The real Daryl Gates

In a guest post on LA Observed, former Los Angeles Times reporter David Cay Johnston remembers the secret intelligence unit the late Daryl Gates ran while chief of the LA Police Department. The Public Disorder Intelligence Division gathered information on elected leaders, liberals, civil rights activists and a whole host of people the department consider undesirable.

From the post:

Locally, people of interest had their homes, offices and cars burglarized. Some were tailed, sometimes quite openly to intimidate them, to make sure they knew they were being watched. None of that is in the generally solid obituary of Gates in the L.A. Times today. But there was much more to the story.

There were no limits to what Gates would do to feed his insatiable need for secret information.

There were undercover officers assigned to sleep with women to gather political information that went to Gates, who spent 45 minutes to several hours each week on his spy files. That last detail Gates admitted to under oath and was reported by an L.A. Times colleague and me in late 1982.

The full post is here.

I got a peek into this world when one of Gates' former lieutenants, Thomas Scheidecker, was hired as police chief for the city of Claremont. I worked as a reporter there at the time. When his past as an operative for the PDID was revealed, the city quickly rescinded the job offer.