Were Dallas Police officers involved in the murder of President Kennedy ?

[Steve Thomas]

7 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

 Quote - “ He (Lumpkin) was Deputy Chief of Police at that time. But he also had an Intelligence unit.

And I, at that time, I was CO of the 488th Strategic Intelligence Unit. And I had previously been a CO of a counter-intelligence detachment here in Dallas and about 100 people in that unit and about 40 or 50 of them were from the Dallas Police Department.

Paul,

Thanks for this.

Crichton seems to speak of this "counter-intelligence unit" as being separate from the 488th. He says it existed "previous" to the 488th.

Interesting.

I was also interested in the part about Lumpkin being the Deputy Chief of Police, but also  having "an intelligence unit" as though it was separate from his duties as the Deputy Chief of Police of the Dallas Police Department.

I wonder if he was referring to Lumpkin's role as the Commandant of the 4150th U.S. Army Reserve Officer's Training School.

The Times of Shreveport, Louisiana

July 15, 1962

https://www.google.com/search?q=%224150th+ARSU%22&client=firefox-b-1-d&biw=1611&bih=944&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=mKOtZKzVDPGU4M%253A%252CiDog6xBKO5mCAM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kRzONpClhVOiPVZeNHZonVq1dA7zQ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKp5_yos3gAhX2JTQIHUVPC4wQ9QEwAnoECAYQBA#imgrc=mKOtZKzVDPGU4M:

In 1966, he was still being identified as the Commandant.

1966 Richardson (Texas) Daily News article that describes George Lumpkin as “Commandant of the 4150th ARSU Dallas United States Army Reserve School”.

https://newspaperarchive.com/tags/george-lumpkin/?pc=24581&psi=94&pci=7&pt=23960&ob=1/

Grand Prairie Daily News – Grand Prairie, TX

September 14, 1966 page 2

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/15245830/

“Fall Reserve Duty Training Announced Col. Geo Lumpkin, Commandant of the 4150th ARSU DALLAS USAR SCHOOL, announces the beginning of fall reserve duty training assemblies. Hours of meetings will be from 1930 hours to 2140 hours on both Monday and Thursday evenings at the Muchert Armory, located at 10031 East Northwest Highway In Dallas. Officer career courses for all branches of service and Command and General Staff Courses are being offered to reserve officers at this time. Courses offered will provide reservists the opportunity to complete their military obligation and acquire credit towards their retirement. All reservists are Invited to visit the school for additional Information and enrollment now.”

 

Training and Organization of the US Army Reserve Components: A Reference Text for Total Force Trainers and a Guide to Other US Military Services 1988-1989. published 1991

Page 73

Fifth U.S. Army (19 USARF Schools)

4150TH USARF SCHOOL 10031 East Northwest Hwy (214) 346-6678Air Defense Artillery Dallas, TX 75238-4399

(page 78) G. Consolidated Training Facilities (CTF) Consolidated Training Facilities are under the control of the CONUSAs. They are for sustainment training of both USAR and ARNG personnel. The courses offered are for military intelligence personnel in Career Management Fields (CMFs) 05, 33, 96, and 98.

 

Boise Smith was a member of the faculty.

Col. B.B. Smith

Daily Palmer Rustler October 14, 1954 page 2

(Member of the faculty 4150^th U.S.Army Reserve Training School)

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth782328/m1/2/

B.B. (Boise) Smith. Director, Civil Defense and Disaster Commission. Dallas Police Department, Deputy Chief of Police.

Reported directly to Chief Curry.

Batchelor Exhibit 5002

https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/pdf/WH19_Batchelor_Ex_5002.pdf

As Director of the Dallas Civil Defense and Disaster Commission, Boise Smith would have been in charge of the Communications Center at the Fairgrounds.

Steve Thomas

 

 

[Paul Brancato]

Steve - that is a possible explanation. But it could also be an intelligence unit within the DPD. 

[Jim Hargrove]

On 8/9/2021 at 6:04 PM, Paul Brancato said:

“ He (Lumpkin) was Deputy Chief of Police at that time. But he also had an Intelligence unit. And I, at that time, I was CO of the 488th Strategic Intelligence Unit. And I had previously been a CO of a counter-intelligence detachment here in Dallas and about 100 people in that unit and about 40 or 50 of them were from the Dallas Police Department.

Paul,

No doubt any nefarious communications between the two would be well hidden, but are you aware of any suspicious connections between Colonel Lumpkin and Captain Westbrook?  It's hard to imagine they didn't communicate with each other often about everyday DPD business, but discovering much beyond that seems unlikely, even if anything conspiratorial about the JFK assassination actually occurred between them.

Still, I believe Westbrook played a part in this, especially in the framing of Oswald and the murder of Officer Tippit.

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Paul,

No doubt any nefarious communications between the two would be well hidden, but are you aware of any suspicious connections between Colonel Lumpkin and Captain Westbrook?  It's hard to imagine they didn't communicate with each other often about everyday DPD business, but discovering much beyond that seems unlikely, even if anything conspiratorial about the JFK assassination actually occurred between them.

Still, I believe Westbrook played a part in this, especially in the framing of Oswald and the murder of Officer Tippit.

I agree about Westbrook. Hard to imagine that he and Lumpkin weren’t well acquainted and perhaps in coordination that day 

[Calvin Ye]

On 7/30/2021 at 7:26 AM, Gil Jesus said:

BLUE DEATH :
Were Dallas Police officers involved in the murder of President Kennedy ?
By Gil Jesus (2021)
(Author's Note: This is newer version of an old post of mine from 2007 )

 

There are many reasons to suspect that the Dallas Police were in some way involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Not only were they responsible for the safety of the President, they were responsible for collecting and processing the evidence from the scene of the murder. They were also responsible for the safety of the accused assassin.
When it was over, the President was dead, his assassin was dead and there remained questions regarding the evidence to this day, almost 60 years later that have not been answered.
Could any major metropolitan law enforcement agency have been so inept, so careless and so unprofessional as to allow this tragedy of errors to occur, or was this a well-planned plot to remove suspicion from those responsible and direct it to a "patsy" who would never see his day in court ?

Power on the Right
Of all people, General Edwin Walker may have given us a clue to who was responsible for the mysterious deaths of witnesses after the assassination, when he told the Warren Commission, "You can anticipate that there are people that would like to shut up anybody who knows anything about this case. People right here in Dallas." (0)
 

Who would know what witnesses had information that needed to be kept under wraps ?  Where they lived or their contact info ?
The ones who took their statements and filed the reports.
 

Membership in right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan was a prerequisite for acceptance on the Dallas Police force. Jack Ruby hinted at right-wing involvement by attempting to direct Earl Warren towards the JBS. (1) Had the Commission looked at the JBS in Dallas, it would have led to, among others, General Walker, H.L.Hunt and members of the Dallas police. Ruby was also fearful to speak in Dallas. 
 

Consider this: The only ones Ruby wasn't safe from while he was in jail were the cops.
 

A Dallas County Deputy Sheriff named Hiram Ingram stated that he had knowledge of a police conspiracy. He fell and broke his hip on April 1, 1968 and died of cancer three days later. (2)
 

The Dallas police controlled security along the motorcade route, the manpower allotments, the crime scenes, the evidence, the media, the interrogation of the suspect, the release of all other suspects, the custody and safety of the prisoner, the prisoner's immediate family and all phases of the preliminary investigation.
To say they did a poor job is a gross understatement.

Motorcade Security
In his testimony before the Warren Commission, Roy Kellerman, the agent on the White House detail who was the on-the-scene agent in charge of the Dallas trip, indicated the motorcade route was in the hands of Secret Service advance agent Winston Lawson and the Dallas Police. (3)
 

Dallas Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels told the WC that the police officials agreed that the route taken was the best. (4) Chief Curry drove Sorrels and Lawson through the motorcade route up to Main and Houston then pointed and said that the highway was "over there."
Because a large number of Dallas police who were on vacation or had the day off refused to work security for the President's visit, the police were forced to use reserve officers. The captain of the Dallas police reserves, Charles Arnett, told the Warren Commission, " if there was a threat of bodily harm (to the President), they (the reserves) were to report their concerns to the nearest "regular officer". (5) So if a reserve officer saw someone pull a pistol and point it at President Kennedy, he was under orders to run a couple of blocks and return with a regular officer.
 

This was Dallas' idea of "maximum protection" for the President. Vacations and days off were not cancelled. Officers whose normal day off was that Friday refused to work overtime and thus kept their day off. For example, in the Homicide Division alone, 60% of the detectives were not available to work on the day of the assassination.
 

This in the city that had roughed up Adlai Stevenson just a month before. (6) As a result of this burden, Chief Curry took to the airwaves to warn the citizens to be on their best behavior.
 

There was only "token" police protection along the motorcade route. There were 178 officers, including reserves, on the parade route for an estimated 250,000 people. That boils down to one officer for every 1,404 potential assailants. In addition, none of the officers either in the motorcade or on its route, were ever told to be concerned about the estimated 20,000 open windows along the motorcade route. (7)
 

On November 20th, two Dallas officers saw "mock target practice" going on at the picket fence atop the grassy knoll. They arrived in time to see the participants depart in haste and only wrote a report on the matter AFTER November 22nd. The report was buried by the FBI and only came to light after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (8)
 

Marion Baker had been assigned to ride alongside the Presidential limousine, but was told by his sergeant five or ten minutes before leaving Love Field that no officers would be riding alongside the President's car. (9) Officer Bobby Hargis confirmed that "we were supposed to be beside the car". (10)

Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry told the Warren Commission that Secret Service agent Winston Lawson cut the number of motorcycles from four on each side of the President's limousine to two on each side, then moved them back. (11) His testimony was supported by Captain Perdue W. Lawrence.(12)
 

Officer Billy Joe Martin told the Commission that "they (Secret Service) instructed us that they didn't want anyone riding past the President's car and that we were to ride to the rear, to the rear of his car, about the rear bumper. (13)
 

According to Martin, "they told us at Love Field right after Kennedy's plane landed...Well, while Kennedy was busy shaking hands with all the well-wishers at the airport, Johnson's Secret Service people came over to the motorcycle cops and gave us a bunch of instructions...They also ordered us into the damnedest escort formation I've ever seen. Ordinarily, you bracket the car with four motorcycles, one on each fender. But this time, they told the four of us assigned to the President's car there'd be no forward escorts. We were to stay well to the back and not let ourselves get ahead of the car's rear wheels under any circumstances. I'd never heard of a formation like that, much less ridden in one, but they said they wanted to let the crowds have an unrestricted view of the president. Well, I guess somebody got an 'unrestricted view' of him, all right." (14) Martin claimed that some of those instructions were that the four Presidential motorcycle officers were ordered that "under no circumstances were they to leave their positions regardless of what happened." (15)
 

The re-deployment of the motorcycle escort to the rear of the rear wheels not only gave "everyone" an unrestricted view of the President, it made it easier for anybody to throw anything from an egg to a bomb at him. In a hostile city as Dallas, to configure the motorcade in the way it was done was more than incompetent.
 

It was criminal.
 

The redeployment of the motorcycle escort left Kennedy unprotected from the front and from the side. It allowed those close enough to him, the people on the curbs, to have an unrestricted and unobstructed opportunity to cause him physical harm.
 

And although the Dallas police claimed that Lawson told them on the evening of the 21st that Kennedy didn't want any motorcycles alongside his car, Lawson was forced to admit under oath that he never heard Kennedy give that order. (16)
 

The last-minute stripping of the President's protection by Lawson on the evening before his arrival is at the least, disturbing.
 

It suggests that Lawson knew beforehand that shots were going to be fired and as a result, removed the police officers from the line of fire. He also removed the military man from the front seat of the limo on the morning of the assassination.
 

The "man with the football", the nuclear codes, was removed from the front seat of the limo where he usually sat between the Secret Service agents and placed in a car further back in the motorcade, presumably to get him out of the line of fire.
 

In Tampa, agents rode on the back of the limo despite the President's alleged aversion to having them there.
 

In Dallas there were no agents on the rear of the car except for agent Clinton Hill, who got on and off of the rear bumper four times during the motorcade. If any of the agents in the White House detail believed that JFK didn't want anyone on the back bumper, they never told Agent Hill.

 

The Press Vehicles
Usually the President's motorcades were filmed from the front by cameramen riding on a flat bed truck in front of the President's limousine. Not in Dallas. In the "Big D" those were convertibles they were riding in and they were six or seven cars in BACK of the President. The remainder of the Press rode in two Busses at the END of the motorcade! The entire configuration of the motorcade was changed on the morning of the 22nd.

Police Deficiencies
Julia Ann Mercer gave a deposition claiming to have seen a rifle being unloaded from a truck at the base of the knoll on Elm St. on the morning of the assassination. In that deposition, she said that "there were three policemen standing talking near a motorcycle on the bridge just west of me" when the rifle was unloaded. (17)
 

Dallas officers disregarded any orders to keep the overpasses clear. Sheriff Bill Decker ordered his men not to participate in the protection of the motorcade. Decker also displayed an unwillingness to transfer Oswald. (18)
 

In a letter to Jean Hill, "JB" wrote:
"I get the distinct feeling that the feds think somebody in the Dallas Police had something to do with the hit on Kennedy....so many Dallas cops knew Jack Ruby, the fact that somebody let him in to the basement right before he shot Oswald, the fact that some of the cops were heard cussing Kennedy for being a flaky liberal." (19)
 

Certain witnesses were totally ignored. They didn't seal off the building right away (20) and as a result, some people who were in the building at the time of the shooting were allowed to leave. When they did finally seal off the building, those still inside were escorted to the County Records Building to give their statements in the office of the Dallas County Sheriff's Department. When this happened, the police had the building to themselves with only Roy Truly present.
( Note: this is when I believe the "gunsack" was made by police )
 

No impediments were placed in the way of fleeing assassins and although they claimed to have known that Oswald ( by name ) was missing from the Texas School Book Depository Building, no-all-points-bulletin was ever broadcast for him.
 

Evidence was faked, altered or suppressed. 
 

Police officers perjured themselves in testimony.
 

Ridiculously biased lineups were held at which witnesses, after seeing Oswald's picture on TV and in the newspapers were asked to identify him standing alongside police detectives, a police clerk, teenagers and an overweight Mexican. 
 

Photographic evidence and video evidence taken by witnesses was seized, never to be seen again.
 

At Parkland Hospital, the police tried to enforce Texas criminal law that required the autopsy to be done by the civilian medical examiner of Dallas County, Dr. Earl Rose. There was shouting and shoving and in the end, they were forced to yield at gunpoint to the Secret Service and forfeited custody of the body to them. Was there a struggle for possession of the body because that was the law, or were there bullets in that body that both sides wanted ?
 

In recent years, evidence has surfaced that the Dallas Police may have been involved in the assassination, if not directly, then at least as an enabler.
There's the whole "badgeman" thing, the discovery by Gary Mack and Jack White of a figure in the Moorman photo of a man in a police uniform firing from behind the picket fence.  And the claim of Al Navis that Lee Bowers once wrote him a letter saying that he saw a Dallas Policeman fire a rifle from the behind the picket fence. And then there's the account of Gordon Arnold and his encounter with a Dallas policeman who had dirty hands on the Grassy Knoll when no policeman was officially there. Whether these were actual policemen or killers dressed up as policemen, no one really knows.
It was never investigated.
 

And while there was a killer on the loose where was the Police Chief ?
While his men wrestled an alleged cop-killer in the Texas Theater, Chief Jesse Curry drove Lyndon Johnson to the airport, then stayed on board Air Force 1 for a photo-op during the swearing-in ceremony.

That's some great leadership.
 

And despite telephone threats against the life of Oswald, the Dallas police took no supplemental precautions to ensure his safety. 
Once wounded, the hospital personnel administered no anesthesia to Oswald.

NOTES
(0) 11H 417, 419
(1) 5H 198; Marrs, Crossfire, p.1
(2) Penn Jones, Forgive My Grief III, p. 15
(3) 2H 111
(4) 7H 338
(5) 12H 132
(6) 24H 259
(7) King ex. 4, 20H454
(8) cited in Davis, Mafia Kingfish, pp. 175-176
(9) 3H 244
(10) Mark Oakes interview with Hargis 6-26-95
(11) 4H 171
(12) 7H 580-581
(13) 6H 293
(14) Jean Hill, Last Dissenting Witness, pp 112-114
(15) Newcomb & Adams, Murder from Within, P.33
(16) 4H 338
(17) 19H 483
(18) 9H 530
(19) Sloan and Hill, Last Dissenting Witness, p.75
(20) 23H 847, 916

I initially thought it was Dillon that gave order for Secret Service not to protect. After reading the post on Globalization, I now know it was the Department of Treasury General Counsel responsible for giving orders to Secret Service