On the morning of October 28, 1967, at about 4:30 a.m., Officer John Frey pulled over Huey P. Newton and Gene McKinney for questioning at the intersection of Seventh and Willow in West Oakland, California. At the time, Newton was cofounder and leader of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (hereafter the BPP) – an African American organization that was challenging diverse actors as well as political and economic conditions in the Bay Area; Mckinney was an associate of Newton's with unclear connections to the Panthers; and Frey was a white rookie officer with the Oakland Police Department who was well known for his hostility to blacks and, in fact, was about to be transferred to another precinct because of numerous citizen complaints about his racism. In line with standard procedure, upon stopping Newton and McKinney, Frey immediately called the dispatch for backup and several minutes later Officer Herbert Heanes arrived.

In many respects, this traffic stop was typical of the BPP–authority interaction. For about a year up to that point, the Panthers and various local, state, and federal authorities had been engaged in a low-level tit-for-tat conflict. The former employed armed monitoring of the police, engaged in mass protest, gave fiery speeches about repression and social struggle, conducted political-education classes, and distributed communist literature; the latter employed physical and verbal harassment as well as raids and arrests for diverse offenses (e.g., loitering, illegal use of a loudspeaker, and robbery).