Black Panther Arrests in Assassination of Berkeley PD Officer

In 1970, a Berkeley police officer, Ronald Tsukamoto was assassinated and the murderers have never been brought to trial. Two men, thought to be former Black Panther Party members, have been arrested. Known former members of the BPP state that the two men were not members. Officials counter that the motivation for the murder was to raise the stature of the group. The BPP, ( info on the BPP here, here, here, and here) was a prominent violent black revolutionary group and darling of the leftist movement.

For many revolutionary groups, the group vitality diminishes as personal agendas, in-fighting, death and imprisonment takes its toll. The bravado of many young revolutionary ideologues, who survive their violent phase, fades and is replaced with the practicality that the cause so much embraced failed to ignite the passions of the masses. Such is the case of with the BPP. The BPP is dead.

Today the vaunted BPP is reduced to efforts of supporting their non-profit organization to memorialize and capitalize on their infamy. The mighty communist oriented BPP is reduced to hawking, in a good capitalist fashion, their hot sauce named, "Burn Baby Burn."

A few leftist ideologues learned the error of their ways and evolved into conservatism. David Horowitz is an example.

In the 1970s he created the Oakland Community Learning Center, an inner city school for disadvantaged children that was run by the Black Panther Party.

In the 1990s he created the Individual Rights Foundation, which led the battle against speech codes on college campuses, and compelled the entire “president’s cabinet” of the University of Minnesota to undergo five hours of sensitivity training in the First Amendment for violating the free speech rights of its students. In 1996 he was a spokesman for the California Civil Rights Initiative, which barred government from discriminating against “or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” This year he has joined Ward Connerly’s campaign to pass a Racial Privacy Initiative. This is an anti-racial profiling initiative that would prevent government agencies from asking citizens about their race. David Horowitz is an outspoken opponent of censorship and racial preferences, and a defender of the rights of minorities and other groups under attack -- including the rights of blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, Christians and white males.

Michael Medved is another example of a leftist, (though I don’t know that he was associated with the BPP), who eventually saw the light and made “Right Turns, ” which is the name of his successful book.

Hillary Rodham-Clinton, on the other hand, has probably never abandoned her leftist ideology. She was a “…co-editor of the far-left journal called The Yale Review of Law and Social Action” which published articles in support of the BPP. (Klein, The Truth About Hillary, p.71) It is far more likely that she has simply made a pragmatic decision to disguise her leftist nature in the furtherance of attaining political power.

UPDATE: 8/13/05

Law enforcement officials say they have arrested the correct people in the murder of Ofc. Ronald Tsukamoto, but the District Attorney refused the case. No charges are being filed at this time.