[cpdiii]

Move was a leftist anarchist organization taking illegal actions. They most definitely needed to be arrested and prosecuted.

What has always puzzled me is why the Philadelphia police dropped Tovex and C4 on them. Tovex is a very stable explosive derived from Ammonium Nitrate it is easy to handle safely. It is hard to set it off thus the C4 to make it go boom. C4 is also stable but a blasting cap will make it go boom. It was almost certain it would kill anyone close to the blast. It was probable it would start a fire. Natural gas for heating burns like hell.

Why did the cops not just keep shooting tear gas in until they came out?

[Mouton]

Yeah, like they did with the SLA.

[lightman]

The Filthadelphia Inky (Inquirer) habitually referred to MOVE as a “radical, back to nature compound”.

[Dr. Franklin]

Why did the cops not just keep shooting tear gas in until they came out?

Because they had a bunker on the roof of the building and in a previous confrontation with police in 1978 one cop, officer James Ramp, was shot dead, and 16 other police officers and firefighters were injured from the firefight. Firefighters were working a water canon to distract them and flood the basement of the house. Officer safety was a real problem.

MOVE was an anarchist group that used their children as hostages in the standoff with police. They called themselves a "back to nature group", while living in a squalid urban house without plumbing. After the '85 incident the joke locally was that MOVE members didn't need to go to bars because they could stay home and get bombed.