Police And Panthers: Growing Paranoia

EVERY month they serve free breakfasts to some 10,000 needy black children, but they also teach the kids a song: "There is a pig upon the hill. If you don't kill him, the Panthers will." They have set up free health clinics for blacks in several cities, but the Black Panther Coloring Book shows a black man shooting a pig-faced policeman as a young black girl looks on. The caption: "Black Brothers Protect Black Children."

They carefully kept order at an Oakland rally the day Panther Defense Minister Huey Newton's trial began, even cleaning up the street after the crowd left; but they maintain alarming arsenals that include grenades and automatic weapons. Their stated aim is to give the black American full pride and dignity; yet though they claim self-defense, they are committed to organized violence. In a last month issue of The Black Panther, Information Minister Eldridge Cleaver wrote: "We call for the violent overthrow of the fascist imperialist United States Government."

Bloody Raids. These ambivalent tactics and extremist rhetoric characterize the Black Panther Party. Over the past two years, says Panther Lawyer Charles Garry, 28 Black Panthers have died in police gunfire. Newton is serving a two-to-15-year sentence for manslaughter. Cleaver, arrested after a shoot-out with police in Oakland, jumped bail a year ago and turned up last month in Algiers. Chairman Bobby Seale, one of the Chicago Eight, was sentenced to four years in jail for contempt last month by Judge Julius Hoffman. In the past two weeks, with bloody police raids on Panther centers in Chicago and Los Angeles, the war between police and Panthers has come to a climax. For the first time, these events brought cries of sympathy from moderate black leaders who once shied away from any identification with the Panthers.

The latest battle between Panthers and police erupted in Los Angeles last week. It came against a background of continuing racial enmity, worsened by last May's re-election of Mayor Sam Yorty over black Councilman Tom Bradley. At 5:30 a.m. last Monday, two Panther offices and one private home were attacked by 300 Los Angeles policemen armed with arrest warrants, search warrants, shotguns, AR-15 rifles, tear-gas grenades, satchel charges, one helicopter, 6-ft. steel battering rams, a National Guard armored personnel carrier, and a fire department "jet-ax" used to cut through the roof of burning buildings. The principal target was Panther headquarters, a two-story brown-and-white brick building at 41st Street and Central Avenue. There, the battle raged for four hours and 45 minutes.

According to police, four Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) men knocked on the door, announced who they were and set to work at once with the battering ram. The door burst open on the third swing. In the police version, the SWAT team stumbled into a hail of automatic-weapons fire; the Panthers insist that the police opened fire first. It was nearly an hour before newsmen arrived, and when they did, police kept them more than two blocks away. "The fury of the gun battle was right out of Viet Nam," reports TIME Correspondent Martin Sullivan. "Hundreds of rounds were fired. The police hurled everything in their armory at the building: that it still stands is a miracle." When the fray was finally over, 13 Panthers stumbled out through the tear gas and gun smoke to surrender, three of them wounded--including the two women who had been inside. Three policemen were injured.

Now, Sullivan observes, "there is not a pane of glass left intact. Bullets have gouged great chunks out of the brickwork. Buckshot has ripped away the posters that used to plaster Panther headquarters." Only a picture of Cleaver still remains, and a sign that says: "Free Huey. Feed Hungry Children." On Wednesday, a group of Panthers pushed aside yellow sawhorses blocking the entrance and marched back in, disregarding a front door warning put up by the Department of Buildings and Safety: UNSAFE--DO NOT ENTER.

Bullets or Nails. Neither Panther nor policeman died in the Los Angeles shootout. That had not been the case the week before in Chicago, where police bullets killed Panther Leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. After interviewing survivors and investigating ballistic evidence, Panther lawyers contend that the police burst in and began firing without warning, killing Clark in the first volley and pumping fatal shots into Hampton as he lay in bed. State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who organized the raid, denounced press and television accounts of the Panthers' story as "an orgy of sensationalism."

The police insist that they opened fire only after they were greeted with a 12-gauge shotgun shell through the closed front door. To the Chicago Tribune, which he praised for its "accurate, fair and balanced account," Hanrahan gave "exclusive" photographs that the newspaper said showed a hole in the front door made by a 12-gauge shotgun slug, a bullet-riddled bathroom door and two holes in the backdoor jamb made by shots fired by Panthers inside the building.

Skeptical newsmen revisited the apartment and discovered that they could find no sign of the shotgun shell in the hallway outside the front door; that the bullet-riddled door led to a bedroom, not to the bathroom; and that the doorjamb "holes" were actually nail heads. Headlined the rival Sun-Times: "Those Bullet Holes Aren't." Hanrahan disclaimed responsibility for the Tribune captions ("We're not editors"), but Tribune Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick said that they came from material provided by the police and by Hanrahan's office. Late last week, at the request of black and white civic organizations, the Justice Department promised an investigation of the shootings, and Cook County Coroner Andrew Toman pledged a blue-ribbon inquest.

Design of Genocide? For Fred Hampton's funeral last week, about 1,000 blacks and a scattering of whites gathered at the First Baptist Church in suburban Melrose Park. Said the Rev. Dr. Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: "There is a calculated design of genocide in this country."

Is there? Specifically, are the raids against Panther offices part of a national design to destroy the Panther leadership? Federal law-enforcement officials deny it. A federal interdepartmental intelligence unit watches the Panthers as well as white militant groups--S.D.S. and the Weathermen, for example. The FBI admits only to keeping an eye on Panther activities and exchanging information with state and local law officers. Actually, what may appear to be a concerted campaign against the Panthers is not difficult to account for.

By Justice Department estimates, the Panthers number between 500 and 1,800 in some 40 chapters around the U.S. The Panthers themselves refuse to give figures; echoing Malcolm X, they contend that "those who know don't say, and those who say don't know." The members include both men and women. Since the once familiar uniform of black leather jacket, turtleneck sweater and black beret has been so widely affected by non-Panthers, they now wear it less frequently. Panther funds come mainly from the 25-c- newspaper, which sells as many as 100,000 copies a week, and from speaking fees for Panther leaders--although law-enforcement officials contend that the Panthers occasionally participate in robberies and get a one-third split of the take.

The Panthers make little secret of stockpiling arms; where it is legal, they brandish them in public. "Off the pigs"--kill the police--is a frequent Panther refrain. What the Panthers view as an extermination plot, says one federal official, is the human response of a cop confronted by someone who has publicly vowed to kill him. "That's no plot," the official says. "It's a perfectly natural reaction by a policeman facing someone who has said, even boasted, that he is prepared to shoot it out." That, added to the perennial edginess of a white policeman in the ghetto and the longstanding and usually merited hostility of blacks to the police, makes cops confronting Panthers very jumpy men who take no chances.

To the Panthers, their organization is a means of defending blacks too often harassed by white police. The proportion of blacks serving on local police forces is growing, but it is still woefully small. While many blacks serve as MPs in the Army, few take jobs as civilian police when they are discharged because of the stigma attached to police by the black community. The Panthers see policemen--white or black--as symbols of a white society that is oppressive and racist.

Occupying Army. A November staff report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence quotes one Panther spokesman on the key to Panther ideology. "We start with the basic definition," he said, "that black people in America are a colonized people in every sense of the term and that white America is an organized imperialist force holding black people in colonial bondage." From that quasi-Marxist assumption, absurd to most whites but increasingly appealing to some blacks, the Panthers conclude that the police are an occupying army. As the staff study puts it, for the Panthers "violence against the police and other agents of symbols of authority is not crime but heroism, not merely an unlawful act but a revolutionary gesture against an illegitimate government." When Huey Newton and Bobby Scale started the Black Panther Party in Oakland in October 1966, their founding statement ended with the opening section of the Declaration of Independence.

Much of Panther rhetoric is couched in Marxist-Maoist terms. One of the few national Panther leaders not in jail or in exile is Raymond Masai Hewitt, the 28-year-old ex-Marine who is Panther Minister of Education. He told TIME San Francisco Bureau Chief Jesse Birnbaum: "We know we can learn from the struggles of China, Korea and Russia. We use it as a guide to action. An ideology has to be a living thing. But the Black Panther Party is not really Maoist." Still, while they may not take all of their own inflammatory rhetoric seriously, other Americans cannot help taking them at their word.

The Panthers have tangled increasingly with police in a dozen cities, and in most cases there is the characteristic dispute over who started it. Panthers contend that cops have regularly harassed and provoked them since the early days of the movement in Oakland. Law-enforcement officials in Washington point to Panther attacks on police in Jersey City, and to the New York indictment of 22 Panthers last April for plotting to kill policemen and dynamite police stations, stores and a railroad right-of-way. Blacks note angrily that 15 of the New York suspects are being held in lieu of $100,000 bail, while four young whites arrested for actually setting dynamite charges in Manhattan office buildings last month had bail put at from $20,000 to $50,000.

Incipient Tragedy. Society has a duty to defend itself against private armies; there can be no argument that Panther arms caches should be broken up just like those of the Mafia or the Ku Klux Klan or the Minutemen. But because of the special history of injustice to blacks, there is incipient tragedy in the use of conventional police tactics against them. Besides, says Lou Smith, a black who heads Operation Bootstrap in Los Angeles, "the police don't use that kind of stuff on the Klan or the Minutemen. You don't find police shooting them down." It is, says Daniel Walker, head of the commission that studied police brutality at the 1968 Chicago convention, "one of those unfortunate situations in which one story is almost totally believed by the white community and another story is almost totally believed by the black community."

To most whites, violence is not justifiable; to an increasing number of blacks, it is. While there is no evidence of a police conspiracy to annihilate the Panthers, more and more blacks believe it to be so. Says Los Angeles' Lou Smith: "They're going to make every one of us Panthers." Even middle-class blacks are rallying. Edward Boyd, a New York marketing executive with a son at Yale and two younger boys at Collegiate, a fashionable Manhattan private school, admits: "I'm changing my mind and they will have my support." The growing paranoia of many police feeds on that of the Panthers. For the American white majority, the risk of an all-out police attack on the Panthers is that it will bring about precisely what it is presumably intended to forestall: creation of a large, militant force of armed, angry blacks dedicated to achieving justice at whatever cost in violence to white society--and to themselves.

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