Murder in the Windy City

FRED HAMPTON and Mark Clark were shot and killed on Dec. 4, 1969, by a special Chicago police unit set up to fight black gangs and the Black Panthers. The police entered the Panthers' West Side flat at 4 a.m. that day, with a warrent to search for unregistered guns.

After returning to headquarters, the police told reporters about a frantic gunfight they said they'd had with the Panthers. But later investigations disclosed that all the bullet holes from the so-called "shoot-out" had been made by shots fired into the building--that is, by the police.

The police left behind spent cartridges and bullet holes indicating, according to a Federal grand jury, that they had fired between 83 and 99 times. There was evidence of only one Panther bullet. Roughly half of the police bullets had come from a Thompson submachine gun, which spit most of its bullets through a thin living-room wall into a tiny room where Fred Hampton, the Panthers' Chicago chairman, died in his bed.

THE SURPRISING FEATURE of the Panther case was not that the police had perpetrated such a slaughter. Edward V. Hanrahan (Harvard Law, '48), then State's Attorney for Cook County, had declared war on Chicago street gangs soon after he was elected in 1968. The Black P. Stone Nation on the South Side was the largest. It had several thousand members, and was turning from traditional gang activities to organizing for political and economic action. The group posed a threat to Mayor Daley's control of ghetto votes and became a prime target for Daley's machine. The Black Panthers, despite its tiny membership in Illinois, were considered an even greater threat. The Panthers were trying to keep gangs from fighting each other and to direct everyone's efforts against city hall. They had also begun to distribute free food to poor people. Hanrahan spent a lot of his time worrying about the Panthers.

Hanrahan's attempt to whitewash the incident was no more surprising than the violent behavior of the police. Hanrahan tried again and again to convince people that there had been a gun battle in which the Panthers had tried to shoot their way out. Hanrahan had his men act out their story on TV. He gave the sympathetic Chicago Tribune "exclusive information" consisting mostly of lies and ambiguous photographs. (One of the photographs showed "bullet holes" which turned out to be protruding nails.) Crime lab technicians faked lab reports. Other evidence was destroyed or misrepresented.

What was surprising, even to veteran Chicago-watchers, was that public uproar could grow strong enough to lead to a Federal grand jury investigation of the police action and, ultimately, to the trial of Hanrahan, five policemen, and several other officials on charges of obstruction of justice.

In the end, Hanrahan and his co-defendents were acquitted, but his actions cost the Daley machine plenty. Hanrahan's defeat in last fall's election let in a Republican State's Attorney who has been prosecuting and convicting corrupt Democratic officials for the past year.

Equally important, Hanrahan so angered black Chicagoans--most of whom had always voted straight Democratic--that they split their tickets last year. The Daley machine depends on unthinking voters who pull the lever for the straight ticket; Hanrahan taught the voters to think. Few acts could hurt Mayor Daley more.

The Black Panther raid may have begun the dismantling of the Daley machine. Michael J. Arlen largely ignores the complex political consequences of the case in his little book on Hanrahan's trial. But An American Verdict is a very effective novelistic piece of reporting in which the trial becomes a symbol of the modern American city.

Arlen deftly interweaves episodes in the Hanrahan trial with scenes showing the inner workings of the city. His descriptive mistakes show some unfamiliarity with the details of Chicago life, but his overall analysis is remarkably perceptive. Arlen can start with a little episode or a single phrase and eventually sum up an attitude of the police or an ethnic group or even the changing moods which strike a whole city.

Chicago political figures tend to make brash and revealing statements which less entrenched politicians in other cities might phrase more delicately. Arlen capitalizes on this characteristic. With a single quotation, for example, he sums up the attitude of city officials across the country toward police excess. "Eddie overplayed it," he quotes one of Hanrahan's friends as saying. "He never figured that Panther raid would blow up so big."

Arlen's description of a community meeting in Uptown, a poor, racially diverse neighborhood, provokes an understanding of the strained relations between neighborhood and police. Irish police commander begins to answer written questions from the audience:

The Commander, smiling benignly, opens a slip of paper and then--in a flat, increasingly incredulous voice--reads: "Why was my kid brother killed by the police? The Commander is clearly non-plussed by the question, crumples the piece of paper into a ball, and says in an official, nearly inaudible reply, that he "has no knowledge of the incident," but that he is certain "there was no wrongdoing in that, or any other of that sort of case."

THE POLICE who shot up the Panther headquarters were not so embarrassed as the mumbling commander. Just after the Panther incident, Sgt. Groth, who lead the raid told reporters his men had called for a "cease-fire" but the Panthers wouldn't agree. Groth claims a voice from the shadows shouted back, "Shoot is out!" The police, he said, "had no choice but to return fire." And the police stuck to their story, even in face of clear-cut ballistic evidence.

Were the men outright liars? Or did they reorder the grisly events, as Arlen suggests, for the sake of their sanity? In foreign war, he observes, the pattern has repeated time after time: "And in each case, it seems, a young officer has said: 'Men! Hold your fire!' and an angry heathen has snapped: 'Shoot it out!'"

The war in the cities seems over, for now, and peaceful Black Panthers run for political office. In Chicago, neighborhood meetings are more calm, though the problems which once aroused great passion have not disappeared. The issues discussed are the cross-town expressway and the extension of rapid transit. The police are under more attack than ever, but not for murder--only for scattered brutality and conscientious shake-down of tavern owners. Arlen returns to the house on West Monroe Street where the Panthers lived. A man is repainting the window trim. "Did something happen here?" Arlen asks. "Was it important?" An American verdict helps us to remember.