The Savage City (32 page)

Mostly, the physical training was to instill a personal sense of confidence, not for any serious expectation of combat. “I never held a gun against a police officer,” said Silvers. “I never did anything aggressive. I was never remotely violent against anyone. But if anything were to come down, I was going to be ready and able to defend myself.”

Female Panthers comprised between 20 and 40 percent of the membership in New York. Their daily routine involved core tasks like selling the
Black Panther,
organizing clothing drives and the free breakfast program for children, and maintaining the “Panther pads,” communal apartments around Manhattan that were available to be shared by three to six party members. Male party members followed a different routine, one colored by shared paranoia and the near-daily possibility of conflict with the police.

 

EVER SINCE THE
night when party members had been arrested in Bed-Stuy for “attempting to incite a riot,” and two cops were ambushed later on Eastern Parkway, interactions between the Panthers and the NYPD had only grown more tense. At a press conference after the shooting of the cops, Joudon Ford, a precocious, baby-faced eighteen-year-old Panther captain declared: “The Black Panther Party did not order those two policemen shot. It should be clear to all that the Black Panther Party was not involved, because if we had been…the pigs would be dead.”

The statement enraged the police. In precincts throughout Brooklyn, a group of cops circulated a petition to banish from the bench Judge John F. Furey, who had presided over the arraignment of the Panthers who were arrested for using a bullhorn on Nostrand Avenue. In the petition, the cops claimed that Furey had “permitted members of a racist group in his courtroom to smoke, permitted them to wear their hats while the court was in session and permitted them to shout threats at the members of the Police Department and at the bench in a successful effort to have two defendants before him paroled and walk out of the courtroom.”

The judge denied the allegations. In the
New York Times,
the judge was quoted saying that he hadn't seen any hats on nor anyone smoking, and that the court was quiet during the arraignment. His account was backed up by a report in the
Times
the day after the arraignment, which noted that the proceedings had been “orderly.”

In general, the police felt they were “not being backed up,” as a
spokesman for the police petition put it. “We do not have the support of the general public. We do not have the support of the courts.” When the petition went nowhere, the aggrieved patrolmen took their effort a step further.

On August 8, a group of policemen announced that they had formed an independent organization called the Law Enforcement Group (LEG), “to protect the life and welfare of police officers and to seek all the assistance possible to enable them to vigorously enforce the laws of the state.”

“We're sick and tired of taking it on the chin,” said John Cassese, head of the PBA, in response to a question about LEG. “Now how much can we take as policemen? We're ready to lay down our life for anybody in the city of New York or any place else. We shouldn't be ambushed by these people…. Among some of the militant guys in the city, war has been declared against the Police Department and I think the sniper incident in Brooklyn points it up.”

But the formation of LEG went unheralded by many—until a month later, when a series of NYPD-Panther encounters brought matters to a head.

In late August, three Panthers were arrested and charged with assaulting a police office on Nostrand Avenue outside the Panther headquarters. At their arraignment, there appeared what the
Times
described as “a group of about 20 off-duty policemen, their badges hanging out of the breast pockets of their sports shirts and jackets. Most left after the hearing.” The cops were angered by the fact that the Panthers had been granted a hearing to have their bail reduced on the grounds that it was “discriminatory and highly unconstitutional.”

William Kunstler, the attorney for the arrested Panthers, alleged that the appearance of the policemen at the hearing was intended to create “an atmosphere of fear” and to convince the judge that “he was dealing with caged animals.” At a press conference in the hallway after the hearing, the loquacious Kunstler—who would go on to become a virtual house lawyer for the Panthers and therefore the bane of policemen everywhere—noted that all over the country “large numbers of policemen invariably turn up when a black militant is on trial.”

Less than a week later, five more Panthers were arrested. This time, a group that included Captain Joudon Ford were held on charges of loitering and resisting arrest. They were arrested in Brownsville and held at the Seventy-third Precinct station house, the same building where the
travails of George Whitmore had begun four and a half years earlier. When Gerald Lefcourt, a young attorney working in Kunstler's office, arrived at the precinct, he asked, “Where are my clients?” A group of cops laughed and nodded toward the squad room holding cell, where the Panthers sat bloodied behind bars.

On September 4, many of the Panthers who had been arrested in recent weeks had a scheduled hearing on the sixth floor of the Brooklyn Criminal Court Building on Schermerhorn Street. They were joined by a group of about twenty fellow Panthers and family members who were there to show support. As the supporters arrived at the outer hall to the courtroom, a group of roughly 150 off-duty police officers appeared out of nowhere and pushed into the courtroom amid shouts of “White power” and “Win with Wallace!” Some of the men were wearing
WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT
buttons, in support of the white supremacist Alabama governor's bid for higher office.

As the crowd grew unruly, the presiding judge ordered that anyone who couldn't find a seat would have to leave the courtroom, then ordered court officers to lock the courtroom door.

Lefcourt, a twenty-five-year-old whose budding law practice was fast becoming monopolized by Panther cases, had never seen anything like it. “You could tell they were off-duty officers because they had a bulge under their shirt at the waist, where their guns were holstered. They were chanting ‘White tigers eat Black Panthers.' It was the most astonishing display of racism I'd ever seen. I don't think there's been anything like it before or since.”

Out in the hallway, the off-duty cops gathered in a group. A number of news reporters on the scene recognized a few of the cops, some of whom appeared to be carrying police blackjacks.

When five or six Panther supporters arrived in the hallway, one of the off-duty cops shouted, “There are the Black Panthers. Let's get them!” The cops surrounded the Panthers. According to David Burnham, a
Times
reporter, “About 150 white men, many of whom were off-duty and out-of-uniform policemen, attacked [the] small number of Black Panther Party members and white sympathizers…. Although the newsmen present could not see any of the white men actually striking the Panthers and their white colleagues during the brief melee, they could see swinging hands holding blackjacks high in the air and, immediately after the clash, blood running from the heads of at least two of those
attacked. A third member of the group said he had been kicked in the back 20 or 25 times.”

As Burnham's gingerly account conveyed, the off-duty cops had overwhelmed the small group of Panthers and their supporters. Other accounts described punching and strangling in the melee. Some who were on the receiving end said they smelled alcohol on the breath of the cops. One Panther—David Brothers, a prominent leader in the Brooklyn chapter—had his briefcase stolen. The briefcase contained documents relating to activities of the Panthers.

Immediately after the brawl, the cops disappeared from the building as suddenly as they arrived.

In the hallway, a young Panther who was bleeding from a blow to the scalp said to a reporter, “Tell [those cops] something for me. If they think what happened in Cleveland was bad—it was nothing.” The youth was referring to the shoot-out between cops and Panthers that resulted in eleven dead.

At least two of the off-duty cops involved in the beat-down were identified as members of the executive board of LEG, the new right-wing police group. The rest of the police gang were cops who had finished their midnight to 8:00
A.M.
shift, perhaps gone for a few drinks, and then decided to go over to the courthouse and confront some Panthers.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad was supposed to be at the courthouse that morning, but he slept in and arrived late. When he got to the Brooklyn courthouse around 10:30
A.M.
, everyone was buzzing with shock and outrage at what happened. There were news media people everywhere. Dhoruba kicked himself for missing out on the action.

The incident at Brooklyn Criminal Court resonated far and wide. The following day, at a meeting attended by some of the Panthers who had been attacked, their attorney Lefcourt, and officials from Mayor Lindsay's Urban Task Force, Panther David Brothers removed his shirt and showed off what one observer called “a mass of ugly bruises.” The mayor himself condemned the attack, announcing, “Commissioner Leary has assured me that he will take immediate and vigorous action against any individual member of the force who had violated the law or departmental regulations, including criminal prosecution if that is warranted by the facts.” An official representing the NYPD even enlisted the help of the Panthers themselves, inviting them to “help us identify the assailants. We want to weed out the bad apples.”

Panther captain Joudon Ford, a gangly teenager who was married to a corrections officer, stood and said, “You don't get it. It's not a few bad apples. It's the whole police force.”

The NAACP's legal department called for a grand jury to investigate the incident. The
New York Times,
in an editorial entitled “Brutality, New York Style,” noted that the attack occurred one week after a massive demonstration at the Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago, during which cops had brutalized protesters on national television for all the world to see. “The brutality of these off-duty policemen compares with last week's brutality of the on-duty policemen in Chicago; indeed, it is in some ways even worse. The attack in a court building makes a mockery of the rule of law and court-decreed justice. It feeds the fear of those in our society who already consider the police less their guardians than their oppressors. Mostly, it demonstrates how quickly the police-state virus can spread.”

In a press release, Joudon Ford alleged that LEG (which he called “a Klan-like organization within the NYPD”) was behind the courthouse attack. A LEG spokesman denied the accusation, but the perception stuck. Given the group's history of public statements against the Panthers, the attack seemed like a logical extension of their stated goals. The organization, which had applied for a state charter, was being supported by the archconservative John Birch Society, who stated in its in-house newspaper, “The battle for the control of the New York Police Department is on. Its results will be felt in every police department in every town in the United States.”

LEG was not officially endorsed or supported by the upper “brass” of the NYPD, but the group did seem to represent the public view of some rank-and-file policemen. They were believed to have a membership-in-waiting of around one thousand officers.

The group's emboldened posture toward the Black Panther Party was part of a larger public relations campaign within the police establishment. There were some who wanted to show the public—and its own officers—that the NYPD could not be pushed around by a bunch of black teenagers, and that those who disrespected the police would be punished with blackjacks in the streets, the precinct houses, and even in the halls of justice. This effort was aimed as much at maintaining department morale as it was at seriously combating the rise
of the Panthers. For that, a far more substantial program was under way—outside the purview of the public and even most members of the NYPD.

 

THE BUREAU OF
Special Services (BOSS) was a clandestine branch of the police department's Intelligence Division. It had originally been set up in the halcyon days of the cold war to monitor the activities of the Communist Party in New York, which earned it the nickname “the Red Squad.” By the early 1960s—especially after the Harlem and Brooklyn riots of July 1964—BOSS switched its focus from communists to what it referred to as “black hate groups.” One of its early efforts had been to supply information through backdoor channels to the CBS television network, which produced a documentary called
The Hate That Hate Produced
. The documentary, produced and narrated by Mike Wallace, was an alarmist portrait of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

BOSS covertly gathered information on anyone who advocated for civil rights on behalf of black people. Its most ambitious effort involved planting undercover agents within black activist organizations. They infiltrated the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X's Organization of African American Unity almost from their beginnings in New York. The organizations SNCC and CORE were rife with police informants, and undercover detectives infiltrating RAM played a major role in that group's demise.

BOSS also infiltrated the Black Panther Party. The Panther organization was growing fast, making it difficult to conduct thorough background checks on all prospective members. The leadership tried to instill quality control by enforcing a rigid initiation process. But the undercover cops were good enough at this kind of work to penetrate whatever security the Panthers could muster—and ultimately this fact created an atmosphere of paranoia within the group that was easily manipulated by law enforcement.