San Francisco – Eight men were arrested Tuesday in the 1971 slaying of a police officer that authorities say was part of a black power group’s five-year campaign to kill law enforcement officers in San Francisco and New York.
Police said seven of the eight are believed to be former members of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party.
The Aug. 29, 1971, shooting death of Sgt. John V. Young, 51, at a San Francisco police station was one in a series of attacks by BLA members on law enforcement officials on both coasts, police said.
The attacks, carried out between 1968 and 1973, also included the bombing of a police funeral in San Francisco and the slayings of two New York City police officers, as well as three armed bank robberies that helped fund their operations, police said.
The arrests were just the latest attempt in recent years to hold anti-war radicals and black-power militants responsible for crimes committed a generation ago.
The investigation of the Black Liberation Army killing spree was reopened in 1999 after “advances in forensic science led to the discovery of new evidence in one of the unsolved cases,” the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement.
Murder and conspiracy charges were filed against seven men. An eighth was arrested on conspiracy charges, and a ninth is still sought. All the men are in their 50s or 60s.
Stuart Hanlon, a San Francisco lawyer for one of the men, called the arrests a “prosecution based on vengeance and hate from the ’60s.”
“There’s a law enforcement attitude that they hate these people, the Panthers,” Hanlon said. “Now they’re going after old men.”
