The Black Panthers and the Police:
A Pattern of Genocide? (page 6)

NEW YORKER

February 13, 1971

by Edward Jay Epstein


THE CASE OF FRED HAMPTON AND MARK CLARK

The final case on Garry's listis certainly the most important one, since it is the one that prompted Garry to speak of a pattern of "genocide." It involves the fatal shooting of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by policemen attached to the State's Attorney's office in Chicago on December 4, 1969. While there may be varying degrees of uncertainty about dome of the other deaths on Garry's list, these two unquestionably resulted from a deliberately planned raid on a Black Panther headquarters.

On December 3rd, Sergeant Daniel Groth, a twelve-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department who had been assigned to the State's Attorney's Special Prosecutions Unit, told Assistant State's Attorney Richard S. Jalovec, who was in charge of the unit, that he had received information from a "confidential informer" that a cache of illegal weapons, including sawed-off shotguns, and also riot guns stolen from the Chicago police, was stored in a Black Panther apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. Having received information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation just the day before that the Panthers had recently moved weapons to that address, Jalovec immediately ordered Groth to plan a raid on the Panther apartment, and Jalovec prepared a search-warrant complaint. Circuit judge Robert Collins signed a warrant later that afternoon.

Groth and thirteen other policemen assigned to the Special Prosecutions Unit assembled at the State's Attorney's office at four the next morning. They were heavily armed: five had shotguns, one had a Thompson submachine gun, and one -- James Davis, one of five black members of the raiding party -- carried with him a .30-caliber carbine of his own. The raid was planned for dawn, to achieve the maximum surprise and minimum potential for neighborhood interference, according to Groth's later testimony.

The raiding party arrived at the West Monroe Street apartment in three cars and an unmarked panel truck, and Groth, Davis, and three of the other members proceeded to the front door of the apartment, which was on the first floor; six members went around to the back door; and the three remaining members were stationed at the front of the building. At approximately 4:40 a.m., Groth pounded on the apartment door with his revolver butt. There are markedly different versions of what happened next.

In the police version, which was published in the Chicago Tribune, Groth shouted, "This is the police! I have a warrant to search the premises!" After a delay, he had Davis kick the door open.

The two men entered a small hall, where they were faced with another closed door. Suddenly, the police said, a shotgun blast from inside was fired through this door and "narrowly missed the two policemen." Davis then plunged through the inner door into a darkened living room, with Groth behind him, as a "second round went right past" him. Groth fired two shots at a woman who, he said, had fired the second shotgun blast, while Davis, after also firing at the woman and wounding her, turned and shot to death a man sitting behind him with a shotgun, who was later identified as Mark Clark. Moments later, three of the members of the raiding party who had gone around to the back broke in through the kitchen door of the apartment. Despite a number of calls for a cease-fire from Groth, the Panthers kept firing shotgun blasts, according to the police version of the events, and a "fierce fire fight" ensued, in which Hampton was killed and four other Panthers and one policeman were wounded.

In the Panther version, as it was reported in the Washington Post, the police burst into the apartment almost simultaneously through the front and rear entrances, without first identifying themselves, and although no Panthers fired any shots whatever, the police opened fire, also without warning. A Black Panther spokesman was reported in the Post to have said that Mark Clark was fatally wounded as he attempted to dodge police submachine gun fire, and others were wounded. Meanwhile, according to the spokesman, the police entering from the rear went immediately to Hampton's bedroom and fired into it, and Davis then went into the bedroom and fired more shots at Hampton. In Chicago Today, the Black Panther spokesman added that "Hampton was murdered in bed while he slept" by a policeman who "must have come in the back door and murdered him with a silencer." A few days later, a private autopsy, performed at the request of Hampton's family, concluded that hours before Hampton was shot to death he had been heavily drugged with Seconal, a barbiturate, which the spokesman deduced had been administered by a "pig agent" before the raid. The independent autopsy also concluded that the bullet that killed Hampton was missing, for the Panthers' pathologist found an entrance wound in the head but no exit wound and no bullet in the head. Lawyers for Panthers intimated that the missing bullet had been secretly extracted and disposed of by the police, because it constituted evidence of murder.

A third version was rendered by a federal grand jury that had been specially empaneled to investigate the December 4th shootings. After having all the physical evidence recovered by both the police and the Panthers analyzed by the F.B.I. Laboratory in Washington and evaluating additional ballistic evidence uncovered by the F.B.I., and after hearing all the witnesses willing to testify, the grand jury concluded, among other things, that the Chicago police investigation of the raid was "so seriously deficient that it suggests purposeful malfeasance."

When Groth and Davis forced their way in through the inner door, according to the grand jury's assessment of the events, a 12-gauge slug was fired from inside the apartment and passed through that door as it swung open to a forty-five-degree angle. There were indications that the shotgun was no more than fifteen inches from the opening door. A 12-gauge slug found at the scene proved consistent with a shotgun that was next to Mark Clark's body and was stained with blood of Clark's type; the slug was also found to match the hole in the door. Moreover, an empty shell found nearby was "positively identified" as having come from the shotgun. Piecing together the physical evidence, the jury posited that Mark Clark, sitting behind the door, fired a shotgun blast through the door just as the police burst in. This, however, was the only shot that could be definitely traced to a Panther weapon.

The grand jury concluded that Groth and Davis apparently came in shooting, for one pistol shot had been fired through the door. Davis shot Clark, who was sitting behind the door holding a shotgun, and a woman then in the room, Brenda Harris, who was holding another shotgun. Minutes later, after the officers claimed they heard a shotgun blast from a bedroom adjacent to the living room, the wall between the living room and the bedroom was "stitched" with forty-two shots from a carbine and a submachine gun. One of these bullets passed through the first bedroom into a second bedroom, where it fatally wounded Fred Hampton in the forehead. Another bullet, apparently from the same volley, since it was traveling at the same angle, struck Hampton in the right cheek, and another struck him in the left shoulder. This last, the only bullet recovered from his body, proved to be a .30-caliber bullet from Davis's carbine. Aside from Hampton and Clark, four of the seven other Panthers in the apartment, as well as one police officer, were wounded by police gunfire in less than twelve minutes after the raid began. Eighty-three empty shells and fifty-six bullets were recovered from the apartment by the police, the Panthers, and the F.B.I., of which all but one shotgun slug and one shell had been fired from police weapons. Although the police steadfastly maintained that at least ten or fifteen shots were fired at them by Panthers, a painstaking reconstruction by the grand jury suggests that, following the first shot by Clark, police entering from the back of the apartment mistook Davis's and Groth's shots in the front of the apartment for Panther gunfire, and the police in the front of the apartment similarly mistook the return fire from the rear of the apartment for continuing resistance. According to the grand jury's version, the officers very probably fired through the living-room wall under the erroneous impression that they were in a gun battle with Panthers.

The grand jury also attempted to resolve conflicts between the findings of the Panthers' private autopsy and those of the police autopsy by ordering Hampton's body exhumed and yet a third autopsy performed, by an out-of state medical examiner in the presence of both a Chicago pathologist from the coroner's office and a pathologist retained by the Hampton family. Two points were clarified by the third autopsy. First, despite the statement of the Panthers' pathologist that there was no exit wound for the fatal bullet that entered Hampton's forehead, this autopsy plainly showed an exit hole in front of the left ear when the sideburns were shaved. Second, the Panthers' claim that Hampton was heavily drugged with Seconal before the shooting was not supported either by this autopsy, which showed "no trace of drugs in the body," or by the report of the F.B.I. Laboratory in Washington, which had also tested the sample used in the Panthers' private autopsy. The toxicologist who performed the analysis for the Panthers told the grand jury he had not performed the most specific test for Seconal, the gas-chromatography test but had relied instead on a less sophisticated test, which required some "subjective evaluation." In performing the gas-chromography tests on the same sample that the Panthers' toxicologist had used, the F.B.I. found no Seconal or other drugs, but did find deterioration in the blook that could have been partially responsible for a mistaken analysis.

Are these ten cases of Black Panthers killed by police part of a nationally coordinated pattern? Although Hampton and Clark were the only Panthers killed as a direct result of a planned police raid, or even in a situation in which the police could reasonably be supposed to have had advance knowledge that they would confront Black Panthers, it still might be maintained that the police involved had instructions of some sort to kill Black Panthers whenever the opportunity presented itself. The theory broached by John Kifner in the Times that the Nixon Administration had, through the statements of public officials, "at least contributed to a climate of opinion among local police ... that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers" seems historically inaccurate since five of the ten Panther deaths that can be directly attributed to police action occurred before the Nixon Administration took office. And, as far as I have been able to determine, no Black Panthers have been killed by the police since the Hampton-Clark shooting.

In all of the ten cases to which Garry’s list has been reduced, at least some of the Panthers involved were armed and presented a threat to the police. Six of the ten Panthers were killed by seriously wounded policemen who clearly had reason to believe that their own lives were in jeopardy. In none of these cases, moreover, is there any positive evidence to support a belief that the wounded policemen knew they had been shot by Black Panthers. According to the evidence that is available, Bartholomew, Lawrence, and Lewis were stopped as burglary suspects; Pope approached a robbery stakeout at night; Winters opened fire when two policemen entered an abandoned building to investigate a citizen's complaint; and although it is agreed that Roberson took it upon himself to challenge the behavior of the police investigating the burglary of a fruit stand, it is not reported that he identified himself as a Black Panther.

In the four remaining cases, the fatal shots were fired by policemen who had not themselves been wounded. A further distinction might be made to take account of the fact that in two of these deaths -- those of Armstead and Clark -- the police state that in each instance they were confronted by an adversary with a lethal weapon and had reason to presume that their own lives were endangered. Armstead pointed a rifle at a policeman and refused to disarm himself; Clark confronted a policeman with a shotgun, which, in fact, he had previously fired.

In any event, there are two cases in which Black Panthers were killed by policemen whose lives were not being directly threatened by those men. These are the cases of Hutton, who was shot while allegedly running from the scene of a ninety-minute. gun battle in which three policemen had been wounded, and Hampton, who was apparently hit by stray bullets in a reckless and uncontrolled fusillade.

Four deaths, two deaths, even a single death must be the subject of the most serious concern. But the basic issues of public policy presented by the militancy of groups like the Panthers and by the sometimes brutal police treatment of angry and defiant black people in general can be neither understood nor resolved in an atmosphere of exaggerated charges whether of "genocide" against the Panthers or of "guerrilla warfare" against the police that are repeated, unverified, in the press and in consequence widely believed by the public. The idea that the police have declared a sort of open season on the Black Panthers is based principally, as far as I can determine, on the assumption that all the Panther deaths cited by Charles Garry — twenty-eight or twenty or ten — occurred under circumstances that were similar to the Hampton-Clark raid. This is an assumption that proves, on examination, to be false.

Special thanks to Lona Manning from Kelowna, B.C. for her assistance in proof-reading the internet version of this piece.


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