Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
The Honolulu Police Department had a special intelligence unit during the 1960s that investigated people involved in anti-Vietnam war protests and other legal political activities, it was disclosed yesterday.
A retired University of Hawaii history professor, who was one of those investigated, said he is considering suing the police department and the city on charges of violating his constitutional rights to free speech.
Walter Johnson, a UH professor from 1966 to 1982, said a Chicago attorney, while investigating police spying activities in Chicago, found out that HPD had kept a political file on Johnson.
Johnson is known nationwide as the biographer of Adlai Stevenson and is listed in Who’s Who in America.
Johnson said he suspected that the federal and military intelligence community may have been interested in his anti-war activities, but said he was surprised to find that the Honolulu police had done an investigation.
"I find the whole thing kind of stupid," Johnson said in an interview yesterday. "The Honolulu police are supposed to take care of crime, not the First Amendment."
Asked to comment on the intelligence unit, Deputy Police Chief Warren Ferreira issued this statement: "We do not have a unit like that nor do we have any files on this matter.
Police department spokesman Wes Young confirmed that there had been an intelligence unit concerned with political activities in the 1960s.
The Star-Bulletin has learned that the unit gathered information on suspected subversives, but the unit was disbanded after the unit’s activities were found to be unconstitutional. All of the files were destroyed.
But part of one record from the unit’s files turned up in a Chicago investigation through the Freedom of Information Act. Attorney Richard Guttman has filed a number of civil suits against the Chicago police in connection with the spying conducted by its so-called "Red Squad." The Chicago intelligence unit traded information with more than 150 local police departments, including HPD, on dozens of political activists.
