AMERICA-1

The war on the home front

MURRAY KEMPTON

`You better send some ambulances. We killed some niggers.' (A Mississippi State Highway Patrolman after he and his col- leagues had fired 230 shots into a dormitory at Jackson State College killing two students and wounding nine others.) The temporary war between the young and their government quieted last week with offensive operations limited to the unleashed larynx of Vice President Agnew, and our attention here in the United States could focus again on the permanent war between the law enforcement agencies and such of the black poor as raise their heads.

Just how one-sided that most-enduring of our domestic conflicts has always been was suggested by release of a federal grand jury report on the 4 December Chicago police assault on the Black Panther headquarters, which resulted in the death in bed of Fred Hampton, that party's Illinois defence cap- tain. The raiding party had claimed then to have fought its way through a barrage of Panther gunfire: 'If 200 shots were fired,' its commander said afterwards, 'it was nothing.' Nine of the surviving Panthers were indicted afterwards for attempted murder.

Now the grand jury has found that the persons under assault may have fired one shotgun shell—no slug has been found— while the police were firing nearly 100 rounds. 'The great variance between the physical evidence and the testimony of the officers raises a question as to whether the officers are falsifying their accounts,' the grand jury decided with the discretion and restraint normal to those extraordinary occasions when police excess is even hinted at in findings directed by a public prosecutor in the United States. The Chicago District Attorney who had praised his raiding party for its containment in the face of 'a vicious Panther attack' withdrew his attempted murder indictments against such Panthers on 7 May. No one, of course, suggested the indictment of any member of the raiding party. The triumph of justice in these affairs is never the conviction of the policeman who shoots; the best that can be expected is that the law will forgive his victim.

The fundamental horror of all these events arises from the suspicion that the lies the American policeman tells us are ones that he has first told himself and goes on believing. The war against the Black Panthers could hardly be as vicious as it goes on being if the law enforcement agencies did not believe themselves under siege, iethere were not a real quotient of paranoia in the minds of policemen these days, if the commander of the Chicago reconnaissance had not genuinely though that, while he was shoot- ing, he was himself being shot at.

At this moment thirteen Black Panthers are on trial in New York for having plotted to blow up five department stores, three police ' station houses and the Bronx Botanical Gardens during Easter Week of 1969. These defendants were indicted after raids on their homes had turned up the makings of three pipe bombs and the com-

ponents of one time bomb, a most pitiable arsenal for an attentat of the dimensions

charged, but accepted by all judges as sub- stantial enough to sustain a limitless cam- paign of terror.

The transcripts of police eavesdropping upon the Panthers were revealed the other day in the course of this particular trial and can serve as all the example we need of the quotient of 'paranoia which informs our domestic war. The New York City Police Department had commenced its investigation of the Panther party in October of 1968 by obtaining a court order to monitor the tele- phone calls of six Panther leaders in Brook- lyn. Eavesdropping is a resort of policemen which judges in America are supposed to tolerate only tipon the most compelling evidence of dangerous practices by the per- sons eavesdropped upon; deference to our Constitution therefore requires a policeman to return to the judge every two months and have his permission to tap the suspect's tele- phone renewed only after proof that his tappings so far have produced evidence of real peril to public safety.

The Panther wiretaps produced transcripts of conversation which, if not always attrac- tive, was all too seldom indicative of serious criminal intent. Persuading judges to the contrary required heroic convolutions of exegesis. Requests for extensions of the wiretapping permission depended, then, on presenting to the court conversations of con- siderable ambiguity accompanied by ap- praisals by the listening policeman which certified them as meaning things dreadful beyond the imagination.

For example, there is the telephone con- versation between a Panther named Jorge Aponte and an unknown male. 'How do you say "explosive" in Swahili?' Answer: 'How do you say "automatic rifle"?'

And then, from the attending policeman: 'In my opinion, the overall intent of these remarks would indicate that they intend to use these type weapons and use African tongue during military operations in New York City.'

A conversation between Panthers Fred Richardson and Jourdan Ford: 'I have your s—t here and I'm not going to keep it any more.'

Then the police interpretation: 'Use of word s—t is a reference to either weapons or demolition or some form of contra- band.'

A conversation between May Mallory, a verbally vigorous but otherwise not notice- ably feckful Black Power firebrand, and

Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther party: Miss Mallory: 'Things are going pretty slow.' Bobby Seale: 'Well, many times we don't hear of the Vietcong. Then we read "118 GIs wiped out by Vietcong." That is the way things move many times' Interpretation: 'This conversation is in code. Gts mean police. Vietcong means Black Panther party.

So, the casual talk of young persons given more to rhetorical fantasy than even the average of Americans was transcribed, the most awful intent ascribed to them, the imagination of -the policeman supplying every defect in seriousness of menace. And this process was accepted and its con- sequences believed by judges of the highest appelate eminence until we see the objects of such investigation on trial for in part at least vagrants' musings magnified by their auditors into vast conspiracies. Our most protracted domestic struggle has all too little history that is not written by policemen, accepted by public prosecutors and given such credence by most respectable persons that when the President of Yale University confessed himself 'sceptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to get a fair trial anywhere in the United States', the ensuing shock came less from any sense that we have come to a place where a responsible American could well arrive at a judgment so harsh, than from simple outrage that the president of Yale could utter such malignant nonsense. What do you suppose, as Tom Wicker wondered in the New York Tinier the other day, an American Negro thinks when he reads an American newspaper?