Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission

The violent confrontation of May 13, 1985 between the MOVE organization and Philadelphia's city government, which left 11 MOVE members dead and 61 homes destroyed, was one of the most controversial episodes in the city's modern history. In its aftermath, the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, appointed by Mayor W. Wilson Goode, investigated in detail the events leading up to and including the attack on MOVE, held televised public hearings, and finally in March 1986 issued a report which was highly critical of government actions.

The confrontation was the cumulation of a dozen years of activity on the part of MOVE, which had emerged in the early 1970's as a small and very extreme "back to nature" radical group following the teachings of the self styled John Africa. Years of increasing trouble with the police and neighbors in the Powelton area of West Philadelphia ended in a gun battle in August 1978 in which one policeman was killed and nine MOVE members arrested and eventually sentanced to jail terms. A number of the remaining MOVE members-- all of whom were black-- settled in 1982 and 1983 in a house on th 6200 block of Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek area, a predominantely middle class black neighborhood. They began to campaign for the release of the comrades and in May 1984 started day and night denunciations of their enimies through a loudspeaker. In October they began the construction of a bunker on the top of their building. The loudspeaker and the extremely unsanitary life-style of the MOVE members led the neighbors to demand action from the newly installed Wilson Goode administration. After over a year of vacillation and appeasement, the city finally determined in the spring of 1985 on a plan to evict the MOVE members and arrest several of them. But the attack early on May 13 went disastrously wrong, as 10,000 rounds of ammunition, tear gas, and explosives failed to break down the fortified MOVE house. At 5:27 pm the police bomb unit dropped a bomb on the house and the ensuing fire was allowed to spread.

The full damage was assessed the next day, it was found that 11 had died in the MOVE house, of whom five were children, and 250 neighborhood residents were homeless. Only one MOVE member and one child had survived the inferno.

Little more than a week after the bombing, Mayor Goode agreed to the appointment of an independent commission to investigate the MOVE tragedy . The head of the commission, William H. Brown, III, had been head of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, and the Commission's eleven members included prominant individuals from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from attorney and politician Charles W. Bowser and Reverend Paul M. Washington to former Judge Bruce Kauffman and ex-Watergate Prosecutor Henry S. Ruth Jr. Other commissioners included Rev. Audrey F. Bronson, Julia Chinn, M. Todd Cooke, Rev. Msgr. Edward P. Cullen, Charisse Ranielle Lillie, and Neil J. Welch. William Lytton was retained as Staff Director and Temple Law Dean Carl Singley as Special Counsel. Eventually, the staff grew to include seven investigators, as well as support personnel. Outside experts in explosives, fires and forensic pathology were retained, and eleven attorneys and forty-five law students conducted about a thousand interviews in the summer of 1985. The total expense for the PSIC grew to about $1,000,000.

After conducting its interviews and gathering evidence from a wide variety of governmental agencies the commission held five weeks of televised public hearings in the fall, at which 92 witnesses testified.

The members of the police bomb unit refused to testify, taking the Fifth Amendment after attempts by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) to block their appearance failed, and the surviving MOVE member, Ramona Africa, also refused to testify. However, witnesses did include all the key city officials, as well as residents, citizen negotiators and expert consultants. The hearings ended in early November. The commission then deliberated for several months before issuing its report on March 6, 1986. That report was a sweeping denunciation of the actions of the city government, typified by the finding that "Dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable." The PSIC's conclusions were followed by 38 recommendations for specific improvements in relevant city planning and operations. Several of them have been acted upon in the ensuing years.