In the early morning of April 8, 1966, twenty-five to thirty Oakland police officers burst into the home of Luther Smith at 1011 Campbell St. in West Oakland, entering without a warrant and beating him and his family members.
After the fact, the department justified the invasion of Smith’s home by noting that Smith’s next-door neighbor was suspected of running a brothel, and that they had observed two white men—in a predominantly Black neighborhood—leaving the Smith home late at night. Smith was innocent of any connection to this alleged unsavory behavior, and the invasion of his home by a few dozen armed officers in the middle of the night first surprised then angered him.
With the help of Flatlands contributor and West Oakland community leader Curtis Baker, Smith began to publicize his story. His case against the Oakland Police Department became one of the paper’s early cause célèbres, as it perfectly encapsulated the frustration that black Oaklanders felt toward the department’s capricious and heavy-handed actions.
In the aftermath of this incident, the paper revived a venerable but newly-relevant demand of the black community in Oakland, for a civilian review board that could examine cases of police brutality and harassment and provide accountability to the community for overreaches of police authority. Over a year prior to the killing of Denzil Dowell by Richmond police that prompted the Black Panther Party’s armed march on the capitol in Sacramento, coalitions of activists and neighborhood groups were attempting to rein in a hostile and corrupt police department in Oakland.