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| Born | July 30, 1897 St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
| Died | May 16, 1952 (aged 54) Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, United States |
| Occupation(s) | Police officer, anti-labor activist |
William Francis Hynes (July 30, 1897 – May 16, 1952) was an anti-communist and anti-labor American police officer who led the Los Angeles Police Department "Red Squad" in the 1920s and 1930s. The LAPD Red Squad generally and Hynes specifically were known for both their violence and their corrupt profiteering as enforcers for hire. Hynes personally pioneered a number of "anti-subversive" propaganda techniques and became a nationally recognized expert on anti-communism with a side hustle as a regional strikebreaker.
Hynes was a U.S. Army veteran who first came to public notice when he infiltrated the IWW in San Pedro, California and contributed significantly to disrupting a strike action there in 1923. Hynes was then promoted within LAPD and ultimately given control of the anti-radical half of the department's Intelligence Division, functioning as both a detective and as a police commander. Hynes, who was described as a proto-fascist mercenary by his targets, his opponents, and the Southern California Methodist Ministers Conference, was just one element of a larger system wherein LAPD worked not so much for the general public as for a close-knit group of L.A. businessmen. The Red Squad's aggressive investigation, infiltration, and physical attacks on liberal groups and labor organizers in the Greater Los Angeles area successfully protected the area's "open shop" system and suppressed the labor movement and left-wing political organizations in Southern California during the Great Depression. By the 1930s the LAPD's anti-radical Red Squad was so overtly violent that entities like the L.A. Sheriff's Department and the city of Pasadena began intervening to protect civil liberties and prevent cop-instigated public brawls.
In 1938, when a new reform-minded chief of police came to power, Hynes was demoted from acting captain back to patrolman and spent the remaining years of his LAPD career as a local beat cop. Hynes died of hepatoma in 1952. Evidence collected by Hynes was still being cited in Congressional anti-communist hearings in 1957. The long shadow cast by the Red Squad continued to influence popular perception of the municipal police in Los Angeles until at least the 1960s if not until the 1992 Los Angeles riots and beyond.