Back when the New Left was new, not long before Elmer Pratt was indicted for the murder of Caroline Olsen, The New York Times ran two stories reporting, as an uncontroverted fact, that the police had to date killed twenty-eight members of the Black Panther Party. Reporter John Kifner, echoing Panther claims, suggested that anti-Panther rhetoric by the Nixon administration had encouraged "a climate of opinion among local police...that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers." Edward J. Epstein investigated the matter for The New Yorker. Epstein examined every one of the twenty-eight deaths. He reported, in February 1971, that only ten of the Panthers had been killed by police (most of the rest had met their violent ends as a result of various forms of internecine warfare), and, as he wrote, "six of the ten Panthers were killed by seriously wounded policemen who clearly had reason to believe that their own lives were in jeopardy." Nearly three decades later, the myth of the Panthers has not been exposed by the Times.
It reminded me of an item I did on the Cincinnati riots, in which I pointed out that of the black men killed by the Cincinnati police, most had been very dangerous, and had done a lot of damage before they were killed.
The point here is that we can find these things out on the internet, and we can present them to you. It took Epstein a lot of work in the 1970's to find out the truth about the Panthers and the police, but today we can do it in minutes or hours.
That's what Vdare.com is here for.
