-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: Sad to hear of Ed Pearl's death Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 03:16:48 +0000 (UTC) From: [email protected] Reply-To: [email protected] To: [email protected] <[email protected]> ( [email protected] )
Hi Joe, Notes on ED PEARL, Fred HAMPTON and the Black Panthers. Let me tie up a couple loose ends from the passing of Ed Pearl with something that certainly did not make any obituary. The Fred Hampton film , JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH is opening this week.Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered in a police attack in Chicago while he slept in his apartment on December 4, 1969. FOUR DAYS LATER, on December 8, 1969 the SWAT squad started a predawn 6 hour gun battle at the Black Panther office on 41st and Central in Los Angeles. According to the LA Times this was the first such mass action in the world by a SWAT team. Like Fred Hampton, the LA Panthers were asleep in the office although they sensed something was coming soon. SIX HOURS, over 5000 rounds. Miraculously no one was killed. Much of this is captured in GREGORY EVERETT'S documentary "41st and CENTRAL" Now what does Ed Pearl have to do with all this? No landlord wanted the Black Panthers as a tenant so ED PEARL took on the master lease so the BLACK PANTHERS could have an office. (JAI: Separately, this on the Panthers and the shootout at 41st and Central 1969 in the building that Ed "took on the master lease"): Opinion: 50 years ago, LAPD raided the Black Panthers. SWAT teams have been targeting Black communities ever since By Matthew Fleischer ( https://www.latimes.com/people/matthew-fleischer ) Senior Digital Editor ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dec. 8, 2019 3 AM PT -------------------- In the early morning hours of Dec. 8, 1969, Bernard Arafat awoke to explosions rocking the library of the Black Panthers’ 41st and Central Avenue headquarters in Los Angeles. Above him, footsteps stomped across the roof. Then gunfire erupted. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arafat wasn’t a seasoned Panther. He was a 17-year-old runaway from juvenile hall whose parents had both died when he was 13. After years of committing small-time crimes, Arafat was taken in by the Panthers and gained a sense of purpose. He helped with the organization’s breakfast program, feeding hungry kids on their way to school. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arafat had never fired a gun. But as he listened to the sound of bullets and heard the screams of his fellow Panthers, he made a decision. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ “I found an automatic shotgun and defended myself.” --------------------------------------------------- Arafat didn’t know it then, but he was part of an experiment in policing. On that morning 50 years ago, the Panthers became the targets of the world’s first major raid by a Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, team. More than 350 officers took on 13 Panthers, ostensibly to execute arrest warrants. The group they battled included three women and five teenagers. Before the day was over, police would detonate explosives on the Panthers’ roof and call in a tank for reinforcements. Six Panthers were wounded, as were four SWAT officers, before the men and women in the house surrendered. Combined, the two sides exchanged more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Miraculously, no one was killed. -------------------------------- For one of the most dramatic moments in American policing, the raid on the Panthers headquarters is a relatively small historical footnote. But in the years since, SWAT has become a mainstay of modern policing. Between 2000 and 2008, more than 9,000 of the nation’s roughly 15,000 law enforcement agencies ( https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/police-militarization-fails-to-protect-officers-and-targets-black-communities-study-finds ) employed a SWAT unit. Thanks to the Pentagon’s controversial “ 1033 program ( https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pbs.org%2Findependentlens%2Fblog%2Fthe-evolution-of-swat-team-equipment-from-wwii-rifles-to-bearcats%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cmfleischer%40latimes.com%7Ca5b7a6b4519542fb2c7a08d779f5fec4%7Ca42080b34dd948b4bf44d70d3bbaf5d2%7C0%7C0%7C637111969751719974&sdata=mzwZnztiO6uKSB8Q8tjx8frHfEjlQJAHLGmlXveMvGo%3D&reserved=0 ) ,” even small-town police departments across the country have stocked up on military-grade hardware, including armored vehicles built to withstand roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. SWAT deployments increased by more than 1,500% ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-entry-warrant-drug-raid.html ) nationwide between 1980 and 2000. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The LAPD’s official history says the department created the nation’s first SWAT team out of concern that officers couldn’t handle sniper and hostage incidents, such as those they encountered during the Watts riots of 1965. Darryl F. Gates, then a young inspector in the department, green-lighted the concept, which he called “Special Weapons Assault Team” until leveler heads at LAPD thought better of the optics ( https://www.salon.com/2017/10/21/when-local-cops-drive-tanks-the-deadly-consequences-of-militarizing-mayberry/ ). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Former SWAT Sgt. Patrick McKinley cut his teeth in the LAPD during the Watts riots. His most vivid memory from the unrest was seeing an old woman in pajamas calling to her cat in the front yard of her bullet-ridden home, shortly after the National Guard had shot up the property in an attempt to stop a shooter holed up in her neighbor’s place. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- McKinley was on the SWAT team from the start, but early on, it didn’t figure heavily among his duties. Extreme tactical situations such as hostage taking or sniper fire, it turned out, were fairly rare. Using the SWAT team to serve the Panther arrest warrants was not only its first major deployment, it was a deviation in the unit’s original mission. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of more than 300 policemen provide cover as officers enter the Los Angeles Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles on Dec. 8, 1969 following a four-hour siege. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Wally Fong/Associated Press) ----------------------------- Yes, the Panthers were armed and certainly might be dangerous if provoked. But that hadn’t stopped the LAPD from detaining or arresting any number of them over the preceding several months. There were no hostages at 41st and Central Avenue, and the Panthers weren’t barricaded in. The wanted members had to leave the building at some point, where waiting officers could arrest them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Across the country at the time, police antipathy toward the Panthers was rising, in part fueled by dirty tricks from the FBI’s conintelpro unit ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/11/22/15-years-of-dirty-tricks-bared-by-fbi/5e344f2f-d850-4469-a33c-a19a20e443ca/ ). As McKinley, who participated in the raid, said: “We had to take them out.” ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Panther raid also has to be looked at in the context of the department’s racial history. Until just a few years before the raid, the LAPD had been headed by William Parker, who once complained during a television news interview ( https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DN2yFsx5vCLU&data=02%7C01%7Cmfleischer%40latimes.com%7C554b1342f79343f1656e08d77a5f7948%7Ca42080b34dd948b4bf44d70d3bbaf5d2%7C0%7C0%7C637112422779458066&sdata=%2Fcqbj4dER2DLBEFpVsXI3HCeRUC5yRY8OMR6D4S0MOg%3D&reserved=0 ) that an influx of African Americans moving to L.A. to escape the Jim Crow South had “flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them. We didn’t ask these people to come here.” For most of his tenure he refused to hire black officers to police their own communities and instead sought white recruits from across the country. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In its Panther deployment, SWAT was transformed from a tool of surgical precision into a blunt-force battering ram, and that’s ultimately how it would find its calling in police departments across the country — especially in African American communities. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last year, Princeton assistant professor of politics and public affairs Jonathan Mummolo published a data-driven analysis ( https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pnas.org%2Fcontent%2F115%2F37%2F9181&data=02%7C01%7Cmfleischer%40latimes.com%7Ca5b7a6b4519542fb2c7a08d779f5fec4%7Ca42080b34dd948b4bf44d70d3bbaf5d2%7C0%7C0%7C637111969751719974&sdata=w52WvSfib7H5uw1s29luB%2FLTXz%2Bmq3WJ1a8Fm%2Brb8kc%3D&reserved=0 ) of militarized policing in the United States. He found that less than 5% of SWAT raids involved the kind of high-risk scenarios they were intended for, such as terrorist attacks, hostage situations or active shooters. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “These are really rare events in the day-to-day scenarios of police departments,” says Mummolo. “So these teams have been adapted to handle more mundane situations.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Maryland, where Mummolo conducted most of his research, more than 90% of SWAT deployments were in service of a search warrant, and black communities were overwhelmingly on the receiving end of these non-emergency militarized raids. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mummolo further found that these types of raids neither reduced crime nor made police officers safer. But they did erode public trust in police. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6324): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6324 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80588736/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
