Dallas Morning News archives, 1970
Today, plain clothes police could be anywhere. Last February, undercovers busted a four men on a robbery spree in a Lake Highlands apartment community, and last summer covert cops caught two habitual petty criminals who were breaking into cars at White Rock Lake.
In the late 1960s, the Dallas Police Department covertly introduced to the community a new breed of undercover officer, the so-called “hippie cop,” according to an archived Dallas Morning News article.
Dallas Morning News archives. Click to enlarge.
They grew their hair and beards — and were easy to spot around the police stations, no doubt, since department rules at the time forbade facial hair or long sideburns — and they increased in numbers as “Dallas’ hippie colony has multiplied,” according to the story.
Some of the real hippies eventually started getting wise to the imposters, but in ’68, a couple of boyish-looking new recruits had Lake Highlands hippies fooled, according to the story, and they enabled police to “break up a growing drug problem in Lake Highlands. More than two dozen arrests came in the wake of the crackdown.”
“Our undercover people got so close to the real hippies that they didn’t have to make any buys — the people just gave them the marijuana,” commander William B. Frazier told the News.
The success of that operation led to more hippie cops.
“The hippie imposter, aside from dressing as a hippie, must also learn to adapt to their ways and mannerisms,” the October 1970 article reads.
Frazier said some of the training comes from hippies friendly to the police. The number of hippie officers exposed is highest among the older officers. For that reason fresh police recruits are favored for undercover work. Frazier says any officer is subject to being withdrawn if his wife sours on the idea of living with a husband who looks more like a hippie than a policeman.
Back when we published a cover story about the history of the Dallas Police Department, we learned about a few interesting tactics tried in the past, like shotgun squads, but we never touched upon the hippie cop (how we missed it? That very probably will haunt me the rest of my days).
“I go out the door, get in the unit, head up any block, before I know it, I’m driving through some giant damn herd of you hippie freaks, each more roustable than the last.” —Bigfoot Bjornsen
Only after reading this piece do I realize how brilliantly Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (later made by director P.T. Anderson into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix) captured the hippie-cop dynamic.
And that 21 Jump Street was never that far fetched after all.
