Season 1, Episode 6: Policing Gold: Law Enforcement in the Shadow of the LA Olympics

Reverb Effect

Los Angeles’s international reputation was on the line. As they prepared to host millions of visitors to the city for the 1984 Olympic Games, planners expressed their anxieties about one issue in particular—crime. To ensure a successful, safe event, planners opted for a massive display of police power. As athletes, spectators, and press from around the world arrived in the city, they would be watched. Federal, state, and local forces would collaborate to control the steady stream of people and to justify the added costs of anti-crime and anti-terrorism technologies.

In hindsight, this was only a blip in the long history of law enforcement expansion in Los Angeles, and in the United States. Police using anxieties about terrorism goes back much farther than the successful Olympics bid. This had long been an effective strategy to obstruct political activism through the twentieth century.

David Helps takes us from his discovery of confidential police records to audio footage of key actors in LA’s history of intrusive law enforcement, to on-the-ground policing, to the assault on US American civil liberties and the response from various activist groups. He illuminates the ongoing possible tensions between police departments, the technologies of surveillance they employ, and civilians. What are the police allowed to know about civilians, and what are their justifications for acquiring that information?