A COLLECTION AND ITS MANY RELATIONS AND CONTEXTS

A COLLECTION AND ITS MANY RELATIONS AND CONTEXTS

Constructing an object biography of the police historical/archival investigative files

EXCERPTED FROM INTRODUCTION AND OBJECT BIOGRAPHY OF THE PAPER

BY KATHY CARBONE

INTRODUCTION

A record is a trace of living behavior left behind that someone deems important to save in a manner that stabilizes its structure and content so that the record remains reliable, authentic, and accessible over time and across space, “whether that be for a nanosecond or millennia” (McKemmish, 2001, p. 336). Records bear witness to, serve as evidence and memory of, and reflect in some fashion the original activity and contexts that gave rise to them. And although archival processes and systems preserve or “fix” the structure and content of records, by being put to new uses in new contexts and subject to different interpretations, records are continually shifting—they are always “in a process of becoming” writes McKemmish (2001, p. 335), a notion Brothman echoes, stating that over time, a “record is an object that occurs as something that is the same as and different from itself” (2006, p. 260, italics in original).

Archivists have long been interested in the activations and itineraries of records in order to understand the contexts—social, cultural, political, technological, institutional, and ideological—in which people create, interact with, and find and make meaning with records. Ketelaar urges archivists to reconstruct the paths records take from their origins to the archive, recovering and recording the voices of “the authors of documents, the bureaucrats, the archivists, and the researchers who all used and managed the files” to discover the manifold meanings that become connected to records through their use and reuse (2001, p. 141).

Object biography, from the field of anthropology, is one method for uncovering the activations of records as well as how people experience, interact with, and ascribe meaning to records, and for contemplating the physical, mental, and social aspects of records and their effects on human endeavors and lives across contexts and temporalities. Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff introduced object biography in 1986, which centers on the idea that an object cannot be fully understood if regarded from only one point or stage in its existence and offers a way to study the production, use, exchange, and disposal of an object as well as the connections that occur between people and an object over its lifespan. Moreover, object biography explicitly focuses on unearthing what kinds of relations, understandings, and significances evolve between people and objects through social interactions in shared contexts.

This paper is an object biography of the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files, a collection of police surveillance records that reside at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon, USA.

THE PROVENANCE OF THE SURVEILLANCE RECORDS

During the early 1920s to the mid-1980s, the Portland Police Bureau, like many other urban police departments across the United States including the Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago departments, kept a secretive police unit: a “Red Squad.”

Throughout their existence, Red Squads engaged in physical surveillance activities such as observation, wiretapping, and photography as well as compiling records and dossiers on political and social activists and groups—information that Squads used to disrupt and undermine these groups (Donner, 1990, p. 1–3). In response to a fear of Bolshevism, the Portland Police Bureau formed their Red Squad unit in the 1920s with both private and public funds (Jacklet, 2002a; Munk, 2011, p. 203; Serbulo and Gibson, 2013, p. 12). By the 1930s, Portland’s Red Squad served as an “outspoken rightwing political gang” writes Munk, which spent its money spying on and infiltrating “labor and political organizations, organizing raids and provocations, and engaging in violent strike suppression” (2011, p. 204).

Red Squads were at their peak in the United States during the 1960s, with over 300,000 police engaging in political repression, which Donner defines within this milieu as “police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent, and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo” (1990, p. 1). Munk correspondingly notes an enlargement of the Portland Police Bureau’s Red Squad at this time, stating that the “revival of activism in the 1960s caused an expansion of the Red Squad, whose files were quickly filled with informer reports and photo surveillance of Portlanders exercising their political rights” (2011, p. 157). The increased monitoring of activists— especially civil rights activists—during this period was also heightened in part by the federal government’s efforts to disrupt the civil rights movement in the late 1960s.

It was during the mid-1960s when Portland Police Bureau Red Squad member, terrorism expert, and member of the radical right John Birch Society, Winfield Falk, along with more than 20 officers who were part of the Bureau’s Criminal Intelligence Unit, whose mission was “to prepare for and prevent acts of political violence and terrorism” (Jacklet, 2002b), started focusing their surveillance activities on mainly left-leaning political and civic activist organizations. This included surveilling both law-abiding groups (e.g. the police kept watch over those who supported the civil rights movement or were against the Vietnam War) and those involved in criminal actions. The police monitored rallies, marches, lectures, school board meetings and kept watch over the homes of political activists (Jacklet, 2002a). Although the police monitored groups and not individuals, the names of at least 3,000 individuals do show up in the Files, in documents such as intelligence reports as well as in posters and newspaper clippings in which their names are highlighted or underlined (Jacklet, 2002a). During their surveillance activities, the police created numerous intelligence reports, took surveillance photographs, and collected a wide range and a substantial number of materials produced by activist groups, such as posters, flyers, event announcements, brochures, magazines, and tabloid newspapers.

In response to a fear of Bolshevism, the Portland Police Bureau formed their Red Squad unit in the 1920s with both private and public funds … Red Squads were at their peak in the United States during the 1960s, with over 300,000 police engaging in political repression …

The police kept watch over 576 activist and civic groups, including the Black Panthers, Students Against the Draft, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Women’s Rights Coalition, American Indian Movement, Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the Portland Town Council, to name just a few. The police kept file folders for each organization arranged in a quasi-alphabetical order, such as “A is for America—as in American Indian Movement, American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee. B is for Black: Black Panthers, Black United Front, Black Muslims. C is for Communists” (Jacklet, 2002a). Besides the aforementioned items, the files also contain documents such as job applications, property records, reports about people’s sexual preferences (Jacklet, 2002c), signed petitions, bookstore mailing lists, the license plate numbers of individuals who attended demonstrations (Jacklet, 2004), and lists of campaign contributors, such as the names and addresses of people who contributed to a 1976 ballot measure supported by Oregonians for Nuclear Safeguards (Jacklet and Skinner, 2002).

There are also letters in the files, including one found within the Rape Relief Hotline file penned by two women discussing Oregon rape laws, which they sent to the Oregonian newspaper in March 1978. A note in the file states that the police ran a background check on the two letter writers (Jacklet and Skinner, 2002). The police also kept index card files containing thousands of index cards naming and linking individuals to various groups; cards that the police organized “by name, by group, by the first three numbers of the subject’s phone number, and by the last three numbers of the individual’s license plate number” (Jacklet, 2002b).

In 1981, the Oregon State Legislature passed a law prohibiting law enforcement agencies from collecting and maintaining information about “the political, religious or social views, associations or activities of any individual, group, association, organization, corporation, business or partnership unless such information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities” (Oregon State Legislature, 1981, Pub. L. No. 181A.250, Chapter 181A 2017 ORS).

Kathy Carbone

However, Falk broke this law (as well as Portland Police Bureau policy that prohibited police from collecting and keeping information not related to criminal activity) and continued to amass information on organizations such as the Hispanic Political Action Committee, Mackenzie River Gathering Foundation (a social justice organization), and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Coalition of Greater Portland (Williams, 2004, p. 190; Redden, 2006).

In 1981, the Oregon State Legislature passed a law prohibiting law enforcement agencies from collecting and maintaining information about “the political, religious or social views, associations or activities of any individual, group, association, organization, corporation, business or partnership unless such information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities.

Although it is unknown whether Falk was carrying out these surveillance activities with his superior’s approval or on his own accord, post 1981 intelligence reports that Falk directed to superior officers suggest that some officers within the bureau knew what he was doing. Further, not only did Falk continue to gather information after 1981, he also took the files (which, per state law, were to be destroyed) from police headquarters. Although it is uncertain as to when he removed the files and took them home (Jacklet, 2002a), and whether he was ordered to take the files or simply took them without anyone knowing, Falk’s removal of the files from the bureau to his garage and later to a barn in Washington was never reported (Redden, 2006). Falk died of a heart attack in 1987 before the public would learn about his surveillance activities and how after 1981, he conducted them beyond the walls (and perhaps, oversight) of the Portland Police Bureau.

The “exchange of objects between people are turning points” writes Dant (2001, p. 12), whether in the life of an object or in the lives of those who engage with the object. Further, these turning points are places of connection and tension—places of affect or “moments of intensity” (O’Sullivan, 2013, p. 11), as different people interact with and experience objects in distinctive ways. Tracing the turning points of the Files—beginning with their removal from the Police Bureau to Falk’s garage, then to a barn in Washington, to a Portland Tribune columnist’s basement, to the Portland Tribune, to the City of Portland Archives & Records Center, and lastly to their transformations into artworks by two Portland artists—affords a view of some of the associations, frictions, and affects the Files have engendered through time and space and how records can influence and negotiate human actions and relationships.

The full article in the Journal of Documentation can be found at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/ doi/10.1108/JD-06-2019-0111/full/html