"We at War": The Bureau of Special Services and the Surveillance of New York’s Black Left in the Era of the Urban Rebellions

• In Event: Law and Order: Surveillance, Resistance and Reality

Abstract

At 5:30 AM on June 21, 1967 over one hundred and fifty members of the New York Police Department’s countersubversive intelligence unit, the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), conducted a predawn raid on seventeen suspected members of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). Based on reports from an undercover officer who had infiltrated the Black radical group, BOSS claimed that RAM was colluding with Third World nations like Cuba and China to stoke guerrilla warfare in American cities. While there was little evidence to bear out these charges, the arrest attracted national media attention and raised BOSS’s profile in the anticommunist internal security state. A mere two months after BOSS’s successful neutralization of the RAM network in New York, the FBI launched its infamous “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups” Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

This paper examines the New York Police Department’s countersubversive intelligence unit, the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS), and their surveillance, infiltration, and repression of Black radical groups during the era of the urban rebellions. Analyzing this influential police intelligence unit in America’s largest city during the era of the urban rebellions provides a clearer picture of how Black radicalism has been criminalized and surveilled than previous studies focused on federal agencies like the FBI. During the 1960s, police intelligence units, or “red squads,” targeted revolutionary nationalist groups like RAM for their socialist politics, Third World solidarity, and support for the urban rebellions. At the height of the Cold War, BOSS’s claim that Black radicals were allying with foreign Communist states to foment urban unrest marshalled the full repressive weight of the state’s internal security apparatus. To understand both the stakes and conditions of Black resistance in the 1960s, it is necessary to interrogate the central role local police forces like BOSS played in the repression of the Black Liberation Movement.

Author

• Joseph Kaplan, Rutgers University