Preface

TITLE: Search and Destroy: A Report by the Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police

AUTHORS: Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark

YEAR: 1973

PUBLISHER: Harper & Row

LOCATION: New York

PAGES: vii-xii

Those of us who want to love our country are not anxious to ask whether our police are capable of murder. So we do not ask. We do not dare concede the possibility.

But we live here, and we are aware, however dimly, that hundreds of us our killed every year by the police. We assume the victims are mad killers and that the officers fired in self-defense or to save lives.

Then came Orangeburg, the Algiers Motel incident, the Kent State killings, and reasonable persons were put on notice. Official conduct bears investigation. In a free society the police must be accountable to the people. Often, instead of seeking facts, we tend, largely in ignorance, to polarize, with ardent emotional commitment to the state and order on the one side and, equally passionately, to the oppressed and justice on the other.

Does the truth matter? If not, we are in an eternal contest of raw power. If it makes a difference, if it changes minds and hearts, can we find it?

This report pursues the truth of an episode that occurred early on December 4, 1969, at 2337 West Monroe Street in Chicago, Illinois. It was a time of darkness, cold, rage, fear, and violence. Facts are not easily found in such company.

The early dawn stillness had been broken at about 4:45 A.M. by heavy gunfire, eighty rounds or more, which lasted over a period of ten minutes. When it stopped, two young men, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were dead. Four other occupants of the premises, the Illinois Black Panther Party headquarters, were seriously wounded. Two police officers were injured, one by glass, the other by a bullet in the leg.

Of the total of perhaps one hundred shots fired that fatal night, probably one bullet was discharged by a Panther. It is possible that no Panther fired a shot, or that two or even three shots were fired by them. But it is highly unlikely that any Panther fired more than a single shot. The physical evidence does indicate that one shot was fired by them; and bullets filed inside a house make their mark.

Fred Hampton may or may not have been drugged or asleep throughout the episode; one can never be sure. Still, the probability is that he was unconscious at the time of his death. Nor can we be positive whether he was shot in the head by a policeman standing in full view of his prostrate body or by blind police gunfire from another room. But we must not weight the possibilities with our wishes. If Hampton never awakened, if he was murdered, it is better to know it. It tells us something we need to know.

The accounts--including those of police and survivors, the coroner's report, the ballistics and autopsy reports--are not entirely clear or consistent. Nor are the press reports, or the federal grand jury Report, or, indeed, this study. Clarity and consistency may occur principally in fiction.

Some conclusions about the episode are reasonably clear, however.

1. Whatever their purpose, those officials responsible for planning the police action and some who directly participated acted with wanton disregard of human life and the legal rights of American citizens.

2. The search warrant for the premises, assuming it was legally supportable, could have been executed in a lawful manner with no significant risk to life.

3. The hour of the raid, the failure to give reasonable warning to the occupants, the overarming of the police, the wildly excessive use of gunfire, all were more suited to a wartime military commando raid than the service of a search warrant.

4. There can be no possible legal or factual justification for this police use of firearms. There was no "shoot-out." The police did virtually all, if not all, of the shooting and most of it blindly. If the one shot that can be attributed to a Panther was fired, and was fired first, it could not justify the more than eighty shots that were fired by the police. If any of these shots were fired in the mistaken believe that they were being fired in response to fire from the Panthers, that such a belief was entertained by police officers would evidence the inadequacy and consequent irresponsibility in planning and control of an operation involving the use of lethal force.

5. It is not safe to entrust enforcement of the laws to authorities who permit the use of a machine gun the way the Chicago police did during the episode.

6. Many statements made after the episode by participating police officers, such as that of Sergeant Groth that "Out men had no choice but to return their fire," are not credible.

7. State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan's statements that the police acting under his authority "exercised good judgement, considerable restraint, and professional discipline," and that "The immediate, violence criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party," render him unworthy of public trust.

8. The failure of the Chicago police and other state and local officials to employ basic investigative practices such as fingerprinting, preserving evidence, examining all firearms, sealing the premises, and examining and photographing the bodies before removing them, as well as gross errors on the part of these officials in ballistics, autopsy, and other examinations, are professionally inexcusable and can only undermine confidence in the competence and integrity of the police and the legal system.

9. The "exclusive" account of the police action given by State's Attorney Hanrahan's office to the Chicago Tribune, and the filmed re-enactment of the episode by police for CBS-TV, demeaned public office, misinformed and prejudiced the public, and violated professional ethics.

10. Systems of justice--federal, state, and local--failed to do their duty to protect the lives and rights of citizens.

There is no chance that needed reforms will be made until the people have the opportunity and the will to understand the facts about official violence. Many may simply refuse to believe officials are capable of unlawful violence. Others will believe such violence and support it. But surely most Americans will not knowingly accept police lawlessness. If official violence is to be renounced, the truth must finally overcome our natural reluctance to incriminate government. It is our hope that this report will serve that end.

Of all violence, official violence is the most destructive. It not only takes life, but it does so in the name of the people and as the agents of the society. It says, therefore, this is our way, this is what we believe, we stand for nothing better. Official violence practices violence and teaches those who resist it that there is no alternative, that those who seek change must use violence. Violence, the ultimate human degradation, destroys out faith in ourselves and our purposes. When society permits its official use, we are back in the jungle.

There is a common thread that runs through the violence of B-52 raids in Indochina, police shooting students at Jackson State College in Mississippi, and the slaughter of prisoners and guards at Attica State Penitentiary in New York. We do not value others' lives as we do our own. The Vietnamese, the black students, the convicts their guards are expendable. Until we understand that George Jackson and Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, as well as the victims Kent State and the nameless and faceless victims of Jackson State and on all sides in the Indochina war, are human beings equal in every way to our children and ourselves, we will see no wrong in using violence to control or destroy them.

Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were valuable young men. They could have enriched our lives. If they spoke of violence, suffered it, or used it, we should not be surprised. It was not foreign to their environment, nor did their government eschew it. And talented or not, violent or nonviolent, they were human beings whose lives and legal rights must be cherished by a just society.

Our Commission was formed in December 1968 to make a searching inquiry and to report on confrontations between police and the Black Panther Party. It sought, as a major purpose, to stimulate government investigation and a faithful perofmrance of duty. It recognized from the beginning the great difficulty official efforts have in finding truth, even with their vast resources, including investigatory and subpoena powers.

The Commission's task has not been easy. Early on it found that few Americans with power are prepared to consider objectively police-Panther confrontations. Money was hard to find, tentative in its commitment, and slow to be paid. Government was uncooperative, if not hostile. The federal government through Assistant Attorney General Jerris Leonard asked the Commission to delay its investigation in Chicago, implying federal indictments were forthcoming. Long delays were made necessary by grand jury investigations of the Chicago episode and finally by the trial of various officials involved in the episode on the charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. This trial resulted from the efforts of Special Prosecutor Barnabas Sears to see truth found, justice done; the Commission was concerned that premature release of any report might prejudice the right of potential or actual defendants to a fair trial.

Finding and keeping an objective professional staff was hard. The Commission itself, large and unwieldy, was made up of busy people scattered over the country, and soon evolved into a steering committee. Its members are Marion Wright Edelman, Sam Brown, Kenneth Clark, George Lindsay, John Morsell, and Ramsey Clark. This committee is finally responsible for the work of the Commission and for its report.

This report, as is the case with most Commission efforts, is largely the work of the staff, which has performed under extremely adverse conditions. An enormous amount of time and energy went into its wide-ranging investigation and hard analysis. A massive amount of material has been collected on police-Panther confrontations around the country. The report reflects the most comprehensive investigation made of a single incident by the Commission, and for it we are indebted to the staff. The original director, Norman Amaker, served on loan from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. His successor, Herbert O. Reid of the Howard University Law School faculty, completed the assignment. All Commission staff members are listed in the appendix.

Steven P. Dolberg, Deborah B. Morse, and Allan R. Abravanel, associates at Paul, Weiss, Ritkind, Wharton & Garrison, also made substantial contributions to the report by editing the staffs manuscript and preparing it for publication.

It is the hope of both Commission and staff that this report will help us recognize our common humanity, understand the need and joy of living together, lay aside our violent ways, and walk in the paths of justice.

May 1973

ROY WILKINS

RAMSEY CLARK

Chairmen