Thirty years ago today, on May 13, 1985, a part of West Philadelphia became a war zone. A group of radical residents called MOVE – who advocated a return to nature and strongly identified with their African roots – were holed up in their home on Osage Avenue in an armed bunker they’d built on the roof. Years of animosity had led up to this day. In a 1978 raid on their home, a police officer was killed (possibly by friendly fire) and several of their members were beaten by police and given long prison sentences. Since then, MOVE had been stockpiling weapons, terrifying their neighbors, and preparing for the next confrontation with police.
Before the raid that day, neighbors evacuated from their homes, many of them looking forward to finally being rid of this nuisance. But things would go a bit off the rails. Unable to raid the house or flush out the residents with normal tactics, Philadelphia police decided to do something a little more drastic.
They flew a helicopter low over the house and dropped a small bomb on the roof.
Even as the bomb slowly ignited a fire inside the building, city and police officials initially held off on having the fire department put it out. When they finally decided to start, an entire city block was burning to the ground. By the next morning, over 60 homes were destroyed, dozens were left homeless. 11 MOVE members were dead.
A documentary called “Let the Fire Burn” provides a great recounting of news footage and historical context from the decade leading up to this disaster. Most remarkable to me was footage of the testimony given to a special commission set up to investigate just how and why this happened, which makes up a significant part of the film.
There were two aspects of the documentary that stood out to me. The first is how much it reminded me of Waco. The MOVE organization was clearly a cult, and the children who were in their care were clearly being abused. The surviving adult members who testified to the commission afterwards gave winding and delusional answers to questions when it was obvious they’d been caught in lies.
The other aspect is how hard it was for the police to hide how their antagonism towards MOVE had become personal and how this led to a conclusion that was more emotional catharsis than proper crisis resolution. The deeper question that the film leads to is determining how much of the growing antagonism was perpetuated by police actions over the years, and how much was the natural result of a cult with a history of irrational behavior. The two things appeared to feed off each other; the inclination of the police towards unchecked aggression and the inclination of MOVE towards unhinged paranoia.
In my last civil liberties roundup, I talked about the lack of transparency in our drone strike program. It was on my mind as the footage from the October 1985 commission showed city and police officials struggling to answer questions about the decisions made that day. It reinforced that the secrecy of these programs comes first and foremost from a desire to avoid this type of scrutiny over the decisions being made. It’s easier to accept the possibility of collateral damage if no one is looking over your shoulder asking if there was a better course of action.
And that’s only part of the problem. It’s also easier to accept the possibility of collateral damage if you think of those being affected only as faceless, nameless “others”, and especially if the general public shares that broad sentiment. Ed Rendell, who was the District Attorney at the time, comes off as a complete madman in some of his testimony, and yet he went on to become both Mayor and Governor. There really wasn’t much of a public penalty for treating an entire neighborhood of West Philadelphia as expendable. As bad as this problem was in 1980s Philadelphia, it’s significantly worse when it happens clear on the other side of the world. Hardly anyone in this country blinks when innocent civilians in Pakistan or Yemen are killed or have their lives destroyed.
Recently, the New York Times put together an important statistical analysis showing that there are roughly 1.5 million “missing” black men in the United States. The best way to understand these figures is to see it as collateral damage from the drug war. And not just the drug war directly, but also indirectly – from the various ways that drug war-inspired legislation and judicial decisions have greatly skewed towards giving police and prosecutors greater power to search people’s homes, to take their possessions, to arrest them in greater numbers, and to send them to prison for longer periods of time.
This is the most glaring, inexcusable, civil liberties crisis in modern America. Just as Philadelphia city officials never would’ve dropped a bomb in a middle-class, white neighborhood, the drug war is only fought in areas where collateral damage carries little political risk. Thirty years after the MOVE fire, that collateral damage is in the form of overcrowded prisons and broken minority communities in nearly every major U.S. city.
A great example of this collateral damage happened right at the half-way point between then and now. In Tulia, Texas in 2000, a crooked drug cop very nearly put half the town’s population of young black men in prison. It’s as vivid an illustration as one can find for how our mass incarceration crisis unfolded. Even as it started to become clear that the entire set of drug cases were based on fabrications, the natural inclination of the city officials, prosecutors, and judges was to ignore it and keep sending people to jail. It’s sobering to imagine how many similar situations played out silently all across America, putting untold numbers of innocent people behind bars. There’s no question that this makes up a significant part of the 1.5 million missing black men.
I was 9 and living in the outer suburbs of Philadelphia when the MOVE fire happened. Absolutely none of this made any fucking sense at the time. The idea of the police carelessly burning down your house was well beyond what I could understand at that age. My parents, who both grew up in urban areas and met at college in West Philadelphia, understood it quite well. They were very content to now live in semi-rural Chester County, away from the high crime rates, police corruption, and general dysfunction of Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s.
Like many progressives in my parents’ generation, they were strong supporters of civil rights in their younger years, but over time paid little attention to the growing mass incarceration crisis – which grew with some huge assists from progressive politicians afraid of being seen as weak on crime. This is finally starting to change. In fact, one of the heroes of the Tulia story, ACLU attorney Vanita Gupta, has been appointed by the Obama Administration to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
But not everyone is keeping up with the times. Last week, Radley Balko wrote this tremendous piece in response to several op-eds warning Hillary Clinton against addressing this crisis, as if nothing has changed in public perception in the last several decades. Thirty years ago, it wasn’t hard to look at the situation in our cities and sympathize with extreme responses to the crime rate. Today, with significantly lower crime rates, militarized police forces using weapons of war, near-daily occurrences of questionable police shootings, and a complete inability to hold police accountable for bad behavior, it’s obvious that the bigger concern should be the amount of crime happening in the other direction.
As Hillary Clinton sets out to return to the White House, she knows she can’t rally young voters without acknowledging the collateral damage from the drug war and demonstrating a real willingness to go in a new direction. One advantage she has is that just about every other Democrat of her generation supported the same slew of terrible ideas that came out of the crime politics of the 80s and have left us with overflowing prisons across the U.S. Martin O’Malley, as mayor of Baltimore, was atrocious. Senator Joe Biden was one of the primary architects of the modern drug war machine. A notable exception is Jim Webb, who despite some other notable flaws as a candidate, has understood the mass incarceration crisis a lot longer than most other politicians.
A lot has changed in the thirty years since the MOVE fire. Social media – and the work of many dedicated journalists – deserve a lot of credit for starting to bridge the humanity gap that widened in the 70s and 80s with respect to America’s neglected minority communities. Uprisings against police unaccountability in various cities are presented with much more context today. Even many conservatives recognize the subtle race-based tyranny of Ferguson’s court system, the shame of having the highest rates of incarceration in the world, the injustice of asset forfeiture, or the affront to liberty of SWAT teams breaking into people’s homes for weed. A generation of giving police more and more power is finally being called to account for the collateral damage it’s caused. And it’s a good bet that over the next thirty years, as our shrinking world bridges the humanity gap across borders and oceans, a similar reckoning will happen on a global scale.
I skipped doing the regular civil liberties roundup to write up this post. It’ll resume in two weeks.
@ Lee
Bear in mind that these MOVE members were Black Hebrew Israelites and had been broadcasting their “sermons” from loudspeakers that could be heard from nearly a half mile away, for years. They had assaulted and murdered several people in their neighborhood and many of their members were longtime junkies and multiple felons. One of the people the Police were attempting to arrest that day was a serial rapist and murderer.
The Black Hebrew Israelites are a radical, holocaust-denying racist and misogynistic hate group that has repeatedly attacked women, Jews, Black Christians, Hispanics and white folks in several cities and has earned a solid reputation for really psychotic behavior. Most of these folks seem to be completely illiterate and reject the very legitimacy of written language except for carefully selected portions of the old testament, the Bible and even the Qu’ran as interpreted by the Wahabists.
They’re fucking nutballs.
That being said, the bombing of that neighborhood was an appalling action on the part of the Philadelphia Police, and the reality is that department has not changed much if at all from those bad old days. But bear in mind, that the Philadelphia police and city administration had been battling that particular group for nearly two decades. They lived in absolute filth, and were considered pariahs by nearly everybody. They had a very long reputation for extreme violence and lawless behavior in every neighborhood they had taken residence in.
When that incident happened, I was 21 years old and was totally blown away by the actions of the PPD, and considered it to be an utterly radical overreaction on their part. But I learned several things about it since. None of it points to anything but the City finally becoming so fed up with the bullshit perpetrated by that organization that they thought it acceptable to take such action. Bombing the rooftop bunker may have been excessive, but the building had been set up to burn by the residents.
I would post a link to an example, but as of yesterday, any post I make that includes a link is eaten by your server and doesn’t appear at all.
Ahhh yes, Puddy’s second cousin lived a few blocks from move. Her son, my third cousin, was a sergeant at that time in the Philly Police force. We know much from him what black police officers thought about Move. Puddy wrote a little about this in the HA archives. You can ask the yellowishleakingbuttspigot arschloch for a replay from the crazed screen scraped databaze of HA thought!
Now let’s discuss Philly at the time. Time to set the table… W. Wilson Goode was the first black Democrat [sic] mayor of Philadelphia elected in 1982. Goode previously was also a community activist… sound familiar? At the end of Goode’s continual tax raising tenure, Philly was less than a month away from being bankrupt? Tax and spend… sound familiar?
Many Move sanitary and noise complaints were lodged by their black neighbors over the years. This definitely was the black section of town. The mayor ordered the bombing of the Move location. What was the composition of the bomb? Tovex, an explosive gel used in underwater mining and C-4 plastic explosive. Think of the The Rock movie with Nick Cage and Sean Connery. Liquid Explosive! And it was burn baby burn! 6 adults and five children died in the fire! My cousin could see the flames coming from their house near city line ave.
Puddy guesses the mayor and police thought the location has some underwater and subterranean locations below it. Kind of strange to drop a bomb on black people in a black part of the city ordered by a black mayor!
The Move Group were part of the eco nutz crowd butt from a black perspective. Seems the eco nutz crowd of today copied has Move’s violent eco nutz behavior!
What was strange was Goode was reelected after this fiasco!
vomit producer @2,
Why do you always use disgusting adjectives and verbs to describe black people? Your innate racism really shows! Yet Steve, drinking his stupid solution stupidly continues to give you a pass!
Also, you wrote “radical, holocaust-denying racist and misogynistic hate group” – so you are classifying John Africa and his group the same way the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies hate groups? Do tell! So then the SPLC would call Move a hate group!
Or as the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the KKK?
Thanks for playing!
I think my own personal failure in this was not realizing just how malignant and endemic racism is. I had a kind of blind faith in American justice as being fair. I’ve had black friends and lovers since leaving the lily white burbs at eighteen and I don’t recall any saying anything hostile or having any run-ins with police. It really wasn’t until a few years ago that the incarceration numbers starting shocking me out of my miasma. Only then was it clear there were serious problems with racist police and the drug war. I can only apologize for my own blindness and vow to do what I can to change things. It cannot be business as usual.
America’s police are a cult with a history of irrational and violent behavior.
If we’ve gotta have a Philly police department, then let’s put them to work doing something useful by sending them to clean out the Cliven Bundy Ranch terrorists.
Great comment, Lee. You’ve done a good job of putting America’s policing crisis into a historical context. You’ve touched on many of the major elements of the crisis — lack of accountability or restraint on bad police behavior, abuse of forfeiture laws, entrenched racism and oppression of minorities, police militarization, mass incarceration, dishonest cops framing innocent people, wholesale violations of civil liberties, etc. — despite our Bill of Rights guarantees, America’s human rights record isn’t a whole lot better than North Korea’s or China’s in some respects. One thing missing from your piece is how to change it.
@8
Thanks Roger. How to change it deserves a whole other post. Lots of things required. Real accountability for police lawlessness. Moving away entirely from the incarceration model of drug control. Eliminating the practice of forfeiture.
Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist, but I feel like we’re moving pretty quickly towards some of this.
For a long time, the cops have had the attitude that they’re actually the military, operating in a hostile, foreign territory, and our leadership has encouraged this kind of attitude by giving the cops military hardware.
It’s time to take away their assault rifles and armored vehicles.
@10…You tell’em Lib! Cops should not be armed with anything more than Nerf bats and bubble wrap.
@ 11
False dichotomy and appeal to ridicule.
Yawn.
Lee,
As a product of the inner city… Phildelphia, Puddy has some direct knowledge of it. Yes Puddy managed to escape it when Puddy’s mother remarried and we moved to NYS, butt, the issues of inner city drugs and inner city drug use have been a topic Puddy has written about since Puddy arrived here.
Puddy was between two and three years old living near 15th and Federal in West Philly. Mrs Anderson was the landlord/manager of the roach and bedbug infested tenement we lived in. Puddy used to sit outside the window and watch the little kids head to school each day. Her son was a drug dealer. He wore a red bandana all the time. Guess what gang he belonged to? He was stabbed and died across the street from where we lived. Puddy remembers it to this day. Puddy still hears Mrs. Anderson’s screams and wails. At the time Puddy didn’t know what was going on until much later when Puddy asked his aunt what happened long ago.
Drugs in the inner city have destroyed black men and forced their incarceration. Yet in the suburbs this for whatever reason doesn’t happen. Despite the fact that study after study shows blacks and whites use drugs at the same rate, my people are incarcerated for drugs at a rate 6 times that of your people, 4.2% vs. 0.7%. Now why is that?
So what has happened… Crack cocaine happened. When cocaine became more prevalent than heroin, the inner city family started falling apart. Cocaine and crack selling by inner city black had profound effects on low-income neighborhoods where drug selling and drug use was glamorized in movies like Superfly by offering a fictionalized view of the “substantial” economic opportunities (for the moronic leftists – fast money making times) one had by getting that big score! Back in 1972 everyone wanted to wear platform shoes,,fancy fedoras and spiffy suits and patent leather shoes. BTW Curtis Mayfield could croon! Movies like that and tunes that glamorized the drug culture undermined the willingness of black youths to work at low-wage legal jobs. Why work for minimum or above minimum wage when you could score. Blacks saw drugs as another avenue to escape the inner city slums.
Bling bling was starting. Wearing golden knuckles and grills was starting. Youth started looking up to the drug dealer who was flashing wads of cash. Some decided to kill the low level drug dealer and take over his territory. Why? Because we as a people will shoot and kill over a meager dime bag! Violence in hard-drug use and selling also increased in the 1980s and carried over into now! Despite increased arrests of low drug dealers, another just took their place. Law and order Democrat [sic] candidates claimed they would clean up the inner city. They were just words! Nothing was ever done. We see that in West Baltimore. All that money from the Porkulus Bill and what was the outcome?
Black neighborhood safety in the inner city has substantially declined in recent years. Think about the young boy children gunned and young girls raped in those tenements. Puddy has delivered sordid story after sordid story through PuddyLinks. And what have Democrats [sic] done about this? The effects of drug abuse in the inner city have significantly contributed to a decline in the neighborhood of most users and sellers. Those who could escape did. This is the reason people rail on Ben Carson. How could he have escaped without taking welfare checks? That’s the disease called the liberal mind. You have to depend on government to succeed. His mother worked hard and he came to a cross roads in life. He chose to stay clean.
Butt those left in the inner city had to deal with an environment of poor health due to drugs and risk of being shot to death at an early age, and a weakening of family relationships because black men were using black girls as cum dumps. These girls would either have an abortion (the reason many cities never report their abortion stats to the CDC) or they brought them up in fatherless homes… Even those who made it in sports still have the same attitudes. Think Shawn Kemp, the multi-city baby maker!
Oh yeah Puddy could continue to explain what it is like. Puddy reads these liberal written anecdotal stories butt they haven’t lived it. Puddy still has family in Philly. My retired police cousin left as a lieutenant. Oh yeah he moved out of Philly two years after the Move bombing. When his momma died they sold the house. Butt, there are other family member still living in Philly.
It won’t get better with the Democrat [sic] policies in place now, which are basically the same Democrat [sic] policies in place back then. And it’s said the crab mentality still exists. When a sports hero comes back and gives back black leaders like NotSoSharpton on HiJackson claim they aren’t doing enough!
Oh BTW it doesn’t help when black freakzoid leaders like HiJackson claim a black man is acting white… http://www.foxnews.com/story/2.....s-accused/
Going to school to improve your lot is acting white…
Getting great grades to improve your lot is acting white…
Getting a great job to improve your lot is acting white…
Getting momma out of the inner city to improve your lot is acting white…
Leaning to speak English correctly is really acting white…