Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

esult of police attacks. 55 It would require another book to consider all of thesecases in detail, but a couple of examples may be quite telling.In Chicago, efforts to disrupt the Black Panther Party focused on a youngleader named Fred Hampton. First, the FBI tried to trigger a feud between thePanthers and a local street gang, the Blackstone Rangers. FBI operatives sentRanger leader Jeff Fort an anonymous letter claiming that Hampton had orderedhis assassination. 1bis tactic seems to have been selected in hopes of producingviolence. The FBI memo describing it reads:It is believed that the [letter] may intensify the degree of animosity betweenthe two groups and occasion Forte [sic] to take retaliatory action which coulddisrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against its leadership .... Considerationhas been given to a similar letter to the BPP alleging a Ranger plot againstBPP leadership; however, it is not felt that this would be productive principallybecause the BPP ... is not believed to be as violence prone as the Rangers, towhom violent type activity-shooting and the like-is second nature.56When the letter failed to produce the desired results, the FBI moved on to moredirect means of neutralizing Hampton.On the morning of December 4, 1969, at 4 A.M., fourteen police armed withsubmachine guns literally shot their way into Hampton's apartment. The policefired ninety-eight rounds, killing Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (head of thePeoria, lllinois, BPP) and injuring three others. Only a single round of fire wasreturned-by Clark, as he died. Hampton was shot five times-three times inthe chest, and then twice in the head.The raid had been planned a few weeks before by COINTELPRO operativeRoy Mitchell and two cops assigned to a special unit under the directionof State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan. Mitchell had met with Hampton'sbody guard, William O'Neal, and received from him a detailed floorplan ofthe apartment, including the location of Hampton's bed. He also arrangedfor O'Neal to drug Hampton with a barbiturate on the night in question. Aweek after the raid, Robert Piper, the Chicago COINTELPRO section head,requested a $300 bonus for O'Neal.s-In this case we see local police, under the direction of the FBI, serving asnothing other than a death squad.Four days after the Chicago raid, forty SWAT officers and more than 100back-ups launched a similar attack in Los Angeles. Under the leadership of redsquad detective Ray Callahan, and again working from a floorplan provided byan FBI informant, the police began their offensive at 5:30 in the morning. Thistime, however, the target-Panther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt-was not inhis bed. The opening burst of gunfire missed him altogether. The Panthers heldthe police off until the media arrived and a crowd had formed; then, they surrendered.Six were wounded and thirteen arrested, but no one was killed.58The raid was a dud, but the campaign against Pratt continued, eventuallyresulting in his arrest for the 1968 robbery and murder of Caroline Olsen in LosAngeles. Pratt maintained that he was at a Black Panther Party meeting in Oaklandwhen the crime was committed, a fact verified by other testimony.59 The defensesought to support the alibi with the FBI's phone tap records, but the feds wouldn'tcooperate. They first denied that the telephone at the Oakland BPP office was159