Ex-radicals arrested in 1971 cop killing, police say

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Eight men were arrested Tuesday in the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer that authorities say was part of a militant black group's five-year campaign to kill law enforcement officers in California and New York.

Police said seven of the eight are believed to be former members of the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panther Party.

The August 29, 1971, shooting death of Sgt. John V. Young, 51, was one in a series of attacks by BLA members on law enforcement officials on both coasts, police said.

Black Panther Party members began monitoring police activity in predominantly black neighborhoods in the late 1960s.

The attacks, carried out between 1968 and 1973, also included the bombing of a police funeral in San Francisco and the killings of two New York City police officers, as well as three armed bank robberies, police said.

Seven of the men, all suspected BLA members, were charged with murder and conspiracy in Young's killing. They are Ray Michael Boudreaux, 64; Richard Brown, 65; Herman Bell, 59; Anthony Bottom, 55; Henry Watson Jones, 71; Francisco Torres, 58; and Harold Taylor, 58.

Richard O'Neal, 57, was arrested on conspiracy charges.

A ninth suspect, Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, 62, was still being sought on murder and conspiracy charges, police said.

Attorney Stuart Hanlon called the arrests a "prosecution based on vengeance and hate from the '60s."

"There's a law enforcement attitude that they hate these people, the Panthers," Hanlon said. "Now they're going after old men."