Today marks the 30th anniversary of a massive police operation in Philadelphia that culminated in the helicopter bombing of the MOVE headquarters.



On 13 May 1985, police moved in to arrest four members of a group called MOVE, a mostly black, radical anti-establishment organization.

The brutal raid killed six adults and five children aged 7 to 13, destroyed more than 60 homes and left more than 250 people homeless. It stands as the only aerial bombing carried out by police on US citizens on US soil.

MOVE had fortified a row-home on Osage Avenue as their headquarters. They boarded up walls, built a bunker on the roof, and broadcast their anti-police/establishment ethos through a bullhorn.

Hundreds of officers, several fire trucks and a bomb squad arrived that day, with military-grade weapons in tow. They first tried to flush out the house with fire hoses. A team then blew holes in the walls to funnel in teargas, but no one budged.

The confrontation that began at 5:50am went on until police dropped the bomb at 5:27pm. Authorities then decided to ‘let the fire burn‘.

After that fatal 1985 raid, Philadelphia prosecutors manipulated a grand jury away from indictments against police. Prosecutors even refused to file perjury charges against police officers caught lying to the grand jury. Not a single Philadelphia police officer or city official faced prosecution for the death and destruction on May 13, 1985.

Philadelphia prosecutors saw no police wrongdoing in the deaths of those children. Their stance contradicted findings of a special investigating commission appointed by Philadelphia’s then-Mayor Wilson Goode (the first African American to hold the position) that described the deaths of the five MOVE children as “unjustified homicides.”

The city’s prosecutors claimed that bombing children was not illegal because the force from the police bomb “was applied only against” the adults, according to a May 1988 Philadelphia grand jury report. That convoluted reasoning rested on the pretense that the blast from the bomb affected only the adults inside the bombed building and not the children.

Although prosecutors refused to charge police and city officials, they did vigorously charge the lone surviving adult MOVE member, Ramona Africa. She served her entire seven-year sentence for conspiracy and riot because she refused state parole-board demands to renounce her MOVE membership as a condition for early release.

The special commission concluded that police gunfire drove other fleeing MOVE members back into the inferno. However, prosecutors—again employing convoluted reasoning—claimed that some MOVE members returned to the blazing building either because they wrongly believed that the police were shooting or because they intended to commit suicide.



Ramona Africa, along with a MOVE child, escaped the fire. Both sustained serious burns.

“Then they just began insanely shooting, over 10,000 rounds of bullets, according to their own estimates,” Africa said. “That didn’t work, and that’s when they dropped the bomb on us, a row-house in an urban neighborhood.”

Watch the Documentary: Let It Burn



Watch Let.The.Fire.Burn. by runningoutoftime

The full version of Let It Burn can be found here. Resume at 50min mark.



Sources

The Root

Democracy Now

Guardian





