Questions Remain

The police raid on a Black Panther apartment in Chicago last December has become a cause celebre. Police claimed that they were attacked as they sought to enter the apartment, whereas Panthers claimed that the two of their number who were killed had been more or less passive victims. Last week a federal grand jury wound up its investigation by citing "the irreconcilable disparity between the accounts given by the officers and the physical evidence." The results were inconclusive, since they failed to clear up the vital questions of just what happened in the predawn raid that took the lives of Panthers Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22.

Even so, the 249-page report is a devastating condemnation of the entire law-enforcement handling of the affair. In light of the actions of the state's attorney's men who conducted the raid and the officials who investigated it, concluded the jury, there is "reasonable basis for public doubt of their efficiency or even their credibility." Among the findings:

> The raid on the Panthers was "not professionally planned or properly executed." Police were heavily armed, but without tear gas or portable lights to decrease casualties. Sergeant Daniel Groth, who led the raid, rejected the standard approach of asking the Panthers to come out peacefully before opening fire.

> The investigation immediately following the raid was riddled by repeated errors. According to the sergeant in charge, it "was conducted not to obtain all the available evidence but to try to establish the authenticity of the account given by the raiding officers." Police said that they had shot a minimum of ten to 15 times into the dark apartment; FBI evidence showed that they had riddled it with between 82 and 99 shots. Though police said that the Panthers fired first and resisted with heavy gunfire, the study indicated that the Panthers got off only a single shot.

Under crossexamination, Chicago Police Captain Harry Ervanian, who ran the Internal Inspections Division, admitted that "this was a very bad investigation." The night before the report was released, Ervanian and two other policemen were demoted, apparently as a result of the controversy.

Fear and Tension. The grand jury found that the raid had grown out of police fears of a Panther menace "totally out of proportion to the minuscule number of members." It offered its own possible explanation: "That in the darkness and the excitement, [police] mistakenly attributed to the occupants the fire of other officers." Concluded the report: "A careful analysis of the testimony shows the way such mistakes could be made, and is even more credible if one considers the natural fear, confusion and tension that each must have felt." The Panthers claim that the police were on a deliberate murder foray.

The grand jury findings lent strong evidence to the case that it was the police --and not the Panthers--who shot first. Yet the jury was unable to return any indictments against the 14 policemen in the raid, largely because the seven surviving Panthers refused to testify before the predominantly white federal grand jury. They seemed to prefer propagandizing their martyrs. "The grand jury is forced to conclude that [the Panthers] are more interested in the issue of police persecution than they are in obtaining justice," the report said. "Perhaps revolutionary groups simply do not want the legal system to work."

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