Radical Responses to Police Violence: A San Francisco Saga

This paper focuses on radical activists' responses to racial exploitation and the ubiquitous police violence visited upon Blacks in the City by the Bay. For example, after a San Francisco policeman killed 16-year-old Matthew Johnson by shooting him in the back as he fled from the officer, radical activists retaliated by shooting and killing a SFPD officer in the same Hunters Point/Bay View community where Johnson was executed. In response to an unprovoked SFPD Tactical Squad attack on the Black Panther Party office in San Francisco, activists responded by bombing a Golden Gate Park police station, and in the process killing yet another police officer. Radical activists also shot and wounded police officers who manned San Francisco's Ingleside Police Station. On August 21, 1971, a separate group of people ambushed that same station, and in the process, wounded civilian clerk Ellen Lipney and killed San Francisco police Sargent John V. Young. This paper contextualizes the above violence by providing in-depth historical analyses, and in the spirit of Elizabeth Hinton's America on Fire, shows how Black peoples' response to police violence in San Francisco mirrored the responses that unfolded in other urban areas throughout the United States during this same period.