The Enduring Legacies of the Mark Clark and Fred Hampton Killings
Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for distrust between black communities and law enforcement.
On December 4, 1969, a special Chicago police squad assigned to the district attorney raided a Black Panther Party (BPP) apartment to execute a search warrant to find illegal guns. In the aftermath, police claimed they had engaged in a gun battle with the militants, walking a camera crew through the bullet-ridden flat to show the ferocity of the fighting. The raid killed two Panthers — 22-year old Mark Clark and 21-year-old Fred Hampton — and seriously wounded four others. Despite half a century passing since the tragedy, the event’s echoes continue to reverberate throughout the politics of American law enforcement and officer-involved shootings today.
A civil suit tirelessly pursued by the raid’s survivors spanned 13 years and uncovered, among other things, that the “battle” between police and the BPP was almost entirely one-sided and more resembled an ambush than a gunfight; that there is reason to believe Hampton was murdered onsite after being taken into custody alive; and that the judge in their case was complicit in hiding the FBI’s involvement in the raid as part of their now infamous COINTELPRO scheme that undermined the constitutional rights of minorities and domestic political organizations.
While the facts and suspicions surrounding the Hampton and Clark killings may seem outlandish today, the official lies, stonewalling, and complicity of the broader legal system are all too familiar to those who have experienced wanton police violence in their communities. No less troubling, over the past two decades, the FBI has resumed activities that target and surveil minority communities and civil rights advocates as suspect classes, indicating that the Bureau is not as far removed from the notorious J. Edgar Hoover era as many would like to believe.
Police killings remain obscured by delays and lies
Until research projects published by the Guardian (US) and the Washington Post in 2015, the best information available showed that American police officers killed roughly 400 people per year. As a result of the data gathered by these media outlets, we now know that the number is closer to and sometimes exceeds 1,000 people per year. Until shamed into reforming their data collection methods, the United States had proven incapable of reporting something as straight-forward as counting the number of bodies left in the streets by police officers on an annual basis.
To make matters worse, the official stories put forth immediately after officer-involved shootings and other police violence is often one-sided and almost uniformly defending the actions of an officer, whether or not that defense is warranted by the facts. In 2018, Hoover, Alabama police said that an officer had shot and killed Emantic Bradford Jr., a 21-year-old black man, who police claimed had fatally shot someone at a local mall. Police subsequently retracted that statement and continued to issue contradictory official explanations for why this innocent veteran who was legally carrying a weapon was shot from behind by one of their police officers. (Unsurprisingly, the officer was not charged in Bradford’s death.)
Police departments release information as they see fit, sometimes withholding crucial information for days, weeks, or months without reasonable explanation. To be fair, state laws and labor contracts sometimes impede immediate transparency — although these protections are usually lobbied for by police unions — but other times the official foot-dragging is so inexplicable as to prompt open discussions of political or institutional cover-ups. In one case in Fairfax County, Virginia, it took nearly 18 months for officials to even publicly identify the officer who fatally shot John Geer during a brief standoff in 2013. Documents finally showed that it was a “bad shoot” from the beginning, and that all other officers — including a supervisor — had submitted reports supporting that conclusion. The officer, Adam Torres, was terminated and eventually pled guilty to manslaughter for Geer’s killing.
The ongoing racialized politics of FBI surveillance
At the time of the raid on the BPP apartment, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was still under the control of J. Edgar Hoover, who is infamous for using the FBI as an intelligence gathering operation to extort, intimidate, and defame any individual or organization he deemed hostile to national interests. As a result of his personal prejudices and almost paranoid suspicion, African-American political and civil rights organizations were often the target of FBI infiltration, surveillance, and disruption. The BPP was one of those organizations, and the head of BPP’s Chicago security apparatus was an FBI informant who literally provided the blueprint that the officers used in the raid.
Despite working out of a downtown D.C. headquarters bearing Hoover’s name, the FBI has spent decades trying to distance itself from the outwardly political and illegal tactics of its nearly five decades under his leadership. Deep state conspiracy theories against the current president notwithstanding, the FBI has cultivated a reputation of consummate professionalism and integrity that many in the Bureau undoubtedly pride themselves to uphold. Nevertheless, the FBI retains and reflects the racial baggage that permeates its history and broader American society, as several recent initiatives illustrate.
In his new book, Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy (The New Press, 2019), former FBI agent Mike German explains how the FBI has recently coined catch-all terms like “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE) to describe black political dissenters and police critics as potential domestic terrorist threats. By raising the stakes to equate social critics with threats to national security, German argues, the FBI can push the limits of some procedural boundaries because of the extraordinary dangers the threats may pose. For example, the FBI has used “assessments” to monitor groups that share ethnic, religious, or racial characteristics for potential threats in given geographic areas. These assessments do not require agents to establish the “factual predication” — that is, show the likely existence of criminal activity — that is typically required to open up proper criminal investigations. Thus, these specious designations and ethno-racial assessments can provide cover for improper mass surveillance for the “new” FBI.
The downstream effects of these designations on local police are hard to quantify, but such flimsy definitions of what makes a person a BIE are absurdly broad. As German poignantly notes, if identifying as black and being concerned about racism and police violence are the only consistent indicators, most of America’s black population could potentially fall under suspicion as BIE. This doesn’t mean that every black person in America is going to be wiretapped by the FBI or local police, but that the definition is so weak that it doesn’t take much for law enforcement to justify treating black activists with heightened suspicion. BIE is thus functionally useless as a tool for identifying legitimate threats, but so malleable that it can be used against almost any politically active black person. Organizations like Black Lives Matter are natural targets for BIE designation and thus have reason for concern.
The more things change…
In the fifty years that have passed since the raid on the Chicago Black Panther Party, the United States has, for the most part, become a better place to live for African-Americans and other marginalized groups along ethnic, gender, sex, and racial lines. But deep-seated problems persist, particularly the antagonism between law enforcement and black communities, and the BPP raid is a reminder of how these problems can result in deadly consequences.
It is tempting to look back at the raid as a singular example of law enforcement run amok; a violent and inexcusable governmental reaction to the political climate of the time. And yet, so much of what happened in the aftermath is familiar to anyone who experiences or studies police violence today.
The reactions to American police killings resound with the dishonesty and obstruction that followed the raid on the Panthers. Despite the humiliation of the COINTELPRO revelations and the reformation of how the FBI does its job, the Bureau continues to antagonize and monitor American minority communities as if their very existence upsets the American status quo. Individuals and organizations in those communities who dare stand up for their constitutional rights become potential threats to both police officers and national security.
It is thus wrong to think of the killings of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton as an isolated event of the ‘bad old days’ which have long since passed. We must remember and teach what happened to them because their struggle remains our struggle: Black Lives Matter.
