The Memphis Police Spied on Activists

I’ve often wondered about the 10 file cabinets of domestic surveillance records that officials in the Memphis Police Department doused with fuel and burned in 1976, the year I was born. What portion was related to my father, Marrell McCollough?

He spied for the department from 1968 to 1972, spending part of that time as a mole in a local Black Nationalist group called the Invaders. The police were worried the group would interfere with garbage collection by strikebreakers during the 1968 sanitation strike. He was performing that role — dropping off two college students and an aide to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Lorraine Motel’s parking lot — when he found himself at the scene of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Dad is the man kneeling over Dr. King in the iconic photograph taken in the shooting’s aftermath.

When those files were destroyed, my family thought a painful episode in our history had come to an end. We were wrong.

A federal trial began Monday, Blanchard v. Memphis, in which the A.C.L.U. of Tennessee argues that the city spied on its citizens again, pairing old methods with 21st century technology.

This cuts deeply because of the Memphis Police Department’s notorious history of spying on its citizens. Memphis had burned most of its relevant files after an activist made a records request more than 40 years ago. Journalists soon discovered that the department had been spying on numerous people and organizations for years, probing their political activities and private lives. A federal court barred the destruction of any more records, but before the order could be served, the mayor ordered the incineration of the remaining files and disbanded the unit.

After two years of litigation, the city entered into a consent decree in 1978 — the first of its kind in the nation — prohibiting the government from “gathering, indexing, filing, maintenance, storage or dissemination of information, or any other investigative activity, relating to any person’s beliefs, opinions, associations or other exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Yet it appears that the Memphis police department has been doing just that. In a 35-page order on Aug. 10, Judge Jon McCalla concluded that the city violated the consent decree by engaging in political intelligence, though questions of fact remain as to the extent of and purposes behind the city’s actions.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in February 2017 by four people named on the police department’s list of dozens of people restricted from entering City Hall without a police escort. In addition to naming participants in Black Lives Matter and other protest movements, the list included demonstrators who had participated in a “die-in” on the front lawn of the mayor’s home in December 2016, as well as people associated with those protesters. How did the department identify the protesters’ associates?

As it turned out, it would have been almost impossible for the activists to shield their social contacts from law enforcement. Police had wrapped Memphis in a dense web of surveillance: software to comb social media for information about protests and activists, still more software to map relationships between people and events, and more than a thousand cameras — perched on tall poles, mounted on trucks, affixed to buildings — capturing footage that could be monitored around the clock.

High-tech surveillance tools like these are commonplace among police departments in large cities. Many departments guard this information closely, claiming that its disclosure would help criminals and jeopardize investigations.

But large numbers of innocent people are also subject to law enforcement’s digital trawling. For example, in 2016 Georgetown Law Center found that the faces of about half of all American adults appear in searchable police databases that use facial recognition technology, making great masses of people trackable without their knowledge or consent.

The Memphis police didn’t rely solely on cutting-edge technology to monitor protesters, though. They also appear to have used a fake Facebook profile named Bob Smith to cozy up to activists and access private posts. They sent uniformed and plainclothes officers to observe protests, noting the participants and taking photographs. They tracked private events, including a “Black Owned Food Truck Sunday” gathering.

The department regularly circulated briefings containing information they’d gleaned about protesters throughout the department and to other government agencies. On several occasions, the department sent the briefings to people at some of the region’s top employers: FedEx, AutoZone, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

As I read the court’s ruling, paged through the pleadings and exhibits, and scanned the news coverage, I couldn’t shake the sense of disbelief that the city was retreading the same old ground, surveilling activists. “2016: A Year of Social Unrest Reminiscent of the late 1960s and early 1970s,” reads a slide in an internal police department presentation on its investigation of protesters.

But it isn’t just the unrest that hearkens to those times — it’s also law enforcement’s reaction.

I thought about all the times Dad and I went back and forth about the ethics of his undercover work befriending activists and posing as a member of their group. How I wrestled with his explanations and my own reactions, trying to remain nonjudgmental, always questioning whether or not I was making excuses for him.

Memphis’ historic sanitation strike had just begun when Dad began working for the unit in February 1968. He was just a couple of months out of the police academy and one of the department’s few black officers. The higher-ups who assigned him to infiltrate the Invaders told him the group might pose a danger to the public, might be planning crimes. Memphis had never seen a collection of people like them before, with their militant rhetoric and Black Power swagger.

But for the most part, the Invaders weren’t dangerous, as Dad told the unit in the oral reports he called in on most evenings. He says he never violated anyone’s civil liberties. And I believe he stayed on the right side of the line, as he knew it. I still struggle with it, though, even as I try to imagine myself in his predicament as a black rookie officer during that turbulent era.

Although the department coordinated its intelligence-gathering efforts with the F.B.I., he says he didn’t know anything about Cointelpro, the F.B.I.’s secret operation to monitor and disrupt political organizations. (The program, which involved police departments around the country, later became infamous for hounding Dr. King.)

“I was never tasked to do any of the stuff that we know happened,” he said.

But he wasn’t privy to everything that was going on. He didn’t prepare his own written reports — he called them in on the phone. Any documentation would have depended on how the person he spoke with remembered what he said.

And while the department’s records of what happened are mostly gone now, the smoke’s stench still lingers, polluting the air.

Leta McCollough Seletzky is a former litigator who is writing a book about her father.