“Red Squad”: An Investigation of the N.Y.P.D.’s Crackdown on Dissent, Fifty Years Ago

Article from THE NEW YORKER
THE FRONT ROW
By Richard Brody
October 26, 2020

For those who believe that the New York Police Department’s crackdown on dissent and targeting of protesters exercising their constitutional rights is a newborn response to the Black Lives Matter movement or an anti-Muslim aftereffect of the 9/11 attacks, Metrograph is here with a corrective. On its Web site, through its virtual-cinema program, the New York movie theatre will be showing (on Monday night and Tuesday through Thursday, for Metrograph members) the 1972 documentary “Red Squad,” which reveals the extraordinary and brazen surveillance of protests against the Vietnam War—and the aggressive, intrusive targeting of individual protesters by the N.Y.P.D. in the early nineteen-seventies.

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