Jack Radey explains his support for EPD use of Flock cameras

Presenter: Jack Radey made some enemies with his closing comments at the Eugene Police Commission July 10, when he expressed qualified support for EPD’s use of the Flock cameras.

Jack Radey (Eugene Police Commission, July 10): I understand what motivates you. I am as concerned about fascism in this country as you are. And you’re absolutely right. What prevents crime are decent social conditions, not the police. As I pointed out, they just try and catch the criminals afterwards.

[00:00:29] But the question of surveillance is kind of central to our discussion. And I have kind of a different perspective than many people, I know on this Commission, certainly.

[00:00:39] And that is, I have been surveilled much of my life by the federal government. The amount of data that they collected, the amount they released to me was a pile this tall (indicating a foot and a half tall), but they said that was two-fifths of it. And within the last 12 years, I believe I had a home visit from the FBI as some stuff was messed with that there was no motivation for anyone else to do, but to leave that aside.

[00:01:04] I’m familiar with concerns about surveillance, but my perspective is a little different.

[00:01:10] I don’t think if they’re interested in someone, any law, policy stands in their way. Edward Snowden made that pretty clear to us. And if you are familiar with their methods and techniques of federal surveillance, if you think you’re hiding something, it’s only because they’re not interested.

[00:01:33] And I know that’s hard to accept, you want to fight back against this kind of thing, but the fact is—(interruption from the audience). Excuse me, I have the floor. Thank you.

[00:01:46] This finding license plates, to project that into a whole huge 1984 scene and the fascism of the federal government and social data storage is a bit of a stretch, folks, because there’s a difference between the federal government and the Eugene Police Department.

[00:02:06] And I strongly recommend to all of you, make it your business to find out considerably more about what goes on inside the Eugene Police Department—their policies, their procedures, their attitudes, and their personnel. You may be in for a surprise. I recommend this highly.

[00:02:36] Presenter: We followed up to learn what other feedback he has received since his comments. Jack Radey:

[00:02:43] Jack Radey: I know some of the people who came to speak were not happy with my comments because I disagreed with them. One of them has called for my removal from the (Police) Commission for that.

[00:02:54] But it’s my belief that as commissioners, we’re just as much community activists as the people in the audience. We volunteer for the Commission. We are regular residents of Eugene, just like them. We are not elected and we are not hired bureaucrats or anything. We’re citizens and we just bring our perspectives to the table. Mine was a little different from theirs and they weren’t very happy about that.

[00:03:19] As I like to say, I’ve got the longest arrest record of anybody on the Police Commission. You know, I’ve been beaten, I’ve been gassed, I’ve been arrested for assaulting an officer. I bring a perspective to the table that many of the other commissioners simply don’t have, and it’s not a useless perspective.

[00:03:37] Here’s the situation: The Eugene Police Department is faced with a rising number of calls for service, a limited number of officers, and a perspective that the future is likely to hold far more calls for service and more budget pressures on hiring officers.

[00:03:57] There are only 180 sworn officers in a city of 178,000 people. Only 60 of them will be on shift at any given time, except it’s nowhere near that many because they have many other things they do, besides patrol. So there might be a dozen officers at any given time, out looking for things.

[00:04:18] And a lot of what the police do is specifically surveillance. They’re looking for people. They’re not there when a crime happens, usually. They come afterwards, take a report, and then try and find the criminal.

[00:04:31] The easiest way to find a criminal is through their car because it has a unique identifier on it, their plate. And because they can be spotted a lot more easily than an individual. An individual can change their appearance quickly or just stay indoors and an officer driving by will never spot them. The car is a little harder to hide.

[00:04:53] Consequently, the department finds it very attractive to have something that will make each officer searching for people more effective. And a license plate reader does that. They had a grant available on a short time frame and instead of notifying the public first, they went for the grant and got it.

[00:05:15] So this is not department money being spent. It’s grant money. You can get grants for gizmos, but you can’t for salaries.

[00:05:24] However, I think that was a mistake because the public has quite legitimate concerns about the dangers of government surveillance, particularly from the federal government. There’s some people who don’t like the police doing their job at all, and I’m sorry, it’s an important and useful social function. It has to be regulated carefully, but we cannot do without it. And we want police to find criminals. That really is a good thing. And this will help, but it has dangers.

[00:05:57] The dangers are that the information is stored in the cloud. According to contract, Eugene Police Department has sole access to the information from its cameras. If it shares with another department, the other department must request a search by Eugene, give a reason for it, Eugene will search its database, and inform the other department if it gets any hits.

[00:06:25] That’s in the contract. That’s supposedly how it’s all set up. But Peter Thiel of Palantir has invested a great deal of money into Flock this year, $7.5 billion. He has been put in charge by the Trump administration of acquiring data for use in immigration enforcement.

[00:06:51] And it is my experience with the federal government that when it wants information, neither your constitutional rights nor any law, nor any contract, nor any standard of human decency, will keep them from getting it.

[00:07:07] They have bugged, burglarized, surveilled countless thousands and thousands of Americans, prominent Americans, everyday Americans—people who are active in a small Quaker group who occasionally hold a peace vigil will have FBI surveillance and reports written on them. It’s insane.

[00:07:30] And consequently, there’s a legitimate fear with our current fascist federal government of breaking through the promises to EPD that the material is discreet and not available, and using it for really bad purposes.

[00:07:52] So people were concerned for a good reason.

[00:08:00] Presenter: He has deep personal experience with federal surveillance. He joined the Communist Party at age 18 and while working in the national office, a Manhattan brownstone on 26th, a roller blind in a window across the street accidentally snapped open, revealing multiple cameras and a shotgun microphone pointed at the office. And surveillance isn’t all they’re up to. Jack Radey:

[00:08:21] Jack Radey: The FBI is adept and well-practiced at disruptive activities in social organizations. You can just about assume that.

[00:08:31] I’ve been to meetings where someone will melodramatically stand up at the beginning: ‘Is there a member of law enforcement present? You have to reveal yourself now or you can’t—’ No, they don’t. Yes, they’re here if they want to be and no, you can’t do anything about it.

[00:08:48] But you know what? We are not planning on arson and sabotage here. We’re planning on organizing a demonstration. So calm yourself down, sit down, and let’s get on with the meeting. Say hello to the FBI if you like, you know, they’re listening, but you know, let’s just don’t pay any attention to ’em.

[00:09:07] I believe they do still use assets. For one thing, assets can be very helpful in stirring up trouble inside an organization. And in fact, I think there was once published their manual on how to do it. I’ve seen, you know: constantly raise objections over petty issues; constantly fight over wording; accuse other people of being insufficiently passionate for the cause or having the wrong position; encourage factionalism.

[00:09:37] A friend of mine was the press secretary for Redwood Summer, if you remember that. He was a Berkeley activist in SDS at the time and one night, he suddenly found three men in his room, all with razor cut haircuts. He had a roommate who was a very funny guy, Paul Glusman and Glusman had put out two leaflets at Cal, mocking the Progressive Labor Party, which was an early Maoist party. They were primarily student-based and talked about the workers all the time.

[00:10:10] So he put out two leaflets, both in the name of Progressive Labor (PL), one arguing why the working class should support George Wallace, and one arguing why the working class should oppose George Wallace, both using the same kind of jargon that PL used. It was fairly funny, ’cause PL was deeply in the jargon.

[00:10:30] Well, he wasn’t there, but these guys said, you know, our friends in PL didn’t care for those leaflets, and then they pistol-whipped him and left him bloody head. So at the next SDS meeting, he walked in with a bloody bandage around his head, and Glusman walked in with a 12-gauge shotgun and said, ‘Anybody from PL get out now.’

[00:10:54] And later on he realized: Guys in PL don’t have razor cut haircuts. They don’t dress like these guys did either. That wasn’t PL.

[00:11:04] Here’s another one. This is from The Glass House Tapes. Black guy was an asset for the FBI. There was a Black Panther chapter that had a really dynamic organizer who was really effective in getting a lot of recruits. The FBI wanted to take him out. So they busted a couple of his lieutenants and then they had their asset thrown in the cell with them.

[00:11:29] After two days in the cell, he goes to his shoe and turns the heel sideways and pulls out a joint he’s got hidden in there and they all smoke and they start talking about this local leader who they’re all, you know, praising, you know.

[00:11:41] Presenter: The FBI asset told the two Black Panther lieutenants that their popular leader was a police informant.

[00:11:48] Jack Radey: And the Panthers are all looking at each other, going, ‘Oh, really? Tell us more.’

[00:11:53] Next thing, he’s released. Then the Panther lieutenants are released. And then about a week later, this young Panther leader who’s so effective ends up in a roadside ditch with a bullet hole in the back of his head. And next thing you know, the FBI are busting his lieutenants for murder. Ha-ha! That was quick work.

[00:12:12] They would send letters claiming to be from one organization to another organization, insulting them, trying to get something going. A friend of mine, my roommate, they sent out anonymously a flyer with a cartoon, and the cartoon showed a woman scantily dressed, running from bed to bed, captioned, ‘Look at Sandy run.’ Sandy was a comrade of ours. You know, stir up stuff inside an organization.

[00:12:43] Another friend of mine I saw recently, she was in the Party in New York, and, she asked her club for a leave of absence. You know, ‘I can’t be coming to regular meetings and taking assignments for a while, but I’m not quitting. I’ll be back.’ So she asked for a leave of absence.

[00:12:57] The next morning she steps out of her apartment heading for the subway, and there’s a guy coming down the street in a suit waving his hand. ‘Oh, Carol! Carol, we’d like to talk to you.’ Figuring if she’s asked for leave of absence, maybe she’s, you know, ready to quit and maybe she could be recruited as an asset. Potentially as a tool they can use.

[00:13:17] Presenter: We asked him if, with AI and comprehensive surveillance, whether they’re still using infiltrators. Jack Radey:

[00:13:24] Jack Radey: I would just about bet, and again, you know, I can’t prove it, but I would just about bet if you knew the background of every single member of the audience who came out to the Police Commission to speak, I’ll bet you one of them meets with an older guy wearing a suit and passes off written reports on his comrades.

[00:13:44] Presenter: With our government now willing and able to use AI to learn everything about us—where we are, what we say, what we read, who we know, we asked where we can find hope in opposing the growing federal police state. Jack Radey:

[00:13:58] Jack Radey: What’s the hope for us? The hope for us is stopping this fascist government. I’m not, I’m not necessarily hopelessly optimistic. My mother’s family got out of Germany in ’33 and as a result we’re having this conversation. Most of their friends did not. And they don’t have children my age ’cause they never made it that far. They all went up the chimney.

[00:14:23] So the possibility that we don’t win has occurred to me. However, I grew up at a time where, when I graduated high school, we saw the world opening and getting better, although Kennedy had just been assassinated, which was kind of a, a hint to us that it wasn’t, but a feeling that whatever—

[00:14:47] See, when I was in the Communist Party, I joined when I was 18. And at the time, a member of the Party who did not register with the government as an agent of a foreign power was subject to a $10,000 fine and a year in prison for each day that they did not register, okay?

[00:15:10] I couldn’t imagine how I was going to raise the money. The minimum wage then was $1.25. But I had full confidence eventually that would get to the Supreme Court and it would be knocked down. Martin Luther King was the leading person in the country and he was dead right that the arc of history bends towards justice and we were pushing on it and feeling it bend that way.

[00:15:38] So that, mixed with the American cultural thing of the good guy always wins in the last reel, before the last commercial, and never really gets hurt badly, and that it comes out okay, we win… Well, that may not actually be true, but I like to think it is.

[00:15:59] So as long as we can fight, I mean, I’m not that mobile. It’s hard for me to make marches ’cause my knees and foot don’t work that well, but I will keep on fighting in my way, and I know others will. And we’re going to keep that up.

[00:16:13] And I’m not ready to give up on this country yet. We have some horrible traditions and some horrible elements in our culture, and we also have some very good ones. And I like to think I’ve been part of that all my life and I’m going to stay with it. And I’m not alone. You can see from the polls, the majority of the American people are with us. Unfortunately, the levers of power are not in our hands at this point.

[00:16:38] Presenter: Jack Radey. In 1964, two weeks after he arrived as a freshman at Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement started and he went on to become the youngest member of its executive committee. He protested the Vietnam War, joined the Communist Party in 1966,  and when Martin Luther King was assassinated he was named as the seventh most dangerous person or organization in New York City.

[00:17:04] After moving to Eugene, he served as head of the local NAACP’s Legal Redress Committee. He says he has seen EPD improve over the years, and doesn’t oppose the license plate readers in principle, because they serve as a powerful and useful force multiplier for EPD.

[00:17:22] But he still has reservations about their security under the present federal regime, and is reaching out for more discussions with security experts.