAXINE BERNSTEIN, JAMES LONG and HENRY STERN

The Portland Oregonian, 09/13/02

A former Portland police officer decades ago removed more
than 30 boxes of police surveillance records and photos on
political activists and groups from the 1960s to early 1980s
that, by state law, should have been destroyed in 1981.The records -- including files on Mayor Vera Katz, American
Civil Liberties Union members and former Gov. Neil
Goldschmidt -- were discovered 15 years after the officer's
death in 1987.

But the passage of time has not lessened the concerns of
local activists, but it has fueled their frustrations with
law enforcement. With a hearing scheduled Thursday on
whether the City Council should renew Portland police
participation in the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force,
critics plan to use the files as fodder for arguing for
stronger oversight of police intelligence gathering.

"I hope it will be a wake up call for the mayor and the City
Council that we need more meaningful oversight of police
intelligence activities," said Dave Fidanque, executive
director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon.

Sgt. Brian Schmautz, a Portland Police Bureau spokesman,
characterized the removal of the files as an isolated abuse.

"It appears to be an aberration," Schmautz said. "The fact
that some goofball stole files some 20 years ago doesn't
mean that we should blame officers in our intelligence
division today."

The Portland Police Bureau owned two sets of "subversives"
files, according to Norm Reiter, a now-retired Portland
police captain who was a sergeant in the Intelligence
Division in the 1960s.

One dealt with suspected communists and labor radicals, or
"Wobblies," between the first and second World Wars. The
second set of files dealt mostly with Vietnam-era activists
of the 1960s and 1970s ranging from civil rights protesters
to members of sometimes-violent radical movements such as
the Black Panthers.

After a court ordered the Vietnam era files destroyed in the
1970s, Officer Winfield Falk, who was a member of the
Portland police intelligence unit on and off for 13 years,
gave 36 boxes -- perhaps the original files -- to a friend
to keep, said his widow, Susan Hauser, a Portland writer.
After Hauser and Falk divorced, she said, Falk moved the
boxes to a farm they owned.

At age 53, after nearly 20 years as a Portland officer, Falk
died of a heart attack in his Southwest Portland home Jan.
25, 1987. The file boxes ended up with his brother, Dennis,
she said.

A file on Mayor Vera Katz has a photograph of her when she
and others picketed supermarkets in 1968 over treatment of
workers picking grapes and lettuce.

"I picketed for Cesar Chavez," Katz said.

Katz said she and a group of at least 10 people picketed
each weekend and that she remembers at least one instance
where someone snapped her picture during one of the protests
34 years ago. She thought it was laughable then but had
largely forgotten the incident. She said the photo in the
file misidentifies her as Linda Katz.

She remembers asking former-Chief Charles Moose if there was
a file on her and being told no. She said that the Police
Bureau is piecing together how the former officer took the
files from the office.

She said legal safeguards and different attitudes would
prevent those abuses from happening today.

Activists aren't convinced.

In the 1970s, when the bureau handed over intelligence
gathered on the ACLU to the organization, it maintained the
information represented virtually everything the bureau had,
Fidanque said.

But the file on the ACLU that Falk held onto included
intelligence gathered as late as 1982 or 1983, he said. It
contained newspaper clippings, ACLU newsletters, and
membership lists.

"The assurances have been unequivocal that this activity
stopped in the '70s" Fidanque said, "but we know that isn't
true."

A 1981 state law prohibits police from collecting or
maintaining information about the political, religious or
social views of any individual or group unless the
information is part of a criminal investigation and involves
criminal conduct. Any state records that did not comply with
state law were to be purged.

The ACLU has urged the City Council to discontinue
Portland's "direct participation" in the anti-terrorism task
force. This would allow the city to audit all police
intelligence gathering, including any terrorism
investigations that the city doesn't fully scrutinize now,
Fidanque said.

Chief Mark Kroeker did not want to comment about the files
until he could examine their contents, Schmautz said. The
bureau was informed of the files Thursday after being
contacted by a Portland Tribune reporter.

"The lesson of the past abuses is you cannot trust
assurances at face value that these kinds of things are not
happening," Fidanque said.