PHOTO: Fred Hampton’s gravesite shot up annually by police officers

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Fred Hampton’s gravesite shot up annually by police officers.

On December 4, 1969, in a FBI orchestrated raid by Hanrahan’s special squad, Hampton and Clark were shot to death. Fourteen handpicked policemen, armed with twenty-seven firearms including a Thompson submachine and shotguns, converged on Hampton’s apartment at 4:45 a.m. The police fired a barrage into the quiet apartment killing the two Panther leaders and wounding all of the other occupants. READ MORE HERE

Attorney Paul Wolf has commented on a nearly identical raid in Los Angeles. “Four days after a similar raid on a Panther apartment in Chicago, forty men of the Special Weapons and Tactics squad, with more than a hundred regular police as backup, raided the Los Angeles Panther headquarters at 5:30 in the morning.”

“The similarities between the Chicago and Los Angeles raids are undeniable, with a special local police unit closely linked to the FBI involved in both assaults, spurious warrants seeking “illegal weapons” utilized on both occasions, predawn timing of both raids to catch the Panthers asleep and a reliance on overwhelming police firepower to the exclusion of all other methods. Both raids occurred in the context of an ongoing and highly energetic anti-BPP COINTELPRO, and—as in the Hampton assassination—bullets were fired directly into Pratt’s bed. Unlike the Chicago leader, however, Pratt was sleeping on the floor, the result of spinal injuries sustained in Vietnam.”

In May 1973, a report from an independent Commission of Inquiry into the fatal shooting of Fred Hampton was issued. Chaired by Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark, the Commission was sharply critical of law enforcement officials.