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in the Deep South during the early ’60’s, King and his group would be marching and would be set upon, how would you see the duty of the law in that situation? Well, it’s just like well the only thing we got goin’ now that’s even close to it would be the Klan and the resistance to the Klan. Whether you agree with what they’re doin’ out there or not, you have to provide some protection to make sure that it doesn’t happen like it did They get shot. This weekend, you know, where the Klansmen got somewhere all the way up North and were marchin’ around, so they got hit with bricks and everythin’ else. commits the violence is the offender isn’t that basically the rule? Well, they are, but it’s still this was a revolutionary communist group or something that was up there disrupting the Klan, so to speak. But your police function today, instead of trying to go around arresting a lot of people, they spend most of their effort trying to keep ’em separated, which I think is a much more beneficial thing in the long run, is not to let violence occur, but to try to keep them separated And let ’em speak, whatever they have to say. Let ’em speak, whatever they have to say. Like I remember one time when we were tryin’ to decide in the Bureau [the FBI] whether we should discontinue the investigation of the Klan. We used to have every Klavern, a case on ’em. They were out espousin’ violence, they hated Negroes, they hated Jews, they hated communists. I remember a meeting with the deputy Attorney General at that time. And like, he told me, he said, you’ve gotta understand that a person can hate blacks, they can hate Jews, they can hate communists, and you can’t do a thing about it They can hate Presidents. You know, that’s hard to accept, when you see a country that’s moved so far in tryin’ to develop a certain degree of tolerance, that you don’t like to see it on either side. But that’s the law, so with it being the law, we closed the cases on the individual Klan groups unless we had a particular group that had engaged in violence and was still talking and planning and inciting to violence. . . . We didn’t investigate most of ’em were just marchin’ around in their robes, but where one of ’em went out and actually burned a school down, or hot some black in his house, then that gave us a basis for a short period of time you can’t run indefinitely on goin’ back to that act of violence but that would give us a basis to say, we do have a reasonable basis to believe that they will commit additional violence. But that’s a hard thing to change in law enforcement. Oh sure. I think the Bureau Took a long time to change it. Took a long time to change it, and yet took the lead because more of the light was focused on our activities in the past years, and I think as a result almost throughout the country, in meetings, discussions I had, that law enforcement recognizes this today far more than they ever did before. I think the First Amendment is a very obvious right, and what they try to do is, if a man points at ya and says, ‘I intend to kill ya,’ you have to act sometimes on rhetoric. Yes. You hafta decide, investigate, to find out whether he means it or not. Where our problem came was that in law enforcement too often, we just waited, kept investigations open for a prolonged period of time, just because we had always operated under the system that once you had something in the files you always kept it. Well that’s changed, and that’s why here, we bring in every year our intelligence agents, when they come back for in-service, they go through every report they wrote that year to determine, is it still pending, is it still timely, and if it isn’t, shred it. In certain cases like organized crime we don’t have any cases on domestic groups or what you used to term domestic security cases You mean none are pending now? None. You mean there are no files open? No files open and none existing. The only thing we’ve still got, I guess, are some of the old Senate reports, or something, but those aren’t indexed. They got outa business in that area and now it’s all criminal investigations, and even those, when the case is closed like if we’re workin’ on a burglar ring, we haven’t identified ’em yet, we’re collecting intelligence, because the criminal acts have occurred, then after two years out it goes. But if it’s the Angelo Bruno organized down in Texas, we’ll keep that a longer period of time. In organized crime, intelligence is not perishable, like it is in most criminal matters. But even there you have to be very careful that you don’t just collect garbage and that it has a relatable basis to criminal activity, not just gathering intelligence for the sake of intelligence. . . . I’m very impressed with the changes the department’s made. I can come in objectively because I wasn’t here when a lot of these things went on. I find a great deal of concern over conducting investigations lawfully. My commanders, like narcotics commander, intelligence, motor vehicle theft, traffic, and criminal, emphasize at every conference you can’t break the law to enforce the law .. . tryin’ to stress integrity. We have our failings, we’re a big organization, 4,600 people, you’ll have some that violate their trust, we try to get rid of ’em, we do get rid of some every year. I consider my most important function to see that procedures are sound, that we resist political pressures. \(Adams here discussed his opposition to a pending bill in the legislature that would lift the prohibition against activity in political campaigns by DPS employees, activity he said could ruin a trooper’s role in a county run by an elected sheriff, for inFor me to use the powers of this office when you have investigative power, you cannot afford to have a nonprofessional organization . . . . We need a state police agency that isn’t out here running errands for a particular administration. I feel that my job is to serve the legislature and the governor and the commissioners, the state government. \(Col. Adams also discussed the reputation the Texas Rangers have as The Rangers today, you know, they’re cases, like against these grocery stores, they’re still very close supporters of local law enforcement in the rural areas. I think the things that caused them to get into problem areas, those laws have been declared unconstitutional You mean on labor specifically? Yeah. Yet I know it will be a long time before some people will think good of the Rangers because of their involvement in some of those activities. \(Adams also mentioned that in the area of minority recruiting, the department of public safety is up to 30 women, 100 black, and 300 Hispanic troopers. The troopers are not yet representative of the public they serve, he said, but These things, they all blend into an overall effort or comprehensive approach to what state law enforcement is all about. LI THE TEXAS OBSERVER 13