The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America 9780367626105, 9780367626150, 9781003109969

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Tables
Figures
Introduction
Notes
Section 1: Police Brutality and Race Before World War II
1. Slavery and the Transformation of Southern Policing
Notes
2. Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs
The Gilded Age
The Establishment of Big-City Police Departments
Policing in the Modern Era
Concluding Thoughts
Notes
3. Mob Brutality in Robert Charles's New Orleans
Notes
4. Urban Policing and Race Riots in the Era of World War I and the Red Summer
Policing the Black Communities of the Great Migration
Urban Police and Black Soldiers During World War I
The Red Summer of 1919 in Washington and Chicago
After the Red Summer
Notes
5. "Killers Who Hide Behind Badges": Race and Police Brutality in the Jim Crow South
Notes
Section 2: Police Brutality and Unionism in the United States
6. Policing the Nineteenth-Century American Labor Movement
Notes
7. Police Unions and Violence in the twentieth Century United States
Notes
Section 3: Police Brutality and Race After World War II
8. The Policing of Black Resistance in World War II
Surveilling Resistance
Alexandria, January 1942
Detroit, June 1943
Harlem, August 1943
At the Summer's End
Notes
9. American Policing and the Struggle for Black Civic Rights
Introduction: The War on Black Civic Rights
Civic Rights Distinguished from Civil Rights, Natural Rights, and National Rights
Policing Black Civic Engagement
The Streets
Parks and Recreation
Schools
Conclusion
Notes
10. Walking the Tightrope of Self-Defense: Imagery, Rhetoric, and Commemoration of the Black Panther Party
Origins of Self-Defense
The Panther Image and Approach to Self-Defense
The Case of Bobby Hutton: Understanding Panther Politics through Death
Redefining Victimhood
Notes
11. "I Don't Mind Dying": Police Violence, Resistance, and the Urban Uprisings of the 1960s
Police and Enforcing Racial Order in Post-War Cities
Urban Uprising as Anti-Police Protest
Vietnam Here: Police Riot and Retaliatory Violence
Year of the Cop: Victimization and Expanded Authority
Conclusion
Notes
Section 4: Police Brutality Against Immigrant and Ethnic Groups
12. Vigilante Policing in Asian American Communities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Notes
13. Latinx Populations and Policing
Conquest
Labor
Youth
War
Notes
14. Islamophobia: Supplement for Anti-Black Racism and Policing
Islamophobia in the Service of White Supremacy
Islamophobia And Surveillance
Equating Black Identity Extremists As Muslim
Islamophobia As Supplement For Anti-black Racism: A History
Patterns: Islamophobia and the Anti-black Mukhabarat State
Notes
15. From A. Mitchell Palmer to Joe McCarthy: Police Brutality in the Fight Against Communism
A Tradition for Police Brutality: Anarchism and Syndicalism
Preparing for the Palmer Raids
"The New Type of Aggressiveness"
"Violence Toward Any Aliens Should be Scrupulously Avoided"
"These Splendid Men, These Real Americans"
The Police Unleashed
The FBI Raids in Detroit 1940
"Whitewashing" the FBI
The End of Police Brutality
Notes
Section 5: Police Brutality and Protest in the Era of Vietnam
16. Behind the Billy Club: Chicago Police and the Violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention
Shoot to Kill
The Yippies are Coming
Convention Eve
Convention Week Begins
The Whole World Is Watching
Notes
17. Police Brutality and the Student Movements of the 1960s
Students and the Antiwar Movement
The Black Student Movement
The Chicano Student Movement
Conclusion
Notes
Section 6: The Legal and Legislative History of Police Brutality
18. Police Brutality and The Nonhuman
Notes
19. Brutality at the Bar: The Supreme Court and Police Misconduct
Notes
20. Chasing the Illusion of Police Reform under Capitalism
Introduction
The Origins of Policing
The Evolution of Reform
Federal Interest in Reform
Civilian Review Boards, Community Policing, and Police Unions
Federal Intervention in Policing
Reforming the Los Angeles Police Department
The Board of Police Commissioners: Civilian Oversight
Oversight and Racism
Watts and the McCone Commission
Reform Efforts Intensify
Burgeoning Surveillance
Rodney King and the Christopher Commission
The Rampart Scandal and DOJ Oversight
Measuring Change—the Consent Decree and Beyond
Data
Complaints
Complainants by Race/Ethnicity
Serious Disciplinary Allegations
Officer-Involved Shootings (OIS)
Confounding Factors
Demographic Changes
Changes in Arrest Levels
Attitudes Toward the Complaint Process
Vulnerability of Arrestees to Intimidation
Implication of Findings for the Period During and After the Consent Decree
Policy and Practice Changes
High-Tech Surveillance
The Los Angeles Case Study Summed Up
Conclusion
Notes
21. President's Task Force on Twenty-First-Century Policing
Introduction
Description of the Problem or Issue
Literature Review
The 1700s to Mid-1800s in America
The 1900s
The 1960s to the Present
Discussion
Progression Toward Police Militarization
National Defense Authorization Act and 1033 Program
Ferguson, Missouri
Analysis
The Legitimate Need for This Type of Equipment
Effects of Police Militarization on Police Legitimacy and the Citizens Themselves
Task Force on Twenty-first Century Policing Report
Assessment of the Report
Conclusion
Policy and Practice Recommendations
Notes
Section 7: Cultural Representations in Literature, Music, and Film
22. Not Only Compton: Gangster Rap, Policing, and Protest
NWA Made Room
Months Later, It Did
Notes
23. Police Violence in Film from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism
"I Was Born Black and I Was Born Poor"
"Can You Dig It?"
"Sire these Lines are Not Homage to Brutality that the Artist has Invented, but a Hymn from the Mouth of Reality"
"They Want Us to Kill Ourselves"
"Can't Afford to be Afraid of Our Own People Anymore"
"Being a Black Man in America Isn't Easy. The Hunt Is on and You're the Prey."
Conclusion
Notes
24. Police Brutality and the Black Arts Movement
Notes
25. From Dragnet to Brooklyn 99: How Cop Shows Excuse, Exalt, and Erase Police Brutality
Cop Shows and the Construction and Transmission of Law Enforcement Norms
Valorizing Law Enforcement: A Highly Successful Propaganda Effort
Police Violence and Police Brutality
Normalizing and Erasing Police Brutality: From Dragnet to the Golden Age
Component One: Erasing Race
Component Two: Erasing Brutality
Can Cop Shows Do Better?
Notes
Section 8: Alterity and Brutality in the Late-Twentieth Century
26. Policing, The Bar, and Resistance
Notes
27. Anti-Brutality Activism and Neighborhood Anti-Crime Activism During the 1970s
Paramilitary Policing in the 1970s
The Expanding Anti-Police Brutality Movement
The Two-Pronged Approach
Anti-Police Brutality Activism at the Ballot Box
Anti- Police Brutality Activism in the Courts
Electoral Victories, Legal Defeats, and the Fracturing of a Police Reform Coalition
Notes
28. The Multiple Meanings of the ASSAULT ON RODNEY KING: Revisiting Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992
The Rise of the Gang Truce Movement
Women's Grassroots Activism: Performing Motherhood
A New Form of Theatre: Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight Los Angeles 1992
Conclusion
Notes
29. Police Brutality in 1990s New York City: The Scars of Zero Tolerance and Community Struggles for Justice
Giuliani Time
The Cases that Shook the City
Police Violence Against Black Women, Women of Color, and LGBTQiA+ People of Color
Baez, Rosario, Vega, Huang
Louima
Diallo
Conclusion
Notes
30. Enacting and Enabling Violence: Policing Indigenous Communities
Policing the Colonial Project
Police Killing of Indigenous People
Police Violence against Women and Girls
Policing protests—The Indigenous "Terror Threat"
Under-Policing: Enabling Violence
Protesting Policing: BLM and ILM/NLM
Notes
Section 9: Police Brutality in the Twenty-First Century
31. Make Visible: Akua Njeri, Breonna Taylor, and Critical Amplification of Police Brutality
Introduction
Theoretical Framework/Perspectives
Akua Njeri, Breonna Taylor, and the Criminalization of Black Women
Black Women and Trauma in the Media
Methods
Results
Significance
Appendix A: Table of Themes Highlighted in Tweeted Articles
Notes
32. #BlackLivesMatter
"This is not the Civil Rights Movement. This is the Oppressed People's Movement."
Approaches to Protest, Black Feminist Foundations
"To Pimp A Butterfly": Impacts of Decentralized Structure
Conclusion: So Just How Do We "Get Free"?
Notes
33. Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability: Exposing and Investigating Police Brutality Using Smartphone Cameras
Introduction
Section One: Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability
Section Two: Technologies of Accountability in Practice
Eric Garner
George Floyd
Section Three: Complicating the Relationship between Smartphones and Police Accountability
Conclusion
Notes
34. Police Brutality and the Militarization of Policing
Challenging Police Legitimacy
Professionalization
Militarization
Pepper Spray—Between the Baton and the Gun
Tasers—"253,368 Lives Saved"
Flashbang Grenades—Reducing Deadly Force
Conclusion
Notes
Section 10: Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues in Police Brutality
35. To End Police Brutality, We Must End the Police
Introduction
To constitute the Social Order: Theorizing Police Power
Police Abolition Praxis
The Battle for the Social Wage: Campaigns to Defund the Police
'Radical Practicality': Community Control of the Police
Disempower the Police: Building the New World in the Shell of the Old
Police-Free Zones
Transformative Justice
Conclusion
Notes
36. Police Terror as Totality: Reformism and the Ensemble of Counterinsurgency
Introduction: Counterinsurgency and the Limitations of "Police Brutality"
Non-Accounting as Infrastructure of Police Violence
From Police Brutality to Police Terror
Reformism as Counterinsurgency
Case Study UCOP
Conclusion: "Deep Responsibility" as Liberation War
Notes
37. Police Unions: The Police Shield for Abuse and Brutality in America
Introduction
The Political Era
The Reform Era
The Boston Police Strike (1919)
Community Policing Era
Qualified Immunity
Points of View, Pro and Con, Related to Qualified Immunity
Use of Force Legal Cases
Police Officer Bill of Rights
A Juxtaposition of Police v. Civilian Rights
Case Histories—Holding Police Accountable?
Homeland Security Era—Militarization Era
Police Unions—Impressive Influence
Conclusion
Notes
38. All It Takes Is One Block: A Case Study of the History of Police Brutality in Public Health
Introduction
Policing Systems in Public Health
The Block as Evidence
The Block as Ecology
The Block as Extraction
The Systemic Roots of Police Brutality
Background Reading
Note
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN AMERICA

This handbook offers a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of police brutality in US history and the variety of ways it has manifested itself. Police brutality has been a defining controversy of the modern age, brought into focus most readily by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the mass protests that occurred as a result in 2020. However, the problem of police brutality has been consistent throughout American history. This volume traces its history back to Antebellum slavery, through the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the two world wars and the twentieth century, to the present day. This handbook is designed to create a generally holistic picture of the phenomenon of police brutality in the United States in all of its major lived forms and confronts a wide range of topics including: • • • • • • •

Race Ethnicity Gender Police reactions to protest movements (particularly as they relate to the counterculture and opposition to the Vietnam War) Legal and legislative outgrowths against police brutality The representations of police brutality in popular culture forms like film and music The role of technology in publicizing such abuses, and the protest movements mounted against it

The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America will provide a vital reference work for students and scholars of American history, African American history, criminal justice, sociology, anthropology, and Africana studies. Thomas Aiello is professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of more than 20 books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. He holds PhDs in history and anthrozoology.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged. The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe Edited by Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger The Routledge History of Poverty, c. 1450–1800 Edited by David Hitchcock and Julia McClure The Routledge History of the Second World War Edited by Paul R. Bartrop The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations Edited by Tyson Reeder The Routledge Global History of Feminism Edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Nova Robinson The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World Edited by Katie Barclay and Peter N. Stearns The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration Edited by Andreas E. Feldmann, Xóchitl Bada, Jorge Durand and Stephanie Schütze The Routledge History of Loneliness Edited by Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America Edited by Thomas Aiello The Routledge History of Antisemitism Edited by James Wald, Mark Weitzman, and Robert Williams For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Histories/book-series/RHISTS

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN AMERICA

Edited by Thomas Aiello

Designed cover image: Protest against police killing people of color in the USA (Black Lives Matter), Vermont State House and surrounding streets, Montpelier, VT, USA. John Lazenby/ Alamy Stock Photo. First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Thomas Aiello; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Thomas Aiello to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-62610-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-62615-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-10996-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

CONTENTS

List of Tables List of Figures

x xi

Introduction Thomas Aiello

1

SECTION 1

Police Brutality and Race Before World War II

11

1 Slavery and the Transformation of Southern Policing Glenn McNair

13

2 Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs Malcolm D. Holmes

25

3 Mob Brutality in Robert Charles’s New Orleans Adam Malka

38

4 Urban Policing and Race Riots in the Era of World War I and the Red Summer Adam J. Hodges

49

5 “Killers Who Hide Behind Badges”: Race and Police Brutality in the Jim Crow South Jeffrey S. Adler

61

v

Contents SECTION 2

Police Brutality and Unionism in the United States

73

6 Policing the Nineteenth-Century American Labor Movement Matthew Hild

75

7 Police Unions and Violence in the Twentieth Century United States Lisa Phillips

85

SECTION 3

Police Brutality and Race After World War II 8 The Policing of Black Resistance in World War II Margarita Aragon 9 American Policing and the Struggle for Black Civic Rights Jonathan Simon

95 97

108

10 Walking the Tightrope of Self-Defense: Imagery, Rhetoric, and Commemoration of the Black Panther Party Cheryl X. Dong

117

11 “I don’t mind dying”: Police Violence, Resistance, and the Urban Uprisings of the 1960s Max Felker-Kantor

132

SECTION 4

Police Brutality Against Immigrant and Ethnic Groups

145

12 Vigilante Policing in Asian American Communities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Stephanie Hinnershitz

147

13 Latinx Populations and Policing Lorena Oropeza

159

14 Islamophobia: Supplement for Anti-Black Racism and Policing Stephen Sheehi

182

15 From A. Mitchell Palmer to Joe McCarthy: Police Brutality in the Fight Against Communism Regin Schmidt

vi

196

Contents SECTION 5

Police Brutality and Protest in the Era of Vietnam

209

16 Behind the Billy Club: Chicago Police and the Violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention Frank Kusch

211

17 Police Brutality and the Student Movements of the 1960s Kathryn Schumaker

224

SECTION 6

The Legal and Legislative History of Police Brutality

237

18 Police Brutality and the Nonhuman Thomas Aiello

239

19 Brutality at the Bar: The Supreme Court and Police Misconduct Thomas Aiello

250

20 Chasing the Illusion of Police Reform under Capitalism Jillian Aldebron and Rodney Green

260

21 President’s Task Force on Twenty-First-Century Policing Frederick W. Turner II and Brent Hoosac

281

SECTION 7

Cultural Representations in Literature, Music, and Film

299

22 Not Only Compton: Gangster Rap, Policing, and Protest Felicia Angeja Viator

301

23 Police Violence in Film from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism Katharine Bausch

314

24 Police Brutality and the Black Arts Movement James E. Smethurst

324

25 From Dragnet to Brooklyn 99: How Cop Shows Excuse, Exalt, and Erase Police Brutality Susan A. Bandes

vii

333

Contents SECTION 8

Alterity and Brutality in the Late-Twentieth Century

345

26 Policing, the Bar, and Resistance William Elijah Hicks

347

27 Anti-Brutality Activism and Neighborhood Anti-Crime Activism During the 1970s Christopher Lowen Agee

364

28 The Multiple Meanings of the Assault on Rodney King: Revisiting Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 Kamran Afary

376

29 Police Brutality in 1990s New York City: The Scars of Zero Tolerance and community Struggles for Justice Paula Ioanide

388

30 Enacting and Enabling Violence: Policing Indigenous Communities Barbara Perry

404

SECTION 9

Police Brutality in the Twenty-First Century 31 Make Visible: Akua Njeri, Breonna Taylor, and Critical Amplification of Police Brutality Aaminah Norris, Nalya A. F. Rodriguez, Maha Elsinbawi, Abigail Cohen, and Dale Allender 32 #BlackLivesMatter Louis M. Maraj

421

423

436

33 Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability: Exposing and Investigating Police Brutality Using Smartphone Cameras Ajay Sandhu 34 Police Brutality and the Militarization of Policing Lesley J. Wood

viii

448

460

Contents SECTION 10

Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues in Police Brutality

471

35 To End Police Brutality, We Must End the Police Meghan G. McDowell

473

36 Police Terror as Totality: Reformism and the Ensemble of Counterinsurgency Dylan Rodríguez 37 Police Unions: The Police Shield for Abuse and Brutality in America Perry L. Lyle

485

497

38 All It Takes Is One Block: A Case Study of the History of Police Brutality in Public Health Alyasah Ali Sewell

513

Index

524

ix

TABLES

0.1 Number of Police Killings 20.1 Complaints, Serious Disciplinary Allegations, and All Serious Allegations, 2001–2019 20.2 Serious Disciplinary Allegations LAPD 20.3 LAPD Officer Involved Shootings, 2005–2019 31.1 Graph of Google Trends on Searches for Njeri, Taylor, and Hampton in 2021 31.2 Google Trends on Police Violence against Black People, Between March 2019 and December 2021 31.3 YouTube Video Data 31.4 Twitter Data on #BreonnaTaylor 31.5 YouTube Video Data Table A1 Table of Themes Highlighted in Tweeted Articles 37.1 Comparison of the Police Officer Bill of Rights versus ordinary Civilian Rights

x

8 269 271 272 428 428 429 431 432 433 506

FIGURES

12.1 20.1 20.2 37.1

Caricature of Yellow Peril, “The Yellow Terror In All His Glory,” 1899, Private Collection, Public Domain Complainants by Race/Ethnicity per 1,000 population of Corresponding Race/Ethnicity, 2006–2017 Arrests per Year in City of Los Angeles Use of Force Continuum

xi

153 270 273 504

INTRODUCTION Thomas Aiello

Willie Watson was a drinker. He was a turpentine and pulpwood worker with a wife at home and eight children, the oldest only 13 years old. But Willie Watson was a drinker. He had begun drinking on Thursday, and continued into the next day, Friday May 4, 1951, until he passed out on a bench less than a half-mile from his home on the south side of Valdosta, Georgia.1 It was there that the policemen found him. Lieutenant Hugh Flowers and his son, officer Raymond Flowers, saw Watson slumped over, sleeping on the bench. When they called out to Watson and he didn’t answer, the two left their car and began beating the sleeping man with their nightsticks. They searched him and pulled the pocketknife from his pants, then continued the beating. Watson woke to the attack confused and disoriented, struggling to escape from his assailants, only to find that his torment was only beginning. The officers pulled out their guns and began firing. Two bullets hit Watson in the legs, another in his abdomen, as he fell and died, never fully roused from his drunken stupor.2 The police’s version of the story was different. In their version, the officers had stopped to see if the sleeping Watson was drunk. They tapped him lightly to wake him up, when the Negro began swinging his knife erratically, cutting the elder Flowers on the hand. His son then responded by trying to arrest the attacker and place him in the squad car. It didn’t work, and Raymond Flowers called for backup. When he did, Watson kicked Hugh Flowers in the stomach and continued to attack both before the officers were finally forced to shoot him.3 It was another in a long line of official abuses in the region. The systematic police brutality that existed in the smalltown South in the decade following World War II was a brutality that was fundamentally dependent upon a racist culture in the police force and carried out by white officers who abused the rights of Black citizens, assuming that their status as policemen and the racial assumptions of all-white juries would protect them. The broader criminal justice system served as both a rubber stamp for police decisions about Black criminal guilt and a bulwark against possible repercussions for police behavior. Such was the case in Valdosta, the seat of Lowndes County, a small city in Southwest Georgia with a population of 20,000, the moderately urban hub of a decidedly rural region. The murder of Willie Watson would bring federal charges and national attention, but it did not exist in a vacuum. It was part of a culture of racist postwar police brutality that existed in Valdosta and Southwest Georgia, and, like other public instances of police brutality in the postwar North and in the twentyfirst century, sparked civil rights activism in the city and the region, served as a driver of that activism rather than a deterrent.4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-1

1

Thomas Aiello

Such might not be entirely surprising, as the nature of reciprocal relationships tells us that the creative role of police brutality, its ability to drive civil rights activism rather than stanch it, is a fundamental part of reciprocation. What is less analyzed in studies of southern rights activism and police brutality is that relationship at the local level prior to the conventionally understood civil rights movement after Brown. My article, “‘Not Too Far Removed from Slavery’: Police Brutality and Rights Activism in Valdosta, Georgia, 1945–1955,” published in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights in 2019, told this story. It argued principally, using the example of the rural postwar South, that police brutality was not one thing—it looked fundamentally different at different points in time and space. The historiography of police brutality in the United States, for example, usually frames the phenomenon in urban settings, one that has existed since the first police forces of the antebellum period and was given its ultimate succor in the development of ethnic enclaves policed by white cops in the throes of the Great Migration and proliferating in the aftermath of World War II. Urban policing existed, in the words of James Baldwin, “to keep the Black man corralled up here, in his place.”5 As Leonard Moore has noted in his groundbreaking study of postwar New Orleans, “In many ways white police officers institutionalized an informal culture of police brutality toward African Americans and they emerged as the protectors of white privilege and the opponents of Black progress.” The historiography presents an analysis that interprets police brutality as a function of the structure and culture of policing. The violence of southern policing is in no way ignored by historians, but is framed less as a function of racism in policing—as a systemic problem within the profession and concept of police work itself—and more as a function of southern racist culture, broadly considered, of which policing is a constituent part.6 Moore’s conclusions about the metropolitan South in the postwar period are not universally applicable to the smalltown South. In larger cities, for example, Moore argues that Black rights demands prompted police to act retributively as agents for whites and whiteness, leading officers to “develop an ‘us versus them’ them mentality” that assumed policing “existed for the protection of whites only.” It was an understandable phenomenon, but one that would be reversed in less populated towns, as there police brutality did not develop its racial “us versus them” mentality after rights demands. Race-based police brutality was a priori to Black agitation. It was the cause rather than the consequence of Black rights activism. There was also no demographic shift in places like Valdosta because of postwar suburbanization as there was in places like New Orleans. Moore’s metropolitan analysis describes the postwar Ku Klux Klan as dynamic and publicly visible, using that visibility and reputation to do its intimidating work without resorting to lynchings. That lack of overt terrorism left “the local police department, with the support of politicians, segregationists, district attorneys, and judges,” to carry out “extralegal violence against African Americans.” With rural white terrorists far more willing to exert themselves publicly in overt acts, however, Moore’s analysis does not apply to smaller southern urban areas.7 Robin D.G. Kelley has argued much the same for Depression-era Birmingham, Alabama. A 1933 May Day protest in Birmingham, for example, was disrupted by police, with aid from the KKK and the White Legionnaires. They had done the same for a Scottsboro protest the previous year. In 1934, Birmingham witnessed several police murders of Black men, all committed without consequence. Little was done, however, as the Communist Party’s International Legal Defense and the NAACP, both conducting individual efforts against police brutality, could not find common ground to join forces in the effort. After a man was found beaten and tortured to death in police custody after being arrested for insulting a white man, Black leaders in Birmingham asked the Southern Negro Youth Congress to investigate police brutality in the metro area. That, too, did little to stop the problem. Under the leadership of police chief E.L. Hollums, Birmingham’s Depression-era experience with police brutality was, as Kelley explains, “overwhelming.”8

2

Introduction

And the story of the South, whether urban or rural, is just one in a much larger picture of police brutality, one that most commonly and infamously has played out in the United States in northern and western urban industrial hubs but extends in time to the country’s early colonial roots and in space to all of its many borders.9 As Glenn McNair demonstrates in this volume, the roots of police brutality began in slave patrols, wherein white authorities used violence against Black lives and bodies as a form of containment for slave labor. It was during the antebellum period when slave patrols reached their apotheosis, and during that same period when the first urban police forces were created. Boston founded its first police force in 1838, and by the time of the Civil War, all of the nation’s metropolitan hubs had them. Malcolm Holmes explains that those forces were notoriously violent, often marshaling their aggression in service to controlling immigrant populations and supporting city political machines. As Adam Malka notes, however, urban police forces in the South used policing to enforce a racial hegemony developed thorugh the slave system, leading to violent sweeps in service to functional apartheid states. But it wasn’t just southern police forces using such tactics. As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, and the country watched as the world went to war, a series of race riots, abetted by law enforcement, swept the country, reaching both urban and rural centers and generating tens of thousands of casualties. The bulk of that violence centered around what James Weldon Johnson dubbed the Red Summer of 1919. But the first surge in race-related attacks, which had always maintained a baseline level of constancy, came at the war’s beginning rather than its end. A broader view of Red Summer places its onset at 1917 and its conclusion in 1921, from the race riot in East St. Louis, accompanied by another in Philadelphia, in 1917 to the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, better encapsulating the breadth of racial violence from the era by including the period at the onset of US involvement in the war and the full run of its economic aftermath. East St. Louis, for example, was approximately 10% Black, and virtually everything within its bounds was segregated. In February 1917, 470 Black workers were hired as scabs for an American Federation of Labor strike in the city, only fueling racial tensions between the Black and white working class on both the Missouri and Illinois sides of the Mississippi River. On July 1, several white men drove through a Black neighborhood firing guns. Soon after, two white plainclothes officers walked through the same neighborhood and were shot and killed, probably by residents who believed that the undercover cops were there to do them harm. Angry white mobs sought revenge, including police, killing and mutilating Black residents, burning Black homes and businesses. At the riot’s end, 35 Black residents and 8 white assailants were killed, and hundreds were left homeless.10 Five years later, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, violence erupted on May 31, 1921, caused by both esoteric and pragmatic factors. More broadly, Black Tulsa had thrived in the wake of World War I. Its business district, known as Black Wall Street, was an affront to a white population that had not experienced a commensurate financial boon. More immediately, a Black man, Dick Rowland, was falsely accused of raping a white woman, and, fearing a lynch mob, a group of Black men assembled at the jail house to protect him. A white mob inevitably arrived, and the two groups exchanged fire, killing several white and Black men. The violence continued, fueled by the white assumption that any Black self-defense was an affront to white citizens of Tulsa, and the next day, a mob of 500 white men confronted a mob of about 1,000 Black men. Attackers burned a church full of people, and as the congregants ran out, whites began picking them off one-by-one. More than four square blocks in the Black neighborhood were burned to the ground. As many as 300 Black residents and 20 whites were killed in the catastrophic violence.11 In between these two poles was Johnson’s Red Summer. Chicago of 1919, for example, had double the Black population of 1916, a result of the first major wave of the Great Migration, leading many white residents to mass resentment, which soon gave way to anger. It was an attitude “nurtured on the killing floors in the stockyards, on all-white blocks threatened with black occupancy, and in parks and on beaches that were racially contested,” as historian William Tuttle has 3

Thomas Aiello

explained. On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan and inadvertently drifted over into the “white” section of the lake. He was stoned by white people and drowned. The police didn’t arrest anyone. Instead, they arrested a Black man who complained that they weren’t doing their jobs. That incident set off a week of violence that left 23 Black deaths and 15 white deaths. More than 500 were injured and almost 1,000 left homeless.12 There were similar conflicts in cities like Houston, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. But such incidents were not limited to urban centers. There were also race riots in Waco and Longview, Texas, and in even smaller communities like Elaine, Arkansas.13 In fall of 1919, Black sharecroppers in and around Elaine attempted to organize a union and withhold their cotton crop from market until they received a higher price. When deputy sheriffs tried to break up an organization meeting, one of them was killed. In retaliation, whites in the region went on a rampage, killing dozens of Black farmers. After the massacre, no whites were arrested, but 12 Black men were convicted of the deputy’s murder. They were sentenced to death, and 67 other Black men were given long prison sentences of up to 20 years in retributive show trials. The NAACP worked diligently on the sharecroppers’ behalf, and in 1923 the Supreme Court overturned their convictions, but the association was powerless to compensate for the lives lost.14 Much of the violence in those urban areas was caused by tensions resulting from the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1940, 1.75 million Black people left the South, doubling the Black population outside of the region. People escaped because of agricultural problems, Jim Crow, racial violence, or other reasons. Most went to urban hubs in the north. Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit. Others moved to urban hubs within the South itself. All of them provided new targets for police forces seeking to protect a perceived white American hegemony in the face of radical demographic change. Meanwhile, as Jeffery Adler explains, in his essay in this volume in the South that so many residents fled, policing served much the role it always had, while also seeking to pressure potential Black migrants into staying in the region, lest white business and farm owners lose its most pliable labor force. The growing population of urban industrial hubs through migration and immigration also facilitated the growth of trade unionism to protect increasingly vulnerable workers. The robber barons of the Gilded Age developed their wealth through a lack of regulatory policies to curb monopolistic expansion and protect the rights and safety of workers. Low pay, on-the-job injuries, and other problems sparked the growth of unions in America. The principal labor organization of the 1880s was the Knights of Labor, founded in Philadelphia in 1869. It was a conservative group by modern standards, but as factory conditions worsened, labor radicalism grew.15 It found its most comfortable home in Chicago, the city most emblematic of demographic instability. Chicago had 50,000 residents in 1850. It had 500,000 in 1880 and 1,700,00 in 1900, a growth fueled by railroads, the Chicago stockyards, and the dangerous and exploitative meat processing industry. The city’s local labor organizations were made up largely of immigrants and included a significant anarchist population. On May 1, 1886, many of those unions planned a general strike to argue for an eight-hour workday. The strike met with violent reaction from the police. Two days later, another strike provoked another police attack that killed four people. Then, on May 4, anarchists held a protest meeting at Haymarket Square. The rally began peacefully, but when police showed up, someone threw a bomb into the crowd of officers, and the police opened fire. The violence left 50 people wounded and ten dead; six of the dead were policemen. In response, eight of the anarchists were convicted (without evidence) of conspiracy to commit murder.16 As Matthew Hild and Lisa Phillips describe, in their own chapters herein Haymarket was notorious, but it wasn’t an outlier. Police forces often became tools of corporate interests to break strikes and force vulnerable workers back into impoverished and dangerous conditions. Police brutality in labor relations didn’t always lead to body counts like those of Haymarket, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, policing and police violence was often used against those who, in idealized representations of law enforcement, officers were supposed to protect. 4

Introduction

Again, however, so much of those confrontations built themselves on race. While the aggregate number of race riots during the Second World War was fewer than the First, they were still prevalent and deadly. Another major wave in the Great Migration led to escalating racial tensions over housing, control of space, and access to employment. In the summer of 1943, for example, one of the bloodiest of these riots happened in Detroit, where white and Black workers had been fuming for months. With all these tensions in place, events finally spilled over in June. The setting was Belle Isle, the segregated city beaches on the Detroit River. When Black swimmers moved into the “white” part of the river, the white swimmers attacked. Soon more than 200 sailors from a nearby naval base joined them. Word of the battle spread through the city, with Black neighborhoods fuming and white mobs roaming the business districts looking for new victims, abetted by local police. Law enforcement’s complicity and inaction forced the arrival of more than 6,000 federal troops to calm the violence, and at its end, there were 34 dead and more than 700 injured. Twentyfive of the victims were Black, and of those 17 were killed by white policemen supposedly tasked with stopping the violence.17 A generation later, race riots would again erupt in urban areas across the country. Detroit, Newark, and Harlem all fumed at the socioeconomic consequences of segregation and racism. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had become law, and had been a clear victory, but for many it wasn’t enough. That same year, almost 30% of Black households lived below the poverty line, while roughly 8% of white families did. The Black unemployment rate was around 8.6%, double that of 4.3% for whites. Kenneth Clark famously argued that “the masses of Negroes are now starkly aware of the fact that recent civil rights victories benefited a very small percentage of middle-class Negroes while their predicament remained the same or worsened.”18 Many of them, particularly in urban areas, began to show their displeasure in new ways. The people of Watts, Los Angeles, for example, were largely unconcerned about the Voting Rights Act passed that year. They had other problems to deal with. Unemployment in Watts wasn’t 8.6%. It was 31%. It was an inner-city Black neighborhood policed by whites, and police brutality was rampant. On August 11, 1965, after a traffic stop drew a crowd and the police called for backup, people began throwing rocks at the cops, leading to a wide-ranging uprising that continued for a week. The governor of California called in the National Guard to lock down the area. In the end, the Watts uprising caused almost forty million dollars in property damage. More than 4,000 people were arrested; there were almost a 1,000 casualties, and 34 people were killed—many of them by the police and National Guard. Margarita Aragon and Max Felker-Kantor parse the role of policing in these two waves of racial violence in the 1940s and the 1960s.19 Between those two poles was the classical civil rights movement, the organized effort by the Black population to fight segregation, job discrimination, and voting restrictions in the South and throughout the nation. Activists were fighting against behaviors abetted by the legal apparatus, making law enforcement the tip of the spear in fighting against the efforts of the movement. Nowhere was that more apparent than in Birmingham, Alabama, where activists turned in the summer of 1963. Eugene “Bull” Connor had been infamous for decades as a staunch bigot and Democratic Party politician. He had served as a state congressman, as the state’s Democratic Party representative, and he had engaged in confrontations with various civil rights leaders over the years. In April 1963, Connor had run for mayor, but lost, mostly because there was a faction of Birmingham residents who were upset by the reputation Birmingham had accrued as a racist bastion. Instead, he retained his traditional position of Public Safety Commissioner, a glorified police chief.20 Connor’s intransigence is why the movement decided to emphasize Birmingham. The nonviolence of Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference only worked if it was placed in stark public contrast to virulent racism. So in April 1963, after Connor’s mayoral loss, King and the SCLC began “Project C” (which stood for “confrontation”) to take advantage of an official who they knew would respond harshly to their tactics. The city was already caricatured as 5

Thomas Aiello

“Bombingham” because of repeated Ku Klux Klan violence and police brutality. Manning the barricades against Connor and the Klan before SCLC’s arrival was Fred Shuttlesworth, a local minister and civil rights leader.21 After a series of arrests, James Bevel, a veteran of the Nashville sit-in movement, suggested that the effort could regain momentum by using children. It was a controversial tactic, to say the least, but ultimately in early May thousands of kids from ages 6 to 18 took to the streets. Connor and his police force didn’t care how young the protesters were. The police attacked them, sicked dogs on them, arrested them. Connor ordered firefighters to turn giant water hoses on the children. And all of it happened in front of the media, showing the nation and the world the consequences of violent racialized policing.22 Less mainstream public sympathy was given to the Black Panther Party later in the decade, but their own confrontations with police and public messaging again highlighted the role of police brutality in Black life. The Panthers were founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, three years after the Birmingham controversy. Though Oakland was far from the South, however, police brutality was common. It was a majority Black city policed by a majority white police force (there were only 16 Black police officers in Oakland), and with no authority to call for protection against the authorities themselves, the Black Panthers needed a way to protect their population from its abusers. They began following police officers with guns while they were in Black neighborhoods, a legal but provocative gesture that often resulted in violent confrontations sparked by police aggression. In the first four years of the Panthers existence, 34 had been killed in shootouts and police raids. Members of the group firmly clung to their right to bear arms as a constitutional guarantee that could help them ensure the safety of their neighborhoods, to help them police a police that had demonstrated a lack of meaningful concern for minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged Oakland residents. Jonathan Simon and Simon Balto describe the role of police brutality in the civil rights and Black Power movements, expanding from these brief examples to evaluate the relationship between policing and race activism in the 1950s and 1960s.23 Racialized policing, however, was not solely a portrait in Black and white. Stephanie Hinnershitz, for example, shows how Asian Americans were harshly policed in different eras in different ways. Lorena Oropeza’s analysis of police brutality against Mexicans and Mexican Americans also demonstrates different forms of violence over time. For both the Japanese and Mexican populations, the apotheosis of that violence came during World War II. A series of incidents between Mexican American youths and soldiers from Southern California military bases in 1943 led to a series of racial conflicts known as the Zoot Suit Riots, which led to police crackdowns scapegoating the Mexican victims of attacks by white enlistees. More systematically, Franklin Roosevelt’s February 1942 Executive Order 9066 directed the relocation and internment of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans to special relocation camps. Almost 130,000, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were forced to abandon their possessions and move to flimsy barracks behind barbed wire, watched at all times by armed guards.24 After both World Wars, violent policing also targeted suspected Communists in various incarnations of paranoia about the spread of Soviet propaganda in the United States, a paranoia matched in the post-Cold War period by a similar effort against Muslims, policing again becoming an agent of social control through violent acts that served a palliative function for American fears of difference and terrorist threat. Stephen Sheehi and Regin Schmidt examine both of these outgrowths of police brutality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other paranoias, of course, were contained to more tightly defined eras, moral panics that gripped the nation during times of specific crisis. Vietnam was one of those eras and violent policing was part of the effort to squelch dissent for an unpopular military conflict. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as described by Frank Kusch, thousands of anti-war demonstrators showed up to protest the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, who supported Lyndon Johnson’s position in 6

Introduction

Vietnam. The Chicago police, as they had at Haymarket in the previous century, responded to the protesters with violence, leading to abusive confrontations between protesters and officers.25 Two years later, at Kent State University, protesters were demonstrating against the war, and in particular the US incursion into Cambodia. On May 1, there had been a massive demonstration, and fearing that things might get out of hand at a second demonstration on May 4, Ohio’s governor called out the National Guard. The Guard responded to the protesters by firing more than 60 rounds into the crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine others. Kent State became a symbol not only of American discontent with Vietnam, but with the government’s abuse of power—they were killing their young overseas and at home.26 Kent State, however, was simply the most famous of many similar incidents, as massive protests on campuses all over the country led 16 different states to call out the National Guard or other forms of police patrol. Less than two weeks after Kent State, on May 14 and 15, student antiwar protests at Mississippi HBCU Jackson State College brought out the Mississippi State Police. The state troopers, responsible for so much police violence during the civil rights movement, responded to the protests of Black students by firing into the crowd, shooting more than 300 rounds into the group of students and into a nearby dormitory. They wounded 12 and killed two students who had been watching events from dormitory windows.27 Kathryn Schumacher describes the broad history of police brutality in response to the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Police brutality has also been more systematic in controlling other groups. The homosexual population and the Native American population have suffered a variety of attacks by police in the course of developing a visible presence in society and an organized movement for rights and recognition. In addition, while there are many women in both of those groups, and in the others discussed here, gender itself has played a decidedly unique role in how policing and police brutality has developed, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapters that follow deal with each of these vital issues. There are also prescient analyses of the legal history of police brutality and efforts at local, state, and federal reform. Other chapters carry the story forward into the modern era, beginning with the videotaped assault on Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department through the murders of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department, to rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its critique of police brutality and its activism to curb it. There are analyses of body cameras and police surveillance, the role of police brutality on public health, and the modern militarization of local police forces around the country. Meghan McDowell describes the police abolition movement as a proposed possible solution to a systematic problem that has been a part of the United States since there has been a United States. Then there are chapters on representations of the phenomenon in American art and culture. James Smethurst reads the response to police brutality of the Black Arts Movement, constituent as it was to late civil rights activism, while Katharine Bausch carries the story forward through film, examining police brutality through television and film the lens of efforts from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism. Felicia Viator assesses the response of hip-hop to instances of police brutality and Susan Bandes analyzes procedural crime dramas on American television. What follows, then, is a collection of some of the leading scholars on police brutality in the United States parsing its history from all angles in an attempt to provide a comprehensive portrait of the practice, one whose most recent apotheosis came in the summer of 2020 in response to a series of police murders of Black men, symbolized must publicly by the image of George Floyd, murdered by Minneapolis police 69 years and 1,300 miles away from the killing of Willie Watson. Like Willie Watson, George Floyd was a drinker. He had battled prescription drug addiction. And like Willie Watson, he was sitting calmly, not hurting anyone, when police accosted him. Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit 20 dollar bill on May 25, 2020, when Derek Chauvin and three other officers pulled him from his car and began their attack. Chauvin handcuffed Floyd, put him on the asphalt, and knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, until well after he had died. The protests that erupted around the country in the Urban Summer of 2020 sought justice for George 7

Thomas Aiello Table 0.1 Number of Police Killings Year

Number of Police Killings

2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013

1,136 1,127 1,096 1,144 1,092 1,070 1,102 1,049 1,087 29

Floyd, but also for myriad other victims of police violence who didn’t receive the same level of publicity. Meanwhile, Chauvin defended himself, like so many before him, by arguing that he feared for his life, playing on tropes of animalistic Black aggression and white fear that had been around since the days of the slave patrols. Since the death of Willie Watson. In parts of the conservative media landscape, the legitimization of white police fear of Black aggression served as an adequate defense of police violence. It is no coincidence that a week after Floyd’s death, the Republican president, Donald Trump, ordered a variety of policing organizations in Washington, DC, including the Secret Service, to move a group of peaceful protestors from Lafayette Square. They used chemical irritants like tear gas and pepper balls. They threw flash grenades and smoke canisters.28 As in the riots of the early twentieth century, police brutality begat police brutality, justified through circular logic and the racialized tropes that generated the brutality in the first place. Such justifications carried significant consequences. The number of Americans killed by police each year has remained relatively consistent, averaging more than 1,100 annual victims (Table 0.1). What began with early slave patrols metastasized over the years to systematic, institutionalized violence that, while it still disproportionately targets Black men, affects and has affected a variety of different groups in a variety of different ways. What follows is an effort to understand the development of the phenomenon that created such statistics, the groups that it targets most frequently, the ways that it has been represented in American art and media, and the historical efforts to fix or justify it, always mindful that for all of the George Floyds and Brianna Taylors who become symbolic icons of movements in death, there are in the more than one thousand annual killings many more Willie Watsons, the lack of consequences for and publicity of their deaths creating the broadly permissive atmosphere that maintains the consistency of such statistics.

Notes 1 Atlanta Daily World, 11 May 1951, 6; Valdosta Daily Times, 5 May 1951, 2; and Polk’s Valdosta City Directory, 1951 (Richmond, VA: RL Polk & Co., 1951), 271. 2 Atlanta Daily World, 11 May 1951, 6. 3 Valdosta Daily Times, 5 May 1951, 2. 4 Though less pronounced in Valdosta, such had been the case in the South before World War II’s end, as well. Timothy Tyson has noted that during the war, white citizens depended on law enforcement officers “to preserve racial etiquette.” The police, however, “were not always able to contain Black anger over persistent police brutality.” Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 33. More, of course, has been made of wartime police brutality in the North. “During the war, police routinely conducted wholesale sweeps of West Oakland,” Donna Jean Murch explains, for example. “In the subsequent decade, treatment of the African American community worsened.” Murch describes how that brutality and access to public higher education

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5 6

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9

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ultimately generated a new radicalism in the mid-1960s, but before southern migrants settled into their new lives in Oakland and accessed quality public education, there was the persistent police brutality. Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 38. Baldwin was describing urban policing in the North, in Harlem, and in 1960, rather than in the decade following World War II. His description, however, applies aptly to policing in the immediate postwar South. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” Esquire 54 (July 1960): 70–76. Leonard W. Moore, Black Rage In New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 1. Part of Ronald H. Bayor’s Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 177–184 deals with race and policing in postwar Atlanta, another large metropolitan southern area. His conclusions look much like Moore’s. Moore, Black Rage In New Orleans, 1–2. Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (originally published 1990; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 33, 71, 85, 123, 216–217. Quote from 206; and Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, New York: Free Press, 1994), 84–87. This introductory portion is a crib of work first published as “‘Not Too Far Removed From Slavery’: Police Brutality and Rights Activism in Valdosta, Georgia, 1945–1955,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 5 (Fall/Winter 2019): 34–67. Some of the best book-length studies of that larger national image include Robert O. Self’s American Babylon: Race and The Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Heather Ann Thompson’s Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Karl Johnson’s “Police-Black Community Relations in Post-War Philadelphia: Race and Criminalization in Urban Social Space, 1945–1960,” Journal of African-American History 89 (March 2005): 118–135; Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper’s The War On Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); and Kenneth Kusmer’s “African-Americans in the City Since World War II: From the Industrial Era to the Post-Industrial Era,” Journal of Urban History, 21 (May 1995): 458–504. As the titles of such accounts suggest, police brutality is an important part of those works but not their sole focus. Newer titles like Clarence Taylor’s Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: NYU Press, 2018), Simon Balto’s Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Max Felker-Kantor’s Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Jeff Pegues’s Black and Blue: Inside the Divide Between the Police and Black America (New York: Prometheus, 2017) center police brutality more directly. Anne Rice, “Gender, Race, and Public Space: Photography and Memory in the Massacre of East Saint Louis and the Crisis Magazine,” in Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory, ed. Evelyn M. Simien (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 131–172; and Charles Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). Elliott Rudwick’s early historical monograph on the East St. Louis race riot explains that racial violence had actually begun the previous year, actions resulting more broadly from political shifts from Democrat to Republican and the immigration of a new Black population, two phenomena that were not mutually exclusive. Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1964). As he had in Brooks County in 1918, Walter White went later to investigate the trouble in East St. Louis. Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (originally published 1948; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 47–51. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Race Reparations, and Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; and Lee E. Williams and Lee E. Williams, Jr., Anatomy of Four Race Riots: Racial Conflict in Knoxville, Elaine (Arkansas), Tulsa, and Chicago, 1919–1921 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 56–73. William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), viii; Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011), 114–126; Williams and Williams, Jr., Anatomy of Four Race Riots, 74–97; and Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels: The Twelve Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (New York: Crown Publisher, 2012). See also Robert T. Kerlin, The Voice of the Negro (1919), ed. Thomas Aiello (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). Lee E. Williams, “The Charleston, South Carolina, Riot of 1919,” in Southern Miscellany: Essays in History in Honor of Glover Moore, ed. Frank Allen Dennis (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 1981), 150–176; William Tuttle, “Violence in a ‘Heathen’ Land: The Longview Race Riot of 1919,” Phylon 33 (4th Qtr.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

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25 26 27 28

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1972): 324–333; Matthew Lakin, “‘A Dark Night’: The Knoxville Riot of 1919,” Journal of East Tennessee History 72 (2000): 1–29; Michael Lawson, “Omaha, A City in Ferment: Summer of 1919,” Nebraska History 58 (Autumn 1977): 395–417; and McWhirter, Red Summer, 41–54, 82–113, 170–181, 192–207. Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), 55–320; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot (Chicago: s.p., 1920); Grif Stockley, Blood In Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001); and Williams and Lee E. Williams, Jr., Anatomy of Four Race Riots, 38–56. See Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, 1962). See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991); and James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); and Robert Shogan and Tom Craig, The Detroit Race Riot: A Study in Violence (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964). Kenneth B. Clark, “The Present Dilemma of the Negro,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, 2 November 1967, 8. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); and Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, Burn, Baby, Burn! The Los Angeles Race Riot, August 1965 (New York: Dutton, 1966). William A. Nunnelley, Bull Connor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991). See Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution ∗New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); and Jonathan S. Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). Ibid. See Curtis J. Austin, Curtis Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006); Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); and Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: The New Press, 2007). For the Zoot Suit Riots, see Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Maurizio Mazon, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). For Japanese-American internment, see Stephanie D. Hinnershitz, Stephanie D. (2022). Japanese American Incarceration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022); and Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). See Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York: New American Library, 1968). See James Michener, Kent State: What Happened and Why (New York: Random House, 1971); and Howard Means, 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence (Paris: Hachette Books, 2016). See Tim Spofford, Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1972); and Nancy K. Bristow, Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Carol D. Leonnig, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, and Rebecca Tan, “Barr Ordered Removal of Protesters,” Washington Post, 3 June 2020, A1; Calvin Woodward, “AP FACT CHECK: Trump denies tear gas use despite evidence,” Associated Press, 3 June 2020, https://apnews.com/2aa7979e6fb88948895407f127e5e5b6, accessed 20 January 2022; and Michael C. Bender, and Sadie Gurman, “Trump’s Show of Force Brings Rebuke, Praise,” Wall Street Journal, 3 June 2020, A8. Data from “2021 Police Violence Report,” Mapping Police Violence, https://policeviolencereport.org/, accessed 20 January 2022.

10

SECTION 1

Police Brutality and Race Before World War II

1 SLAVERY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOUTHERN POLICING Glenn McNair

The evening of September 26, 1858, was cloudy, dark. John Howard stood on the main campground in Bibb County, Georgia. A camp meeting of local Blacks and Whites was in full swing. He had been summoned there by William Bone, captain of the county vigilance committee. Howard was a patroller, and he and several other men were there to find and arrest slaves selling liquor. Soon after his arrival, they had caught two enslaved “boys” with “spirits” and began to whip them. As they were flogging the pair, Howard heard “the rattling of tin buckets” and turned to see a Black man running towards him, chased by a White man. The pursuer was Thomas Bagby. Bagby was not a member of the patrol but had shown up because he wanted to help in the searches and arrests. Howard and the two enslaved men he had just whipped grabbed and held the fleeing man, Jacob, another slave. Bagby caught up to the group; he took one of Jacob’s arms and Howard the other. As the patrollers walked Jacob off the campground he attempted to break free. Bagby suddenly saw that he had a knife in his right hand. The three men scuffled and fell to the ground. Bagby jumped on top of Jacob, and one of the flogged Black men grabbed his left arm. Jacob’s right hand flashed upward several times. The knife struck Bagby in the stomach, just above his right hip. Captain Bone and several other White men ran up; one of them put his foot on Jacob’s neck and the others were able to subdue him. Bagby succumbed to his wounds and died at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon several days later. On November 15, 1858, Jacob was put on trial for murder in Bibb County Superior Court. He was convicted and hanged.1 The deadly confrontation between Jacob and Thomas Bagby was the outcome of a system of policing structured by the imperatives of human bondage. Police officers are “people authorized by a group to regulate interpersonal or intragroup relations through the application of physical and/or moral persuasion.”2 In colonial America, policing—in both the North and the South—was a community affair. Official authority was vested in a few men who called on others when needed to address specific internal or external threats. Crime and disorder were such that these small units of police volunteers were thought sufficient to handle them. As the nineteenth century progressed, policing in the two regions diverged. As the North urbanized and industrialized large police departments of paid officers replaced the ad hoc citizen forces in big cities. This modernization and professionalization of policing continued for the remainder of the century. In the South, however, slavery demanded that the entire White population involve itself in policing the entire Black population. Rather than becoming an increasingly public responsibility, southern policing remained and became an even more private one. As a result, the number of police officers remained small in comparison to the North. Their reach and enforcement powers, however, extended far beyond what their numbers DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-3

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would suggest. Furthermore, in significant respects southern police forces were decades ahead of their northern counterparts. They began wearing uniforms and carrying weapons at the end of the eighteenth century, and several southern cities had police guard units with well over 100 officers, which northern cities would not surpass until the 1840s. Most importantly, Southerners began patrolling to prevent crime, the practice most closely identified with modern policing. This evolution in law enforcement occurred because White Southerners feared African Americans as dangerous internal enemies. In pre-modern England, policing was based on the mutual pledge system, which dated back to the tenth century. The men of a community banded together as needed to protect themselves from outlaws or to come to each other’s aid in other times of distress. Ten families constituted a “tithing”; each tithing was governed by a tithingman. All men over 15 years of age in the tithing could raise the “hue and cry” (a loud call for assistance) when they detected a crime, and neighborhood men were required to respond to it. By the 1400s, the position of tithingman had evolved into that of town constable, who was empowered to draft citizens into a night watch, mostly for fire prevention. Ten tithings made up a “hundred,” which was under the authority of a shire-reeve (later shortened to sheriff), whom the king appointed to enforce the law. He had the power to call together the men of the hundred in a posse comitatus to pursue fleeing felons. The shire-reeve system worked well in rural areas but much less so in urban ones. Night watches and day constabularies were established in larger cities like London, Manchester, and York. Unlike their rural counterparts, the urban systems were not particularly good at preventing crime or even reacting to it. Overall, law enforcement remained local and decentralized.3 The American colonists continued this system of community-based policing. Eventually every colony hired constables and marshals and established militias and night watches made up of all free adult men. The constable was the chief law enforcement officer in cities and towns. He had the power to arrest suspicious persons and minor offenders, execute warrants and serve other court orders, inspect taverns for orderliness, supervise town watches, collect local taxes, maintain custody of lost items, find and arrest runaway servants, and place arrested persons in the stocks or jails, along with other responsibilities relating to public safety, health, and order.4 Communities generally hired only one or two constables to serve one-year terms. Even large cities had few constables: Charlestown had five in 1685, New York City one in 1686, Newport had two in 1688, and Boston employed eight in 1690. Constables only worked during the daytime hours. They were not paid but were allowed to keep a portion of the fees they collected. Given the position’s low pay and status, it was a difficult one to fill. In Boston, for example, the city imposed a £28 fine for failing to serve, but many men chose to pay the fine rather than take the job. The public often ridiculed constables and rejected their authority, refusing to be summoned or arrested.5 As in urban England, the American constable system proved inadequate for preventing and controlling crime in the disordered colonial environment. Native Americans and foreign enemies were the main public safety concerns. The colonies turned to militias and night watches to meet the challenge. All free White men were expected to make themselves available for militia duty. Initially, militias provided defense against the threatening Indians and foreign adversaries, but by the middle of the eighteenth century these functions were increasingly the responsibility of special Britishcommanded military units. Threats from outsiders receded over the decades but were replaced by transient populations and more and more criminals as cities grew in number and size. As areas along the Eastern Seaboard became more crowded, more diverse, and more conflict-ridden, the militia’s mandate evolved from external defense to combatting localized threats and providing internal security. In New York and parts of New England, for instance, the militia became the basis of the night watch, and in emergencies could be called upon as part of the posse comitatus.6 In the North, all men were also expected to serve on the night watch on a rotating basis. The most common emergencies to which the watch was expected to respond were “fires, Indian attacks, 14

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wild animals, runaway slaves, thieves, and grave robbers,” as well as “suppressing disorder, arresting drunks, and enforcing the curfew.” Like constables, most night watchmen were drawn from the lower classes; they had no training and were poorly paid—if they were paid at all. Men could avoid watch duty by paying a fine or hiring a substitute. Boston established perhaps the best known night watch in 1631. It began as a military watch but quickly became a civilian one in which every ablebodied man was required to serve. The watch operated under the supervision of a constable from sunset until around 4:00 a.m. In 1654, the city employed two bellmen at six shillings each; after a massive fire in 1677, the number of bellmen was increased and fire duty was added to the list of watch responsibilities. The number of watchmen and the amount of money Boston devoted to the watch continued to increase over the decades. Most American cities established and expanded their night watches in like fashion.7 America underwent a profound transformation from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Civil War. The Louisiana Purchase and lands acquired after the Mexican War greatly enlarged the country. Rapid economic growth produced by industrialization in the North and cotton cultivation in the South accompanied this territorial expansion. The nation also underwent significant demographic change, with millions of immigrants pouring into the country. As a result of these developments, conflict between White Protestant Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants, and Mexicans escalated. Nativism and racism were rampant in the Northeast, leading to multiple riots in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other population centers; by the 1830s and 1840s, ethnic conflict was a feature of most major cities. These social divisions played themselves out in politics through an expanded electorate, which became increasingly polarized around issues of labor, slavery, and westward expansion. This discord led to disorder that simply could not be contained by civilian watches or a few constables.8 It was this need to combat disorder that led to the modernization of policing. New York City established the first modern department. In the 1830s and 1840s, the city experienced mass immigration that led to progressively more intense labor and ethnic antagonism, which was aggravated by the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1837. These decades also witnessed the rise of the abolitionist movement and the anti-Black racism it engendered, which resulted in regular rioting that often had to be quelled by militia. This complex and strife-ridden state compelled an 1845 reform of existing police manpower structures, responsibilities, and practices, with London’s Metropolitan Police Act serving as a model for the reorganization. London’s new department featured a military chain of command, and its constables (nicknamed “bobbies” after Robert Peel, the British home secretary responsible for the act) were uniformed and paid regular salaries. Bobbies assumed the traditional functions of the day and night watches, “lighting streetlamps, calling time, [and] watching for fires,” but their main purpose was crime prevention, which they would accomplish by regularly patrolling the city. Over time, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) became increasingly effective at controlling crime and disorder.9 New York replaced all police positions—except that of constable—with a “Day and Night Police” of no more than 800 men. Each ward constituted a patrol district with one captain, two assistant captains, and as many other officers as the city common council deemed necessary. A chief of police would ostensibly provide overall supervision of the districts, but could not hire, fire, or assign officers, as these were prerogatives of the common council. The chief’s duties would consist mostly of inspecting hacks, cabs, stages, omnibuses, and carts. Despite these relatively limited powers, the chief would be the first modern law enforcement executive. New York would also be the first city to make the transition from private to public police. The city’s officers would eventually be uniformed and also the first in the country to wear badges. The New York City Police Department would not be nearly as proficient at crime prevention and control as London’s MPD, and corruption would characterize it for decades; nevertheless, it became the template that other big cities would follow. In addition to curbing and stopping criminal activity, these departments were 15

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also responsible for everything from enforcing building and health codes to licensing taverns and animal control. They would also be all-White.10 In their early years, the southern colonies, too, relied on constables, night watches, and militias for policing. But, as in the North, they proved ineffective at controlling crime and maintaining order. For example, Charleston (the largest and busiest port south of Philadelphia) established its constable watch in 1685, 15 years after South Carolina’s founding. It was largely a failure: watchmen fell asleep, did not respond to crime or other disturbances, or simply failed to show up. To address these problems, in 1696 the city set up a paid watch of one captain and five men; it was no better than its predecessor so the civilian watch was reinstituted after two years. Poor oversight, unqualified candidates, and—according to the historian Douglas Greenberg—a “general disregard of South Carolinians for the authority of the law” doomed the constable and watch systems.11 The South’s demographics and distinct culture also stood as barriers to effective law enforcement. There was a disproportionate ratio of men to women, high death rates, and ferocious competition for land. These factors produced levels of violent crime higher than those of the northern colonies. This violence would be exacerbated over the centuries by a regional honor culture and general disrespect for legal authority. Ethnic or racial homogeneity also played a significant role in the efficacy of policing. The more diverse a society is the greater the conflict within it, and hence the difficulty of controlling its crime. Community-based policing of the kind practiced in the Old World worked best with a shared group identity and at the least the perception of shared interests; more homogeneous regions like New England had fewer problems than the more diverse Middle Colonies and the South. Moreover, because of slavery, “the Southern experience with race” was “a much more intense, deep, and embedded phenomenon,” creating a hostile racial division unlike any other in the country. Finally, communities in the South were geographically isolated, and as slave populations grew so, too, did fears of slave rebellion. This fear and the need to exercise tighter control over the enslaved caused Whites to deviate profoundly from traditional policing norms and practices.12 The first change the South made was ideological. The mutual pledge system for policing that the colonists had brought with them from England depended on a sense of community; the people of a town or village voluntarily came together to protect one another. As the English jurist and commentator William Blackstone explained in defining crime, “public wrongs, or crimes and misdemeanors, are a breach and violation of the public rights and duties, due to the whole community, considered as a community, [italics mine] in its social aggregate capacity.”13 For a criminal justice system to be considered legitimate, all had to be bound by its rules and all had to be protected by them. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that, “We lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right: that without this, they are merely arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and without conscience.”14 Slavery demanded that Blacks be in, but not of, communities governed by shared rights and obligations, permanent internal outsiders. They represented the principal threat from which Whites had to be protected, so they would be ruled and policed by force, not through their voluntary cooperation. Southerners regularly defended the use of force in maintaining slavery; indeed, they viewed force as essential to all governance. The South Carolina slaveholder and politician James Henry Hammond, said that, “[critics of slavery] complain that our slaves are kept in bondage by the ‘law of force.’ In what country or condition of mankind do you see human affairs regulated merely by the law of love? Unless I am greatly mistaken, you will, if you look over the world, find nearly all certain and permanent rights, civil, social, and I may even add religious, resting on and ultimately secured by the ‘law of force.”’15 According to George Fitzhugh, another southern social theorist and proslavery ideologue, since “physical force, not moral suasion, governs the world,” the enslaved readily accept this reality of power and become habituated to its necessary violent coercion; indeed, doing so becomes second nature: “The negro sees the driver’s lash, becomes accustomed to obedient 16

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cheerful industry, and is not aware that the lash is the force that impels him.”16 Moreover, it would be the height of foolishness for slaveowners to seek the consent of slaves in matters of their governance. “Masters dare not take the vote of slaves as to their government. If they did, constant holiday, dissipation, and extravagance would be the result.”17 Townspeople came together as a community to select their sheriffs and constables and to serve on night watches and in militias and to respond to the hue and cry; in the colonial and antebellum South, White communities united to police enslaved and free Blacks, internal enemies with no voice or role in the criminal justice process. The abolitionist William Goodell described the tyrannical relationship about which Jefferson warned: “He [the slave] is the only being in the universe to whom is denied all self-direction and free agency, but who is, nevertheless, held responsible for his conduct, and amenable to law … . He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by law, and can only know law as an enemy, and not as a friend.” [Italics in original].18 In Goodell’s view, this antagonistic relationship was also a product of the slave’s relationship to the society and its legislative process: “It must be remembered that the primary object of the enactment of penal laws is the protection and security of those who make them. THE SLAVE HAS NO AGENCY IN MAKING THEM. He is indeed one cause of the apprehended evils to the other class, which those laws are expected to remedy. That he should be held amenable for the violation of those rules established for the security of the other, is the natural result of the state in which he is placed.” [Italics and capitalization in original].19 The entire character of southern policing was shaped by this adversarial relationship between Blacks and Whites. The slave states retained the system of sheriffs, constables, and night watches to police Whites, but augmented them with patrols to control free and enslaved Blacks. It would be slave patrols that gave southern law enforcement its distinctive character. There were no patrols in the seventeenth century because slave populations were still too small to necessitate them. Even though Virginia had been involved in slavery for decades longer, South Carolina set up the first patrol system because of its proportionally larger enslaved population. As with much else about slavery in South Carolina, its patrolling practices were based on Barbadian slave law and the experience of the island’s slaveholders. Patrols were initially made up of detached members of the regular militia; the two groups were formally combined into a single unit with shared responsibilities after 1721.20 In response to the Stono Rebellion in 1739, South Carolina revised its slave code and patrol law in 1740. The act’s preamble vividly describes White fear of Black violence: “Forasmuch as many late horrible and barbarous massacres have been actually committed, and many more designed, on white inhabitants of this Province, by negro slaves, who are generally prone to such cruel practices, which makes it highly necessary that constant patrols should be established and kept in the several militia districts of this Province, for the better preventing any future insurrections or cabals of said slaves.”21 Georgia had a similar rationale for establishing its slave patrol in 1765: “It is absolutely necessary for the security of his majesty’s subjects of this province, and for preventing the many dangers and inconveniences that may arise from the disorderly and unlawful meetings of negroes and other slaves within the same, that patrols be established.”22 This existential fear of Black violence gripped the Slave South and would inform criminal justice legislation and law enforcement strategies and tactics for the remainder of slavery’s existence. Patrols varied in size, but generally numbered between 3 and 10 members. The South Carolina slave code of 1740 set patrol membership at seven men and women (women who owned fewer than ten slaves were exempted). In addition to a captain, in Alabama patrols would consist of “not less than three, nor more than five men.” In Georgia, they were limited to 10 members. Antebellum Arkansas county courts had the authority to appoint men to serve on patrols, “not exceeding ten.” Not “more than seven, nor less than four persons, including the leader” patrolled in antebellum Mississippi. In Kentucky, no more than “three men … discreet and sober” could assume patrolling responsibilities.23 17

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Kentucky established “special patrol companies” to prevent runaways. These units were larger and had more expansive powers than the regular patrols. “Counties bounded by the Ohio River, if they think proper, may, at any time, appoint for their respective counties a strong and active patrol, to consist of sober, discrete citizens, not to exceed thirty in any county, whose duty it shall be to guard and watch the places for crossing the river, and such other points and places as may be designated by the court.” These special companies would “have power to arrest, without warrant, any person found lurking about, with the intention to afford assistance, by advice or otherwise, to any slave to escape from his master, or who may be lurking about for any harmful purpose to the community.”24 The small size of slave patrols obscures their true nature and that of southern policing. While most men were expected to serve in the militia or to be called upon if a hue and cry were issued, all Whites were expected to play some role in policing all Blacks (including the sheriffs, constables, and night watches). For example, citizens had the authority to enforce the pass laws. Any White person could stop, punish, or return to their plantations any of the enslaved caught without passes or permission tickets. In South Carolina, “If any slave who shall be out of the house or plantation where such slave shall live, or shall be usually employed, or without some white person in company with such slave, shall refuse to submit or undergo the examination of any white person, it shall be lawful for any such white person to pursue, apprehend, and moderately correct such slave; and if any such slave shall assault and strike such white person, such slave may be lawfully killed.” (Georgia based its 1755 slave code on the South Carolina slave code of 1740 and used this exact language to grant Whites the power to surveille, police, and punish the slave population.) In Alabama, it was lawful for “any person to apprehend” slaves who violated the pass law, and to carry them before a justice of the peace to be “punished with stripes.” Mississippi used this same language verbatim to authorize free White persons to police slaves. Likewise, “any citizen” of the state could “apprehend and take … before any justice of the peace” slaves offering up goods for sale.25 In addition to expecting the White populace to aid them in restricting the unauthorized movements of slaves in their districts, patrols could also rely on them for additional manpower in the performance of their other duties. After 1839, South Carolina patrollers were “empowered and required to call unto their assistance such force and assistance from the neighborhood, as he or they may judge necessary.” The same was true in Florida, where patrols were “authorized to call unto their assistance, from the neighborhood, such force as he or they may judge necessary.”26 There were also no laws that prohibited Whites from offering patrols their aid, as did Thomas Bagby in his fatal encounter with Jacob at a Georgia campground in 1858. Furthermore, local law enforcement and patrols were expected to work in concert. In Georgia, the night watch—under the direction of a constable—was empowered to “Seize & apprehend every negroe [sic] and other Slave that shall be found in the said town [Savannah] not having a tickett [sic] or token” from their owners or a “white person in Company with him or them” or a “satisfactory account” of the business they were conducting on their owner’s behalf. In antebellum Alabama, justices of the peace were required “to furnish the constable of that beat to which they belong, a copy of the list of patrol detachments, setting forth the leader of each detachment, and the name of each patrol-man belonging to his detachment, and the time at which each leader shall commence his tour of duty” for the purpose of coordinating their policing activities. In Mississippi, it was “the duty of all sheriffs, coroners, and constables” to “seize from, and take” all articles being unlawfully sold by slaves—“for their own use.”27 Southern men also formed private slave patrols and other criminal justice organizations that reinforced those the state authorized. For example, in Branchville and St. Matthews Parishes in South Carolina White men formed unofficial policing associations. These private patrollers received indemnification against any lawsuits that might be brought for causing injury to a slave. Members of 18

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a similar group, the Edisto Island Auxiliary Association, sought official recognition from the state legislature in 1823. In one South Carolina district, just before the Civil War, men sought to establish the “Military Vigilance Poliece [sic],” whose purpose was to set up juries to immediately try any slave they suspected of sedition.28 The shared White commitment to controlling the slave and free-Black populations meant that they did not need much of the formal apparatus of policing. As James Henry Hammond explained (while understating the nature and extent of volunteer policing), “With thus every citizen concerned in the maintenance of order … our mutual vigilance renders standing armies, whether of soldiers or policemen, entirely unnecessary. Small guards in our cities, and occasional patrols in the country, ensure us a reposing security known nowhere else.” As a result of this constant White surveillance and minimal police forces the South was safer and freer: “You cannot be ignorant that, accepting the United States, there is no country in the world whose existing Government would not be overturned in a month, but for its standing armies, maintained at an enormous and destructive cost to those whom they are destined to overawe—so rampant and combative is the spirit of discontent wherever nominal Free labor prevails, with its ostensive privileges and its dismal servitude.”29 Slave patrols had two major responsibilities. First, they were to search slave quarters for evidence of revolts, weapons, books, paper and other indicators of education, and for Blacks who did not belong there—especially runaway slaves. Second, they were to disperse unlawful gatherings of enslaved Blacks or those who aided them. In 1839, South Carolina defined as unlawful “all assemblies and congregations of slaves, free negroes, mulattoes, and mustizoes, [sic]” and any “white persons, assembled or met together for the purpose of mental instruction, in a confined or secret place of meeting, barred, bolted, or locked, so as to prevent the free ingress and egress to and from the same.” In Florida, “all assemblies and congregations of slaves, free negroes and mulattoes, consisting of four or more, met together in a confined or secret place,” was “declared to be an unlawful meeting.” Patrols were empowered to “enter into any such places, and for that purpose, to break open doors, windows or gates if resisted, and disperse such slaves, free negroes or mulattos as may be then and there found unlawfully together.”30 In Alabama, it was “the duty of each patrol detachment, to visit all Negro quarters, all places suspected of entertaining unlawful assemblies of slaves or other disorderly persons unlawfully assembled, and upon finding such disorderly person or persons, to take him, her, or them, if free, before the nearest justice of the peace.” If any of these assembled persons were slaves the patrol could administer “any number of lashes, not exceeding fifteen.” Arkansas patrols were mandated to “visit all Negro quarters and other places suspected of unlawful assemblages of slaves … . Any slave found at such assembly, or who shall be found strolling about from one house or plantation to another, without a pass from his master, employer or overseer, shall receive any number of lashes at the discretion of the patrol, not exceeding twenty.” Patrol laws in all of the slave states had responsibilities similar to those of South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas.31 To effectively carry out their mission of policing Blacks, patrols also had the power to search the persons and homes of Whites, and to arrest them if necessary. In South Carolina, patrols could enter the homes of servants—both Black and White—apprehend them and seize contraband. According to the state’s 1740 slave code, patrols were required to ask permission before searching any house owned by Whites suspected of harboring fugitive slaves. If the “owner or other white person so entreated shall refuse to deliver up such fugitive slave or slaves, or to suffer search to be made for them, (the said patrol or any of them having seen such slaves enter) shall forfeit the sum of five pounds current money for every such offense.” At the end of the antebellum period, elite South Carolinians even proposed granting patrols the authority to arrest White poachers, trespassers, and vagabonds. In Arkansas, “if any white person shall be caught in company with negroes, in the night time, in suspicious places, by the patrol, they shall take him before some … justice of the peace who 19

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shall on conviction of the person so caught, commit him to jail for trial; … and if he shall be found guilty by a jury, he shall be punished with the like number of lashes as would have been inflicted on a slave, not exceeding twenty.” Given Americans’ deep commitment to protecting individual liberties, southerners’ willingness to empower slave patrols to enter onto or into private property without warrants was a clear deviation from the nation’s republican values. Grant of this amount of power was predicated on the belief that Blacks were a violent population that simply had to be subordinated. This racist view of African Americans became woven into the fabric of southern law enforcement.32 While slave patrols had arrest and search and seizure powers that generally extended beyond those of northern police, they had one other that made them truly unique in colonial and antebellum law enforcement: the power to mete out summary punishment. As seen in the examples above, patrollers could detect violations of the criminal law, apprehend the offenders, and sanction them on the spot. In Georgia, slaves caught “without the fences or cleared ground of their owner’s plantation” without a pass or responsible white person could be whipped, not to exceed twenty lashes.” “All slaves who may be found without the limits of their owner’s plantation” in Florida could expect patrollers to administer “moderate whipping with a switch or cowhide, not exceeding twenty lashes.” In South Carolina, “officers and persons” dispersing an “unlawful assemblage of persons, shall, if they think proper, impose such corporal punishment, not exceeding twenty lashes, … as they may judge necessary.” Enslaved persons in Kentucky “strolling from one plantation to another, or found in a town or city without a pass for the time from his master or overseer” or attempting to “sell, any commodity, or have the same in his possession for sale” without their master’s permission could anticipate—“at the discretion of the captain of the patrol”—“any number of stripes not exceeding ten.” In Mississippi, any slave who violated the slave code and was apprehended by patrols would receive “any number of lashes not exceeding fifteen.”33 In policing African-American slaves, patrollers acted as judges, juries, and executioners of the law. Patrols that were adequate to control African Americans in rural areas were insufficient for doing so in the South’s largest cities—even with the aid of other law enforcement agencies and the White citizenry. Black populations were too large and transient; there were too many places where they could not be effectively surveilled, and too many opportunities to plot in secret. An urban Black insurrection would be too big and complex for a patrol to quell. Much larger, armed police forces were necessary. Southern cities and towns began to replace slave patrols with paramilitary city guards soon after the American Revolution, beginning with Charleston in 1781. Savannah established its city guard in 1796; its officers were uniformed and carried swords. (Later, the guardsmen were mounted and armed with pistols.) In Charleston, Raleigh, Richmond, and New Orleans, these forces were allocated the largest part of city budgets. These urban guards and watches adopted military postures and practices because, according to the historian Dennis Rousey, “policemen who looked like soldiers probably helped ameliorate the deep anxieties many whites harbored about the dangers of slave crime and revolt.” These urban police forces only grew larger over time: during the antebellum years, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans had higher ratios of policemen to citizens than New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.34 The New Orleans gendarmerie provides an excellent example of an early militarized police force. Founded in 1805, the gendarmes were salaried, uniformed, and armed—not with the clubs or staffs carried by night watchmen in the North—but with flintlock pistols and swords. Half the force was mounted, and they patrolled mostly at night, although a portion of their number was held in reserve “during the day for any public official to call upon when needed.” The command structure was military, from a captain down to the rank-and-file gendarmes. And, as in the army, the gendarmes were housed in barracks. This highly militarized police force lasted only a few years because of the great expense required to maintain it and was replaced by a city guard that was unmounted and armed with pikes and sabers rather than pistols (although guardsmen were authorized to use muskets 20

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in times of emergency). New Orleans finally moved towards a northern-style civilian police department in the 1830s.35 In Charleston, by contrast, the patrol became more military as the nineteenth century progressed, donning uniforms and carrying swords and muskets. Until 1821, they patrolled the city in 20- to30-man platoons. In response to the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy in 1822, the South Carolina legislature passed an act to create a “Municipal Guard.” The guard would be made up of no more than 150 men and was responsible “for the Protection of the City of Charleston and Its Vicinity.” It would patrol “at all times of day and night, as necessity may require” and would furnish “any number of men which the police of Charleston … may require, for the preservation of peace and the public safety.” It would enforce all laws relating to “the government of Negroes of free persons of color” but would “have no military power over the white inhabitants of the State.” The Municipal Guard could be “enlisted for any term not exceeding five years, and shall be governed by the rules and articles of the United States army.” These paramilitary police would be paid for by “a tax of ten dollars” levied on all houses “inhabited by Negroes or persons of color, as tenants or owners” or “all free male Negroes or persons of color, who exercise any mechanic trade within city limits.” In 1837, with its approximately 100 members, the Charleston city guard was the largest police organization in the country.36 Foreigners remarked on America’s stark regional dissimilarities in city policing. A British traveler in 1830, James Stuart, wrote of the differences between the paramilitary police forces of the South and the civilian ones of the North and the reason for them: The “armed police, [of] Charleston and New Orleans do not resemble the free cities of America; but the greater number of the black population, and the way in which they are treated by the whites, render this precaution, I have no doubt, indispensably necessary.” Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach, a visitor to Charleston, described the municipal guardsmen as “police soldiers” posted throughout the city, and who owed their support “to fear of the negroes.”37 Policemen in these cities were uniformed, armed, conducted themselves as military units, and patrolled the streets in large numbers—all out of fear of Black crime and violence. After the Civil War, many modern police departments, North and South, evolved to share many of these characteristics, sadly, for the same reason. When the British colonists set up their social, political, and economic institutions, they did so by modeling them on those they had known. Accordingly, policing practices mirrored those in England. A few townsmen would be legally empowered to call upon volunteer others to address crime and disorder as the need arose; there would be no permanent, standing police. The people of a community were thus both protectors and protected. Even those who broke the law were considered members of the community—though wayward ones. Old World institutions and behaviors gave way to fast-changing conditions in North America. North and South diverged as each region became ever more deeply committed to their respective economic systems, slavery in the South and free labor in the North. This divergence had profound implications for law enforcement. Rapid industrialization led to increasing immigration and urbanization and the crime and discord that accompanied them. In response, northern police forces became larger, paid, and professional, with civilians playing a declining role. The opposite happened in the South. As slavery expanded, the region’s African-American population grew, reaching four million by 1860. These Black millions created public safety concerns—fears—that necessitated a much more expansive and intrusive form of policing than had previously existed. Southerners accomplished this not by expanding their public police significantly, but by calling upon all Whites to play some role in policing all Blacks. Slave patrols, city guards, and White-citizen surveillance resulted in largely private, rather than public, law enforcement. Focus on Robert Peel’s 1829 Metropolitan Police Act and northern police departments have caused scholars to underappreciate the role of the South in the evolution of American policing. The failure of the night watches led southern cities to establish the forerunners of urban police forces far 21

Glenn McNair

sooner than those in the Northeast, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Southern city guards were large, often uniformed, armed, and patrolled their cities—all characteristics we associate with modern police departments. According to the historian Martin Alan Greenberg, those forces represent “the first era of modern policing.”38 Patrolling is perhaps the most important police function. The first police departments in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia did not initially consider it an essential part of crime prevention and detection, but White southerners knew they could not control slave crime without patrols and constant surveillance. A former New York police commissioner, Patrick Murphy, has gone so far as to say that “slave patrols of the South were America’s first modern-style police forces.”39 It is inconceivable to think of modern policing without officers on foot or car patrol, but the first Americans to do so were on horseback riding the roads and fields of the South to keep Whites safe from the enslaved Blacks in their midst. American law enforcement officers and the general public have been unwilling to associate the nation’s police with slavery and White supremacy. As the historians Robert Wadman and William Allison observe, beginning consideration of American policing with Robert Peel’s “Principles of Law Enforcement … is substantially more comfortable and acceptable to those in policing than the reality that some current police functions evolved from slave patrols and enforcement of slave codes.”40 Like much else about race relations in America, policing was shaped by centuries of chattel slavery. Failure to acknowledge this history makes it difficult to truly comprehend one of the most pressing issues of our day: the deeply troubling relationship between Blacks and the police.

Notes 1 State v. Jacob, Bibb County Superior Court, November 15, 1858, drawer 183, microfilm box 15, vol. 9, p. 136, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow, GA. 2 Martin Alan Greenberg, Citizens Defending America: From Colonial Times to the Age of Terrorism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 12. 3 Ibid., 1; Robert C. Wadman and William Thomas Allison, To Protect and Serve: A History of Police in America (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004), 2; Elizabeth Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States, 1789–1939 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36; and George L. Keeling, William Francis Walsh, and Jean-Paul Brodeur, “The Development of Professional Policing in England,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/The-development-of-professional-policing-in-England. 4 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 1, 4, 23–24; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 9. 5 Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 8–9. 6 Ibid., 9; Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 22. 7 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 37; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 9–10. Like modern police departments, fire departments were an outgrowth of the functions of night watches. See Stephen F. Ginsberg, “The Police and Fire Protection in New York City:1800–1850,” in Policing and Crime Control, Part 1, ed., Eric Monkkonen, Crime & Justice in American History (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992), 227–33. 8 Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 14–16. 9 James F. Richardson, “The Struggle to Establish a London-Style Police Force for New York City,” in Police, Prison, and Punishment: Major Historical Interpretations, ed. Kermit L. Hall (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987), 568, 72; Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 2–3; and Keeling, Walsh, and Brodeur, “Development of Professional Policing.” 10 Richardson, “Struggle to Establish London-Style Police Force,” 582, 587–90; Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 17–25; and Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 3. 11 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 251; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 11. 12 Douglas Greenberg, “Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America,” in Crime & Justice in American History, ed. Eric Monkkonen, vol. 1. The Colonies and Early Republic (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991), 240; Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 28–29. For perhaps the most important monograph on the role of honor in southern culture, see, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 257; and Dale, Criminal Justice in the U.S., 36. 13 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed., William Carey Jones (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1765–70; repr., San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney Co., 1915).

22

Transformation of Southern Policing 14 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 142. 15 James Henry Hammond, “Slavery in the Light of Political Science,” in Cotton is King and Other Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E.N. Elliott (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott & Loomis, 1860), 677. 16 George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 248–49. 17 Ibid., 243. 18 William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions and Illustrative Facts (n.p.: American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 309. 19 Ibid., 310. 20 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8–10, 24–25; and Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 34–36. 21 Thomas Cooper, Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1838), 3:570. 22 Oliver H. Prince, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia (Athens, GA: Oliver H. Prince, 1837), 441. 23 Cooper, South Carolina Statutes, 3:570; C.C. Clay, Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL: Marmaduke J. Slade, 1843), 336; Prince, Digest of Laws of Georgia, 442; William McK. Ball and Samuel C. Roane, Revised Statutes of the State of Arkansas (Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 1838), 604; T.J. Fox Alden and J.A. Van Hoesen, Digest of the Laws of Mississippi (New York: Alexander S. Gould, 1839), 677; and Richard H. Stanton, The Revised Statutes of Kentucky, Adopted and Approved by the General Assembly, 1851 and 1852, and in Force from July 1, 1852 (Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke and Company, 1867), 1:196. 24 Stanton, Kentucky Statutes, 1:196. 25 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 34–36; David J. McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 7 (Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1840), 7:399; Allen D. Candler, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta, GA: Franklin Printing and Publishing Co., 1904), 18:105–6; John G. Aikin, Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL: D. Woodruff, 1836), 391; and Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 747. 26 McCord, South Carolina Statutes, 7:441; Leslie A. Thompson, Manual or the Digest of the Statute Law of the State of Florida (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1847), 175–76. 27 Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 751; Candler, Colonial Records of Georgia, 18:292–93; and Clay, Digest of Laws of Alabama, 394. 28 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 47. 29 James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Honorable James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Throw & Co., Printers, 1866), 127–28. In the South, citizen involvement significantly affected not just policing, but the entire criminal justice process. As Hammond expounded elsewhere: “On our estates we dispense with the whole machinery of public police and public courts of justice. Thus we try, decide, and execute the sentences, in thousands of cases, which in other countries would go into courts.” William Harper, James Henry Hammond, William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas Roderick Dew, The Pro-Slavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Gambo, 1853), 130–31. Hammond’s analysis was accurate for colonial and antebellum Georgia, where formal and informal criminal justice processes interacted to create a legal culture that decidedly favored mastery. See Glenn McNair, Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 30 Hadden, Slave Patrols, 108; McCord, South Carolina Statutes, 7:440; and Thompson, Statute Law of Florida, 175. 31 Aikin, Digest of Laws of Alabama 336–37; Ball and Roane, Arkansas Revised Statutes, 604; Clay, Digest of Laws of Alabama, 392; Stanton, Kentucky Statutes, 196; Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 675; John Haywood and Robert L. Cobbs, Statute Laws of the State of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN: F.S. Heiskell, 1831), 324; Samuel Shepherd, Statutues at Large of Virginia (Richmond, VA: Samuel Shepherd, 1836), 3:17; and Prince, Digest of Laws of Georgia, 774–75. 32 Dale, Criminal Justice in the U.S., 36; Cooper, South Carolina Statutes, 3:572; Ball and Roane, Arkansas Revised Statutes, 604; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 35. 33 Prince, Digest of Laws of Georgia, 443–44; Thompson, Statute Law of Florida, 174; McCord, South Carolina Statutes, 7:441; Stanton, Kentucky Statutes, 1:196; and Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 675. 34 James M. Campbell, Crime and Punishment in African American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 29; Dennis Charles Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 21, 24, 39; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 34. 35 Rousey, Policing the Southern City, 16–18.

23

Glenn McNair 36 David J. McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 6 (Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1839), 6:177–78; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 35–36. 37 James Stuart, Three Years in North America (Edinburgh, Scotland: Robert Cadell, 1833), 2:139; and Duke of Saxe Weimar-Eisenach Bernard, Travels Through America during the Years 1825 and 1826 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828), 2:7. 38 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, xii. 39 Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 27. 40 Ibid.

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2 POLICING IN GILDED AGE URBAN HUBS Malcolm D. Holmes

The economic, political, and social structure of America underwent massive transformations during the nineteenth century, social changes that converged to shape big-city policing. The agrarian communities and small towns of the colonial era were socially homogeneous and close relations existed among citizens.1 These patterns persisted into the early nineteenth century, but increasingly social relationships became more impersonal with the growth of cities. Industrialization began expanding in the North, fueling urbanization and the rise of big business. New patterns of immigration and the emergence of labor unions created tensions among various ethnic groups and social classes. Political machines emerged in the rapidly growing cities of the North. These changes escalated dramatically after the Civil War, during the historical period that came to be known as the “Gilded Age.”2 Formal systems of policing emerged in large northern cities late in the antebellum period. After the war, the new system of social control rapidly diffused to large cities throughout the nation.3 But it was the social milieu and struggles of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Northeastern and Midwestern cities that shaped both the formal structure and informal culture of law enforcement. Although policing has undergone major changes since the turn of the twentieth century, in many ways the factors that shaped early police departments and practices still influence policing today.4 Indeed, the pressing concerns about policing in contemporary America, especially tensions between police and ethnic minority communities and police brutality that disproportionately targets those communities, are deeply rooted in the Gilded Age.5 Social class and ethnic group interests shaped early policing and continue to do so today.6 When significant social inequalities characterize a society, policing implicitly involves protecting social arrangements that advantage more privileged groups. Critical theories assert that coercive crime control is an instrument that expressly aims to protect the interests of powerful groups by controlling the “dangerous classes” of immigrants, racial/minorities, and the poor by whatever means necessary.7 In the northern cities of the nineteenth century, European immigrants and the working poor were seen as particularly threatening to the social order and the interests of more affluent classes.8 Groups perceived as threats to the status quo have borne the brunt of police coercive control, including violence, throughout American history.9 The core of the police role rests on the statesanctioned authority to use force, including deadly force, to protect citizens and officers from the dangerous people in their midst.10 At the same time, democratic societies circumscribe that mandate. The use of force may be deemed proper or excessive, depending on whether it is necessary and justified to realize a legitimate police duty.11 From the perspective of law, excessive physical force most clearly constitutes what is popularly termed police brutality.12 However, early policing in America was more DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-4

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Malcolm D. Holmes

aligned with subcultural norms of the occupation than with legal norms.13 The indiscriminate use of force in disadvantaged neighborhoods became a hallmark of policing in the nineteenth century, a practice that many citizens of color, as well as critical scholars, believe persists today.14 In this essay, I explore the development of big-city policing and the forces that shaped it during the nineteenth century. While the institution has been transformed in many ways over the course of the twentieth century, the organization of policing departments reflects that heritage and policing still represents the interests of the powerful, including those of officers themselves, over those of more disadvantaged populations.15 Nowhere is that more troubling than in the deployment of violence by police.

The Gilded Age Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and technological innovations were a major part of the changes that reshaped American life during the late nineteenth century. Another important element involved major shifts in the sociodemographic structure of the nation, as immigrant streams from Europe and sharp increases in economic inequality restructured northern cities. The North was the center of early industrialization in America, with factories spreading across New England and the Middle Atlantic states during the antebellum period, whereas the South and Midwest remained largely agrarian. The end of the Civil War ushered in the greatest industrial growth in the history of the country.16 Industrialization increased dramatically in the North and Midwest, as well as to a lesser degree in the South. A major change during the Gilded Age was the development of the modern corporation in certain industrial sectors, such as oil, railroads, and steel production. These massive, hierarchically organized corporate bureaucracies were at the vanguard of rapid economic growth. The growth of railroads provided a central part of the transportation infrastructure essential to the distribution of goods. Technological changes were also key.17 Advances in communications, notably the telephone, supplemented the telegraph and facilitated rapid coordination of production and transportation of goods. Other technological developments, especially the transmission of electricity and techniques of mass production in factories, facilitated the manufacture of an array of new consumer goods. Industrialization and urbanization are generally interrelated phenomena. The rapid growth of large-scale manufacturing in America went hand-in-hand with a major shift in the distribution of the population from rural to urban.18 Regional variation was evident in urbanization, reflecting the unequal pattern of industrialization across the nation. In 1860, the urban population comprised 35.7% in the Northeast, which jumped to 66.1% in 1900. In contrast, the South remained primarily rural, with 18% of the population residing in urban areas in 1900. The North Central (Midwest) and West regions fell between these two extremes. As cities expanded and new forms of transportation appeared, spatial changes reshaped urban life. In the compact cities of early America, people typically walked to their destinations and little differentiation existed in patterns of land use.19 There was considerable intermingling of different ethnic groups and social classes. The development of mass transit, such as street railway systems, and the physical expansion of cities altered this pattern, with cities becoming more segregated by ethnicity and class. The more affluent moved to developing suburban areas along mass-transit lines, while immigrant and poorer populations were increasingly concentrated in densely populated neighborhoods comprising the urban core. The arrival of new immigrants further fueled urbanization. Before the Civil War, immigrants to the United States originated almost exclusively from northwestern Europe.20 Although the bulk of immigrants arriving during the Gilded Age still originated from that region, immigration from southeastern Europe became more prevalent late in the nineteenth century. Immigrants from Europe were motivated primarily by economic considerations, with employment opportunities 26

Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs

being increasingly located in the urban, industrial sector of the economy. These jobs were disproportionately located in northern cities that were the heart of the changing economic structure of the country. Consequently, those cities saw substantially greater increases in immigrant populations. The Catholic Irish comprised the first “new” immigrant stream that challenged the hegemony of America’s largely Protestant population of western European origin. Driven by poverty and famine, they began settling in northeastern cities in the 1830s. Popularly viewed as racially inferior to nativeborn Whites, the Irish were relegated to low-paying jobs, lived in dilapidated neighborhoods, and experienced harsh social ills including crime.21 They were stereotyped as a belligerent and drunken problem population. Yet, despite increasing nativist sentiment that aimed to halt immigration and keep the Irish, along with other Catholic immigrants, from acquiring political power, the Irish came to dominate urban politics in many northern cities during the Gilded Age. Catholics from other countries also comprised significant immigrant streams during the nineteenth century.22 Germans were most numerous, with Italian and Eastern European Catholics comprising major immigrant streams later in the century. Nativist sentiment had become a prominent political issue by the beginning of the Gilded Age, with hostility intensifying as ever-larger Catholic immigrant streams arrived. Although holding rather different philosophies regarding nativist hostility and moral benevolence, the Know Nothing Party and the anti-drinking American Temperance Movement were allied with respect to curtailing the assault on the American way of life purportedly mounted by Catholic immigrants.23 These immigrants were hardly the only targets of the nativist movement. But the large number of Catholic immigrants, their settlement in the Northeastern and Midwestern cities where industrialization flourished, and their lack of skills and capital made them especially threatening to “old-stock” Americans. Many immigrants arriving during the Gilded Age were consigned to unskilled jobs in an economy increasingly based on wage labor.24 The new industrial order of America fostered overall prosperity but also greater economic inequality. While business elites benefited immensely from the new industrial order, many immigrant workers lived in abject poverty even as living standards improved among more advantaged populations. The working class suffered the harsh deprivations of work—long hours, low wages, and dangerous conditions—that characterized the industrializing economy. Class conflict became a hallmark of the Gilded Age. For example, there were nearly 10,000 strikes and lockouts during the 1880s, primarily in industrializing cities of the North. The emergence of the labor movement further exacerbated tensions between capitalists and workers. Powerful business and political interests called upon state militias, federal troops, and local police to crush strikes and repress the labor movement.

The Establishment of Big-City Police Departments Given the rapid social change and tumult that America experienced during the nineteenth century, it is unsurprising that a new form of social control emerged by mid-century and then proliferated during the Gilded Age. Early colonial communities depended on personal and familial relationships to create informal systems of social control.25 Unwritten customs and religious prescripts provided the normative framework governing behavior, and ordinary citizens shared the responsibility of monitoring and protecting others. Following English traditions, they performed law enforcement duties as constables and night watchmen, usually on a part-time basis.26 These informal means of social control began to weaken as personal ties gave way to more impersonal relationships with the growth of cities. The constabulary charged with carrying out law enforcement functions typically spent little time controlling crime and social disorder.27 Civil duties took priority because constables were often paid on fee schedules that provided more certain remuneration for inspecting taverns and serving papers. Night-watch systems dealt primarily with problems of nighttime disorder, such as 27

Malcolm D. Holmes

fires and drunkenness. Male citizens generally had a civil obligation to serve on the night watch, but poor pay and responsibilities to families and jobs motivated many to actively dodge this service. Despite the increasing prevalence of crime and disorder, and the widely shared belief that the constabulary and night-watch were ineffective at solving those problems, these loosely structured systems of informal social control endured well into the nineteenth century. The acceleration of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the early part of the century fundamentally changed the nature of life in American cities.28 Cities became more densely populated and diverse as they grew. Large influxes of immigrants resulted in increased racial and ethnic tensions as culturally and religiously diverse groups competed for scarce resources in densely populated neighborhoods. Historic animosities were transported to the United States and often erupted in urban violence. Large-scale urban disorder and riots were commonplace before the Civil War and persisted throughout the nineteenth century. The riots were motivated not only by ethnic conflicts, but also to protest matters such as elections, taxes, and economic conditions.29 The constabulary and night-watch were ill-equipped for responding to the perceived problems of urban disorder and crime.30 The night-watch of most towns was poorly organized and inadequately staffed. Constables had neither the training nor the resources to handle mob violence. The military, although better equipped to handle riots, responded slowly and risked inflaming ethnic and class tensions. Business elites and the middle-class increasingly feared for the stability of society. They especially feared the “dangerous classes” of the poor, ethnic immigrants, and Blacks. Frequent reference was made to the threat posed by this allegedly “unmanageable, volatile, and convulsively criminal class at the base of society.”31 Elites’ fear of the dangerous classes, and their concern about the social instability created by riots and civil disorder, led them to advocate for a mechanism to control those seen as threats to the stability of society. They came to believe that a formal public institution backed by the coercive power of the state provided the best option for controlling disorder and crime.32 Urban elites, middle-class citizens, and business owners stood to benefit from the creation of a bureaucratic police system in a number of ways. It could protect property and control the urban underclasses while sheltering these privileged citizens from participation in informal mechanisms of social control such as the nightwatch. Moreover, the new institution would benefit the dominant classes by redirecting the animosity of the dangerous classes to the police who ostensibly served larger societal interests. Reflecting the concerns of more affluent citizens, American police departments were first created in cities that experienced substantial immigration and social disorder. Shortly after becoming incorporated, Boston reorganized the night-watch into a police department in 1838. New York City followed in 1844, and police departments soon began appearing in other northern cities, including Cincinnati (1848), Chicago (1851), Philadelphia (1854), Baltimore (1857), and Washington, D.C. (1861).33 Virtually all early city police departments were located in northern cities. In contrast to the urbanizing North, the agrarian South relied primarily on slave patrols to control the large Black population of the region throughout the antebellum period.34 After the Civil War, police departments rapidly proliferated throughout the nation.35 Like the constabulary and night-watch, in many respects, the first police departments in the United States followed the English model. The Metropolitan Police of London was founded in 1829 by Robert Peel, relying on a quasi-military bureaucratic model that aimed to position the new police between the state and citizens. Although intending “to create a ’softer’ means of social control than the military, [Peel] had established the institution that would be at the center of social conflict for the next 150 years.”36 The Metropolitan Police provided the model for early American police departments, but there were important differences between the two systems. The Metropolitan Police relied on a highly centralized organizational framework, whereas American departments were geographically and administratively decentralized. A related difference was their mode of legitimization, with the former seeing themselves constitutionally bound by the 28

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rule of law, the latter calling upon populist democratic principles to justify officers individually administering justice on the street.37 Often the organizational structure of early American police departments deeply involved the police in local neighborhood affairs, where they could readily serve the politicians to whom they were beholden. Police chiefs were appointed to manage departments, but in reality local politicians controlled precinct appointments, which left chiefs with little practical power over officers on the beat.38 Despite being “created by and for elites,”39 the police were never monopolized by a single powerful faction; rather, they were a valuable instrument that competing interest groups fought over. Local political machines, often formed from immigrant neighborhoods, ensnared big-city police by the mid1800s. Police officers were political appointees beholden to politicians for their positions, which were awarded through a system of patronage.40 They were generally recruited from the neighborhoods in which they would work. Given the early arrival and size of the Irish population, they came to dominate urban political machines and, consequently, the ranks of northern police departments in cities such as New York and Chicago.41 In many cities power often shifted hands from one political faction to another, resulting in high turnover in police departments as newly elected politicians rewarded supporters from their neighborhoods with appointments as police officers.42 Indeed, policing was largely viewed as a temporary job rather than a career in the nineteenth century.43 Entry requirements for prospective police officers were generally minimal. New officers often had little formal education, as one only needed the right political connections or willingness to pay a fee to obtain a position. The new police officer was provided a club and badge, but little or no training. Lacking training and supervision, the police officer of the nineteenth century had considerable freedom in carrying out his duties. Early police officers spent a good deal of time avoiding their job responsibilities altogether. Nonetheless, police agencies provided numerous services directly out of precinct houses, and officers were expected to maintain at least a semblance of order on their beats. Insofar as police were neighborhood based and heavily influenced by dominant political powers, the kind of policing citizens received depended largely on the neighborhood in which they resided. The police “maintained a paternal surveillance” in ethnic neighborhoods, whereas in more affluent locales “police spared no effort or force to locate culprits of crime.”44 Given that Black populations were small in northern cities and had little political influence, their neighborhoods were largely ignored. Police were not drawn from those neighborhoods, and they paid little heed to the needs of the Black community.45 In short, police activity reflected the racial and ethnic composition of neighborhoods. Conflicts between police and citizens frequently had an ethnic or racial character, with the police sometimes representing one ethnic group over another.46 Controversy often surrounded nineteenth century policing. Rampant corruption plagued bigcity police agencies.47 The red-light or vice districts of cities were often seen as choice assignments, as they provided a steady source of pay-off money for the police. They accepted bribes from operators of illegal establishments to overlook the illegal activities of patrons who did not seriously disturb the public peace. Police served as poll watchers during elections and were expected to ignore common fraudulent activities, such as ballot-box stuffing, that benefited their political patrons. Police brutality was a particularly prominent concern of citizens and early reformers. Lack of training, minimal supervision, public hostility, and ethnic tensions compelled the police to rely heavily on personal authority to obtain compliance and respect. Indeed, the use of violence under certain circumstances became an accepted norm among police. Police officers often individually meted out justice on the street rather than relying on the courts.48 Arrest was not always feasible, as officers could not easily summon other officers to assist them or transport prisoners to jail. Rather, they freely applied the “hickory” (a moniker based on the hardwood from which nightclubs were crafted) to roughly administer justice, primarily targeting immigrants and the working-class. Citizens often complained about police “clubbing” people with nightsticks or blackjacks.

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For their part, citizens frequently challenged police authority, and officers resorted to brutality to establish control.49 Not only did the use of violence serve the instrumental ends of maintaining social order; its use also preserved the personal dignity of officers in the face of citizens’ affronts. A police clubbing often resulted from challenges to officers, with “insults, snide remarks, rowdy or drunken behavior, or a failure to obey orders [being] common provocations.”50 These behaviors generally did not involve criminal violations, but they were (and still are) seen as violations of police subcultural norms that demanded rough justice be dispensed on the street. Police became notorious for clubbing citizens during the Gilded Age. The brutality of policing was widely criticized by the working class, who saw them as handmaidens of capitalists, and by middle-class reformers, who saw them as lower-class brutes. Indeed, the term police brutality, first used in newspaper accounts of the 1860s, “implied that that police were inhumane beasts who cruelly and savagely abused citizens.”51 The police did not just employ brutality on the streets. Despite the assurances of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, police relied heavily on the “third degree” to coerce confessions and the identity of accomplices.52 Suspects were detained and tortured, both physically and psychologically, for days on end. These practices were seen as a necessary expedient and became an accepted part of police investigations. They were not as highly publicized as clubbing on the streets because victims of the practice feared retribution from their criminal accomplices and the police. Moreover, the public was less concerned with the treatment of purported criminals than the gratuitous beatings triggered by minor violations of citizens within their neighborhoods. Working-class concern about brutality stemmed not only from police action in ethnic neighborhoods, but also from the role police played in controlling riots and breaking strikes. Riots were commonplace throughout the nineteenth century. Strikes became commonplace with the rapid industrialization of the Gilded Age, visibly symbolizing the class conflicts between capitalists and workers that accompanied the increasing social inequality of the period.53 Wealthy capitalists became politically powerful, and by the 1880s they were able to garner the support of governors and federal officials to exert control over workers who sought to improve their wages and the conditions under which they labored. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw rapid growth of labor unions and thousands of massive clashes between workers and their employers. Pitched battles between strikers and were often brutally suppressed by the military and police, though occasionally local police sided with strikers. Not all efforts to control poorer populations were punitive, however. Notably, the police also engaged in efforts to alleviate the suffering of the homeless poor during hard times by providing overnight lodging, and often food, in police stations.54 Although far from luxurious or welcoming, these accommodations kept many paupers alive when there were no other resources to turn to. Ironically, despite the problems of widespread corruption and brutality during the Gilded Age, the police were more oriented to non-criminal services than they would become in the decades that followed.

Policing in the Modern Era By the turn of the twentieth century, the foundation of big-city policing as we know it today was in place. Yet, urban policing retained its corrupt and politicized quality during the early part of the century.55 In many ways the social context surrounding the institution remained little changed as the Gilded Age came to an end. The corporate greed and political corruption that were hallmarks of the late nineteenth century persisted into the 1920s. Political machines retained considerable power and corporations were able to fend off efforts to reign in their excesses. Massive streams of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe continued until World War I. Two major social changes were on the horizon by the turn of the century, however, changes that would significantly alter policing in the modern era. 30

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A particularly important transformation involved racial and ethnic relations. Beliefs about purported racial inferiority commonly become part of public discourse regarding the social disadvantages confronted by various groups. Some such beliefs dissipate relatively quickly, but others endure tenaciously. As immigration streams from Europe tapered off, these populations eventually came to be seen as less threatening as they assimilated into the dominant society. For example, stereotypes and ideologies about the “racial” inferiority of Catholic immigrants served as useful justifications for the rampant discrimination they experienced during the nineteenth century.56 Yet, by the 1950s the various Catholic immigrant groups, once often consigned to conditions of abject poverty, were largely assimilated into the mainstream of American society.57 Although vestiges of their ethnic identities and stereotypes undoubtedly still exist, beliefs about their racial inferiority and innate criminality have largely faded away. In contrast to the rapidly growing population of European immigrants, Blacks comprised a small part of the population in northern cities during the nineteenth century, but antipathy toward them was as intense in the North as in the South.58 The beginning of Jim Crow in the South was marked by the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which infamously established the “separate but equal” standard for permissible segregation.59 This ruling provided southern states with the opportunity to develop new means of exerting social control over the Black population. Public institutions and facilities were strictly segregated, and lynching emerged as a powerful tool for suppressing the threat allegedly posed by Blacks.60 The Great Migration of the twentieth century ensued as many Blacks from the largely rural southern population migrated to northern cities to escape the tribulations of the Jim Crow era. In 1900, the population of the United States was 11.6% Black, which was very unevenly distributed across regions.61 Blacks comprised less than 2% of the population in the Northeast and Midwest, whereas they made up almost one-third of the population in the South. By 1990, less than 20% of the South’s population was Black, and the Black population of the Northeast (11%) and Midwest (9.6) had nearly reached the national figure of 12.1%. Much of the population of the northern and midwestern states resided in highly segregated, impoverished urban neighborhoods.62 This demographic shift profoundly affected race relations in northern and midwestern cities, including between the police and Black citizens. Tensions emerged between Whites and the southern Backs who flooded into old ethnic neighborhoods in the early twentieth century.63 Resentment arose among the old immigrants who perceived Blacks as competitors for jobs and housing. Riots occurred as Irish residents in particular sought to drive Blacks from their neighborhoods. Given the prevalence of the Irish in big-city police departments, it is not surprising that the police sided with their countrymen. Blacks were frequently beaten and arrested by police, whereas the White instigators of the riots often went unpunished. Black citizens lacked powerful allies because of the lack of Black police officers and political officials. Blacks increasingly became the target of coercive crime control throughout the large cities of the northern tier of states. Unlike European immigrants, Blacks have never had the opportunity to fully assimilate into American society. They remain highly segregated today, many in very disadvantaged neighborhoods where they experience tensions with police and a high incidence of police brutality.64 The other major change of the early twentieth century was the advent of the Progressive Era. Calls for reform began during the late nineteenth century, when progressives sought to curtail the corrupt business and political practices of the Gilded Age, as well as restricting the entry of “undesirable” immigrants into the nation. Various forms of police brutality and corruption did not escape their attention. The police were still little oriented to legal norms; rather, they remained beholden to political interests and the demands of their informal subculture.65 Middle-class, native-born Whites became increasingly riled by corruption scandals and accounts of brutality, motivating a political movement to reform the police.66 Progressives were not the only ones interested in changing policing. Police chiefs held accountable for the failures of their agencies, 31

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even though they had little control over their precinct commanders and street-level officers, wanted a means to achieve greater control. The movement to reform city police departments evolved into a coalition of progressive outsiders and police insiders that sought, in part, to diminish the power of immigrant political machines by wresting away their control of policing. In 1931, The National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (The Wickersham Commission) harshly condemned the use of police brutality in a widely publicized report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.67 That report helped foster the movement to improve policing. Reforming police departments centered on narrowing organizational focus, increasing centralization and control, and improving personnel.68 The police began to focus more on enforcing laws and controlling crime, and less on maintaining order and providing service. Provision of services previously provided by police increasingly came under the purview of emerging social service agencies. The decentralized structure of early police departments gave way to more centralized organization, giving greater control to the police chief while wresting away the power of local neighborhood commanders and their political sponsors. Changes in the recruitment, selection, and training aimed to remake the police officer as a professional. Civil service reforms, such as hiring/promotion examinations and enhanced entry requirements, ended patronage appointments and weeded out unqualified applicants. New training programs instilled police recruits with a legalistic orientation and prepared them to perform their jobs. Greater supervision and accountability procedures sought to ensure that officers carried out their duties properly while avoiding the enticements of corruption. In addition to these reforms, technological innovations (e.g., patrol cars, two-way radios) significantly altered street-level policing, and police departments adopted new business practices to ensure organizational efficiency.69 The professional police of the modern era had fully emerged by the late 1950s, with a new emphasis on crime fighting. Despite the profound changes in policing that came about by the movement toward professionalism, events of the 1960s again triggered public concern and scrutiny of the police.70 Widespread civil unrest, including civil rights protests and urban riots, brought the police into direct conflict with Black citizens. Newspaper accounts and television news reported police officers beating civil rights marchers and setting dogs on them. In an exhaustive investigation of the urban unrest that swept through American cities during the late 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, identified numerous contributing factors to these immensely destructive riots.71 The Commission concluded that longstanding socioeconomic disadvantages and general perceptions of unequal justice among Blacks, combined with precipitating acts of police violence, provided the catalysts for the outbreak of urban race riots. The reforms of previous decades clearly had not eradicated the enduring and destructive problems of “racialized” urban policing. After the riots of the 1960s, scholars became increasingly interested in whether a different standard existed for police use of violence in Black communities, given that police killings of citizens often precipitated the civil unrest.72 Several early studies demonstrated that Black citizens were disproportionately killed by police, but their higher death rates were correlated with higher rates of violence and resistance among Blacks.73 That research generally concluded that the disparity was attributable to the objective threats posed by Blacks rather than to racial bias among the predominantly White police officers of that era. That conclusion seems at odds with the welldocumented existence of police racism and permissive standards regarding the use of deadly force in place at the time. Indeed, these studies could not explain the substantial differences in rates of police killings across cities by variations in levels of community violence.74 A new reform movement aiming to ameliorate police–minority tensions took hold after the 1960s. This round of reforms originated from the recommendations of the Kerner Commission and focused on breaking down the insularity of the police and making them more accountable to the communities they serve.75 Popular proposals included increasing racial/ethnic diversity in police agencies, developing community policing programs, and establishing civilian review procedures for 32

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complaints against police officers. Moreover, police discretion that may have contributed to disproportionate use of deadly force against Black citizens was reined in by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v. Garner.76 That case involved the shooting of an unarmed Black juvenile as he was fleeing the police. The Court ruled that police use of deadly force is a permissible means of apprehending a fleeing, apparently unarmed felony suspect only when it is necessary to prevent the escape and probable cause exists to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of serious physical harm to the officer or others. Given this more restrictive standard, it seemed likely that racially biased police killings would become less common. Although there was a substantial reduction in the overall incidence of police killings of citizens after the Court’s decision,77 research using post-Garner data indicates that racial bias in policing killings persists today.78 Although the Supreme Court curbed the use of deadly force in the Garner decision, a subsequent ruling assured that police officers retained considerable discretion in the use of force. In Graham v. Connor, the Court held that the standard for the legal use of force is whether, given the facts and circumstances confronting them, officers’ actions are “objectively reasonable.”79 The determination of objective reasonableness inevitably involves some subjectivity, and cases of police-caused homicide of Black citizens may be ruled justifiable even when they clearly involve questionable circumstances.80 Typically, police use of force is socially constructed by police administrators and the courts in ways that favor the police and disadvantage citizens, as it has been since the inception of big-city policing. While police agencies have increasingly implemented new policies aimed at improving relations with citizens and reducing police violence in minority communities, high-profile incidents of police brutality involving Black citizens continue to occur. Since the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, there has been a litany of highly publicized cases of police brutality, including the vicious sodomization of Abner Louima in a New York City precinct station, the shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago by an officer who emptied his gun into him, and the horrific death of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. While each of these cases resulted in successful prosecution of the offending officer(s), far more commonly the police are able to avoid being held legally accountable for their actions. While the officers involved in these events often escape consequences, communities do not. Police killings of minority citizens intensify racial/ethnic tensions, undermine police legitimacy, deplete government resources to pay civil damages, and sometimes trigger civil unrest.81 An unintended byproduct of the century of reform was further solidification of the police subculture that represents officers’ unique interests.82 Whether appointed through patronage or civil service, the principal concern of the police has always been the challenges they face in their day-to-day work on the streets. Although the new police professional no longer panders to local politicians, the problems of policing the “dangerous classes” remain essentially unchanged since the Gilded Age. Much of the street-level behavior of police today continues to revolve around maintaining authority and identifying potential threats.83 The movement toward professionalism did little to ameliorate the perceived problems of policing the “dangerous classes.” Moreover, increasing militarization of the police in recent years appears to be linked to the presence of threatening populations and a higher incidence of lethal encounters between police and citizens.84

Concluding Thoughts Despite the major reforms of big-city policing during the nineteenth century, patterns of street-level policing seen during the Gilded Age appear to remain entrenched even today. Yet, our historical understanding of police brutality in America is hampered by a lack of reliable data, particularly from the early years, and conclusions must be infused with caution. Good contemporary data are also scarce. Increasingly, however, systematic empirical research indicates that Black, and most likely Hispanic, 33

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citizens are disproportionately subjected to police brutality.85 Many of them reside in segregated urban neighborhoods characterized by unyielding social and economic disadvantages, as well as high crime rates.86 Policing these disadvantaged neighborhoods poses many challenges, and the coercive strategies employed by police continue to provoke tensions with citizens.87 While the use of police brutality may be less overt now than it was in the Gilded Age, it unquestionably continues to have deleterious effects on citizens of color. Police brutality inflicts significant costs not only on individual victims, but also the collective consciousness of communities of color.88 Efforts to address the problem of police brutality through departmental policies have been immensely popular among scholars and practitioners.89 Organizational changes of the past half century have sought to improve police personnel, change the structure of departments, break down the subculture of policing, and exert greater oversight over officers on patrol. Yet, the available evidence indicates these policies have been largely ineffective in reducing police brutality against minority citizens. Even racially diversifying police departments seem to have little impact on its incidence in communities of color.90 Why is that? The answer, in part, is that organizational changes in police departments cannot ameliorate the larger social and economic deprivations experienced in many minority neighborhoods. Notably, the report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing mentioned those problems in just a couple of sentences while providing a long list of policy recommendations for improving police–citizen relations through organizational reform.91 Although police brutality poses a significant social problem in its own right, it is symptomatic of a much larger pattern of racial and ethnic inequality in American society. Critical policing scholars remind us that those in power, irrespective of the groups or interests involved, are capable of mobilizing coercive control over those who are less advantaged. Throughout its history, policing has always been influenced by the political interests of powerful segments of society.92 For example, police strength in cities is determined by political decisions of local governments, decisions that elites can heavily influence. But irrespective of their status, citizens have never exerted much control over street-level policing. Officers’ unique concerns about averting danger and maintaining authority largely shape their day-to-day actions. They perceive the difficult conditions of the many severely disadvantaged minority neighborhoods in America’s large cities as especially threatening, hence residents of these areas may experience more brutality at the hands of the police. Members of the dominant group often overlook or seek to justify these actions, which they may see as justifiable and necessary to protect society from its dangerous citizens. So long as severe economic inequality characterizes communities of color, it seems unlikely that police will forgo employing coercive strategies of control that serve their interests.

Notes 1 Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History Of American Criminal Justice, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press 1998). 2 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (New York: Penguin, 1873/ 2001). The popular moniker originated from this satirical account of the serious social problems in America during the period of roughly 1870–1900. 3 Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 4 Mark H. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890–1925,” Law & Society Review 10 (1975): 303; and Walker, Popular Justice. 5 Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 6 Malcolm D. Holmes and Brad W. Smith. Race and Police Brutality: Roots of an Urban Dilemma (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). 7 William J. Chambliss, Power, Politics and Crime (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); and Austin T. Turk, Criminality and Legal Order (New York: Rand McNally, 1969).

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Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs 8 Allan Silver, “The Demand For Order In Civil Society: A Review Of Some Themes In The History Of Urban Crime, Police, And Riot.” In The Police: Six Sociological Essays, ed. David J. Bordua (New York: Wiley, 1967). 9 David Jacobs and Robert M. O’Brien, “The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (No. 4 1998): 837; and Johnson, Street Justice. 10 Egon Bittner, The Functions Of The Police In Modern Society: A Review Of Background Factors, Current Practices, And Possible Role Models, Public Health Service Publication No. 2059 (Washington: USGPO, 1970). 11 Richard R.E. Kania and Wade C. Mackey, “Police Violence As A Function Of Community Characteristics,” Criminology 15 (No. 1 1977): 27. 12 H.G. Locke, “The Color Of Law And The Issue Of Color: Race And The Abuse Of Police Power,” in eds. W.A. Geller and H. Toch, Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 13 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior.” 14 Johnson, Street Justice; and Ronald Weitzer, “Theorizing Racial Discord Over Policing Before And After Ferguson,” Justice Quarterly 34 (No. 7 2017): 1129. 15 Holmes and Smith, Race and Police Brutality. 16 Glenn Porter, “Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business,” in ed. C. W. Calhoun, The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 17 W. Bernard Carlson, “Technology and America as a Consumer Society, 1870–1900,” in ed. C. W. Calhoun, The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 18 Robert G. Barrows, “Urbanizing America,” in ed. C. W. Calhoun, The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 19 Ibid. 20 Roger Daniels “The Immigrant Experience in the Gilded Age,” in ed. C. W. Calhoun, The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 21 Ibid.; and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2012). 22 Daniels, “The Immigrant Experience in the Gilded Age.” 23 Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and Holmes and Smith, Race and Police Brutality. 24 Eric Arnesen, “American Workers And The Labor Movement In The Late Nineteenth Century,” in ed. C. W. Calhoun, The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 25 Walker, Popular Justice. 26 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920. 27 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Walker, Popular Justice. 28 Walker, Popular Justice. 29 Eric H. Monkkonen, Crime, Justice, History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002); and Walker, Popular Justice. 30 Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920. 31 Silver, “The Demand for Order in Civil Society,” 3. 32 Harlan Hahn and Judson L. Jeffries, Urban America and Its Police: From The Postcolonial Era Through The Turbulent 1960s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); and Silver, “The Demand for Order in Civil Society.” 33 Hahn and Jeffries, Urban America and its Police; and Monkknonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920. 34 Robert F. Wintersmith, Police and the Black Community (New York: Lexington Books, 1974). 35 Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920. 36 Ibid., 39. 37 Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920; and Craig D. Uchida, “The Development Of The American Police: An Historical Overview,” in ed. R. G. Dunham, Critical Issues in Policing, 6th edition (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2001). 38 Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). 39 Richard J. Lundman, Police and Policing: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 31. 40 Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977). 41 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Johnson, Street Justice. 42 Monkkonen, Crime, Justice, History. 43 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Walker, Popular Justice. 44 Hahn and Jeffries, Urban America and its Police, 8.

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Malcolm D. Holmes 45 Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, The Evolving Strategy of Police: A Minority View, No. 13, US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, 1990. 46 Walker, Popular Justice; and Johnson, Street Justice. 47 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Johnson, Street Justice. 48 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920; and Johnson, Street Justice. 49 Walker, Popular Justice. 50 Johnson, Street Justice, 19. See also Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior.” 51 Johnson, Street Justice, 37. 52 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Johnson, Street Justice. 53 Arnesen, “American Workers and the Labor Movement in the Late Nineteenth Century.” 54 Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920. 55 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920; and Johnson, Street Justice. 56 Although race was conceived of as involving meaningful biological categorizations, today the scientific consensus is that race is socially constructed. See Holmes and Smith, Race and Police Brutality, 68–70. 57 Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 58 Leon F. Litwack, “The Abolitionist Dilemma: The Antislavery Movement and the Northern Negro,” New England Quarterly (1961): 50. 59 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 60 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012). 61 Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics On Population Totals By Race, 1790 To 1990, And By Hispanic Origin, 1790 To 1990, For The United States, Regions, Divisions, And States (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2002). 62 Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 63 See, for example, Johnson, Street Justice. 64 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Rod K. Brunson and Jody Miller, “Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States,” British Journal of Criminology 46 (No. 4 2006): 613; and Brad W. Smith and Malcolm D. Holmes, “Police Use Of Excessive Force In Minority Communities: A Test Of The Minority Threat, Place, And Community Accountability Hypotheses,” Social Problems 61 (No. 1 2014): 83. 65 Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior”; and Johnson, Street Justice. 66 Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform. 67 Walker, Popular Justice. 68 Fogelson, Big-City Police. 69 Walker, Popular Justice; and Uchida, “The Development of the American Police.” 70 Uchida, “The Development of the American Police.” 71 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). 72 Ibid. 73 For a review, see James J. Fyfe, “Police Use of Deadly Force: Research and Reform,” Justice Quarterly 5 (No. 2 1988): 165. 74 Ibid. 75 Holmes and Smith, Police Brutality. 76 Tennessee v. Garner 471 U.S. 1 (1985). 77 Abraham N. Tennenbaum, “The Influence Of The Garner Decision On Police Use Of Deadly Force,” Journal Criminal Law & Criminology 85 (1994): 241. 78 Justin Nix, Bradley A. Campbell, Edward H. Byers, and Geoffrey P. Alpert, “A Bird’s Eye View Of Civilians Killed By Police In 2015: Further Evidence Of Implicit Bias,” Criminology & Public Policy 16 (No. 1 2017): 309; Cody T. Ross, “A Multi-level Bayesian Analysis Of Racial Bias In Police Shootings At The County-level in the United States, 2011–2014,” PloS One 10 (No. 11 2015): e0141854; and Brad W. Smith, “The Impact Of Police Officer Diversity On Police‐caused Homicides,” Policy Studies Journal 31 (No. 2 2003): 147; and Brad W. Smith, “Structural and Organizational Predictors of Homicide by Police,” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management (2004): 539. 79 Graham v. Connor 490 U.S. 386 (1989).

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Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs 80 Malcolm D. Holmes, Matthew A. Painter, and Brad W. Smith, “Race, Place, and Police-Caused Homicide in US Municipalities,” Justice Quarterly 36 (No. 5 2019): 751. 81 Malcolm D. Holmes, “Police Brutality,” in ed. J. Trevino, The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 82 Uchida, “The Development of the American Police.” 83 John P. Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2004); and J.H. Skolnick, Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, 4th edition (New Orleans: Quid Pro Books, 2013). 84 Edward Lawson, Jr., “Trends: Police Militarization And The Use Of Lethal Force,” Political Research Quarterly 72 (No. 1 2019): 177; David M. Ramey and Trent Steidley, “Policing Through Subsidized Firepower: An Assessment Of Rational Choice And Minority Threat Explanations Of Police Participation in the 1033 Program,” Criminology 56 (No. 4 2018): 812. 85 See, for example, Malcolm D. Holmes, “Minority Threat And Police Brutality: Determinants Of Civil Rights Criminal Complaints In Us Municipalities,” Criminology 38 (No. 2 2000): 343; and Smith and Holmes, “Police Use of Excessive Force in Minority Communities.” Although these studies suggest that Hispanics, a rapidly growing population that is perceived as threatening, experience a higher incidence of police brutality, there is much less evidence about that population compared with Blacks. 86 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; and Ruth D. Peterson and Lauren J. Krivo, Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime And The Racial-spatial Divide (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). 87 Brunson and Miller, “Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States”; and Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: NYU Press, 2011). 88 Malcolm D. Holmes and Brad W. Smith. “Intergroup Dynamics Of Extra-legal Police Aggression: An Integrated Theory Of Race And Place,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 17 (No. 4 2012): 344. 89 Holmes and Smith, Police Brutality. 90 See, for example, Holmes, Painter, and Smith, “Race, place, and Police-caused Homicide In Us Municipalities”; Brad W. Smith and Malcolm D. Holmes, “Community Accountability, Minority Threat, and Police Brutality: An Examination of Civil Rights Criminal Complaints,” Criminology 41 (No. 4 2003): 1035; and Smith and Holmes, “Police Use of Excessive Force in Minority Communities.” 91 President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (2015). 92 Holmes and Smith, Police Brutality.

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3 MOB BRUTALITY IN ROBERT CHARLES’S NEW ORLEANS Adam Malka

The trouble began when three officers of the New Orleans police department (NOPD), all white, accosted two Black men sitting on a stoop on Dryades Street. It was 11 pm on July 23, 1900. Several minutes earlier, Sergeant Jules Aucoin, the night commander of the Sixth Precinct, had been alerted by concerned neighbors that the two men were violating racial protocol by sitting on a white family’s steps, an offense in that time and place akin to blaspheme. Aucoin was soon joined by patrolman August Mora and his rookie partner, Supernumerary Joseph Cantrelle. The Black men were named Leonard Pierce, aged 19, and Robert Charles, aged 35.1 Neither Pierce nor Charles heard the officers’ approach before Aucoin was in front of them, demanding they explain why they were there, in that neighborhood, on that night. Charles replied that he lived in the house and that they were just waiting for a friend. Aucoin knew who inhabited the home and reacted with rage. Grabbing Pierce, he pressed his revolver to the younger man’s head, threatening to kill him if he moved, while Mora grabbed at Charles and tried to beat him over the head with his club. Cantrelle then made a mistake that inflamed the situation and set into motion events that would roil the city for days. A part-time officer only a few months on the job, Cantrelle fired his gun, a warning shot into the air. Charles, locked in a struggle with a policeman, was in no position to distinguish between a harmless shot into the air and a mortal threat to his person. He drew his own gun, Mora drew his, and a shootout erupted, venting percussive sound into the night. At some point Charles shot Mora in the hip. At another point Mora shot Charles in the leg. Whatever the sequence of events, whoever shot first and at whom, Charles escaped, wounded leg and all, leaving a slow-footed Cantrelle, a writhing Mora, and a shocked Aucoin behind. Two white men who arrived on the scene to investigate the sound of gunfire discovered Aucoin still standing there, still holding Pierce, still pressing a gun to Pierce’s head several minutes after Charles had gotten away.2 The first casualties were counted a few hours later on Fourth Street, where Charles and Pierce shared a room. A group of Sixth Precinct officers led by Capt. John Day arrived at the Black men’s boardinghouse at 3 am. Four of them—Day, Aucoin, Corporal Ernest Trenchard, and patrolman Peter Lamb—entered an alley off the street with six doors, that each led to a separately-inhabited apartment. One of these belonged to Charles. The officers had learned of the residence from Pierce, whom they had interrogated for several hours, and they hoped to catch the fugitive at home. Charles was at home. He had returned to bandage his gunshot wound before heading to other quarters, but now, with the police closing in, he pivoted. Charles seized his rifle and waited, quietly, by the front door, which he cracked open to provide a view of the alleyway that led beyond. 38

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-5

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And when the four silhouettes appeared in his sights, he fired. One bullet hit Day in the chest; another ripped through Lamb’s head. This was enough to persuade the other two officers, Aucoin and Trenchard, to stand down. A woman who lived in one of the other apartments off the alley offered them a hiding spot, and they rushed inside, eager to avoid their colleagues’ fates. This decision allowed Robert Charles to slip away a second time.3 No policeman or concerned citizen would locate Charles for several days, but there would be more violence in the meantime. Between July 24 and July 27, white mobs took to the streets in search of Black New Orleanians to harass, assault, and kill. Tuesday was relatively uneventful, particularly since much of the city’s Black population stayed indoors and out of sight, concerned about the potential of a white backlash. By nightfall on Wednesday, July 25, though, as the manhunt for Charles stalled, crowds began to assemble at the foot of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Lee Circle (where else?) reciting the incantation of so many mobs before them: “Catch any nigger anywhere you can find him.”4 That night white rioters committed four separate murders, all of them of Black men, and injured countless others. Large mobs inflicted some of the damage and earned much of the media attention, but smaller parties brutalized far more Black residents than the authorities could track. Over the course of the evening, nobody was arrested. Nobody was even detained.5 Thursday brought news that Mayor Paul Capdevielle had issued a call for volunteers to form a “citizen police” to support the official police, maintain calm, and protect New Orleanians of all races from the roaming mobs. Capdevielle’s intention was to deputize white men from the “best” families of the city—these private citizens were to represent the business community in a time of damaged credit, stalled commerce, and unruly masses. Residents from some of the city’s most respectable quarters responded with enthusiasm. By the evening of July 26, Capdevielle boasted of two dozen new squads of citizen policemen walking the streets, a mob of civilians armed and authorized by the city to protect against other mobs of white men. And yet: more Black victims fell to the fury of the mobs over the next 24 hours. On Rousseau Street, in the Mabry family home, white men arrived after dark and fired dozens of shots through the cottage’s windows. One of the bullets found Hanna Mabry, 52 years old, piercing her lung while she slept. She died a few hours later.6 Everything came to a head on Friday, July 27. That afternoon four NOPD officers arrived at 1208 Saratoga Street, a house occupied by Silas and Martha Jackson, a Mississippi-born Black couple who had moved to the city during the 1890s and made Charles’s acquaintance. It had been three days since Day and Lamb’s deaths. Desperate now, city officials hoped to turn something up by responding to all tips, however unlikely they were to bear fruit, and these officers were doing due diligence in response to an anonymous phone call that suggested Charles was hiding at the Jackson home. Two policemen stood guard out front while the other two walked down a small alley that led to the apartment. Inside, they found nothing; the policemen thought it was another lead to nowhere. But then, as the officers headed back to the street, one of them made a slight detour for a water bucket standing in the corner of the alley near a free-standing pantry. And it was there, in the pantry, that Charles sat. The thirsty officer had no idea what awaited him before Charles, materializing as if out of nowhere, fired his rifle four times, in quick succession. Both policemen fell. Charles quickly retreated to the second floor of the building, rifle in hand, as people flocked to the scene believing he had finally surfaced. With awareness of Charles’s presence at 1208 Saratoga Street spreading, white gunmen took to neighboring rooftops and fired in his apparent direction without discretion. Hundreds of armed men, and thousands of civilians, surrounded the property in which Robert Charles huddled, on the second floor, peering into the alley and onto the street beyond.7 The ordeal ended that evening after municipal leaders set fire to the building, sending flames into the walls to flush Charles out of hiding. The plan worked; Charles descended the stairs and sprinted through the alleyway to the back door of the main house when he could tolerate the heat no longer. We will never know his plan, or whether even he had a plan, but a gunshot felled him before he 39

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reached the main door. He died immediately, and the surrounding masses erupted. Bystanders punched, stomped, and shot through Robert Charles’s body, then dragged it to the street, where others took their turn doing the same. Later, as evening gave way to night, white New Orleanians looted Black homes on Saratoga Street, killed two more innocent victims, and burned down the city’s premiere African American grade school. None of that stopped the mayor from declaring peace restored and advising the good citizens of New Orleans to move freely, go to work, and resume their lives once more. Robert Charles was dead. As far as the authorities were concerned, citizen policemen had done their jobs well.8 § The history of police brutality is also a history of mob violence. Not unlike the conceptual line separating members of the police force from the angry crowds on New Orleans’s summer streets, the legal demarcation between legitimate force and vigilante justice often collapsed when the people being policed were Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. What Robert Charles’s last days revealed were the symbiotic ties between professional and popular policing. By the time armed civilians were jockeying with policemen for a better vantage point to kill Charles, the white mob had engulfed the largely white police force, rendering the border between them imperceptible. Uniforms no longer mattered. Badges had become irrelevant. In 1900 New Orleans, as in many other cities and communities in the segregating United States, ordinary white men who committed acts of racial brutality did so as official policemen. Black southerners’ coiled relationship with both police and mobs helps explain the destruction, cruelty, and death that befell New Orleans after Sergeant Jules Aucoin’s approached Robert Charles on that stoop. Uniformed officers and ordinary citizens worked together to uphold the racial order across the Jim Crow South, and during the violence of 1900, both played important roles. I want to parse how Black southerners like Charles interacted with each group. Only then might we appreciate the popular history of police aggression. Only then, indeed, can we begin to understand how whiteness was foundational to Jim Crow-era policing, and the ways police brutality was little more than the actions of a mob. This account starts with Black people and the police. According to Silas Jackson, one of the occupants of 1208 Saratoga Street, Charles “used to say that he never would be arrested, because he said that there was no justice for a nigger.”9 A telling statement, if true: Charles viewed the criminal legal system in adversarial terms. Many of his Black contemporaries did too. When, for instance, Ida B. Wells-Barnet reported on the week’s carnage a few months later, she laid blame not on Charles, but the police. The initial confrontation began, she wrote, with an “inexcusable and unprovoked assault upon two colored men by police officers.” All the harm, and all the deaths, owed to the original sin of racist police aggression.10 If Black hostility towards the police institution was common in the turn-of-the-century South, so was Black dread. A person of color accosted by a policeman knew enough to expect trouble, and had good reason to fear pain. That was because police officers harassed Black citizens in even the most mundane scenarios. A Black woman in 1880s New Orleans, Emma Robinson, was devastated to learn that her father had drowned, and the despair led her to chase the charity wagon heading to the lake where his body had turned up. She wanted to see him, to say goodbye. Two policemen thought the scene unseemly, though, and arrested her for disturbing the peace; they also arrested three women trying to calm her down for good measure. “She was locked up, and remained in the cell until long after 10 o’clock, as a punishment for giving utterance to her grief at the loss of her father in the presence of a policeman,” wrote a reporter.11 Harassment could and regularly did turn into assault. To take one example, the policeman who noticed Eliza Williams sitting in her own doorway began rhetorically, demanding to know what she was doing there. She replied that it was 40

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her own home. That reply was too presumptuous for his liking, and he punched Williams in the face, kicked her, and tore some of her clothes off while threatening to kill her.12 Police assaults like the one Williams endured in 1886 were legion in the post-Reconstruction South. It was not unusual for a Black person to turn up at an arraignment with “marks of violence on his person,” the result of “an unprovoked assault and battery on the part of … policemen.”13 An officer responding to a disturbance at a Black home was as liable to attack everyone involved, including the aggrieved party, as intervene and de-escalate the situation.14 Black people arrested for nebulous peace crimes like “disorderly conduct” were especially vulnerable to violence. To brace oneself against the entrance to a jail cell, refusing to be locked up for the night because alcohol consumption was no crime, was to invite the “persuasion” of multiple officers’ clubs.15 Black southerners risked harm even when they turned to law enforcement for help. Having reported a robbery at a gambling house, one Black New Orleanian in 1887 bore a beating for his trouble. The responding officer chased him down the street, as if he was the suspect in the crime he had reported.16 These stories hint at still-worse offenses committed by policemen: the fatal violence that underwrote each interaction between a person of color and an officer of the law. Think about Corporal Murphy of the NOPD, who killed James Weiss with a bullet behind the right ear. Murphy had tried to arrest, and then killed, Weiss for the crime of following him as he dragged another man to the precinct house.17 Ponder, too, South Carolina State Constable Eison, who killed a Black man in Columbia, Jim Long, after Long had stolen a valise and attempted to run away. Eison later claimed the shooting was an accident. He had been trying to use his weapon to knock Long down, and his gun had gone off in the process.18 Finally, consider the two police officers in Montgomery, Alabama, who shot a Black man in the back while he was jumping through a bedroom window. The policemen had burst in on him sleeping because he had allegedly stolen five dollars, and terrified, he had tried to flee. He died for five dollars.19 In most cases these killers—the police officers—were exonerated. Murphy was back on the beat eight months later, while the coroner’s jury endorsed Eison’s story of an accident, leading to his immediate release from custody.20 Clemency followed the familiar dictum that Black criminality was to blame for police brutality, not the officer who wielded a club or fired a gun. “An attempt by the police to quell a disturbance among a crowd of disorderly negroes in the western part of the city this afternoon resulted in a riot, during which a negro was killed,” read the lede of one story. Through passive sentence construction, the reporter absolved the shooter—in this case, a patrolman in Savannah, Georgia—and assigned agency to the “disorderly negroes” who provoked the riot during which that patrolman riddled a Black man’s body with seven bullets.21 Another outcome of the same rationale might be the victim of police assault getting arrested and arraigned for “disturbing the peace,” never mind his “severe scalp wounds, from which the blood flowed copiously.”22 The presumption of Black criminality provided so iron-clad a foundation for police violence that southern politicians endorsed it—they celebrated it—in the name of law and order. Governor Allen Candler charged the “colored man as responsible for ninety per cent. of the crimes committed” in Georgia. As Candler saw it, white men clothed in public authority brutalized Black bodies so as to secure justice, not pervert it.23 Local factors peculiar to New Orleans also shaped Charles’s altercation with the NOPD. Policemen during the 1890s had begun to arrest far more people than in previous decades, and by 1900 they were arresting Black New Orleanians at almost double the rate of white New Orleanians.24 To make matters worse, a recent crime panic exacerbated tensions between Black men and the police. White residents in the Morris Park neighborhood worried endlessly about Black burglars, a neighborhood only a few blocks from where Charles and Pierce rested on that Dryades Street stoop.25 This was also the era of the “third degree,” the torturous methods police interrogators used to extort confessions from criminal suspects. According to a 1930 report delivered to the American Bar Association by the Committee on Lawless Enforcement of the Law, prisoners in police custody were often subjected to beatings with whips, rubber hoses, clubs, and fists; electric 41

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shocks; freezing cells with no light or furnishings; and the sweat box, “a small cell completely dark and arranged to be heated until the prisoner, unable to endure the temperature, will promise to answer as desire.”26 Charles may have even noticed that many of those arrested and tortured by police were working for the New Orleans city government free of charge. Due to budget cuts, the men and women lodged in the police jail were forced to toil during the day in place of the paid municipal employees who typically performed such work. In the sixth and second precincts that covered Charles’s different neighborhoods during the 1890s, three quarters of those jailed were Black. Anyone could see them, working without wages in full view.27 All of this is to say that Black people like Robert Charles confronted a deeply antagonistic police system, and that they knew it. It is therefore unsurprising that African Americans both in his time and through the years have interpreted Charles’s bloody actions as understandable and in sympathetic terms. Most immediately, his Black neighbors endorsed his behavior by granting him sanctuary as mobs roamed the streets and the authorities fanned out to find him. The trail ran cold on a bleeding suspect who had recently been shot because Black New Orleanians froze out the police.28 Black intellectuals and political leaders beyond New Orleans, including the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, took it a step further by depicting Charles as a law-abiding man who “raised his hand to resent unprovoked assault and unlawful arrest that fateful Monday night.” To many Black witnesses, Charles’s deeds seemed reasonable. To a few of them, he emerged as “the hero of New Orleans.”29 Charles’s story likewise loomed large in Black memories well after his death. New Orleans jazz musicians kept his name alive by lauding his skill and precision with a gun. Danny Barker called him “quite a marksman with the rifle,” exclaiming that “There’s a helluva story behind that day when he was shooting policemen!” “Every time he raised his rifle and got a policeman in the sights,” Jelly Roll Morton added, “there’d be another one dead.”30 We will never have a full accounting of Robert Charles’s motives during the week of July 24, 1900. The man left no record of his thoughts between the moment he ran on Dryades Street to the moment he fell on Saratoga Street. But context matters more than motive. However Charles understood the shootings, his confrontation with the NOPD bore the weight of an already-vicious history of antipathy between Black southerners and the police. When in turn-of-the-century New Orleans an officer approached two Black men sitting on a darkened stoop, it was to escalate. § Police violence is one of two historical frames to understand the events surrounding the New Orleans Riot of 1900. Vigilante violence is the other. For three days, crowds of angry citizens attacked Black New Orleanians with impunity, inflicting life-threatening injuries upon dozens of Black people who had merely committed the offense of walking the streets, riding the streetcars, working at their jobs, or sleeping in their beds—and in the process killed close to a dozen of them. At different points during the week white vigilantes stormed the parish prison, where Leonard Pierce was being held; attacked Black nightclubs, where the crowds of potential victims were biggest; and shot wildly through the windows of Hannah Mabry’s home, where she slept through the last minutes of her life. Thousands of witnesses, including hundreds of policemen and city officials, observed these actions without lifting a finger. This outbreak of mob violence after Charles shot Day and Lamb drew on an extended history of white men’s racialized policing. The post-emancipation South, and for that matter the slave South before it, depended upon ordinary white men to assist police when it came to Black suspects. This had been the case since police departments first formed in the middle of the nineteenth century, some 50 years earlier. Cities were the sites of the nation’s first police forces, and in cities with both slave codes and large free Black populations, white men policed the Black population alongside uniformed 42

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officers—surveilling, arresting, and punishing under the aegis of the law. When it came to policing Black people during the age of slavery, ordinary white men functioned as a part of the state.31 Popular white policing endured during the 1860s and 1870s, and in the post-Reconstruction South, it thrived anew. The city of New Orleans had certainly witnessed its fair share of citizenaided arrests of Black people. In 1885, Virginia Johnson almost escaped police custody for disturbing the peace before “some citizens interfered in the interests of the law.”32 In 1892, James Taylor resisted arrest after a policeman attempted to detain him for vague reasons. Only after “several citizens came up and, with their assistance, the officers closed in on him,” did a policeman and civilian jointly “overpower” him.33 Sometimes pedestrians took the law into their hands without waiting for an officer to arrive. In 1892, Lewis Francis attacked several passersby on the corner of Willow and Julia streets. “Two citizens named John O’Leary and Hugh Hannon, residing in the neighborhood, undertook to arrest the negro,” reported a newspaperman.34 Similar stories peppered the dailies of neighboring locales during the 1890s. In Brunswick, Georgia, the combined efforts of citizens and policemen managed to quell “a bloody shooting scrape” on a just-arrived train after a Black man opened fire on a policeman. “The whole city becoming alarmed by the shots turned out to reinforce the officers,” reported a local newspaper, “and on every side men with Winchesters, pistols, and clubs were seen hurrying to the rescue.” Blending race pride with racial prejudice, the correspondent congratulated the vigilant citizenry on a job well done: “the presence of armed men cowed the darkies, and the field was soon partially deserted.”35 In Columbia, South Carolina, another case concerned a police chief who needed “the intervention of his friends” to save him from the indignity of losing a female suspect in front of a crowd of angry Black onlookers. He feared for his life until “the only white men about” came to his rescue.36 White citizens who assisted police or played the part of policeman were a regular occurrence in the era of Robert Charles, both before him and for the years to come, especially when dealing with Black suspects. “Citizens Land the Murderer in Prison with Difficulty,” read the headline of a story about Jackson, Mississippi. It did not need to specify that the “citizens” in question were white or that the “murderer” in question was Black.37 This history helps explain the mobs as well. For just as the boundary between legal justice and police brutality blurred when uniformed officers pursued Black people, so too did the difference between police assistance and mob law dissolve for ordinary white men who pursued Black people. Arthur Williams learned as much while under arrest for an unknown charge in 1896 in Gouldsboro, Louisiana. “Approached by Officer Knotts, of the Gretna police force, who placed him under arrest,” Williams was still standing with his captor “when a man in shirt sleeves and wearing a mask, came up … The unknown man in shirt sleeves thereupon fired at him and the bullet lodged in his hip. He fell, and the man, advancing with the weapon, fired again while he was prostrate and that ball entered his left breast.” All the while, the officer in charge did nothing, nor did two others who “were present when the shooting took place.” They preferred to let the mystery be.38 More common were the packs of white men who inflicted summary punishment upon Black workers with whom they competed for jobs, such as those that ran rampant on the New Orleans wharves in October 1894 and March 1895. Mobs killed a number of Black people during the outbursts, a handful of whom worked elsewhere in the city, not even in the maritime trades.39 As for police protection, “there has been none furnished so far,” reported the Picayune. “The police in every case arrived on the scene after the negroes had been attacked and stampeded.”40 In one instance, the officers assigned to protect Black screwmen sat in a shed while throngs of whites wreaked vengeance.41 Policemen ignored popular racial violence in no small part because white vigilantes were inclined to avenge them. A Black man accused of killing a white policeman was as likely to be lynched as was a Black man accused of raping a white woman. Sometimes lynch mobs captured the suspected murderer immediately following the murder, before law enforcement officials could make the arrest.42 More frequently white men invaded the jail in an attempt to abduct the suspected killer 43

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after he was already locked up.43 Nor did a Black man need to have killed a policeman to invite a lynching; simply shooting an officer was enough to earn it. Jim Tayloy, a Black man in 1891 Knoxville, Tennessee, died for the crime of shooting Policeman Charles Cook. Cook’s survival did not prevent “a well organized mob” from attacking the jail, seizing the prisoner, and executing him as he hung from the crossbeam of a covered bridge. Policemen sanctioned this violence for much the same reason they committed acts of brutality: the mob that executed a Black cop killer was disciplined and lawful by definition. The Knoxville men who lynched Tayloy “hung him in an orderly manner, under recognized leaders.” By the logic of the era, some white mobs were no mobs at all; they were well-regulated bodies of respectable men. Only the Black victim, in these cases, was “peculiarly atrocious.”44 Policemen in the early-Jim Crow South depended upon crowds of white men to do their bidding, from capturing Black suspects to quelling Black riots to assaulting, shooting, and executing Black killers of other officers. No surprise, then, that in 1900 New Orleans, after Robert Charles murdered two policemen and escaped into the cracks of the city, white citizens materialized to help the police find him. According to the historian Andrew Baker, the initial search for Charles on July 25 was a joint concern. “Civilians armed with clubs, axes, and guns began to arrive in numbers, swearing vengeance,” writes Baker. “Many had been summoned by patrolmen, who were canvassing the neighborhood and enlisting white men to join the search.”45 And when these motley crews did not find Charles quickly, their constituencies—both the uniformed and non-uniformed alike—grew restless, more agitated, more violent. The mobs began to hunt Black people in general, not just Charles, while the policemen began to arrest Black pedestrians for disturbing the peace, not the individuals terrorizing them for being Black. “They claim the police was trying to stop the mob,” recalled the jazz clarinetist “Big Eye” Louis Nelson Delisle, the son of one of the mob’s victims. “But fact was, the police were worse than the others.”46 To the establishment, the only problem with Black carnage was reputational. As white men terrorized Black victims and policemen turned their heads, certain elite members of the business and political communities began to worry that the violence was giving New Orleans a bad name with northern creditors. Their discomfort with overly zealous white mobs had precedent as well. White community leaders across the South regularly performed opposition to lynch mobs, whether by calling them “an outrage” and “crime against the law,” or by criticizing policemen for allowing their prisoners to be taken, or by demanding “all good citizens to use every effort to find out and bring to justice the perpetrators” of lynchings.47 Still, we must not confuse these denunciations of a given mob’s crimes with a rejection of mobs in toto. The men who prattled about upholding “the constituted authorities” and helping protect “every person” believed that one the best ways to do both was with the community’s collective fists, feet, and guns. “Late Sunday night the citizens were aroused by a volley of shot, followed by scores of stray shots in rapid succession,” reported the Augusta Chronicle in 1890. The marshal had ascertained that the jail, which held a Black man accused of killing a police officer, was under attack by a white mob, and he hastily summoned “help among the neighbors … to the rescue of the jail. The marshal’s party fired upon the masked men, who beat a hasty retreat.”48 Likewise in Dallas, Texas, where following the murder of a policeman by a Black man, the authorities incarcerated the accused killer. This action provoked a mob of 3,000 to arrive at the jail’s doorstep, demanding summary punishment. Even so, a local correspondent assured readers that the situation remained under control: “Citizens are flocking to the rescue of the officers.”49 An analogous story played out in 1900 New Orleans. White vigilantism was so central to the police system that elites’ fear of financial fallout led them to summon their own vigilantes. Mayor Paul Capdevielle called into service a thousand private citizens whom he quickly deputized as police officers. These “citizen policemen,” as they were called, blurred the lines between racist rioter and good citizen despite booster efforts to differentiate the two groups along class lines. Such distinctions relied upon a fiction that collapsed into absurdity on the ground. City residents phoned into the 44

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mayor’s office throughout Wednesday and Thursday to complain about the mobs of armed white men marching through their neighborhoods hunting Black people. The mayor’s assistant, Arthur McQuirk, had to explain to each exasperated caller that these armed crowds were not the mobs of their imaginations—no, these white men were protecting against the mob. In any event, nobody could tell the difference; each group looked the same and carried similar weaponry. The standoff on Saratoga Street finally demonstrated just how farcical was this dichotomy between “citizen police” and “lynch mob.” Once Charles’s presence was made known, special police captains handed out weapons to anyone who showed up, no credentials required. Wealthy and working-class men mingled indiscriminately upon rooftops and street corners as they competed to gain position for the kill shot. And in the aftermath of the shootout, the crowd of thousands reacted to Charles’s death with fury and sadism, desecrating his body beyond recognition. “In its ritualistic assault on the corpse,” observes historian K. Stephen Prince, “the crowd bore more than a passing resemblance to a lynch mob.”50 § The years that followed the killing of Robert Charles brought little change to the policing system. As before, white policemen and citizens worked together to surveil, control, and punish Black people across the Jim Crow South. Civil authorities deemed this union necessary because Blackness, in their eyes, constituted a perpetual state of criminal emergency requiring an almost unlimited degree of “legitimate” violence. So long as the pursuer was white and the pursued was Black, a uniform, badge, or salary was redundant. Blackness demanded white policing, and the result was a democratization of racial violence.51 Conventional forms of police brutality persisted. Policemen kept brutalizing Black arrestees, whom they presented to judges in varying states of horror. One Black man appeared in 1908 before the First City Criminal Court in New Orleans with a “deep wound in the back of his head, in which the blood had congealed, and it was impossible to pull the headgear away. His ear was split and his head was a mass of bruises and cuts.” The 80-year-old had been on his way to work when two officers accosted him “with clubs and billies until he fell senseless to the ground.”52 Policemen also kept torturing Black suspects in the hope of drawing confessions out of them, a task which many relished. “You ought to have seen that negro jump when the juice hit him,” bragged one Birmingham policeman in 1910 after he extricated an admission of guilt with a jolt of electricity.53 And, yes, policemen kept executing Black people in the “discharge” of their duties, no matter the offense. Assault, reckless driving, public drunkenness: any or all could precipitate an altercation that left a Black person dead and an officer claiming self-defense.54 In New Orleans, fatal police shootings rose to unprecedented levels during the first decades of the twentieth century. Black men represented less than 15% of the city’s population yet constituted nearly 70% of the fatalities of police shootings, and most of the victims were unarmed and charged with peace violations. By 1930, Black New Orleanians made up the overwhelming majority of victims in police shootings despite their minority status.55 Assisting policemen in this deadly work were the ordinary white men whose support made the entire system possible. “A Bold Negro Operator Jailed by Citizens,” read one headline.56 “Citizens Get a Negro Who Robbed a Grocery Store,” read another.57 Reporters regaled their readers with stories of citizens who halted Black robbers in the act, who gathered around Black men resisting arrest, who chased fleeing Black suspects, and who raided Black homes, hangouts, and gambling dens.58 Those white men also demonstrated their virtue by facilitating police assaults of Black people. “Police Officer Powell had to use his club freely on a negro yesterday,” explained a correspondent from Georgia, but when the officer’s liberality provoked a protest by Black onlookers “some white men passing in a wagon, leaped from it and went to the officer’s assistance.”59 A vigilante’s helpful hand could even wield a murder weapon. Emile Hamilton allegedly shot at a 45

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planter’s son on a plantation near Torras, Louisiana, and was chased by a posse in the aftermath. When two white men caught up to him at a bridge near his home, they “ordered Hamilton to throw up his hands and submit to arrest.” He refused, and they shot him dead. In the eyes of the authorities, the killing of Emile Hamilton was good police work performed by rightful enforcers of the criminal code. The two killers had “determined to capture [Hamilton] and turn him over to the officers of the law. His refusal to surrender resulted in his death.”60 Robert Charles died at the hands of another vigilante authorized to kill him. Hunted by white men both in and out of uniform, he fell when a private citizen acting the part of policeman gunned him down. The circumstances of his death laid bare the two forms of brutality that plagued Black life in the Jim Crow South: that which was committed by the police, and that which was committed by the citizenry. Regardless of the different stories we tell about this violence, regardless of the rhetorical distinctions we make between legitimate force and mob justice, they were one and the same in 1900 New Orleans. Members of the white mob were no less capable of enacting racial power than were policemen dressed, armed, and paid by the state. The converse was equally true. White vigilantes could become policemen who brutalized Black bodies because policemen were racial vigilantes who formed lynch mobs, a harsh reality acknowledged by Black observers who scornfully likened the police to “an organized mob” ready at a moment’s notice “to do their bloody work up on helpless women and innocent victims at the Devil’s bidding at any time.”61 Then again, nobody ever did determine who killed Robert Charles. A curious appendix to the New Orleans Riot of 1900 was a dispute over the identity of the gunman who had fired the fatal shot. Multiple white men claimed they had done it, and the mayor’s office wanted to settle the question if only to close the case. Two candidates emerged as the most likely culprit: Charles Noiret, a citizen-made-policeman for a day, and Adolph Anderson, a member of the state militia.62 In October, for three exhausting nights, Mayor Capdevielle held a trial during which the claimants recounted their exploits, called their witnesses, and contradicted each other repeatedly. Nobody could say for certain what had happened on Saratoga Street, but the arbitrators were forced to choose someone, and they finally landed on Noiret as their man. He had been the first to report Charles’s death on July 27, having been discovered with the body. He was also a medical student, an aspiring professional, the most respectable choice. In the years to come, Noiret would lead a successful career as a drug manufacturer while Anderson, the volunteer militiaman, would become a policeman, rising through the ranks until being named captain in 1921.63 The difference between Noiret and Anderson’s chosen careers would have been irrelevant to someone like Robert Charles. Whichever white man killed him that day, whether it was both, one, or neither of them, he had become a Black man decried by the white community as a “desperado.”64 That moniker transformed all white men—whether medical students or militiamen, citizen policemen or salaried professionals—into officers of the law and members of a lynch mob at the same time. So while the hearings failed to demonstrate Charles’s killer to everyone’s satisfaction, they did prove one thing conclusively: each claimant had been ready, able, and eager to kill a Black man on the authority of the state. It had been that way for years, since the inception of police forces during the previous century. It would remain that way for many years to come.

Notes 1 For an earlier history of the New Orleans Riot of 1900, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); for more recent analyses, see K. Stephen Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); and Andrew Baker, To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America (New York: The New Press, 2021). 2 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 114–118.

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Mob Brutality in Charles’s New Orleans 3 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 122–128; and Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 16–17. 4 “The March of the Mob,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 26 July 1900, 1. 5 “Negroes Hunted All Night By Mobs Made Up Of Boys,” Daily Picayune, 26 July 1900, 1, 7; Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 18–22, 89–105; and Baker, To Poison a Nation, 155–169. 6 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 170–197; and Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 117–129. 7 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 198–213. 8 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 213–227. For attempts to rewrite the events of the week as a victory for the forces of law and order, see Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 130–140. 9 “With the Prisoners,” Daily Picayune, 29 July 1900, 2. Also quoted in Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 82. 10 Ida B. Wells-Barnet, “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” in On Lynching (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002), 155. 11 “Police Brutality: A Negro Man Drowned, and his Daughter Arrested and Locked Up for Expressing her Grief on the Occasion,” Daily Picayune, 22 May 1884, 2. 12 “Police Brutality: Grave Statement Against Two First Precinct Policeman,” Daily Picayune, 17 March 1886, 8. 13 “Police Practice on Negro Heads,” Daily Picayune, 7 July 1881, 2. 14 “A Police Officer Arrested for Beating a Negro Woman,” Daily Picayune, 3 December 1884, 2. 15 “Was Fined $45,” Augusta Chronicle, 30 July 1901, 5. 16 “Negro Gambling Den” Daily Picayune, 25 November 1887, 6. 17 “Bad on the Police,” Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), 8 March 1880, 1. 18 “Escaping Police Jim Long is Killed,” The State (Columbia, SC), 6 June 1905, 1. 19 “Police Kill Negro,” Montgomery Advertiser, 28 November 1907, 2. 20 “A Police Raid on a Negro Ball Room, Where Gambling was Carried On,” Daily Picayune, 14 November 1880, 11; and “Escaping Police Jim Long is Killed,” The State, 6 June 1905, 1. 21 “A Riot at Savannah. A Mob of Disorderly Negroes Attack the Police,” Columbus Enquirer-Sun, 30 November 1888, 1. 22 “Police Practice on Negro Heads,” Daily Picayune, 7 July 1881, 2. 23 “An Anti-Negro City,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia, PA), 9 November 1899. 24 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 112. 25 Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 50–1; and Baker, To Poison a Nation, 112. 26 The National Commission On Law Observance and Enforcement, “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement,” No. 11 (Washington, D.C.: Govt. Printing Office, June 25, 1931). 27 Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 82–6. 28 Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 112–117. 29 Wells-Barnet, “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” 197. Also quoted in Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 155–156; and Baker, To Poison a Nation, 131. 30 Both quoted in Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 184. 31 Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 89–186. Also see Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 32 “Mishaps and Misdeeds,” Daily Picayune, 27 March 1885, 8. 33 “A Crazy Negro Pursued and Arrested by Police and Citizens,” Daily Picayune, 14 October 1892, 3. 34 “A Crazy Negro,” Daily Picayune, 17 June 1892, 3. 35 “Negro Riot at Brunswick,” Macon Telegraph, 24 June 1890, 1. 36 “An Exciting Negro Riot,” The State, 15 May 1892, 8. 37 “Jackson Policeman Killed,” Times Picayune, 2 February 1902, 16. 38 “A Gretna Negro Mysteriously Shot,” Daily Picayune, 7 September 1896, 1. 39 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 30–37. 40 Mob Law on the Waterfront,” Daily Picayune, 12 March 1895, 4. 41 “Murder on the Wharves, Daily Picayune, 13 March 1895, 1–2. 42 “Captain Marshall Foully Murdered,” The State, 8 February 1898, 1; and “Negro Saved from a Mob,” Daily Picayune, 29 December 1907, 23. 43 “Lynching Threatened,” Knoxville Journal, 19 July 1895, 1; “Shot Police Chief,” Biloxi Daily, 25 February 1908, 4; and Negro Lynched,” Daily Picayune, 6 April 1909, 7. For what it’s worth, these revenge killings also occurred outside the south. See “The Mob Shot Them,” Augusta Chronicle, 13 March 1890, 1. 44 “A Negro Lynched,” Knoxville Journal, 1 May 1891, 1. 45 Baker, To Poison a Nation, 139–140.

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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Quoted in Baker, To Poison a Nation, 169. Alexandria Mass Meeting Denounces Negro Lynching,” Times-Picayune, 11 May 1904, 8. “Stormed the Jail,” Augusta Chronicle, 18 November 1890, 1. “An Infuriated Mob after a Negro Murderer - Great Excitement,” Columbus Enquirer-Sun, 26 May 1892, 1. Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 117–129. Quote on 127. Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Whiteness of Police,” American Quarterly 66 (December 2014): 1091–1099; and Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Police Clubbers Beat Up an Old Negro in Frightful Manner,” Times-Picayune, 24 January 1908, 15. “Birmingham Detective is on Trial for Perjury,” Montgomery Advertiser, 1 November 1910, 9. For broader discussions of the topic, see Jeffrey S. Adler, Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 20–24; Silvan Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955, trans. Paul Cohen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). For other examples, see “Third Degree Cures Stubborn Witness,” Montgomery Advertiser, 27 June 1909, 7; “Third Degree for Suspected Negroes,” Fort Worth StarTelegram, 14 July 1909, 2; and “Maddox is to Talk to Cops on ‘Third Degree’,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 11 March 1910, 7. “Columbia Police Kill Two Negroes,” Augusta Chronicle, 30 August 1909, 8. Baker, To Poison a Nation, 267–269; and Adler, Murder in New Orleans, 116–119. “Stealing Sugar,” Times-Picayune, 27 January 1905, 5. “A Burglar Chase,” Daily Picayune, 24 January 1913, 2. See, for example, “The Latest News in All Louisiana,” Daily Picayune, 30 May 1907, 16; “Virginia Police Kill a Desperate Negro,” Montgomery Advertiser, 20 December 1908, 17; “Stole Mail Box,” Daily Picayune, 26 May 1912, 29; and “White Man Robbed; Negro Raid Follows,” Times-Picayune, 2 August 1915, 7. “Tried to Rescue Negro Prisoner,” Augusta Chronicle, 13 October 1903, 2. “Negro Desperado Shot to Death by a Posse of Angry Citizens,” Times Picayune, 30 March 1906, 1. For “organized mob,” see “Arkansas to Georgia,” Christian Recorder, 3 September 1885; for “bloody work,” see “A Darker Picture,” The Christian Recorder, 9 November 1899. John Banville, a civilian bystander who had been shot during the chaos on Saratoga Street, also claimed to have killed Charles, but his story was neither consistent nor well-supported. For Anderson’s promotion, see “Many Policemen to be Promoted,” Times-Picayune, 27 April 1921, 4. For the dispute over the shooter’s identity, see Prince, The Ballad of Robert Charles, 158–160, 172–173. Many of the newspaper accounts of the event referred to Charles as a “desperado,” which was a common moniker in White discourse for a Black man perceived to be criminal. Ida B. Wells-Barnett disputed the term in “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” 187–192.

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4 URBAN POLICING AND RACE RIOTS IN THE ERA OF WORLD WAR I AND THE RED SUMMER Adam J. Hodges

The historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s 2010 book, The Condemnation of Blackness, has dramatically improved our understanding of the evolution of a national discourse indelibly connecting criminality and Blackness in the Progressive Era following the 1890 census, which included prison data and measured that Blacks were 12% of the US population, though 30% of its prisoners. “From this moment forward,” Muhammad argued, “notions about blacks as criminals materialized in national debates about the fundamental racial and cultural differences between African Americans and native-born whites and European immigrants.” He asserted that the idea of an inherent criminality unique to Blackness became a major justification “for white Americans of every ideological stripe” to engage in not just prejudice and discrimination, but also “racial violence as an instrument of public safety.”1 Progressive reformers cast “white criminals sympathetically as victims of industrialization,” as opposed to “self-destructive and pathological blacks,” with violent consequences. “Trans-ethnic gangs of white men—backed by consenting police officers—drew on these ideas as they attacked black pedestrians and homeowners in an increasingly violent and enduring contest over racialized space in the urban North.”2 This intellectual departure has great import for our comprehension of the evolution of urban policing in the years approaching World War I. Legal scholar Sidney L. Harring, in an influential 1983 book, employed a Marxist perspective to focus on the modern development of policing as a form of social control of the working class in industrializing cities in the North.3 Muhammad, however, lamented that “much historical and sociological scholarship” gives “the impression that the history of racial criminalization began and ended in the Jim Crow South” until the 1960s. Instead of separating a supposedly modernizing North and pre-modern South in the Progressive Era, Muhammad persuasively argued that scholars should grapple with the reality that pervasive fears connecting Blackness and criminality were central to the modern national development of policing and the justice system in this period.4 Two major coinciding phenomena help explain how this racist conviction became particularly explosive during the 1917–21 period: World War I and the Great Migration. The nation’s first truly national, coast-to-coast war mobilization effort conscripted and trained a military millions strong and then built the weapons and transport to send enough soldiers to France in a matter of months following the spring 1917 declaration of war to fight the largest offensive on foreign soil in US history in the summer and fall of 1918. This unprecedented and successful effort was achieved through a rapid and thorough militarization of the nation’s economy and political culture.5 In an environment of hyper-patriotism criminalizing dissent and idealizing commitment to the collective DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-6

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war effort, the power of both federal and local policing grew dramatically to enforce the order that the mobilization required and that some, across social class, had long desired to impose on a rapidly transforming nation they felt was escaping their mold and grip. Vigilantism was not just condoned, but often organized and even officially encouraged, becoming an important appendage of the policing capacity of the state and of localities.6 The Russian Revolution in late 1917 electrified radicals worldwide, already long a source of popular panic in industrial nations, and compounded fear and conflict in the US during an unprecedented strike wave, which crested, alongside nationwide official and vigilante repression of left-wing speech and organizing, during the Red Scare of 1919.7 Just at this moment, an unprecedented Black exodus outward from the Southeast to cities nearer its borders or beyond occurred, and this Great Migration would eventually transform the racial demographics of the nation. As the twentieth century began, over 90% of Blacks in the US lived in the South and mainly in rural areas. By 1970, historian Ira Berlin has recounted, “a near majority of black Americans resided in the North and West, almost entirely in cities.” Six million Blacks had left the South during those decades, with the first large wave occurring during the industrial boom of the World War I era. “By 1930, more than 1.3 million [Blacks] resided outside the South, more than triple the number at the turn of the century.”8 Fear and conflict tracked and awaited these hopeful migrants. Federal investigators, blinded by racism to the autonomous growth of Black activism, were convinced that white radicals were instigating Black revolt and relentlessly targeted Black organizations.9 As the US committed to full war mobilization in early 1917, mounting fears of the police and vigilantes pushed the growing Black communities of the migration to arm in determined selfdefense; the stage was set for tragic conflict.

Policing the Black Communities of the Great Migration The assertion of Black citizenship coinciding with the Great Migration out of the South and toward community building in locales on the region’s border or beyond seemingly holding greater potential for autonomy, prosperity, and safety was met with police intimidation and violence throughout the era and in disparate places. While the backlash peaked in the summer of 1919, there is a clear continuity in the nation’s cities stretching before and after that shocking season. A strand drawn from rioting in East St. Louis and Houston in 1917, to Washington and Chicago in 1919, to Tulsa in 1921, demonstrates continuity of struggle, even if the most extreme violence was sometimes sporadic, though there were certainly other major events and smaller-scale episodes were continuous and widespread.10 The urban links in this strand also elucidate the centrality of urban policing in both directly escalating conflict and, crucially, doing so indirectly by enabling, even legitimating, racist vigilantism while actively working to disarm Blacks. The industrial town of East St. Louis, across the Mississippi River by bridge from St. Louis, was comparatively small, but rapidly growing. Racial violence there in early July 1917 emerged in shocking scale over several days and prompted a Congressional investigation in the city recording extensive testimony.11 “When the terror ended,” historian Charles L. Lumpkins wrote, “white attackers had destroyed property worth three million dollars, razed several black neighborhoods, injured hundreds, and forced at least seven thousand black townspeople to seek refuge … . By the official count, nine white men and thirty-nine black men, women, and children lost their lives.”12 Historian Malcolm McLaughlin found that “many deaths, it was said, were not recorded officially and some bodies had been thrown into the Mississippi River and been swept away, south. Countless African Americans were left injured, many grievously so, and thousands effectively became refugees.”13 W.E.B. Du Bois, the editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, went to East St. Louis to investigate the horror himself, along with colleague Martha Gruening, who would soon be going to Houston as well. “A mob of white men, women and children,” they reported, “deliberately [m] urdered, by shooting, burning and hanging, between one and two hundred human beings who were 50

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black.”14 Lumpkins recounted that “others said that … many more—perhaps up to five hundred—black citizens had perished.” The NAACP investigators and many who followed, including historians, looked to white working-class fear and anger over the supposed threat to their economic security represented by the Black newcomers of the Great Migration. Employers did eagerly recruit Black strikebreakers and sent the message to white workers that they could be replaced during and after conflicts if they were foolhardy enough to raise a challenge.15 The Crisis investigation reproduced an open letter from Secretary Edward Mason of the Central Trades and Labor Union (CTLU) of East St. Louis written to all members on May 23. It began: “The immigration of the Southern Negro into our city for the past eight months has reached the point where drastic action must be taken if we intend to work and live peaceably in this community.” Mason complained that ten thousand “undesirable negroes” had recently arrived and “these men are being used to the detriment of our white citizens by some of the capitalists.” The letter announced a rally of the city’s union membership to “call upon the Mayor and City Council” at City Hall to demand a halt to Black migration and force those in charge to “devise a way to get rid of a certain portion of those who are already here.”16 The meeting escalated into violence and irrevocably linked organized labor to the later massacre in July. The prominent anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells visited East St. Louis after the massacre to investigate and record testimony. She wrote that white workers “had made up their minds to drive out colored laborers” and “Negro laborers made up their minds to sell their lives as dearly as possible, and to hold their ground in an effort to make a living for themselves and their families.”17 Lumpkins, however, has blamed the CTLU leadership more than its rank and file and, in perhaps the most original analytical approach to the origins of the massacre, has disagreed with scholars who “attribute the clashes” of this era “mainly to interracial competition for jobs and housing.” While the sources have influenced “leading scholars to assign the causes of the racial tumult to white reactions to job-seeking black southern laborers,” it led him to focus on “the increasingly assertive black drive for independence from white political machines.”18 He has argued that the CTLU leadership fanned racism in a bid to unify the white working-class majority under its leadership, which it was having difficulty asserting in an era of independent strike militancy, and had no interest in interracial solidarity, ignoring “the fact that black workers often cooperated in work actions and strikes with white workers, occasionally acted as strike leaders, and usually refused to break strikes,” and also that “far more white than black laborers had arrived in East St. Louis in search of jobs.”19 While CTLU leaders worked to link Black migrants to both crime against whites and theft of opportunity from them, Mayor Fred Mollman was seemingly paralyzed; he did not want to anger labor or alienate Black voters, which might enable the further rise of Black businessman Leroy Bundy, “who sought to institutionalize an independent black political machine.”20 When the May 28 meeting spiraled out of control and became a platform for demagogues outside the CTLU who hoped to inspire vigilantism, it was a critical moment of failure for policing in East St. Louis and foreshadowed greater violence to come. Rather than defuse the situation, “two white city police detectives spread the word that patrolmen had just arrested a black man for shooting a white man” and the crowd outside City Hall grew to about 1,200 as police brought the suspect into the jail. CTLU leaders, though they had entirely lost control of the event, shielded the jail entrance to prevent the crowd from lynching the suspect and tried to order union members to go home. The mayor begged the mob to disperse while some in the crowd accused him “of having bought the black vote” and demanded his hanging. Some in the crowd began assaulting Blacks in the area and the mayor requested that the governor send the guard to restore order. Lumpkins argued that the attackers “operated with the acquiescence or passive support of the police” as they expanded the area of their assault and that “the forty white policemen on the East St. Louis police force, though they prevented black people from being killed, were generally sympathetic to the white throngs and provided opportunities for them to attack African Americans,” who 51

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they had for some time been disarming in a sustained campaign. Over 70 Black men were jailed during the riot for having guns, “conveying the impression that black townspeople were out to kill white people.” Police arrested six men in a car, owned by Leroy Bundy, coming into town from St. Louis with firearms and bullets, further feeding rumors that he was building a Black fighting force.21 McLaughlin has also noted that, during the early July massacre to come, “unfounded rumors emerged that an arsenal, ready for use in a black uprising, was hidden at the home of” Bundy.22 The National Guard stopped white rioters at points of access to Black neighborhoods and arrested Blacks with weapons. In the end, though 75 Blacks and three whites were injured, nobody died and Lumpkins estimated that “6,000 African Americans fled to St. Louis.”23 The partially successful ethnic cleansing of East St. Louis seems to have encouraged further white assaults, and also fears of Black revenge. Police checkpoints stopped Blacks entering the city from St. Louis to search their cars for guns. When local Black leaders protested this ongoing, systematic confiscation of guns to Mayor Mollman, he ordered them returned, but there is no record of the police doing so and Lumpkins found that “black townspeople redoubled their efforts to obtain weapons.”24 Meanwhile, “white assailants had no fear of being arrested, let alone convicted, because police officers, bondsmen, and politicians protected them.” Late on July 1, vigilantes, including at least one current and one former police officer, drove through Black neighborhoods shooting into homes. The police received a call after midnight warning that armed Blacks were mustering in front of a church and the chief sent two detectives and two patrolmen to investigate, along with a driver and a reporter. Their vehicle’s path was blocked by a crowd of 150 armed Black men who were searching for the white men who had assaulted two Black women. A confrontation escalated and the armed Black men fired on the car, killing one detective and wounding the other and the two patrolmen. The car retreated to a hospital, where the second detective died of wounds. The “blood soaked, bullet-riddled” auto was left parked in front of police headquarters and drew those who “vowed to retaliate” and, Lumpkins asserted, “provocateurs counted on little if any official interference,” because, “unlike the situation on May 28 and 29, agitators this time had the police on their side.” The chief of police had sent his men home late that night, giving vigilantes free reign. National Guard troops arrived in the morning, though some were out of uniform and there were reports of soldiers providing rifles to white vigilantes.25 McLaughlin found that “individual Guardsmen … actually assisted the rioters and were seen firing at Blacks.”26 Lumpkins added that “some militiamen looted and then torched black dwellings and businesses and shot at fleeing black occupants, sometimes forcing them back into the burning structures.” By the afternoon, with encouragement from troops, the police, and local officials, mobs had begun to murder and destroy on a mass scale and with impunity. “The state’s attorney for St. Clair County … watched as attackers beat and killed black people” and “even released eighty-nine jailed assailants before police had a chance to book them.” The mayor’s secretary “ordered police and guardsmen to arrest anyone photographing the beatings or killings or destroy their cameras.” In the end, “the perpetrators became officially anonymous because police either failed to record the names of arrestees or later destroyed arrest records.”27 McLaughlin noted that although some guardsmen did arrest some rioters, the police did not create any record and then placed them in a ground floor room with windows for easy escape and return to the fray. Further, “just as the police had encouraged the outbreak of violence in the morning, by the afternoon, they were believed to be encouraging the killing, helping to establish murder as a ‘norm’ within the riot.”28 On July 3, military order was gradually asserted in East St. Louis, but even then, Lumpkins found, “a few agitators, vengeful policemen, and rogue guardsmen continued their attacks.” Even a determined attempt to disarm Black residents did not prevent a self-defense effort that may have saved many lives and “some African Americans across the nation drew lessons about the value of armed self-defense in holding down death tolls during mass assaults on black people, especially when government at all levels failed to protect them.”29 Lumpkins’ political focus helps us to understand 52

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the breakdown of institutions, though his insistence upon the word pogrom, of seeing the massacre as ethnic cleansing born of racial hatred, must surmount discussion of competition over urban power and resources as an explanation for the savagery of the violence, during which the mob normalized the murder of children and the mutilation of corpses. The horrors of East St. Louis, and determined Black resistance, would set the stage for the Red Summer of 1919 and, before that national conflagration, for the mutiny of Black soldiers in Houston that soon followed.

Urban Police and Black Soldiers During World War I The late August 1917 mutiny and rioting of some Black members of the 24th Infantry, stationed in Houston to guard the construction of Camp Logan, was the largest and most consequential event of its kind in the US during World War I and it was directly escalated by policing. The origins of this extraordinary event elucidate broader conflicts over policing and racial hierarchy during a moment that seemed to hold the potential for a reordering to both those who pushed toward and against it. Historian Christopher Capozzola recounted just a moment of the service of Sergeant Noble Sissle, one of the 367,000 Black men who served in the segregated US military during World War I, to devastatingly demonstrate the humiliating, and potentially dangerous, dilemmas these soldiers in uniform navigated daily, particularly in the South. When Sergeant Sissle entered “a crowded hotel lobby” in South Carolina, “he knew that the rules of white supremacy required him to doff his hat in the presence of a white man; he knew, too, that military regulations forbade him from ever removing Uncle Sam’s cap.” He simply left, and received a kick from a white man on the way out. Soldiers, both Black and white, defended him that day, but his 15th New York Infantry was quickly shipped to France, “lest race war consume Spartanburg.”30 Though the outlook for positive change often appeared bleak, the hope for a transformative outcome won over the editorial stance of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. The June 1918 issue was dedicated to “men of Negro descent” in the US military, and also the “dark men of India and Africa” in the British forces. “Never again will darker people of the world occupy just the place they have before.” In addition to “a self-governing India” and “an Africa for the Africans,” “out of this war will rise, too, an American Negro, with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult.”31 Ardent defenders of Jim Crow saw this vision and a dramatic increase of Black men armed and in uniform as a potentially apocalyptic turning point requiring even further repression just as Black aspirations were increasing, raising the likelihood of both the escalation of widespread racist violence and determined resistance to it. Senator James K.Vardaman of Mississippi, on the floor of the US Senate, warned of “the final disaster, the … downfall and death of our civilization.”32 Most African American units were assigned service roles in a conscious effort to have the public see their contributions as secondary to those of white combat heroes. Capozzola noted that “conscripted African-American troops serving in labor battalions throughout the South were not issued uniforms at all.”33 It is in this context that the behavior of two white policeman on Houston’s nearly all white force, in a city that was a quarter Black, sparked a one night rebellion by uniformed Black troops. Soldiers killed 17 whites and wounded 11, and then faced mass court martials.34 The August 23 tragedy began with two white policemen dragging a semi-clothed Sara Travers out of her house after she made a comment they didn’t like while searching her home without a warrant or permission for someone they were chasing, a common practice in the Black community of Houston’s fourth ward. After being slapped, refused the opportunity to dress, and having one of her children thrown to the ground, Travers was marched outside with her arms pinned behind her back to await a police wagon. Historian Adriane Lentz-Smith has brought the origins of the Houston mutiny into a compelling new light with a dynamic analysis of both a defense of Black manhood and womanhood, and a racial contest over public and private space. Now that the Black 53

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soldiers of the 24th Infantry were in town, and often came to the fourth ward, who was in charge?35 Martha Gruening of the NAACP conducted an investigation of the causes of the Houston riot for The Crisis, having just recently reported from East St. Louis, and sought out the full story from Mrs. Travers and also “eyewitnesses whose names are in the possession of the Association, but are withheld for their protection.” Mrs. Travers recounted that Officer Sparks said to her: “You all God damn nigger bitches. Since these God damn sons of bitches of nigger soldiers come here, you are trying to take the town.”36 Lentz-Smith emphasized the threat Travers represented in the wartime context: “By commenting on the police officers’ behavior first in the streets in front of her house and then by questioning Sparks’s right to search her house, Travers revealed herself to be a ‘biggety’ woman, a troublemaker.” A crowd in the street grew to about 20 and looked to the lead of a Black soldier, Private Alonzo Edwards, who was larger than Sparks. Outnumbered and in a Black neighborhood, the officer quickly decided on a show of force and beat the soldier repeatedly with his pistol. Just as he had yelled at Mrs. Travers, “Don’t you ask an officer what he want in your house,” Sparks was asserting that white police had total control with impunity over the space and bodies of the fourth ward; a military uniform could not change the prewar configuration of racial power. Edwards had asked the policemen to allow Mrs. Travers the opportunity to dress properly and was knocked to the ground for his attempt to rescue her dignity and assert that of the fourth ward community.37 The situation escalated further after Mrs. Travers and Private Edwards left in a police wagon and a Black military police (MP) soldier of the 24th arrived and was similarly pistol whipped by the two officers after approaching them for an explanation. Lentz-Smith asserted that “although the MPs went unarmed in deference to white Houstonians’ concerns … , their mere existence provoked white officers such as Sparks and Daniels.” Corporal Charles Baltimore fled under police gunfire, hid in a house, and was found and arrested. His testimony of the incident, and that of Officer Sparks, was later recorded in military reports. Sparks said of Baltimore, after the soldier was bleeding badly, that “he didn’t seem like the same nigger he was when he first came up to me.” Baltimore said of Sparks that “he said he would kill me … and I pleaded with him not to kill me.” Lentz-Smith has found the core of this episode of humiliation and violence for us in the sources: “Thinking back on the encounter, Officer Sparks would later tell a municipal board of inquiry that he did not mind black military policemen, ‘as long as they would stay in their place.’”38 This incident was not the first time that Black soldiers had been beaten by police during the four weeks that the 24th had been in town. There had been an ongoing contest of freedom and authority unfolding in the surroundings of the camp in west Houston. Friction escalated over the soldiers’ alleged challenges on the city’s segregated public transit, whether bars and dance halls should be permitted in the area, and women having access to camp grounds where the police did not have jurisdiction.39 Martha Gruening’s investigation for the NAACP clearly stated her disapproval of the soldiers’ camp behavior. Along with not arming Black MPs, she believed it was one of two “contributing causes” of the riot: “lax discipline at Camp Logan which permitted promiscuous visiting at the camp and made drinking and immorality possible among the soldiers.” However, she argued, “the primary cause of the Houston riot was the habitual brutality of the white police officers of Houston in their treatment of colored people.” Gruening found that local Blacks believed that the most fundamental problem was Black MPs not having guns and being forced “to call on white police officers to make arrests” in areas beyond camp where the soldiers socialized. “The feeling is strong among the colored people of Houston that this was the real cause of the riot.”40 There was a long history of tension surrounding attacks on, and expulsion of, Black troops in Texas towns before 1917. Black units had long served at the border and historian Garna L. Christian, who has deeply researched the experience of Black soldiers in Texas during the preceding two decades up through the Houston mutiny, found that “tensions always lay near the surface.”41 Historian C. Calvin Smith has asserted that “of all the places where black soldiers served, the 54

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documented record of ‘ill treatment’ and lack of respect was greatest in Texas.”42 In 1906, in the border town of Brownsville, a nighttime raid of likely less than twenty people “firing several hundred shots indiscriminately or into lighted areas … ended within ten minutes.” The local population was convinced that the Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry stationed there were to blame, despite scant evidence. The raid had followed a pistol whipping incident in which a customs officer had attacked a Black soldier for a supposed slight to his wife and another white woman on a sidewalk, and a host of arrests, insults and threats directed to the men of the 25th.43 As would later be the case in Houston, it was widely assumed that this was a planned revenge because, as an editorialist for the Houston Post wrote of Brownsville at the time, white people there had refused “to treat them as equals” and the soldiers then “waited the opportunity to unleash their brutal and murderous propensities.”44 Because the soldiers were supposedly protecting the guilty among them, an order from President Theodore Roosevelt discharged 167 men. A Congressional investigation affirmed the order, though a minority report protested that it had “relied on discredited testimony from biased Brownsvillians.”45 The white officers of the 24th Infantry, a decade later, protested the assignment of the Black soldiers in their command to Houston. The battalion commander, Colonel William Newman, testified that he had requested cancelation of the order because of an incident that occurred while serving in Del Rio the previous year, “when,” in his words, “a colored soldier was killed by a [Texas] ranger for no other reason than he was a colored man; that it angered Texans to see colored men in the uniform of a solider.”46 Following the incident with the police in the fourth ward, rumors grew among the Black soldiers of Camp Logan that a white mob would attack and that, finally, one was indeed approaching. The response was panicked and some soldiers left the perimeter with weapons amidst shots fired at the camp, later confirmed by testimony and physical evidence to be from non-military firearms.47 Smith argued in 1991 that “all studies of the Houston incident agree on most of the basic facts: a small group of soldiers of the 24th were involved in a violent confrontation with white police and civilians of Houston, sparked by police brutality and the use of the terms ‘niggers.’” He rejected, however, prior interpretations, including the only book-length study, that tended to confirm “the military authorities’ conclusion that the violence grew out of a planned conspiracy, carefully concealed by a manufactured fear of a white mob attack, of revenge against the police on the part of experienced soldiers.” In the end, 20 people died from the fighting that August night in Houston: “two black soldiers, five white police officers, and thirteen white civilians.”48 Military justice was swift, with 118 Black soldiers arrested for murder and mutiny and tried in three groups with 110 convictions, though all of the men insisted upon their innocence during proceedings that did not “produce any evidence to identify individuals.” Of the 28 death sentences, almost half were rushed to secret executions “before the cases could be reviewed and without notification to the respective families.” The resultant national Black outrage pushed President Wilson to commute ten of the remaining execution orders.49 It would be easy to misinterpret this tragedy in Houston as another story driving home why Blacks were leaving the South and moving northward in record numbers. The Camp Logan mutiny was very much a part of a national struggle that unfolded in this era and although its location in both Texas and the South explains elements of why the violence escalated as it did, the event certainly does not establish a clear regional exceptionalism in policing, particularly in light of what had just unfolded in East St. Louis.

The Red Summer of 1919 in Washington and Chicago Although not the first outrages, or the most deadly, in what would become the most horrific year of racial violence in the nation’s modern history, adjacent large-scale riots in Washington and then Chicago in late July 1919 formed the peak of national panic and has focused historical memory upon that summer. James Weldon Johnson, who became executive secretary of the NAACP in 1920, 55

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would later invent the enduring label of “Red Summer” in the early 1930s.50 The Washington riot is an important reminder that racial violence in cities with growing Black populations did not always have a central causal component of economic or political competition. The city had 110,000 Black residents in this era, a quarter of the population. It was home to the prestigious Howard University, the first Black-owned bank in the US, and the nation’s largest chapter of the NAACP. Journalist and historian Cameron McWhirter has asserted that “at the time, Washington was black America’s leading cultural and financial center.”51 Washington had expanded quickly during the war, gaining nearly a hundred thousand more residents. It had a shortage of housing and some white resentment simmered over Black prosperity and government employment, but these would not become the key problems sparking a race riot.52 In late June and early July, 1919, amid a growing number of demobilizing soldiers in the city, Washington feared it had a serial rapist, who both Black and white women victims had described as a Black man. A hundred policemen, along with deputy sheriffs from neighboring Maryland and volunteers in the hundreds, were on the hunt for the rapist. Historian David F. Krugler noted that “in an action that further blurred the line between law enforcement and vigilantism,” the chief of police “authorized the [wartime volunteer] Home Defense League to patrol as a police auxiliary” and “sweeping roundups of black men ensued.” Over 100 Black men had been through police interviews by July 10, many taken “from their homes without warrants,” and “crowds of white men accosted black men on the street to interrogate them.” The police made several unconvincing arrests. The NAACP sent a letter to the city’s daily newspapers on July 9 warning “that their coverage was ‘sowing the seeds of a race riot.’” Just over a week later, it happened. When Elsie Stephnick, a young woman married to a civilian employee of the Navy, was walking home from her government job on Friday, July 18, she was supposedly accosted by two Black men. Krugler found that the press coverage was consistent; it “lingered on the race of Stephnick’s alleged attackers …, emphasized their purported menacing intent, and elaborated on Stephnick’s escape.” A series of recent altercations between white servicemen and local Black men had already built anger and a thirst for revenge, exacerbated by the hunt for the rapist, and “the result was a mob in uniform” by the next night.53 A violent weekend followed and both the number of soldiers participating in the rioting and the number of those summoned to halt it escalated, as did the efforts of Blacks to defend their neighborhoods. On Monday evening, police, supported by troops, attempted to clear a crowd of armed Blacks who were out in their street to protect it. “When no one moved, the police drew their weapons and advanced. Shots rang out,” a policeman was wounded, and all sides fired. Krugler argued that this was a turning point, with the police now set on clearing all public space of Black people. Blacks found themselves “in a veritable two-front war” against “both white mobs and hostile authorities,” while “brutal treatment of black prisoners by the police stoked further conflict.”54 On Tuesday, Secretary of War Newton Baker met with President Wilson and then called in General William Haan to restore order. Haan had largely fulfilled that charge by the next day and, according to McWhirter, “blamed the crime-obsessed press for the riot, saying he was fighting ‘merely a newspaper war.’” Although “no one ever determined a final tally of deaths and injuries,” four Blacks and three whites were identified and “hundreds were injured; an untold number later died.”55 Of course, the harsh military justice meted out to Black soldiers in Houston did not apply to rebellious white soldiers in Washington. James Weldon Johnson, reporting for The Crisis, concluded that “it might have been worse” if “Negroes, unprotected by the law, would not have had the spirit to protect themselves.” He argued that “if the white mob had gone unchecked—and it was only the determined effort of black men that checked it— Washington would have been another and worse East St. Louis.”56 Violence in Chicago began just several days later and as it might have in any southern city: over a perceived violation of the segregation of public space and police refusal to protect Black lives from white reprisal. The poet Carl Sandburg had begun writing a sympathetic series of articles on Black 56

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Chicago in the Daily News just three weeks before the riot and he continued on afterward. It all began, he wrote in the wake of the riot’s bloodshed, when “a colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line” at a Lake Michigan beach in the city, was stoned, and then drowned. “Colored people rushed to a policeman and asked for the arrest of the boys throwing stones. The policeman refused.” Sandburg fumed that “we have blind lawless government failing to function through policemen ignorant of Lincoln, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation.”57 William M. Tuttle, Jr., whose 1970 book on the riot remains the definitive work, wrote that Black Chicagoans “had expected little else of a police force which they had come to view as the armed representative of white hostility … and they had also come to anticipate law enforcement that was biased in favor of white hoodlums.” He recounted that “once ignited on July 27, the rioting raged virtually uncontrolled for the greater part of five days.” Not only was “the police force an ineffectual deterrent to the waves of violence;” in the end, “police officers had fatally wounded seven black men during the riot.” Sixteen more Blacks and fifteen whites died and hundreds were wounded in the fighting.58 Tuttle’s book details long-simmering grievances over housing, neighborhood boundaries, jobs, strikes, and political power that became amplified further in the World War I era. He remarked of the period between 1894 and 1919, “the race riot was in many ways the tragic culmination of those twenty-five years of conflicts between blacks and whites in the labor market.”59 The disputes had been brewing longer than in East St. Louis, but had many parallels. However, Chicago was much larger and so was its Black population, with an already entrenched major role in the complex ethnic patchwork of the city’s ward politics since 1910, in Tuttle’s analysis.60 “The school census of 1914 counted 54,557 black people, and some blacks estimated that at least that many more arrived between 1916 and 1918.”61 Sandburg argued at the time that “the Black Belt of Chicago is probably the strongest effective unit of political power, good or bad, in America.”62 Tuttle asserted that because of the bloodshed in East St. Louis, the official enabling of it, the government inaction that followed, and the similar sources of the tension they were experiencing, “Chicago’s black community believed it had abundant justification for arming itself.” Demands to increase the Black presence in the police had led to a doubling between 1915 and 1919, but that still amounted to just 2% of the force. There was a dramatic increase in attacks on Blacks during the war era, with “the inactivity and occasional collusion of the police.” As in East St. Louis, racial violence escalated sharply in advance of the main conflagration. Police inaction in June further encouraged provocateurs and “the lack of arrests practically assured future clashes.”63 In an article for The Crisis analyzing the causes of the enormity of the Chicago riot, Walter F. White asserted that “State’s Attorney Hoyne openly charged the police with arresting colored rioters and with an unwillingness to arrest white rioters. Those who were arrested were at once released,” a clear parallel to a major cause of the severity and persistence of violence and its toll of Black lives and property in East St. Louis.64 Historian Jonathan S. Coit has found that “police were the most common sources of news reports” during the rioting and that Chicago’s newspapers “evoked a one-sided race war, in which only blacks were armed and organized.” As had been the case in Washington, the press was a crucial source of escalation. Even Sandburg’s Daily News, the least inflammatory major paper, blamed all sides. Coit added that “police passed multiple rumors to reporters of African Americans buying or stealing guns or raiding armories.” He argued that these rumors were spread to justify both concentrating the police force in Black neighborhoods and “the other main thrust of the police response: disarming African Americans,” a clear parallel to the police campaign in East St. Louis.65

After the Red Summer Although the period label “Red Summer” rightly evokes both the bloodiness of that 1919 season and its location during the Red Scare, it unfortunately makes the horror seem brief, even an aberration. Pogroms enabled, escalated, and prolonged by policing and inspired by white fears of 57

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armed Blacks, a breakdown of racial segregation, and growing Black political and economic power were certainly nothing new in the World War I era. The period conditions outlined in the introduction merely help explain the surge and shape of racial violence in this era, which continued well past the summer of 1919. The massacre of Blacks in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, in October may well outstrip the savagery of any of the summer riots. Ida B. Wells investigated and wrote that “the terrible crime these men had committed was to organize their members into a union for the purpose of getting the market price for their cotton, to buy land of their own and to employ a lawyer to get settlements of their accounts with their white landlords.”66 Attorney and historian Grif Stockley noted that death toll estimates of the massacre ranged from 20 to 856 among those who investigated it from 1919 to 1925 and “if accurate, these numbers would make it by far the most deadly racial conflict in the history of the United States.” His book makes the case that “the United States military participated in the massacre along with white civilians” and that “the cover-up … was so effective that the dimensions of this American tragedy will never be known.”67 Librarian Jan Voogd has attempted a taxonomy of the 1919 riots and devised a category of those “Involving the Military as Agents or Targets,” with five instances cited, though not Phillips County, Arkansas, and there may well be more.68 When we discuss policing and racial violence in the World War I period, the role of white and Black soldiers and veterans must become more prominent. When racial violence exploded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of May 1921, war demobilization was in the past, but as the Great Migration continued, so did its attendant tensions. White fears and resentments remained consistent: the prosperity of the Black-owned Greenwood District, growing Black political power despite voter repression, blurring of Jim Crow lines in public and social spaces, assertive Black veterans, and fears of armed Blacks.69 An incident between a white woman and a Black man in an elevator was reported by the press as an attack and in a matter of hours there was mob violence on a massive scale and the National Guard was mobilized. Historian Scott Ellsworth recounted that “the Tulsa police deputized scores of whites” and in the “early morning hours of June 1, 1921, the wholesale burning and looting of black Tulsa began.” During the mob attacks, “the police were either nowhere to be found or were busy disarming and interning black Tulsans.”70 Only the imposition of martial law diminished the attacks. The scale of devastation was vast, despite the comparative brevity of the rioting. Ellsworth found that “while most rioters returned to their homes, most of Tulsa’s black citizenry was imprisoned; over six thousand blacks were reported as being interned on the night of June 1” and “over one thousand homes and businesses – much of black Tulsa – lay in ruin.” Like East St. Louis and Phillips County, we will never get close to the number of dead, though clearly Blacks far outnumbered whites, and “estimates range from 27 to over 250,” with many more injured. Noting that the military banned funerals in the city, Ellsworth still had to ask, in 1982, “what happened to the riot dead? How were they buried?”71 There is much we do not know, and perhaps cannot know, about the race riots of this era, but some key truths about policing have always been clear. In January 1920, the House Judiciary Committee held perfunctory hearings over just two days to investigate the nation’s recent escalation of interracial strife. In his statement, Neval H. Thomas of the NAACP said of the 1919 riots that “the police power of the state broke down and sympathized with the mob, and instead of arresting the perpetrators they were hunting down negroes who were bearing arms in self-defense and filled the jail.”72

Notes 1 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3–4. 2 Ibid., 8–9.

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Urban Policing and Race Riots 3 Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983). 4 Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 4–5. 5 For an overview of the war mobilization campaign, home front tensions, and the experience of US soldiers in France, see Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6 On patriotic coercion and vigilantism during the war, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 7 For a brief overview of the strike militancy of the era, see David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–22,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 509–529. For a survey of the Red Scare, see Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). 8 Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Penguin, 2010), 152–155. 9 On federal efforts to police Black activism in the era, see two book by Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.: “Investigate Everything”: Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 10 There is no scholarly agreement at all on how to categorize episodes of racial violence in the era and, even more fundamentally, how many occurred and with what total toll. Journalist and historian Cameron McWhirter has suggested “at least 25 major riots and mob actions” and over twice as many lynchings during 1919 in his book, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 13. 11 Special Committee to Investigate the East St. Louis Riots, House of Representatives, U.S. Congress, Transcripts of the Hearings of the House Select Committee That Investigated the Race Riots in East St. Louis, Illinois (Washington, DC: GPO, 1918). 12 Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 1. 13 Malcolm McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2. 14 Martha Gruening and W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” The Crisis, Vol. 14 (No. 5, September 1917): 219–238. Quote on p. 219. 15 Lumpkins, American Pogrom, 2. 16 Gruening and Du Bois, “The Massacre of East St, Louis,” 221. 17 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (Chicago: The Negro Fellowship Herald Press, 1917), reprinted in Mia Bay, ed., The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (New York: Penguin, 2014), 456–495. Quote on p. 467. 18 Lumpkins, American Pogrom, 2. The books by Lumpkins (2008) and McLaughlin (2005) both react to and build upon Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964). 19 Lumpkins, American Pogrom, 7, 84. 20 Ibid., 92, 95. 21 Ibid., 97, 99–100. 22 McLaughlin, Power, 132. 23 Lumpkins, American Pogrom, 100–101. 24 Ibid., 106. 25 Ibid., 111, 113–114. 26 McLaughlin, Power, 133. 27 Lumpkins, American Pogrom, 119, 115. 28 McLaughlin, Power, 132, 140. 29 Lumpkins, American Pogrom, 125, 127. 30 Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 33–34. 31 “The Black Soldier,” The Crisis, Vol. 16 (No. 2, June 1918): 60. 32 Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, 35. 33 Ibid., 34. 34 Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55 [demographics of Houston], 43 [casualty figures]. 35 Chapter two of Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, focuses on the Houston riot. The incident with Mrs. Travers in the fourth ward is recounted in detail on p. 45–51.

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Adam J. Hodges 36 Martha Gruening, “Houston. An N.A.A.C.P. Investigation,” The Crisis, Vol. 15 (No. 1, November 1917): 14–19. Quotes on p. 15. 37 Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles, 45–46. 38 Ibid., 47, 51. 39 Ibid., 60–62. 40 Gruening, “Houston,” 14. 41 Garna L. Christian, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899–1917 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 19. 42 C. Calvin Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917, Revisited,” The Houston Review, Vol. 13 (No. 2, 1991): 86. 43 Christian, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 72–73. 44 Ibid., 75. 45 Ibid., 80–83. Quote on p. 83. 46 Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917,” 87–88. 47 Ibid., 94–95. 48 Ibid., 90. Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976) remains the only book-length study of the event. 49 Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917,” 97. 50 The phrase “Red Summer” first appears in his book Black Manhattan (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1930), 246, and again in the autobiography Along This Way (New York: Viking Press, 1933), 341. 51 McWhirter, Red Summer, 96–97. 52 David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 68, 94. 53 Ibid., 70–73. 54 Ibid., 82–83. 55 McWhirter, Red Summer, 109–110. 56 James Weldon Johnson, “The Riots: An N.A.A.C.P. Investigation,” The Crisis, Vol. 18 (No. 5, September 1919): 243. 57 Sandburg’s enduring articles were collected and published in November 1919 with an introduction by Walter Lippmann and then reissued with a new preface added in the era of the urban riots of the 1960s. Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots: July, 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), 3–4. For a critical analysis of Sandburg’s article series, see C.K. Doreski, “From News to History: Robert Abbott and Carl Sandburg Read the 1919 Chicago Riot,” African American Review 26 (Winter 1992): 637–650. 58 On the importance and influence of Tuttle’s book, see Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., “Race Riot Redux: William M. Tuttle, Jr. and the Study of Racial Violence,” Reviews in American History 29 (March 2001): 165–181; William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 33, 8–10. 59 Tuttle, Race Riot, 112. 60 Ibid., 185. 61 Ibid., 75. 62 Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, 5. 63 Tuttle, Race Riot, 231–232, 234, 237. 64 Walter F. White, “Chicago and Its Eight Reasons,” The Crisis, Vol. 18 (No. 6, October 1919): 295. 65 Jonathan S. Coit, “‘Our Changed Attitude’: Armed Defense and the New Negro in the 1919 Chicago Race Riot,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11 (April 2012): 240–241. Daily News analysis on p. 233. 66 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot (Chicago: Ida B. Wells Barnett, 1920), reprinted in Mia Bay, ed., The Light of Truth, 501. 67 Grif Stockley, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), xiv-xv. 68 Jan Voogd, Race Riots & Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), Chapter 5. 69 Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Chapter 1. 70 On reporting the elevator incident, see Ibid., Chapter 4; Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 54, 57. 71 Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land, 63, 66–67. 72 Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, U.S. Congress, Transcripts of the Hearings on Segregation and Antilynching (Washington, DC: GPO, 1920). Thomas statement spans p. 68–72, quote on p. 70.

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5 “KILLERS WHO HIDE BEHIND BADGES” Race and Police Brutality in the Jim Crow South Jeffrey S. Adler

Charles Sims’s life unraveled on August 6, 1941. At 3:00 pm, as the African American gardener repaired a screen on his house, two white New Orleans policemen, Sergeant James Smith and Patrolman Emery Landry, approached the 29-year-old father of six. Reeking of alcohol, Smith, without explanation, brandished his service revolver and directed Sims to enter their vehicle. Landry drove to a desolate stretch of the Air-Line Highway in adjoining Jefferson Parish. A life-long New Orleanian, Sims likely knew that the journey constituted “the ride.” Policemen routinely transported African American crime suspects to this spot, just outside of Orleans Parish, and beat them if they refused to confess and sometimes murdered them. But Charles Sims was not a suspect, a witness, or presumed to have any knowledge of a crime when Landry and Smith took him to this isolated location.1 After the patrol car pulled off the highway, Landry walked out of sight, leaving Sims with the 58-year-old Smith, a 16-year police veteran with a fifth-grade education who had risen to the rank of sergeant despite repeated reprimands for drunkenness. The police officer asked Sims where he could find his cousin, Cornelius Williams. Sims supplied the address, adding that Williams was probably home at the time. The gardener would later learn that Smith sought to question his cousin about the recent robbery and murder of a white service-station attendant, an interrogation that would establish that Williams had no connection to the crime.2 Upon receiving the address, the policeman barked “shut up” and shot Sims in the abdomen. Certain that the inebriated sergeant would shoot again, Sims wrestled the gun from Smith’s hand, fled from the vehicle, dropped the revolver, and dragged himself home. Shortly thereafter, state troopers took the badly bleeding gardener to Charity Hospital, where Sims endured two operations and had much of his liver removed.3 But Charles Sims’s nightmare had only begun. Two weeks later, as he was discharged from the hospital, a New Orleans policeman arrested him on a larceny charge—for taking Sergeant Smith’s revolver. The patrolman brought Sims to Smith’s home precinct, where detectives interrogated and likely beat him. Then New Orleans law enforcers transported Sims to Jefferson Parish, where he was charged with larceny. Sims languished in the parish jail for nearly three months, until the prosecutor finally presented the case before a grand jury, which returned a “no true bill” verdict on November 18, 1941, resulting in the charge being dropped. But the district attorney did not release Sims until January 9, 1942.4 On May 14, 1942, Harold N. Lee, a Tulane University philosophy professor and the president of the Louisiana League for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights, demanded that the New Orleans

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-7

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police chief investigate the shooting, noting that Sims had not been a crime suspect and that Smith had no legal authority for detaining or shooting him.5 Superintendent George Reyer interviewed Smith and Landry, concluded that Smith had been “justified in shooting the Negro,” and announced that “no department action [would be] taken against the officers.”6 Unsatisfied, Lee apprised the Jefferson Parish district attorney of the policemen’s treatment of Sims and insisted that charges be filed against Sergeant Smith.7 Hoping to avoid publicity from the persistent Lee, District Attorney John Fleury consented to inquire into the matter. On July 9, 1942, a Jefferson Parish grand jury convened, returned a “no true bill” verdict, and instructed Fleury to dismiss all charges against Smith.8 Charles Sims’s ordeal was not unique or even unusual. Again and again, African American residents, and occasionally white labor organizers, endured similar treatment. At any time and for no lawful reason, municipal cops threatened, beat, shot, confined, and even murdered these New Orleanians, and the city’s policemen frequently reminded local African Americans that they could coerce, brutalize, and kill them at will, with impunity, and employing the authority of the rule of law. In Jim Crow New Orleans, cops merged crime control and racial control, and criminal justice institutions in the city, and throughout the South, became bulwarks in the battle to preserve white supremacy. Racial violence did not begin during the early twentieth century, but policemen assumed a significantly expanded role in such brutality and emerged as the principal cudgel in the crusade to safeguard the region’s racial order. Whereas sheriffs and cops had long undergirded the South’s “caste system” through inaction and tacit complicity in mob atrocities, law enforcers increasingly spearheaded the violent defense of white supremacy, invoking the legitimacy of the legal system in their efforts.9 Louisiana’s leading African American newspaper dubbed this the “bluecoated terror.”10 The early twentieth century, particularly the 1930s, marked a turning point in which the function of policing, and specifically police violence, shifted, institutionalizing practices that continue to haunt the nation. Identifying the interwar period as the pivot point, however, challenges two widely held perceptions of police brutality in the United States. One view posits a seamless past in which law-enforcement violence against African Americans has been largely unchanging.11 The other interpretation traces modern brutality to more recent events, particularly the backlash against the civil rights movement or episodes in the last few decades, when police officers fatally shot or choked African American city dwellers.12 Neither of these views is entirely accurate, though there are important elements of truth in both. To be sure, well before the birth of institutionalized policing, unofficial, self-anointed white “law enforcers” mauled and murdered African Americans in defense of racial custom. The earliest formal police departments also focused on controlling people of color. Likewise, more recent incidents of police violence, often captured on film or cell phones, have exposed systemic racism in American law enforcement. But the methods, intent, and especially the purported justifications for police brutality against African American citizens have changed over time, and police violence assumed its modern form during the early twentieth century, when it became cloaked in the rule of law. Beginning in the interwar era, southern law enforcers and public authorities explicitly justified race-based police violence as a legally legitimate mechanism for maintaining “law and order,” an argument that some government officials continue to embrace. This essay explores the development of such a modern expression of police brutality, which champions law enforcers’ use of force as lawful, necessary, and the guardian of social stability. It focuses on Jim Crow New Orleans. Despite the city’s distinctive cultural and institutional history, New Orleans police violence was typical for the region, as early twentieth-century cops, throughout the South, defended the systematic deployment of law enforcers in the service of white supremacy, insisting that their often-deadly actions conformed to the rule of law. In their goals and methods, local detectives and patrolmen echoed those employed by their counterparts in other interwar southern cities. If New Orleans cops’ brutality exemplified an emerging norm in southern (and American) 62

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policing, however, the extant source material for the city is anything but typical. Remarkable police files, legal records, and related sources have survived, shedding significant light on a wider transformation in American criminal justice.13 ∗∗∗ The roots of police brutality against African Americans run deep. In early America, white Southerners relied primarily on informal methods of racial control. Planters, overseers, and slave patrollers possessed no formal authority but nonetheless beat and murdered African Americans in defense of the region’s racial order. The earliest police departments in the United States, beginning in New Orleans in 1805, also served this goal.14 Through the mid-nineteenth century, the boundary between rough justice and formal policing remained fluid, and individual white men viewed violent racial control as the collective responsibility of respectable citizens.15 Late nineteenth-century white southerners also eschewed distinctions between informal mechanisms of racial control and institutionalized law enforcement. Police officers employed such violence, but so too did mobs.16 During the early twentieth century, however, state-controlled institutions assumed increasing responsibility for preserving white supremacy. New Orleans policemen continued to exercise old-style rough justice during the 1920s (and beyond), dispensing immediate, extra-legal punishment in response to perceived breaches in racial custom. In the lion’s share of 1920s brutality incidents, cops threatened, bludgeoned, and killed African American residents who failed to demonstrate proper deference or appeared “uppity.”17 Patrolman Elmo Evans, for example, became enraged in 1924 when Lilly Scales seemed insolent. Evans struck the 22-year-old African American resident, tethered her to a fence, and fired his revolver at her.18 Similarly, Supernumerary Patrolman Joseph Cronin pistol-whipped, shot, and killed 36-year-old, partially deaf George Simmons because the African American laborer failed to respond quickly enough after being instructed to “raise his hands.”19 Just before firing two bullets into Simmons’s abdomen, Cronin, who was inebriated, bellowed “you’re a bad nigger, huh.”20 During the 1920s, every fatal police shooting of an African American occurred on local streets, reflecting the instant resort to summary justice in reaction to violations of racial etiquette. The “maltreatment of Negroes,” an African American journalist quipped, “is the sport of policemen.”21 Three overlapping currents redefined the mission of New Orleans policing during the late 1920s and 1930s, transforming the nature of such brutality and the mandate of the criminal justice system. First, the South’s integration into the national economy indirectly influenced legal institutions. Officials throughout the region sought to attract Northern industry. To do so, they hoped to shed the South’s reputation for lawlessness and demonstrate that the region offered a stable environment for investment.22 Elected leaders, who had long supported or remained silent about vigilante violence, began to argue that rough justice jeopardized economic development. Between 1925 and 1930, lawmakers introduced anti-lynching bills in Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas, and southern governors denounced mob violence as “barbarous” and a violation of “both the law of God and man.”23 Municipal police departments tried to prevent such murderous behavior. On numerous occasions during the 1920s, for instance, New Orleans cops “rescued” African American suspects from white mobs, insisting that the legal system should dispense punishment.24 These efforts, however, reflected the larger campaign to curry favor with Northern business interests, rather than concern about the rights of African American New Orleanians, and similar actions unfolded throughout the region. But regardless of their motivations, southern law enforcers assumed an expanded role in responding to inter-racial conflict, investigating crime rather than abetting vigilantism.25 Second, mounting fears of “race mixing” led New Orleans policemen, all of whom were white during this era, to devote greater attention to law enforcement and especially to African American crime. The local African American population swelled after the Great War, when thousands of 63

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young migrants poured into the city from Lower Mississippi Valley farms. The influx overwhelmed the backyard and alley pockets housing African American residents, producing greater inter-racial contact and generating anxiety from white residents. White New Orleanians expressed alarm about inter-racial crime. Municipal authorities, who had been content to ignore black-on-black crime, began to worry that African American violence would bleed across racial lines and that “bad niggers” would attack law-abiding white residents.26 Behavioral and residential boundaries appeared to be crumbling, and white New Orleanians turned to local cops to stem the breach.27 Third, and magnifying these fears, a crime panic gripped the city during the 1920s. White New Orleanians grew frantic. Invoking unmistakably racialized language, a former parish prosecutor warned that “no city in American has worse protection from the criminal classes.”28 White residents insisted that “respectable” citizens desperately needed protection from African American killers. They especially worried about volatile, murderous African American robbers. National currents intensified the local hysteria, as public officials, led by J. Edgar Hoover, manufactured and exploited anxieties about vicious predators. The high-profile crimes of the era, including the Sacco and Vanzetti payroll robbery-murders and Edward Hickman’s abduction, mutilation, and killing of Marion Parker, commanded front-page attention across the nation and intensified the local panic, though white New Orleanians framed the threat to life and limb in regionalized, racialized terms.29 White residents fundamentally misunderstood local crime trends, but violence did, in fact, explode in New Orleans. Between 1920 and 1925, the murder rate more than doubled. New Orleans became one of the most violent cities in the nation, with a homicide rate nearly twice that of Al Capone’s Chicago and six times that of New York City.30 Inter-racial crime accounted for only a tenth of murders, though white New Orleanians perceived a different reality and believed that African Americans roved the city, robbing and butchering “respectable”—i.e., white—residents. According to a journalist, the surge in violent crime “is all on the side of the negroes.”31 Using racially inflected language, one mayor promised to make New Orleans a “safe city for respectable people.”32 White New Orleanians turned to the police. Local cops had devoted modest attention to crime fighting until the mid-1920s. Instead, they supplied muscle to the political machine, directed traffic, and managed the French Quarter vice trade.33 Policemen made arrests in fewer than half of homicide cases during the early 1920s, and only 14% of killers were convicted. Municipal cops, however, rapidly refocused and militarized during the late 1920s and early 1930s as city officials pledged to “stamp out lawlessness.”34 They equipped policemen with machine guns and doublebarreled shotguns, mandated shooting instruction for patrolmen, and issued “shoot-to-kill orders” when law enforcers encountered dangerous criminals.35 In 1929, Chief Theodore Ray introduced his “death-dealing weapon,” a motorcycle with a machine gun mounted on its sidecar.36 New Orleans cops became more aggressive, and police violence emerged as a crime-fighting tool. Between the early 1920s and the early 1930s, the police use of deadly force doubled, even though the homicide rate fell by nearly half. Furthermore, the killings increasingly occurred while suspects were in custody, and law-enforcement violence migrated from dark alleys to precinct houses and the Airline Highway. Police beatings also surged, as detectives—throughout the South—embraced third-degree interrogation methods, precisely when law enforcers in most of the nation, in response to the 1931 publication of the Wickersham Commission’s Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, abandoned such practices.37 In early April 1933, for example, one local reform organization received reports of more than 200 cases in which city cops beat suspects until they confessed.38 In interwar New Orleans, police brutality, coercive investigative methods, and police homicide became symbols of crime-fighting acumen. Even newspaper editors who decried thirddegree interrogation techniques lauded the use of such violence to protect respectable residents from the “gunmen, murderers and their like who now infest the streets.”39 64

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Pandering to the racial anxieties of white residents, municipal authorities redefined the threat to public safety in racial terms; African Americans, they insisted, posed the principal danger to good citizens and social stability. “Most of the murders in New Orleans,” Police Superintendent Guy Molony explained, “are committed by Negroes.”40 Crime-fighting efforts, therefore, increasingly targeted African American New Orleanians and embraced a binary framework. Race and criminality aligned in the white imagination, in the strategies of law enforcers, and in the interrogation rooms of police stations. Concentrating law enforcement efforts on African American residents was conveniently selfreinforcing. During the early 1920s, parish prosecutors had convicted white assailants at higher rates than African American killers, reflecting their indifference toward black-on-black homicide. The late-decade crime panic and accompanying racial hysteria reversed this pattern, and by the early 1930s the African American homicide conviction rate was twice the white rate, which provided criminal justice authorities with seemingly irrefutable statistical evidence to support their focus on the perceived African American threat. All at once, the new focus on African American violence promised to combat crime, protect white residents, restore order, and preserve the racial hierarchy.41 This was also a winning political strategy, for it justified Jim Crow restrictions on African American housing, public activities, and especially voting; by 1940, these New Orleanians comprised 30.3% of the population but 0.4% of registered voters.42 As local authorities buoyed the economic fortunes of the city’s marketplace by tamping down mob violence, they contrasted civilized white residents with savage African American New Orleanians, using crime data to bolster their argument. Crime control elided with racial control and made efforts to restore law and order indistinguishable from protecting white supremacy. In the age of Jim Crow, the rule of law and race-based, violent law enforcement co-existed, overlapped, and fused in New Orleans and across the South. While local patrolmen, as well as white civilians, continued to engage in old-style rough justice, New Orleans policemen increasingly seized the mantle of racial control in response to white residents’ demands for law and order. Police brutality became normalized and institutionalized, gradually supplanting street justice.43 During the 1920s, municipal cops typically beat and shot African Americans as “unofficial punishment” for breaches of racial etiquette, but by the early 1930s police violence had become a targeted law-enforcement tool. Nothing symbolized this shift more starkly than the racialization of third-degree interrogation methods. Although the African American crime rate plummeted, and black-on-white homicide plunged by 85.7% during the 1930s, white perceptions of an explosion in inter-racial robbery and murder not only justified but necessitated the use of more aggressive, more violent police methods against African American New Orleanians. Coercive interrogations of these suspects became commonplace, at the same time that police officials rejected the use of such tactics against white suspects. One New Orleans policeman admitted that detectives “considered brutality a standard procedure, especially, but not exclusively, in the handling of Negroes.”44 Even as national police reformers championed “scientific crime fighting” and decried violent interrogation methods as a vestige of amateurish law enforcement, New Orleans detectives embraced and defended the routine use of physical coercion against African American suspects. Cops employed batons, pipes, blackjacks, and rubber hoses against these New Orleanians. During the early 1930s police officers adopted the “iron claw,” a ratcheting metal clamp exerting increasing pressure “to make prisoner’s talk.”45 Combining older forms of racial control with their new focus on crime control, detectives routinely stripped African Americans suspects and whipped them or staged mock lynchings until they confessed. In 1930, when Charles Johnson denied assaulting a white woman, detectives placed a “rope about [sic] his neck and lifted him up for about ten minutes, beating him while suspended in the air” and instructing him to sign the confession statement that they had drafted.46 They often employed this interrogation method against African American witnesses as well. In August of 1936, for example, detectives sought to convict 17-year-old Willie Williams for the armed robbery of a white 65

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woman. Convinced that Eddie Johnson, an African American schoolboy, had seen the suspect running from the crime scene, police officers brought the 11-year-old to the Twelfth Precinct station for questioning. When Johnson explained that he had not observed Williams on the night of the robbery, they offered him a plate of ice cream and a bicycle to say otherwise. Johnson, however, insisted that he could not implicate Williams, leading detectives to beat him, “place a belt around his neck,” and threaten to “hang him if he did not say that Williams, the accused, was the guilty man.”47 Nor were these isolated cases, and policemen employed comparable methods across the South during the 1930s.48 Granting detectives free rein to brutalize African American suspects served myriad police and politicians’ interests and enjoyed widespread support from white New Orleanians. Racialized interrogation methods, particularly during a period of falling homicide rates, enabled police officials to crow about saving respectable citizens from the ravages of vicious predators.49 Far from exposing the gratuitous nature of dispensing draconian punishment in response to an imaginary crime wave, the combination of surging law-enforcement violence and plunging murder rates seemed to demonstrate the effectiveness of aggressive, brutal policing. For New Orleans detectives, such methods also affirmed their white, working-class racial sensibilities, translating plebeian notions of racial custom into legal action. One observer explained that “the policeman is simply the channel of the general white hostility against the Negro.”50 Unleashing working-class cops to brutalize African American residents assuaged white class tensions throughout the region during the 1930s and 1940s.51 For elected officials, the use of coercive techniques against African American residents pandered to their constituents, trumpeting the binary framework that cast white New Orleanians as civilized, law-abiding citizens and African Americans as volatile, dangerous predators. Not surprisingly, the district attorney and the local Democratic machine explicitly celebrated both racialized crime fighting and white supremacy in election advertisements.52 White residents also endorsed the use of coercive interrogation techniques against the most menacing suspects, nearly all of whom they believed were African American, even as they applauded their moral superiority in rejecting thirddegree methods.53 Brutalizing Africans American New Orleanians and protecting white residents represented opposite sides of the same coin. Local whites, including social reformers, typically defended and lauded police violence against African American suspects, for torturing that latter safeguarded the former. The interrogation of Sidney James Mims, and especially white reactions to the methods employed on the African American 15-year-old, illustrated this elision. Certain that Mims had participated in a home burglary in a white neighborhood, Detectives Louis Martinez and Thomas Whalen arrested him and began pummeling the teenager the moment he entered their vehicle, demanding that he confess. When Mims maintained that he knew nothing about the theft, Martinez and Whalen drove to police headquarters and for the next five hours kicked him and “stuffed papers in his mouth, bound him and beat him with a piece of cable wire.” Following the well-established interrogation ritual, the detectives then threatened to take the teenager for “the ride” and shoot him. Although Mims’s white employer confirmed that the 15-year-old had been working at the time of the crime, the suspect was charged. The following morning, a white physician examined Mims and documented that fresh welts and contusions covered his face and torso. The doctor and Mims’s boss directed the teenager’s mother to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, whose lawyers filed a formal complaint.54 The organization’s attorneys emphasized Mims’s age, and the case commanded attention from other groups supporting “reform in [the] handling of children arrested by the police.”55 The Young Women’s Christian Association passed a resolution protesting the “brutal treatment of minors.” Similarly, the New Orleans Family Service Society and the Orleans Parish League of Women Voters urged the mayor and prosecutor, Eugene Stanley, to investigate.56 But racial dynamics shaped responses to the complaint. Coercing a confession from an African American burglar seemed entirely appropriate, and many white New Orleanians expressed outrage 66

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that Stanley, a zealous proponent of law-and-order policing and white supremacy, would charge cops for doing their jobs. The judge banished five white men from the court hearing after one roared “it is an outrage to prosecute two white men for beating a ‘Nigger.”57 Even child reformers balked at the complaint. Mrs. F. I. Williams, chairperson of the local League of Women Voters’ Child Welfare Committee, dismissed the allegation as “much ado about nothing,” adding that “I am opposed to third degree methods but the Mims boy apparently got what he richly deserved.”58 If beating a minor seemed unacceptable, brutalizing an African American minor was another matter altogether. Policemen, judges, voters, and many moral reformers rejected rough justice yet endorsed race-specific law enforcement. A few local cops gained particular renown for their violent interrogation prowess. According to one detective, “certain members of the police department are considered expert technicians in the application of brutality and were called upon to ‘go over’ prisoners who refused to cooperate.” Captain James Burns held such vaunted status, and detectives frequently funneled obstinate African American suspects to his police station for interrogation. The commander of the Twelfth Precinct, Burns practiced a signature technique. When African American suspects refused to confess, he instructed his officers to sodomize them with a heated stove poker until they admitted their guilt. After Gordon Nichols, a 26-year-old railroad worker who was arrested as a “dangerous and suspicious character,” failed to confess to having stolen the time piece found in his possession, for instance, Burns ordered Patrolman John Mobray “to take a red-hot poker from the stove ‘and burn that nigger until he tells where he stole the watch.’”59 Under Burns’s leadership, the precinct became known as the “damnable 12th,” and suspects recoiled at the threat of being interrogated at this station house. Orleans Parish judges, however, rejected every allegation of torture leveled against Burns; Judge A. D. Henriques dismissed Nichols’s complaint, explaining “I know him [Burns] to be one of the kindest-hearted men I’ve ever met.”60 Other law enforcers developed different signature methods, enjoyed similar status among their peers, and inspired comparable fears from African American residents. Detective William Grosch specialized in “the ride” and frequently threatened, tortured, and killed suspects at the location where Sergeant Smith shot Charles Sims. African American residents often heard him “bragging about it in the streets.”61 Grosch and his partner fatally shot eight suspects and were called the “killer twins.”62 His younger brother, John, who rose to the rank of chief of detectives, specialized in flogging suspects and became known as “Third Degree Grosch.”63 He, too, publicly boasted about beating suspects until they confessed, telling the local Rotary Club that “there is only one way to handle criminals, and I handle them that way.”64 Coerced confessions, nearly always admitted by the courts, generated soaring racial disparities in convictions and executions. Between the early 1920s and the early 1930s, the white homicide conviction rate contracted by 10.9%, while the African American rate swelled by 113%, shifting from being slightly lower to being double the white rate. Confessions extracted with threats and torture transformed capital punishment as well. Between 1920 and 1933, African Americans comprised half of the killers sent to the gallows. But from 1934 to 1945, they made up 100% of those executed. Shifts in New Orleans policemen’s use of lethal force reflected the same pivot. During the late 1920s, African American suspects comprised 34.4% of those fatally shot by municipal cops. By the early 1940s, the figure had mushroomed to 85.7%. Highlighting policemen’s emerging role as defenders of the racial order, the proportion of white-on-black killings committed by policemen tripled between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, soaring from 21.1% to 65.4%. The rate of police homicide against African American New Orleanians swelled to six times the comparable level for whites by the early 1940s.65 The “triggers” for the use of deadly force changed as well. White victims were felony suspects. Most possessed guns, and the proportion suspected of being robbers or burglars rose from 40% during the late 1920s to 100% during the early 1940s. Local cops increasingly killed African 67

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American for more ambiguous reasons. The proportion of suspected robbers or burglars dropped from one-third to one-sixth. Instead, policemen employed lethal force against African Americans suspected of misdemeanors, particularly engaging in disorderly conduct or suspicious behavior. “The killing of innocent Negroes by policemen is no graver an offense than killing a rat or an insect,” an African American observer complained.66 With increasing frequency, New Orleans law enforcers shot African American residents who made furtive movements. Patrolman Peter Fos, for example, killed Harold Martin because the latter “placed his hand into his right hip pocket as if to draw a weapon,” while Patrolman Charles Shadrock shot Winston Thomas when the African American laborer made a “hip-pocket move.”67 Yet death-scene investigations revealed that 83.4% of these police homicide victims possessed no firearms. An African American editor charged that cops employed this “excuse” to justify their lethal actions when they killed residents who had committed no crime and possessed no weapon, since the furtive-movement explanation was impossible to refute.68 But such an effort was largely unnecessary, for white grand jurors casually supported local cops. One juror, for instance, commented that “this was a case of a policeman shooting a ‘nigger,’ and that was all right.”69 The impact of police violence, however, far exceeded the body count. Just as the Grosch brothers publicly boasted of their wanton use of third-degree methods against African Americans, many cops freely announced—and exaggerated—their quick resort to deadly force. After shooting an African American suspect in the shoulder, Patrolman Lawrence Terrebone bellowed “it is not my custom to shoot a ‘Nigger’ once and stop. I always follow the first shot with a second one, and the second shot means another dead ‘Nigger’; I’ve killed three ‘Niggers’ already, and you’re lucky you’re not the fourth.”70 Similarly, Patrolman David Marks crowed that he had fatally shot thirteen African American New Orleanians.71 Although Terrebone committed no such killings and Marks employed lethal violence once, their bluster, like that of the Groschs, had the desired effect, instilling fear in African American residents.72 Throughout the region, law enforcers employed this performative intimidation method.73 The police embrace of violence as a crime-fighting tool transformed the local criminal justice system. Remnants of rough justice persisted, and New Orleans’s legal institutions remained anemic. But racial disparities in arrests, coercive interrogations, convictions, incarcerations, and executions exploded when the police became the guardians of white supremacy and when police violence against African Americans became a core component of the Southern version of the rule of law. Cops throughout the region adopted similar strategies and with comparable effects.74 The early twentieth-century pivot in the function of the police both succeeded and failed. On the one hand, police brutality enjoyed new legitimacy, at least in the eyes of many southern whites. It jettisoned the taint of mob violence, and “law and order” became (and for some remains) a euphemism and a justification for state-sanctioned violent racial control. On the other hand, such brutality unleashed a powerful backlash, mobilizing the African American community and launching the city’s and region’s civil rights movement.75 ∗∗∗ Charles Sims’s 1941 nightmare reflected a new model of southern policing. In contrast to earlier law-enforcement violence, in which cops typically dispensed summary punishment in response to breaches of racial etiquette, Sims’s beating and shooting at the hands of Sergeant Smith was purposeful and committed during a criminal investigation. Similar acts of law-enforcement brutality erupted throughout the region during the interwar period, often during interrogations. Police violence became more frequent, more race-based, more deadly, and was increasingly defended as lawful crime fighting. Operating under the guise of crime control, the New Orleans law enforcers, and their counterparts throughout the Jim Crow South, became a bulwark for racial control. Policemen enforcing the regional racial hierarchy was not new. In blending crime control with racial control, however, interwar 68

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cops employed the former to mask and justify the latter. Ironically, the rule of law served ideological goals, protecting white supremacy and recasting the torture of African Americans as legal reform.76 Invoking the rule of law to justify police brutality offered a facade for state-directed racial terrorism. Like other forms of terrorism, the violence was episodic but could erupt anywhere and anytime, imposing on African American Southerners constant vulnerability and an unpredictability that cops exploited and brazenly conveyed to instill fear.77 Not every patrolman or detective was violent, and most were not, though any policeman could be as sadistic as James Burns or as murderous as William Grosch and could beat, torture, or murder African Americans with virtual impunity. African Americans’ individual behavior, as Charles Sims discovered, mattered little. Rather, in the eyes of many law enforcers, their racial identity defined them as threats to law and order, making every African American Southerner a potential victim of this terrorist violence. Early twentieth-century ethnographers, in New Orleans and throughout the region, described this terrorist law-enforcement strategy. In his study of Indianola, Mississippi, the psychologist John Dollard explained that “it is not too serious a matter” if policemen brutalized an innocent person, “since the warning is even more clear” if it targeted a non-criminal. “The negro caste is punished through one of its representatives … . What matters most is the fear,” Dollard added, of “not knowing when or how the danger may appear.”78 A New Orleans detective offered a similar analysis of crime fighting as racial terrorism, reporting that “even when they when they are not violating the laws, these Negroes are very, very scared and afraid of the police.”79 With the increasing migration of African Americans from the Deep South to the industrial North, in combination with later crime panics, the elision of racial control and crime control spread and infected law enforcement across the nation. In sum, interwar law-and-order criminal justice provided a modern, seemingly justifiable mechanism for employing racial violence in the service of sustaining the racial hierarchy. This represented a form of state-directed terrorism. It deployed isolated acts of extreme, unpredictable violence to instill fear in a sizable segment of the population, for the “bluecoated terror” cloaked the defense of white supremacy in the purported rule of law.

Notes 1 Charles Sims, “Account Concerning his Shooting by Sergeant Smith,” August 16, 1941, Papers of the Louisiana League for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights, Harold Newton Lee Papers, HowardTilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA [hereafter “Louisiana League Papers”]. 2 “Another Suspect Sought Here in Torture Slaying,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 7, 1941, 2. 3 “Case of Charles Sims,” October 22, 1942, Louisiana League Papers. 4 “Case of Charles Sims,” October 22, 1942, Louisiana League Papers. 5 Harold N. Lee to George Reyer, May 14, 1942, Louisiana League Papers. 6 “Two Exonerated in Shooting, Reyer Tells Lee,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 26, 1942, 12. 7 Harold N. Lee to John Fluery, May 29, 1942, Louisiana League Papers. 8 “Case of Charles Sims,” October 22, 1942, Louisiana League Papers. 9 John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1937); Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941). 10 “Charge Two, Though Scores Were Put in Hoosegow for Night,” Louisiana Weekly August 3, 1940, 1. 11 Sarah Olutola, “The History of Racist Colonial Violence Can Help Us Understand Police Violence,” https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177152; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “The Origins of Policing in America,” https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177508. 12 See Nick Gillespie, “Washington Post Journalist Radley Balko on Civil Rights, Militarized Policing, and the Power of Video,” https://reason.com/2020/09/07/washington-post-journalist-radley-balko-on-civilright-militarized-policing-and-the-power-of-video/. 13 Homicide case files and witness interview transcripts have survived. “Homicide Reports,” New Orleans Police Department, City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA [hereafter “Homicide Reports”] and “Transcripts of Statements of Witnesses to Homicides,” New Orleans Police Department, City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA [hereafter “Statements of Witnesses”]. For

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14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

more on these sources, see Jeffrey S. Adler, Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 183–191. Unless otherwise indicated, the quantitative evidence in this essay draws from a dataset using these records. Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Pantheon, 1944), 532; Michael J. Pfiefer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 139. Convict leasing and prisons also played a role, though rough justice remained at the core of racial control. Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, 500; Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 541. “Policeman Dismissed for Tying, Shooting at Girl,” New Orleans Item, November 28, 1924, 1. “Report of Homicide of George Simmons,” January 10, 1931, Homicide Reports. “Negro Mourner at Wake is Shot by Drunken Cop,” Baton Rouge Advocate, December 28, 1930, 20. “Policemen’s Sport,” Louisiana Weekly, March 20, 1926, 6. Pfiefer, Rough Justice, 139–47. Monroe N. Work, ed., Negro Year Book: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, 1931–32 (Tuskegee: Tuskegee Institute Press, 1931), 295–96. “White Boy, 8, Murdered by a Negro Lad Below Algiers,” New Orleans Item, March 16, 1925, 1; Silvan Niedermeier, “Forced Confessions: Police Torture and the African American Struggle for Civil Rights in the 1930s and 1940s South,” in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, ed., Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 64. Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 144–47. “Big Knives and Pistol Found on Negro Pair by Observing Police Officer,” New Orleans Item, January 2, 1921, 5. Adler, Murder in New Orleans, 103–34. St. Clair Adams, “Delays Now Strangling Justice in New Orleans’ Criminal Courts,” New Orleans Item, May 8, 1925, 8. Adler, Murder in New Orleans, 103–32. Frederick L. Hoffman, “The Homicide Record for 1925,” The Spectator 116 (April 1, 1926): 4, 37–38. “Murders, Suicides Increase in 1921,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 1, 1922, 20. African Americans committed two-thirds of homicides, though the white murder rate far exceeded that in Northern cities. “Our Police and Crime,” New Orleans Item, October 28, 1925, 12. “Ray Warns City Thuggery Looms Under Behrman,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 26, 1925, 25; “Our Police and Crime,” New Orleans Item, October 28, 1925, 12. “Vows Policy of Action as Police Chief,” New Orleans Item, May 13, 1925. “Police Squads Proficient with Guns,” New Orleans States, April 7, 1930, 1; “How to Kill Bandits to be Taught Police,” New Orleans Item, October 28, 1925, 1. “Bandits, Beware,” New Orleans Item, July 10, 1929, 1. Silvan Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). “Physical Examinations Urged for ‘Confessors,” New Orleans States, April 22, 1933, 3. “Third Degree Case,” New Orleans States, May 13, 1932, 6. “High Homicide Record Here Due to Large Black Population,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 24, 1924, 2. For a related analysis, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Pamela Tyler, Silk Stockings & Ballot Boxes: Women & Politics in New Orleans, 1920–1965 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 28. The shift reflected cultural assumptions, and capital punishment did not simply replace mob violence, for there was no correlation between surges in executions and drops in lynchings. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 108, 111. “Police Discipline and Morale,” in Aaron M. Kohn, “Report of the Special Citizens Investigating Committee of the Commission Council of New Orleans,” New Orleans Police Department, vol. III, April, 1954, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University Library, New Orleans, LA (typescript), 113.

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“Killers Who Hide Behind Badges” 45 “‘Iron Claw,’ Used to Quell Unruly Prisoners, Shown,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 20, 1933, 5; “He Wouldn’t Talk,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 18, 1937, 23. 46 “Johnson Saved, But Gets Life Imprisonment,” Louisiana Weekly, August 30, 1930, 1. 47 James B. LaFourche, “11-Year-Old Witness Tells Court Cops Beat Him and Promised Him Bicycle for Lie,” Louisiana Weekly, May 15, 1937, 1. 48 “Testimony of Ed Brown,” in the trial transcript of Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278 (1936), 43. 49 “Crime is Curbed by ‘Third Degree,’ Asserts Grosch,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 1, 1939, 1. 50 Joseph H. Fichter, “Police Handling of Arrestees: A Research Study of Police Arrests in New Orleans” (unpublished report: Department of Sociology, Loyola University of the South, 1964), 32; Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 535–41. 51 Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper, 1943), 299; Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree, 38. 52 “Stanley is Pledged to a Relentless War on Crime,” New Orleans Item, May 4, 1930, 18. 53 “Against Third Degree,” New Orleans States, June 3, 1933, 4. 54 “Reyer Orders Full Probe of Third Degree,” New Orleans States, March 17, 1933, 2. 55 “Police Beating Case Soon Ready for Trial,” New Orleans Item, May 16, 1933, 11. 56 “Reported Cruelty Arouses Protests,” New Orleans Times Picayune, April 19, 1933, 19. 57 “2 Detectives are Found Guilty,” Louisiana Weekly, June 3, 1933, 7. 58 “21st Amendment Study by Special Session is Urged,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 27, 1933, 2. 59 “Torture Laid to Policeman,” New Orleans Item, December 1, 1929, 4. 60 “Court Dismisses Torture Complaint Against Police,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, December 7, 1929, 2. 61 “On Trial, Lads’ Bodies Show Cuts, Bruises; Await Verdict,” Louisiana Weekly, July 31, 1937, 4. 62 “The ‘Hot Tamale’ Decision,” Louisiana Weekly, November 8, 1941, 10. 63 “Labor Hearing in C.I.O. Row is Continued,” Baton Rouge State Times Advocate, July1, 1938, 6. 64 “Grosch Upholds ‘Third Degree’ Use by Police,” Baton Rouge Advocate, June 1, 1939, 1. 65 The region had a seven-fold gap. Niedermeier, “Forced Confessions,” 61. 66 “Not Guilty,” Louisiana Weekly, May 30, 1931, 6. 67 “Report of Homicide of Harold Joseph Martin,” January 25, 1945, Homicide Reports; “Hip-Pocket Move Brings Death to Attack Suspect,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 18, 1939, 12. 68 “Not Guilty,” Louisiana Weekly, May 30, 1931, 6. 69 Harold N. Lee to Henry A. Scheinhaut, October 22, 1942, Louisiana League Papers. 70 “Second Man Shot at Gentilly,” Louisiana Weekly, August 12, 1933, 4. 71 Quoted in Christina Metcalf, “Race Relations and the New Orleans Police Department, 1900–1972” (Honor Thesis, Tulane University, 1985), 39. 72 “Testimony of Harry J. Daniels,” in Kohn, “Report of the Special Citizens Investigating Committee.” 73 Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree, 35. 74 Neidermeier, The Color of the Third Degree, 14–38. 75 Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Leonard N. Moore, Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree, 64. 76 Amy Louise Wood, “Cole Blease’s Pardoning Pen: State Power and Penal Reform in South Carolina,” in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, ed., Wood and Ring, 150; Vivien Miller, “Hanging, the Electric Chair, and Death Penalty Reform in the Early Twentieth-Century South,” in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, ed., Wood and Ring, 184. 77 John A. Lynn II, Another Kind of War: The Nature and History of Terrorism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 5. 78 Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 359, 361. 79 “Testimony of Harry J. Daniels,” in Kohn, “Report of the Special Citizens Investigating Committee.”

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SECTION 2

Police Brutality and Unionism in the United States

6 POLICING THE NINETEENTHCENTURY AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT Matthew Hild

The American labor movement grew slowly during the early and mid-nineteenth century. Boisterous labor demonstrations were rare and violent ones even less common. But as the labor movement grew, strikers sometimes became unruly, and police intervention and suppression began to occur. For much of the nineteenth century, such clashes were more an exception than the norm. This started to change during the Gilded Age, as the labor movement expanded rapidly along with American industrialization. Beginning with the “Great Upheaval” of 1877, clashes between strikers and police forces not only became more common, but increasingly would end with the arrival of state militiamen or federal troops. By the end of the century, some American labor leaders had come to fear large strikes because of the likelihood that they would be brutally and bloodily crushed by the forces of “law and order.” In New York City, as documented by Sean Wilentz, confrontations between police forces and striking or demonstrating workers occurred as early as 1825, when riggers, stevedores, and wharf laborers struck over wages. A biracial assemblage of over 1,000 of them marched to the Manhattan port and shut it down. Police soon arrived, dispersed the strikers, and reopened the port. Three years later, journeymen weavers in Manhattan struck for higher wages. They threatened the city’s largest textile employer, Alexander Knox, by throwing a projectile through his window with a note attached, demanding that he “either quit the bus[i]ness or else pay the price [higher wages].” When several days passed with no response, some 40 or 50 wavers (not employees of Knox) visited his home to reiterate their demand as well as to threaten to destroy his machinery if he did not comply. A “gang” of weavers then invaded Knox’s shop, where they proceeded to make good on the threat and prevented his journeymen from working. Knox’s son and a few policemen soon found the gang, “only to be throttled by the crowd,” according to Wilentz.1 In 1850, the tailors—the largest trade in New York City at the time—went on strike over wages and working conditions. By then, as the result of a law passed by the state legislature in 1844, the city now had a well-organized, professional police force. During the summer, large numbers of tailors marched to firms that paid below scale wages; at least 19 of these marches took place without violence. But on July 22, a rock fight broke out between tailors working in a shop and the demonstrators outside. Two policemen who had been on watch in anticipation of the strikers’ arrival alerted other policemen, and in a matter of minutes an entire detachment of officers showed up and began beating strikers with night sticks and arresting them.2 Two weeks later, about 300 tailors were marching through the Garment District to confront two subcontractors who were allegedly hiring out work below scale. At the corner of West 38th Street DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-9

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and Ninth Avenue, a large phalanx of policemen blocked their path and attacked with clubs. By the time the tailors gave up and departed, at least two of them had been killed. Dozens of them suffered severe injuries, and 40 were placed under arrest. A handful of policemen emerged with injuries, too, such as knife wounds and bruises. “For the first time,” according to Wilentz, “urban American workers had been slain by the forces of order in a trade dispute.”3 Ten years later, shoemakers in Lynn and Natick, Massachusetts—and, subsequently, throughout New England—went on strike for higher wages. The strike, which began in early February 1860, drew the participation of reportedly almost 20,000 workers.4 Not long after the strike began, skirmishes broke out between shoemakers and city marshals in Lynn. The mayor and other city officials, under pressure from the city’s manufacturers, then turned to higher authorities for assistance. On February 24, 1860, “shoemakers arose with dawning amazement to find their community occupied by outside police and armed militia.” Not surprisingly, these outsiders met with a harsh reception from the shoemakers and other locals, as, according to Alan Dawley, they were “hounded by hoots and hisses, pelted by stones and brickbats, … ran the gauntlet of a hostile crowd, participated in a ‘general melee in which several of the crowd were knocked down,’ and finally ended their tumultuous trek through town at the railroad depot in Central Square where it had begun.”5 The mayor issued a proclamation “stating that the laws will be enforced, and all riotous and tumultuous assemblages suppressed.” Three or four rioters were arrested on the 24th, and they were each held on an impossibly high bail of $4,000 (equivalent to about $125,000 in 2021).6 Female shoemakers played an active role in the strike, staging demonstrations and parades. This fact, unusual in the strikes of that era, may have limited the level of violent suppression brought to bear by police and militia forces. Some employers soon granted the strikers’ demands for higher wages. But the strike proved only partially successful, for the employers refused to grant the shoemakers’ union recognition.7 In the local elections in the fall of 1860, however, Lynn workingmen “captured nearly every seat on the board of aldermen and city council, elected a shoemaker mayor, and placed their strike leaders in charge of the local police force.”8 Clearly, efforts at police repression proved to be of limited effectiveness in this strike, which was the biggest in United States history to that point. After the Civil War, the ranks of organized labor in the United States grew considerably. The National Labor Union, described by historian Bruce Laurie as “a congress of trade unions and sympathetic reformers,” emerged in 1866 and lasted until 1875. By then, a much more inclusive, larger, and less short-lived organization, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, was in the process of becoming the largest union that the nation had ever seen. The Order claimed nearly 750,000 members in 1886, and its actual membership may have been about one million.9 The Knights of Labor played little direct role, however, in what Jeremy Brecher has called “the first great American mass strike, a movement that was viewed at the time as a violent rebellion”: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. This strike started on July 16 of that year in Martinsburg, West Virginia, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages by 10%, which was the company’s second wage reduction in eight months. When a cattle train pulled in that evening, the crew walked off, and other workers “uncoupled the engines, ran them into the roundhouse, and announced to B&O officials that no trains would leave Martinsburg until the pay cut was rescinded.” When the mayor arrived and met with a hostile reception from the strikers (and a growing crowd of supporters), he ordered the policemen who had arrived to arrest the strike leaders, but the angry crowd made them think better of it. At the behest of B&O officials, Governor Henry Matthews sent state militiamen to get the trains running again, but this only led to violence—a striker and a soldier were both fatally shot—and the militia soon withdrew.10 As the strike spread to (or, in some cases, began simultaneously and independently in) other cities, the effectiveness of police forces in suppressing it varied. In Baltimore, B&O management succeeded in using strikebreakers to keep the trains running while the city police force chased away strikers. 76

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The strikers regrouped in the days ahead, though, and clashed with as many as 500 policemen, who on several occasions opened fire, as well as state militiamen and ultimately Army troops sent by President Hayes. At least 15 people perished in the violence by the time the strike ended.11 In at least one city where railroad workers joined the Great Strike of 1877, the police bargained with the strikers in order to maintain peace and prevent the destruction of property. In Albany, New York, the police chief addressed a meeting of strikers and promised to circulate a petition, with the support of the mayor and other “influential citizens,” requesting that New York Central Railroad owner and president William H. Vanderbilt rescind the July 1 pay cut that lay at the heart of the dispute. In return, the police chief asked the strikers to return to work and “quietly await the action of Mr. Vanderbilt upon his receipt of their petition.” Many of the strikers complied. Ultimately, Vanderbilt refused to budge, the strike was lost, and an act of sabotage cause a train passing through East Albany to end up on the wrong track and to crash into an old roundhouse.12 In some southern cities, the Great Strike of 1877 drew participation from African Americans, which not surprisingly for that era meant less support from the local community. In Louisville, Kentucky, white railroad workers did not strike; instead, a delegation of skilled railmen met with the president of the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad, E.D. Standiford, and negotiated the restoration of wage cuts. Black workers, however, in a variety of occupations, “did not have access to those same means of negotiation and redress.” They instead took the lead in a general strike, and, drawing some participation from whites, too, led “an integrated crowd of five or six hundred people … down Seventh Street toward the L&N Railroad Depot.” The parade turned into a riot, as one demonstrator hurled a rock through the window of a sewing machine factory, and then rioters began breaking street lamps and all of the windows at the railroad depot. From there, the rioters went to the home of L&N President Standiford, breaking all the windows and damaging furniture. While the family hid upstairs, rioters also ransacked the homes of other prominent white citizens and broke windows and engaged in looting at grocery and liquor stores, confectionery shops, hotels, and drugstores.13 Finally, Louisville city policemen met up with the rioters; the police had the backing of a hastily assembled special militia, which consisted largely of local white workers. (A few African American men apparently joined too, though, serving under Captain Isaac Calvert, who may have been a veteran of the U.S. Colored Troops.) Policemen fired when the crowd appeared to be on the verge of torching the Short Line Railroad Depot, but the rioters fled and no one was injured. During the days that followed, the police and special militia arrested “both black and white men on charges of disorderly conduct.” More strikes, by workers of both races, followed, but within a week the demonstrations and strikes were over. “The strikes ended,” according to historian Shannon M. Smith, “with no overwhelming victory for either labor or capital.” One long-term consequence followed, though: the creation of new State Guard units in Kentucky, including the Louisville Legion.14 Not surprisingly, since the railroad industry was the nation’s largest during the latter half of the nineteenth century (and remained so until World War II), railroad strikes would continue to occur frequently throughout the Gilded Age. Many of these strikes were local in nature, and therefore local police would be in charge of dealing with them. For example, in April 1883, brakemen on the Iron Mountain Railroad in Little Rock, Arkansas, went on strike after the company reduced the number of brakemen per train from three to two, which would result in one-third of the brakemen being laid off. The strikers tried to block rail traffic just north of the city. Railroad company officials retaliated by immediately firing all of them—ultimately, about 60 to 75 brakemen lost their jobs—and a Pulaski County deputy sheriff arrested six strikers, a total that reached about 15 by the time the strike ended. Police and railroad detectives crushed the strike within a couple of days.15 In 1884, the Knights of Labor began a series of successful strikes against railroad companies: two against the Union Pacific that year, followed by successful strikes the following year against Jay Gould’s Southwest (or Southwestern) System and the Wabash Railroad. The success of the 1885 strikes in particular accounted in large part for the enormous growth of the Knights of Labor during 77

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the year that followed.16 But when the Knights began another strike on the Southwest System in 1886, Gould was much better prepared; indeed, some historians have contended that he deliberately provoked the strike so as to rid himself of the union.17 This strike lasted for about two months, from March to May, and its outcome proved to be one of the reasons for the Knights of Labor’s sudden reversal of fortune beginning around the middle of 1886. According to the most recent study of the strike, its failure stemmed from a host of factors, including a lack of solidarity across the large Southwest System and between skilled and less skilled workers, a lack of public support for the strike, and particularly the unprecedented use of injunctions on the Missouri Pacific.18 In Texas, the Democratic governor and judges and sheriffs helped break the strike. Extra deputies and special police hired by the railroads assisted as well. In St. Louis, policemen participated in efforts to get the trains running again. In Little Rock, the Knights of Labor initially convinced the sheriff to deputize seven of its members so that they could help prevent anyone from damaging railroad property. But when Iron Mountain Railroad management attempted to run the trains, exchanges of gunfire left a member of the Knights wounded in the leg and a deputy seriously (although not fatally) wounded. The sheriff promptly revoked the deputy commissions that he had given to the seven union members. The strike resulted in at least nine arrests in Little Rock.19 On the same day that the Southwest Strike officially ended—May 4, 1886—the Knights of Labor and the American labor movement suffered an even larger, and more tragic, setback in Chicago. In early 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor, which was formed later that year) began promoting a nationwide strike on May 1 for the eight-hour day. The eight-hour day had been a goal of labor reformers at least since the formation of the National Labor Union twenty years earlier. The national leader of the Knights of Labor, General Master Workman Terence V. Powderly, opposed the suggestion, but many within his organization supported it. Some 340,000 workers across the nation participated in the strike, with degrees of success in some cases. In Chicago, however, a strike-lockout at the McCormick Reaper Works, where many workers belonged to the United Metal Workers and/or the Knights of Labor, erupted in violence on May 3, when about 200 policemen attacked strikers with clubs and fired at them with pistols, reportedly because the strikers had attacked strikebreakers who were leaving the factory at the end of the workday. The police killed, according to varying reports, from four to six workers. August Spies, a leading Chicago anarchist and a member of the Knights of Labor who had been speaking in front of the McCormick plant when the violence occurred, called for a protest march and rally at Haymarket Square to be held on the following night.20 The May 4 meeting began at 7:30. Approximately 1,500 people heard the first speaker, Albert R. Parsons, a well-known anarchist labor leader and member of the Knights of Labor. The crowd had thinned a bit by the time the final speaker, stone hauler Samuel Fielden, began his remarks. “Defend yourselves, your lives, your futures,” he exhorted the working-class audience as a phalanx of 176 policemen approached. The commanding officer yelled, “In the name of the law, I command you to disperse.” No sooner did Fielden reply, “We are peaceable,” than a dynamite bomb went flying through the air. It landed in the middle of the street along which the police were approaching and exploded. The police responded by firing into the crowd. Within moments, those demonstrators who were able to flee the scene did so. One policeman had been killed and almost 70 wounded. Official reports said that one member of the crowd had been killed and 12 wounded, but the actual number of wounded was probably more like 60 or 70. Some people who were wounded that night died soon thereafter. The Haymarket Riot dealt severe blows to the eight-hour movement, the Knights of Labor, and the American labor movement generally.21 After the Haymarket Riot, police suppression of strikes became more common and more consistent, as did the use of state militia, which had been utilized in squelching the second Southwest Strike. Sometimes militia (or state National Guard) units and police forces would be used in 78

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conjunction, as in the crushing of a strike by Knights of Labor dockhands at Newport News, Virginia, in January 1887. In that case, most of the strikers were African American, so Virginia governor Fitzhugh Lee (who had been joined on the podium by Terence V. Powderly and an African American delegate at the Knights of Labor national General Assembly meeting at Richmond in October 1886) sent African American National Guardsmen to the scene following a violent confrontation between strikers and strikebreakers. In this instance, a Knights of Labor committee negotiated a settlement that was not all that favorable to the strikers, but nevertheless city police and “special deputies” remained at the docks after the strike ended.22 Later that year, police and militia units engaged in the brutal, violent suppression of an overwhelmingly African American labor force of Louisiana sugar cane cutters who waged a strike for higher wages under the auspices of the Knights of Labor. The slaughter not only crushed the strike but also left approximately 60 African Americans dead.23 While the Thibodaux Massacre was the worst episode of its kind in the late-nineteenth-century South, it was not an isolated occurrence. In Pulaski County, Arkansas, 30 or more African American farmhands, men and women, struck under the aegis of the Knights of Labor on Thursday, July 1, 1886. They wanted a raise from 75 cents to one dollar per day and payment in cash rather than scrip. Members of the Knights of Labor from nearby Little Rock brought meat, flour, and meal to the strikers as they remained on the plantation over the weekend. On Monday, July 5, at five o’clock in the morning, Sheriff Robert Worthen (who had recently had dealings with the Knights of Labor in the second Southwest Strike) came to the plantation with several deputies. The officers approached the house of one of the strike leaders, Hugh Gill, “called him out of bed and to the door,” and then one of the deputies shot him with a double-barreled shotgun, wounding him in both arms. When this news spread throughout Pulaski County, about 250 African American men, many of them armed, came to the scene. Worthen and his deputies remained inside Gill’s house and sent out word for a posse to be sent from Little Rock. When the posse of 27 men arrived on the evening of July 5, some of its members fired shots. Some newspaper accounts reported that the strikers fired shots as well, but Arkansas Knights of Labor State Master Workman E.H. Ritchie claimed that the strikers, under the guidance of local Knights leaders D.F. Tomson (white) and G.W. Merriman (black), “refused to return fire, … preferring death rather than to violate the law or resort to violence.” No one was seriously hurt that evening, but the posse succeeded in dispersing many of the African American men at the plantation. On July 7, the strike ended, as most of the strikers returned to work without their demands being met.24 Police repression would be brought to bear against a strike by African American farmworkers in rural Arkansas with deadlier results five years later. In September 1891, R.M. Humphrey, the president of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, issued a call for a strike of African American cotton pickers after planters in some parts of the South, including Memphis and Charleston. South Carolina, held conventions at which they decided to pay pickers no more than 50 cents per 100 pounds. When Humphrey encountered significant opposition to this proposal within the ranks of the Colored Alliance on the well-founded ground that such a strike would be dangerous, he formed a splinter group called the Cotton Pickers League to facilitate the strike. He then declared that more than one million pickers would go on strike on September 12. Historian William F. Holmes suggested, however, that in all likelihood “the majority of cotton pickers—most of whom were illiterate—never knew of the proposed strike.”25 In most parts of the South the strike never materialized, but in a few isolated instances it did, most notably (and tragically) in Lee County, Arkansas. The Knights of Labor had been active in Lee County from 1885 until at least as late as 1890, and while no evidence establishes that organization’s involvement in the strike, it may have laid a foundation for black labor protest. An African American labor organizer from Memphis named Ben Patterson apparently started organizing efforts in Lee County in early September 1891, but local blacks soon assumed control of the movement. The results, however, proved disastrous. The Lee County strike began on September 20, and five days 79

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later strikers killed two pickers on a plantation where the pickers refused to join the strike. Three days later, strikers killed a white plantation manager. By that time, the county sheriff already had formed a posse and launched a manhunt for Patterson and other strike leaders. Whites from neighboring Crittenden County swelled the posse’s ranks, and deputy sheriffs from Phillips County, just to the south of Lee County, also joined. By the beginning of October, the strike came to a dismal conclusion, after the posse had killed fourteen strikers and Patterson. The strike and its brutal suppression also essentially destroyed the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, which fell into a rapid and irreversible decline.26 While the Lee County cotton pickers strike ranks among the era’s deadliest, it received far less national attention (and has received far less in history books) than the two infamous industrial strikes that followed during the next three years. “Never before,” wrote labor historians Melvyn Dubofsky and Foster Rhea Dulles, “had labor and capital been engaged in such organized private warfare as would develop at Homestead in 1892, nor had the public ever become more alarmed over the dangers of industrial strife than during the great Pullman strike two years later.”27 Andrew Carnegie and his steel company’s chairman, Henry Clay Frick, precipitated the Homestead Strike (which was actually more of a lockout) in order to rid the Homestead steel plant of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. A previous attempt to do so three years earlier had failed, despite aid from the local sheriff and private detectives hired by the company. “The posse taken up by the sheriff—something over 100 men—were not permitted to land on our property; were driven off with threats of bodily harm, and it looked as if there was to be great destruction of life and property.”28 Months in advance of the June 30, 1892 expiration of Carnegie Steel’s contract with the Amalgamated, Carnegie had resolved to make his plant nonunion at that time. As the deadline approached, Frick announced wage cuts and the company’s intention “to deal with our men individually.”29 As Andrew Carnegie left for a vacation in his native Scotland, Frick, under his boss’s advice, turned the steelworks into a fortress, surrounded by a 12-foot-high fence with three-inch holes at a suitable height for riflemen every 25 feet and three strands of barbed wire along the top. The steelworkers dubbed it “Fort Frick.” While Frick contacted the Pinkerton Detective Agency for 300 “guards” to be sent to Homestead, the strikers maintained a presence near the idled steel plant, keeping an eye out for scabs as well as anyone who might undermine their cause by damaging the company’s property. On the morning of July 5, Allegheny County Sheriff William H. McCleary attempted to carry out Frick’s request that the strikers be cleared from the vicinity of the plant. But McCleary could not find enough men to do the job; he was “powerless.”30 One day later, on July 6, 1892, the infamous clash between the strikers and the Pinkertons occurred, resulting in the deaths of nine strikers and seven Pinkertons, and hundreds of men being wounded or injured. When the smoke cleared, the strikers still controlled the plant, but Sheriff McCleary repeatedly requested that Governor Robert Pattison send the state militia to Homestead. Pattison refused at first, but under pressure from fellow Republicans and Frick, he changed his mind. Between 8,000 and 8,500 militiamen arrived on July 12. No further bloodshed occurred (except for a failed attempt to assassinate Frick), but the strike was crushed.31 In 1893, the U.S. economy suffered another “panic”—one of the financial collapses that occurred about once every 20 years during the nineteenth century—and the worst depression that the nation had ever experienced ensued. Hundreds of banks and thousands of businesses went under, and unemployment reached a rate of about 20%.32 The hard times, which for many workers who kept their jobs were exacerbated by wage cuts, sparked massive labor unrest. Between half a million and 750,000 American workers went on strike in 1894, even more than during the “Great Upheaval” of 1886.33 This large number of strikers included some 125,000 coal miners across the nation who walked off the job during the spring of 1894. Police forces, including newly sworn-in deputies, played a key 80

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role in breaking the strike. Near Connellsville, Pennsylvania, some 2,000 strikers tried to keep strikebreakers from entering the mines on May 24. They seemed to have succeeded, when suddenly about 75 deputies “rushed out” from their encampment near the mines. A deputy fired the first shot, and while the deputies were vastly outnumbered, they were much better armed. “The strikers,” reported the New York Times, “were unable to endure the deadly fire and fled down the public road. The deputies followed closely upon them, and continued firing at them. The narrow defile of the road prevented the strikers from scattering or getting away from them.” The deputies kept chasing and shooting. Four strikers “were instantly killed and twelve or fifteen were wounded,” the Times reported. “Some of these are dangerously hurt and will die.” The deputies arrested 66 strikers. Four deputies were wounded.34 Ultimately, concluded labor historian Bruce Laurie, “repeated clashes with local police and militiamen ended the strike and nearly brought down the UMW.”35 While that epic conflict between labor and capital (and, on the side of the latter, law enforcement) was gradually coming to an end, an even larger one began, one that “would make Chicago the chief site of the most significant power struggle between capital and labor in industrial America.”36 Some 4,000 workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company—more than 90% of its workforce—struck on May 11, 1894, over significant wage cuts, the company’s refusal to lower rent in the housing that its workers rented, and the continued payment of high salaries to foremen and officers and quarterly dividends to stockholders. The strike soon grew into a nationwide boycott by the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, of all trains carrying Pullman cars. The General Managers’ Association (GMA), a consortium of 24 railroads with terminals in Chicago, beseeched the Grover Cleveland administration, particularly Attorney General Richard Olney, who had been for many years a lawyer for railroad companies, to send troops to Chicago. “If it takes every dollar in the Treasury and every soldier in the United States Army to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card shall be delivered,” Cleveland said in granting the GMA’s request.37 By the second week of July 1894, 2,000 federal troops were in Chicago. “Even larger numbers of federal marshals, militiamen, police, and private railroad guards were on duty, and though martial law was not declared, Chicago seemed to many a war zone,” according to historian David Ray Papke. “The boycott also resulted in violence, rioting, and the use of federal troops outside of Chicago.”38 On July 7, soldiers fired upon a crowd, leaving at least four strikers dead and about 20 wounded, while military officers arrested Debs and other strike leaders. By the beginning of August, the number of strikers who had been killed reached 13, with more than 50 others wounded, and the strike ended in failure. The strike ended similarly elsewhere, too. In Arkansas, Governor William Fishback sent state militiamen to Little Rock and Fort Smith, although the strike at least ended with little bloodshed in those cities.39 The suppression of the Homestead and Pullman strikes marked a turning point away from local police dealing with strikes in favor of state and federal troops. Of course, police brutality against strikers did not disappear though. During the summer and fall of 1897, the UMWA began organizing coal miners, many of them of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian origin or descent, in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. When the miners struck and marched to the mining town of Lattimer, the Luzerne County sheriff and his deputies tried to stop them. By the time the strikers reached Lattimer, their ranks consisted of about 400 men. As they neared the colliery, deputies suddenly opened fire, killing 19 miners and wounding about 38 others. “The men who died,” notes historian Paul A. Shackel, “were all foreign born and unnaturalized.”40 By this point, however, the violent suppression of strikes by local police forces was less the norm than what happened during miners’ strikes in the Couer d’Alene mining district of northern Idaho in 1892 and 1899. When the first of those strikes occurred, and violence broke out between miners and armed guards who were protecting scabs, Governor N.B. Willey, a Republican, declared martial law and sent what one historian has described as “an unenthusiastic militia” to the district. When Willey realized that the militia would not or could not crush the strike, he requested that 81

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President Cleveland send federal troops. That achieved Willey’s desired goal. The Army removed the local sheriff and marshal, whom miners had elected, and installed a company doctor, despised by most of the miners, as sheriff. An Army colonel shut down two mines that were still utilizing union men, supposedly because “union men used them as a meeting place.” Troops arrested more than 500 miners and many of their supporters, imprisoning them in barbed-wire enclosed stockades called “bullpens.” Nearly all the men were soon released, though, after charges against them failed to stick in court, and they resumed the strike and won insofar as the mining companies fired the scabs and rehired the strikers. Subsequently, the strike leaders set about organizing their brethren into the Western Federation of Miners.41 Seven years later, miners at Coeur d’Alene struck again. Once again, the governor (this time a Democrat, Frank Steunenberg) declared martial law and requested (this time from President William McKinley) federal troops. The Army effectively broke the strike. “The military,” as noted by historian Philip Y. Nicholson, “was never used to protect workers from owners in the United States, no matter the outrages or illegalities carried out against them.”42 James R. Sovereign, who from 1893 to 1897 served as the General Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, wrote about and witnessed “military abuses” in the suppression of the strike.43 On September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States following the assassination of McKinley. In contrast to his Gilded Age predecessors, Roosevelt did not send troops to crush strikes. In fact, in 1902 when the UMWA waged a strike that produced a severe coal shortage and caused prices to quadruple, Roosevelt invited union leaders and coal mine operators to come to Washington and allow him to broker a settlement between them. When the operators responded in a way that a Roosevelt biographer deemed as “intransigent and even ill-mannered,” the president threatened to send troops to the mines not to assault the strikers and pave the way for the arrival of scabs, but rather to run the mines as a receivership. The operators then agreed to binding arbitration, and while the settlement did not grant formal union recognition to the UMWA, the strikers did get their workday shortened from ten hours to nine along with a 10% raise.44 Roosevelt’s course of action in the 1902 coal strike, however, proved to be an aberration rather than heralding a permanent shift. As historian Chad Pearson has noted, by the end of the nineteenth century, organized employers knew they could count on “state assistance” in their battles with organized labor, “including direct help from judges and police forces during labor conflicts … openshop advocates saw themselves as firmly embedded in the political mainstream and securely allied with the nation’s lawmakers and enforcers.”45 Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from its founding in 1886 until his death in 1924 (except for one year, 1894), had had his own run-in with anti-labor police violence at Tompkins Square in New York City in 1874, when, according to one account, “a policeman’s billy whizzed past his ear.” By the close of the nineteenth century, he and other AFL leaders had come to embrace “prudential unionism,” that is, “a strategy that repudiated mass strikes and general work stoppages for fear of inciting labor violence.” Of course, it was not violence by workers, in and of itself, that gave Gompers nightmares; rather, it was that such violence or even its possibility “brought out the bully in the state that crushed unions as readily as it beat and bruised individuals.”46 The fact that the leader of the nation’s most powerful labor organization of the day harbored such concerns speaks volumes about how successfully the American labor movement had been “policed” by the forces of law and order as the nineteenth century drew to an end.

Notes 1 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 169-70. 2 Ibid., 322, 377-80.

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Nineteenth-Century American Labor Movement 3 Ibid., 380. 4 Melvyn Dubofsky and Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History, 7th ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2004), 82. 5 Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 85-87. 6 Detroit Free Press, February 26, 1860. 7 Dubofsky and Dulles, Labor in America, 83. 8 Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 206. 9 Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895: A Study in Democracy (New York: D. Appleton, 1929; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959), 66; and Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 12. 10 Jeremy Brecher. Strike!, rev. 3d. ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 11-12. 11 Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959; reprint, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989), 93-114; and David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 117. 12 Stowell, Streets, 93-95. 13 Shannon M. Smith, “‘They Met Force with Force’: African American Protests and Social Status in Louisville’s 1877 Strike,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 115 (Winter 2017): 1-37. 14 Ibid. 15 Little Rock Daily Arkansas Gazette, April 10-11, 1883. 16 Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-NineteenthCentury South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 66-69; and Ware, Labor Movement, 134-137, 139-145. 17 Ware, Labor Movement, 144; Ruth Allen, The Great Southwest Strike (Austin: University of Texas [Press], 1942), 47; and Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 179. 18 Brecher, Strike!, 41-46; and Theresa A. Case, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 184. 19 Brecher, Strike!, 41-46; Robert A. Calvert, Arnoldo De León, Gregg Cantrell, The History of Texas, 6th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2020), 204; Case, Great Southwest Railroad Strike, 182; Ralph V. Turner and William Warren Rogers, “Arkansas Labor in Revolt: Little Rock and the Great Southwestern Strike,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Spring 1965): 29-46; and Jerry W. Chandler, “The Knights of Labor and the Southwestern Strikes” (M.A. thesis, Florida State University, 1970), 87. 20 Dubofsky and Dulles, Labor in America, 97, 148; Phelan, Grand Master Workman, 187-88; Brecher, Strike!, 46-48; James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 148-151, 169-171; and Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes (New York: The New Press, 2018), 62-63. The Knights of Labor changed the title “Grand Master Workman” to “General Master Workman” in 1883, but the original title remained in somewhat common use, as it has among historians. 21 Green, Death in the Haymarket, 5-8 (first two quotations on 6); Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 163, 169-70; and Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements (c. 1936; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1963), 171-78 (third quotation on 176). 22 Melton A. McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 65-66; and Philadelphia Times, October 5, 1886. 23 McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South, 74-75; and John DeSantis, The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2016). 24 Little Rock Daily Arkansas Gazette, July 6, 1886; Journal of United Labor (Philadelphia), October 10-25, 1886 (quotations); New York Times, July 7, 1886; William Warren Rogers, “Negro Knights of Labor in Arkansas: A Case Study of the ‘Miscellaneous’ Strike,” Labor History 10 (Summer 1969): 498-505; and Case, Great Southwest Railroad Strike, 214-15. Rogers says that the strike began on July 2, but the two newspaper accounts cited above both say that it began on July 1. 25 William F. Holmes, “The Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 and the Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1973): 107-119. See also Matthew Hild, “Black Agricultural Labor Activism and White Oppression in the Arkansas Delta: The Cotton Pickers’ Strike of 1891,” in Michael Pierce and Calvin White, eds., Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta: Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022).

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Matthew Hild 26 Holmes, “Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike,” 113-19; Gerald H. Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Movement: Ballots and Bigotry in the New South, rev. ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 27-30; Jonathan Garlock, comp., Guide to the Local Assemblies of the Knights of Labor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 15; M. Langley Biegert, “Legacy of Resistance: Uncovering the History of Collective Action by Black Agricultural Workers in Central East Arkansas from the 1860s to the 1930s,” Journal of Social History 32 (Fall 1998): 81-83; William F. Holmes, “The Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Journal of Southern History 41 (May 1975): 200; and Brooksville (KS) Earth, October 9, 1891. 27 Dubofsky and Dulles, Labor in America, 153. 28 Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 201; Brecher, Strike!, 61-62 (quotation on 62). 29 Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 302-03. 30 Brecher, Strike!, 63-65 (quotation on 65); and Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 313-14. 31 Brecher, Strike!, 65-69; and Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 327-28, 354-56. 32 Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 347. 33 David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 20; Brecher, Strike!, 77-100. 34 Brecher, Strike!, 78-79; and New York Times, May 25, 1894. 35 Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 204. 36 David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 19. 37 Ibid., 14-37 (Cleveland quoted on 30). 38 Ibid., 33-34. 39 Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes, 74; and Matthew Hild, Arkansas’s Gilded Age: The Rise, Decline, and Legacy of Populism and Working-Class Protest (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018), 117-18. 40 Paul A. Shackel, Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). (Quotation on p. 1.) 41 Philip Y. Nicholson, Labor’s Story in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 121 (first quotation); Brecher, Strike!, 71-72 (second quotation). 42 Nicholson, Labor’s Story, 121; Brecher, Strike!, 72. 43 Martin Tuohy, “Sovereign, James R.,” in Eric Arnesen, ed., Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3: 1308-10. 44 Louis Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Times Books, 2002), 45-47. 45 Chad Pearson, Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 13-14. 46 Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 198.

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7 POLICE UNIONS AND VIOLENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY UNITED STATES Lisa Phillips

To police is to protect, keep order, and surveil. If we are to examine the history of police-initiated violence in the United States, and police unions’ role in perpetuating it, we have to understand the historical dynamics involved in placing people in relative positions of power, the surveilled vs. the surveil-ers. History holds the answers to much of what we are collectively witnessing here in the early twenty-first-century United States. One can draw a fairly straight line from the 1890s to 2020s in terms of who is and is not policed. The trick is to explain why, by what means the power to police has been maintained. No one reading will be surprised to learn that policing is a product of a hierarchical society and that those most marginal are the most heavily policed. In a Foucault-ian sense, those policing maintain the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable behavior within unequal societies.1 In essence, the police’ job is to maintain that hierarchy, to enforce “respectability.” The police enforce the state’s understanding of good and bad behavior, of the criminal versus the upstanding citizen. Every generation of the marginalized, easily criminalized, has been more than aware of the fragility of their standing. One “false” move, however defined and applied, and their life’s path is determined for them. Those at the top of the ladder experience the opposite: no care about their risky behavior, no surveillance, no sentencing. People between these extremes might “brush up” against or have some “run ins” with “the law” but generally can escape taking on a permanent criminal status. While state-condoned surveillance varies in that it reflects the priorities of a given society, location, and time period, what is clear from the history of the United States is that skin color has been the most stable marker of who is and is not surveilled. Historians have identified slave patrols and plantation overseers in the nineteenth-century United States with the roots of racialized surveillance. In the north and west, railroads employed overseers as well, monitoring the hours worked by immigrants—Chinese and Irish at first then Italian, Czech, Slovak, and native-born now “working-class” by the 1870s–80s. The working-class immigrants who were “overseen” were darker skinned immigrants, lower on the social Darwinist ladder—not “white.” Said President Theodore Roosevelt to a Hampton Institute audience in 1906, “there is no challenge greater than fighting the criminality within your own race.”2 Policing in the over-seeing sense was performed to protect White men’s businesses, whether big agriculture, railroad construction, cargo arriving on ships in Boston, New York, and other harbors. In the case of large plantation agriculture, it was the for-profit industrialized setting that created the need for brutal and racialized over-seeing. Plantation agriculture in the nineteenth century required back-breaking, sun-up to sun-down labor. Overseers, all White, made sure the work was DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-10

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done and were given the authority by the plantation master to wield whatever punishment was necessary to extract that labor. It’s important to understand that this system was brought on by the use of two key inventions: the cotton gin and the mechanical reaper (for wheat). Both enabled crops to be “mass” planted, which required enormous amounts of labor. Prior to the use of machinery, the amount of labor involved was human-dependent. People who were enslaved, kept on the plantation through the brutality of the White slave patrolmen, operated on the “task” system. Once the tasks were completed, they were done for the day. Machinery meant the “task” was never done. Tasks shifted, in an agricultural setting, to hours worked and required an “overseer” to extract the labor as enormous amounts of profit hung in the balance. Some historians now argue that it was the machine-driven agricultural day in the US south that drove the industrial day as it emerged in factory settings in the north. The need, in both regions, for the constant surveillance of laborers, initially Black, then immigrant and Black, drove at least one major move toward the acceptance of a new level of surveillance nationwide.3 Still an overseer is not a policeman. Formal police forces emerged in the 1830s in the north, particularly Boston and New York, to protect shipped goods. They were hired by shipping companies, an early version of the famed Pinkertons, private police forces hired to protect property at, literally, any cost including engaging in pitched battle with striking workers. Policing and property go hand-in-hand. After the Civil War, as urban areas grew in size, formal police departments began the process of institutionalization. Assumptions about who would police and why were embedded then in the very creation of the police departments themselves and varied from one location to the next. Whether surveilling immigrants, labor agitators, or people who were newly freed from slavery, the power granted the people who policed far outweighed those who were surveilled. Police unions were created to protect the power to surveil, the essence of the job.4 Boston and New York offer good examples of how ethnic groups, particularly the Irish, positioned themselves as the surveil-ers in the urban and immigrant context of the late nineteenth century. As immigrants arrived from all over the world to take advantage of industrial jobs in the United States, they created ethnic enclaves. Irish, German, Bohemian, Slovak, Italian neighborhoods, each with its own language and unique subculture, served to divide cities by areas that were patrolled by ethnic “gangs.” The Irish, particularly Irish Catholics, historians tell us, quickly gained the reputation for being ruthless patrolmen. They maintained the “deadlines” over which non-Irish did not cross. While all immigrant groups patrolled and enforced these invisible boundaries, the Irish, were the most aggressive in doing so, they “went out looking for a fight.” As urban areas created formal police departments, the Irish actively sought the jobs so that they were disproportionately represented within the police’ ranks. High paying positions akin to those of skilled tradesmen, the status associated with being a cop quickly became a source of pride, a part of the Irish identity. In the social Darwinist, eugenics-driven understanding of race and intelligence that dominated people’s thinking in the time period, this was a step up the social ladder for an immigrant group that was, like the Italians, understood to be inferior to other ethnic groups, particularly the English and Germans.5 Policing offered the Irish status and stability and access to the power structure that existed at the time.6 Within this same eugenics-inspired “race culture” emerged the pseudoscience of determining a “criminal profile” to better help police protect the communities they were employed to serve. The criminal profile was rooted in same late nineteenth and early twentieth century assumptions about “natural” racial and ethnic predispositions to criminal behavior. Profiling was considered cutting edge at the time, albeit pseudoscience steeped in racism as we now understand it.7 Khalil Muhammed’s work lays bare the stark contrast in how Progressive Era (1900–14) reformers’ assumptions about criminality varied depending upon whether the person was an immigrant or “Negro.” “Negroes” were more often criminalized while immigrants more often deemed in need of rehabilitation. What followed from those racist assumptions was the funding of playgrounds, kindergartens, meal assistance, education, job training all directed at immigrants who would, the thinking 86

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went, benefit from such programs. Negroes’ inferior intelligence rendered the same programs pointless for them. Police then redirected immigrants’ criminal behavior into something productive and worthwhile, to benefit the society as a whole, while Black men (and women) were sentenced to longer times in jail with no access to redirection. Playgrounds, “fresh air and exercise,” organized team sports, were all designed to keep immigrant kids out of trouble. With no such publicly funded programs for Black children, “criminal” behavior quickly became racialized, a kind of northern “Jim Crow” understanding of predisposed criminality.8 At the same time, Black men and women, the few (less than 5%) who lived in northern, urban, areas were also subject to housing discrimination. Black urbanites were stuck in overcrowded areas with no access to playgrounds, no access to education, limited access to jobs and those low paying. The crime rates rose, not surprisingly. A kind of vicious cycle, racially discriminatory policies combined to render what were still small Black urban populations “biologically and inherently predisposed” to crime with no recognition of the environmental factors that contributed to while immigrants were, at the same time, afforded the “environmental” understanding of criminal behavior. Whites, Khalil argued, were able to redefine “white crime and violence as symptoms of class oppression.”9 Progressive-era Philadelphia provides an example of how these societal assumptions played out. Philadelphia’s reformers supported the work of what were called the “vice crusaders,” neighborhood watch surveillance groups. In this setting, Black men almost never attacked White neighborhood watchmen as it was “unsafe” for Black men to walk the streets at night. The vice crusaders’ main nemeses were “white roughs.”10 In this setting, vice crusaders helped “clean up” White neighborhoods affording the protection to White, immigrant residents one might expect. What was racialized was the LACK of the similar removal of vice in Black neighborhoods. Garnering little attention, good or bad, Black Philadelphians were unprotected from assault and virtually all other forms of crime. Reformers and vice crusaders argued that Black crime was Negroes’ own fault. When migrants began moving up from the south, this lack of protection was an established pattern. As crime increased in these areas, it was explained as emerging from Blacks’ natural tendencies and thereby not the responsibility of the city to protect people from the same “vice” from which Whites and immigrants were protected. White reformers explained “slum” development in Philly by invoking the “low grade Negro element.”11 The more militant Black middle-class responded by forming organizations designed to voice their concerns. The NAACP protested the racism that was embedded in these institutions just as they were being created. There was an emerging understanding by the 1920s on the part of the NAACP that the vice patrols were an outgrowth of the White power structure, that Black crime was the product NOT of Black “degeneration,” but, surprise, a lack of resources. Leading Black intellectuals, including WEB DuBois, worked with the newly formed National Urban League and the Chicago Commission on Race Relations to bring the public’s attention to structural inequality. Their focus? The vice districts neglected by the police. DuBois and other Black intellectuals struggled within this context. Even they fell into the trap of blaming newly arriving Black migrants for high crime rates in Black neighborhoods. DuBois’ inability to separate the inherent, racialized predisposition of Black migrants to crime was what contributed to his lack of support for Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant ethnographic work on the same population; he feared publicizing Black, southern, ways of life would damage the fragile “uplift” work in which he and other Black reformers were engaged. Nevertheless, through a kind of sustained attack, Black reformers and their White allies transformed the debate around Black criminality from a “moral” one to a “social” one, an amazing accomplishment given the deep roots of society’s understanding of “negro inferiority.”12 Henderson Donald, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier all contributed to this fundamental paradigm shift in the understanding of the origins of criminal behavior. They emphasized the “primacy of environmental factors in determining human capacity,” as opposed to an inherent predisposition rooted in the racist assumptions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century 87

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urban context. Still, White sociologists doubted Black sociologists’ emphasis on environmental factors and continued to, Muhammed argues, “conflate cultural inferiority with racist police behavior.” Black sociologist Anna Thompson compiled statistics indicating, this is in the 1920s, that, of the arrests made, 25% were Black although Black people constituted only 7% of the population. She blamed the disproportionate statistics on targeted vice raids. Muhammed argues that Black people were subjected to both too little and too much policing: the vice raids combined with cop corruption (police frequented neighborhoods engaging in the very illegal activities they later conducted raids for) to contribute to this 1920s version of racialized surveillance.13 In the wake of the 1919 Chicago riots/uprisings, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, the NAACP, and the NUL, after studying the causes, concluded that structural issues were the culprit. Vice raids were primarily directed at what were increasingly all-Black neighborhoods where White “criminals” were encouraged to locate! During Prohibition, for example, White organized crime rackets “operated more safely in the Black Belt.” Vice districts, Muhammed argues, were controlled by the White power structure. A completely corrupt system in Muhammed’s telling: vice districts enabled Whites to engage in criminal behavior under the radar while vice raids were conducted occasionally to give the city’s White residents the idea that the police were fighting crime, their targets Black residents while Whites engaged in criminal behavior at the same time, in the same location.14 Just as Black sociologists began bringing the community’s attention to this type of corruption and to erroneous statistics, de facto police unions and other similar organizations formed: the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) in 1893, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1908, and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in 1915.15 All three agencies (they were not yet technically unions) encouraged the use of early forensic science to “profile” criminal activity. Fingerprinting became the go-to method to track criminals. Statistics were now kept and a line was drawn around “white” and “black” criminals as the category of White wasn’t broken down by ethnicity. At this point, argues Muhammed, “blackness became the single mark of a criminal, the statistically significant category.” “Black criminality was,” Muhammed says, “crucial to the making of modern America” as Whites continued to understand Black crime as pathological and White/ ethnic/immigrant crime as structural.16 This understanding continued into the 1950s with the publication of Gunner Myrdal’s influential Negro in America in which he argued the Blacks in the North were their own worst enemy, that they lived “equitably” relative to Southerners. “In the North,” wrote Myrdal, “the recognition of full democracy in principle and unhampered rights to fight for its gradual realization in practice give Negroes a basis for hope.”17 The specter of southern racism ultimately rendered the discriminatory northern criminal justice system “invisible.” By the 1940s, Black criminality was considered “a universal problem” just as the words “foreign born” were removed from crime statistics.18 Police across the country, but especially in major urban areas, understood the connection between race and crime as fundamental as the very job was steeped in that intellectual paradigm. By the 1960s, when civil rights activists began calling attention to the racism embedded in policing, it felt as if the critique came out of nowhere. Few, then, had any understanding of northern, urban, racism as the focus had for so long been on Jim Crow southern segregation. The North had been rendered a pass. By the late 1960s, Jesse Jackson, Sr. and his PUSH coalition were calling for the city of Chicago to hire more Black officers. In 1968, Jackson helped found the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). The AAPL’s goal was to combat police brutality from the inside. It had the previous 15 years of television coverage to back its arguments that surveillance had turned brutal. As if on queue, the summer 1969 television coverage of police beating Black kids who had opened up a fire hydrant to cool off proved the AAPL’s point. The kids had no access to public pools. The beatings resulted in a four-day riot during which 1500 members of the National Guard were sent to Chicago to help “keep order” or, civil rights activists argued, “to keep black people in their place.”19 88

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Minneapolis provides another example of the transition from invisible discriminatory policing to an outright rejection of that system by civil rights activists, a transition from the “quiet” 1940s to the turbulent 1970s. Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, wanted to overhaul the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) because of growing criticism of racism and “unequal policing.” The MPD was the first in the country to implement anti-bias training. In response, the Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis or “the Federation,” took cues from the just organizing National Conference of Police Associations (NCPA) (which would become the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA)) to directly confront accusations of racial bias. In Minneapolis, just as in Chicago, it was the police’ defensive reaction to civil rights activists’ calls for reform that cemented the antagonism. Michael Lansing argues that the Federation’s “labor advocacy” on the issue of racial bias training “proved to be a potent way to defend racialized policing” in Minneapolis and, by extension, elsewhere.20 Cops’ paradigmatic understanding of race and crime was amplified by the entry of police unions into the scene in the mid-1950s and in response to civil rights activism. The lines were drawn in Minneapolis in the early 1960s. After years of attempts by the progressive mayors Hubert Humphrey and Eric Hoyer and the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL) to implement some kind of racial bias training, training supported by the city’s police chief, the Federation responded NOT by following their own chief’s lead but by joining with the NCPA (organized in 1954) to “combat efforts to discredit police officers through false charges of police brutality.” Beginning in 1961, his first year in office, the progressive DFL mayor Arthur Nataflin began capitulating to the Federation’s understanding of “crime” and its demands to fight it. Nataflin, unlike his DFL predecessors, was dependent upon the Federation for re-election and he was operating within a nationwide effort to unionize public sector employees. Despite the fact that the MPD reported African Americans in the city experienced “unequal policing in many ways,” the mayor agreed to the Federation’s demand to hire more officers. The additional officers helped to “limit crime” in what were now increasingly “colored” downtown shopping centers as Whites moved out to the suburbs. The fact that the public supported the effort, despite the increase in taxes, demonstrates the power of racialized policing here. The visibility of White officers surveilling the Black inner city helped justify the city’s hiring additional White officers. Because the mayor depended upon the Federation’s support, he compromised his position and failed to address racially motivated policing despite the fact that he and the police chief agreed there were significant problems.21 The new recruits were required to take racial bias training from long-time civil rights and labor activist and Fair Employment Practices (FEPC) veteran, Louis Ervin. When the officers argued that they were being brainwashed, the city fired Ervin. Tensions flared. Eventually the city council reversed course, reinstated Ervin and suspended the officer who claimed brainwashing. Two years later, in 1963, a riot was narrowly averted when Minneapolis police officers first stopped Charles Daniels for using obscene language and, later the same day, beat boxing instructor Raymond Weles. Both were Black. Understanding the incidents as clearly racially motivated, the NAACP and CORE called for immediate change, including police training, the hiring of more African American officers, and the creation of an oversight committee. CORE asked the Federation to “adopt a code of fair practices toward minority groups and to condemn derogatory remarks and conduct by officers against minority groups.” Nataflin and the city council sided with the NAACP and CORE and fired the police chief, holding him responsible for the incidents. Instead of considering CORE’s requests, the Federation took up a collection for their suspended chief to which the city responded by suspending the officer who’d organized the collection. When a bomb went off outside the suspended police officer’s house, the Federation demanded the city allow the officer to move arguing, ironically, that officers now feared for their safety. The pressure worked. White officers moved out to the suburbs, starting the process by which they no longer lived in or even near the neighborhoods they policed. Black families remained in the city, prevented by restrictive covenants from moving 89

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and the Federation established itself a major player in Minneapolis politics. The racialized, polarized “sides” seemed etched in stone by 1964.22 The Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis protected its members’ traditional labor interests, i.e., wages, conditions, pensions, by ignoring the unequal policing statistics, an unequal funding distribution, the restrictive covenants that promoted White flight to the suburbs, and their own chief’s 1950s assessment of the problems associated with race-based policing. Were White police officers inherently racist? Some might argue that they operated within a societal framework in which African Americans were understood as predisposed to criminal behavior and that the statistics related to crime rates supported this understanding. But when the “environmental” or structural arguments, which had been made for decades and which were clearly understood when applied to immigrant populations, were continually dismissed, it’s difficult to see their actions as anything other than motivated primarily by race. By 1967, even the DFL Minneapolis’ mayor Nataflin ran on a campaign to restore “law and order” in the city “and take the handcuffs off the police.” Nataflin positioned himself, then, as protecting the labor interests of a mostly White police force. Over the 1960s, the Federation “fused traditional union goals of wages and job protections of whiteness in a predominately white city.” Levine argues that the “Minneapolis Police Department continued to police [i.e., help to maintain], deep and painful racial divides in Minneapolis.”23 Had Humphrey initially targeted the racial bias in the city’s funding distribution rather than amongst the police officers themselves, he’d have had a different fight on his hands, yes, but, police unions might not have defined their members’ ability to do the job on whether they were racist and in need of antibias training. The lack of attention to the structural or “environmental” reasons for criminal behavior, in this case, created a situation in which police officers’ training became the focus; they reacted defensively—the union defended them and the lines were drawn. Originating within the understanding that Black Americans were predisposed to criminal behavior because of some genetic inferiority, exacerbated by racial covenants that separated Black from White neighborhoods, further exacerbated by the second biggest demographic shift in US history—the White move to the suburbs—then plagued with chronic discriminatory funding patterns, surveillance is mired in so many layers of complexity that the solutions that have been attempted from the racial bias training and civilian review boards first proposed in the 1950s to the recent efforts to defund and abolish the police, solve nothing. It’s difficult to “blame” any one aspect of a power structure that directs resources and power to Whites as it all collectively works together to that end. It’s the lack of a structural analysis that’s been at the root of the failure of any kind of meaningful reform. What can be said is that police unions, employed to carry out the state’s objectives, have functioned to protect that power structure, to shield it and the people/White policemen who benefit from it. It’s the protection of the White power structure, yes, of predominately White jobs, yes, and, now of a particularly brutal form of White surveillance of Black, Latinx, and indigenous people, yes. But why do police unions seem so unable to cast any kind of a critical gaze on the violence they engage in? Why is it, as we saw in Minneapolis as early as the 1950s, just as the demographic shift that created blighted inner city, did police officers and their unions react so defensively? Wasn’t anyone within the realm of policing willing to question their own surveillance techniques, to question their role in enforcing the power structure, to question the power structure itself? The two largest, nationally based, organizations to function as the de-facto labor unions for police officers are the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA). The FOP began in 1915, the IUPA in 1954 as the NCPA mentioned earlier. Both purposefully distanced themselves from the labor movement. In the 1910s, despite the fact that some FOP locals negotiated officers’ terms of employment, it presented as more of a “fraternal” organization or lodge, akin to the masons. The police were in the process of professionalizing just as doctors, nurses, and others had done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Associating with the labor movement was not the route to doing so. The labor movement itself was ambivalent 90

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about chartering police unions. Policemen were the ones, after all, to break up strikes not call them. Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1886 to 1924, never authorized charters to police unions. He and others argued that police unions would, at best, exhibit divided loyalty. After the Boston police force went on strike in 1919, the response was to bar all government employees from forming unions. The police were not allowed “to go on strike against public safety,” an act President Wilson called “a crime against civilization.” The ban extended to all government employees and was in line with the anti-labor sentiment that developed in the postWWI context of the Bolshevik revolution. It was not until the 1960s that the Kennedy administration pushed legislation through Congress supporting public section unions.24 Public sector unions have historically had a difficult time arguing for increased pay and benefits. Their members’ salaries are paid by taxpayers, requiring public support and subsequent tax increases. They negotiate not with business owners but with elected officials who are beholden to those same tax payers. With the exception of teachers’ unions, public sector unions do not often call strikes because doing so is a violation of “public trust” and puts, in the case of firefighters and police, the public in danger. Teachers, too, suffer from accusations of not caring about kids when their unions call strikes. Public sector unions cannot argue for a bigger share of the profit as their work provides a government service, not a for-profit product. These dynamics contribute significantly to the ways in which public sector unions negotiate. Historically rooted in both patronage and nepotism, and operating within a more virulent anti-labor framework than private sector unions (if that’s possible), public sector unions have few of the traditional anti-capitalist attributes private sector labor unions often use to rally support and build camaraderie. These historically White-collar, non-industrial unions, appear at best aloof and in reality at odds with the working-class generally.25 Police officers’ unions are unique within even the realm of public sector unions. Hamstrung in their ability to negotiate traditional bread and butter wage increases, police unions in the context of the civil rights protests of the 1960s began negotiating “protection” from prosecution. No other government job necessitates this kind of protection from prosecution. The protection was quickly viewed as a benefit, a part of the compensation package, and institutionalized in contract after contract. Any FOP local that negotiated it away was seen as weak, not worthy of union dues paid.26 Mark Thomas and Steven Tufts have argued convincingly that police unions have made this continued trade off, protection from prosecution for higher pay, for decades now. For them, the neoliberal austerity measures implemented after the 2008 global crisis (I would argue starting in the 1990s under the Clinton administration) pushed police unions to further embrace this kind of protection, now considered a right in the absence of other types of compensation.27 The collective bargaining agreements police unions negotiate provide further evidence that they have, historically, functioned differently than other labor unions so much so that referring to them as anything more labor-sounding than a bargaining agent or mediator would be a mistake. A study of the collective bargaining agreements negotiated in 81 of the largest cities in the United States concluded that unions used their influence to establish “unfair protections” in their contracts, to create “one set of rules for police, another for civilians,” and to “make it difficult to punish those unfit to serve.”28 Another study finds that police unions negotiate contracts in 36 US states and serve as a kind of gatekeeper to any kind of reform suggested as the unions often reject the reform measures as part of the contract-negotiating process.29 While all government employees are, technically, agents of the state only the police are empowered by the state to use coercion and act violently to preserve order. They are the only “unions” that, in Michael Levin’s words, “represent capital.” In the absence of the ability bargain for that bigger share of the profit, police unions have sought to enhance officers’ ability to do the coercive part of the job required of them. “As a core institution within a racially ordered capitalist society,” Thomas and Tufts argue, “police are intimately connected to the role of the state in producing and reproducing the conditions of capital accumulation.”30 Some scholars go so far as to argue that 91

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police unions are so embedded within the racial-capitalist hierarchy that organized labor should reject them as they serve to disrupt labor solidarity by their very nature. This manifestation of police union is purely an American phenomenon. Other countries differing histories have produced police forces that are citizen-oriented rather than property and state-oriented.31 The state has created the “systems” by which communities are underfunded and under or overserved, by which people are left homeless for lack of quality mental health care, by which people in poorer areas engage in criminal activity for lack of access to better alternatives. The police are, in that sense, extensions of the state’s apparatus. Police unions are not, by design, an oppositional force as are traditional private sector unions and others in the public sector—instead they work to enhance officers’ ability to preserve social systems and governmental policies, most all of which are rooted in racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, ableism. In order to create any meaningful change, police unions would have to develop an oppositional stance to the state rather than seek to best enforce its mandates. While other labor unions have, historically, protected marginalized groups, police unions protect the state’s interest in keeping people marginalized. The practical manifestation of this unique relationship between the state and police unions is found in the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) negotiated between police unions and the municipalities in which their members work. CBAs enhance the police’ ability to preserve the state’s version of law and order. Levin argues that CBAs “operate as markers or structural guarantors of obstruction and unaccountable policing particularly as affects communities of color, poor people, and other marginalized groups.”32 In Chicago, for example, lawyers representing plaintiffs in civil rights cases argued that the CBAs negotiated between the city and police unions “turned the code of silence into an official policy.” Because CBAs are the manifestation of the “collusion” between the state and police officers, they could, Levin argues, be used to as the pressure point from which to work for change. Eliminating police unions from the umbrella American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) would highlight further the fact that police unions operate counter to the goals of the larger labor movement in that they enforce “racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the oppression of the working-class.” To actually protect marginalized groups, police unions would have to engage in social protest themselves, to upend the system.33 CBAs, negotiated without union endorsement, would render the relationship between the state and its enforcement arm visible. Occasionally, state and local officials have attempted to change the state’s mandates, to force police officers and police unions to negotiate a new set of rules designed to address the racial underpinnings of police’ brutality. In Philadelphia, reform district attorney Larry Krasner, elected in 2017 to tackle mass incarceration, tried to introduce new policies and prosecute officers who used excessive force. His main obstacle was the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which he described as “racist and white dominated.” To get around the union, Krasner initiated a “do not call list” for other prosecutors to avoid putting “bad apples” on the stand. The FOP sued and called attention to the fact that, of 6500 cops, only 65 made it to Krasner’s list.34 While Krasner was acting on behalf of the state, as a reform candidate he was “oppositional” to the state’s goals. The FOP’s ability to sue the state on behalf of its members’ ability to use coercive force was a re-stabilization of the state’s “traditional” goals. Similar to Minneapolis’ mayor Nataflin’s shift to supporting the Minneapolis FOP and campaigning on “law and order” in the late 1960s, until “the state” pursues some kind of non-hierarchical agenda, unions will work to enhance officers’ ability to maintain that hierarchy. The co-existence now of the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements are modern extrapolations of these historical underpinnings, none of which have been understood well enough to create a sustained and meaningful overhaul of the system. The problem of police brutality is, yes, clearly rooted in the United States’ racist past and upon the institution’s creation within a eugenicsoriented framework. The problem, though, is also attributable to the capitalist state’s dependence upon maintaining a racial hierarchy, on its support of low pay, and the American public’s aversion to systemic change and the type of agitation, labor, civil rights, and otherwise, that would be required 92

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to upend the system. Based upon the history presented here, union protection of bad cops could be de-incentivized by dramatically increasing police officers’ pay and adding conditions—something simple like “we’ll triple your salary if you waive immunity from prosecution, wear a body camera, and live in the community you police.” Municipalities, particularly elected officials from mayors to sheriffs, would have to somehow convince the public to authorize the salary increase through tax hikes. The political will is simply not there and yet there has to be a monetary incentive big enough to overcome what has substituted for it over the years: immunity from prosecution. Other solutions rely on goodwill, on a theoretical commitment to democracy, on “doing the right thing,” on antibias training. None are enough to overcome almost two centuries of racialized surveillance combined with abysmally low pay structure combined with a now oppositional identity rooted in, on the police’ side, maintaining law and order.35

Notes th

1 The most influential theorist of the 20 century, see Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1975]), the paradigm through which scholars have understood, yes, crime and punishment but more broadly the social boundaries that support the power structures that define criminal behavior and the punishment associated. 2 Khalil Muhammed, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019 [2010]), xx. 3 See the essays in Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman’s Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 4 General histories of policing in the US that analyze the power systems at play include Laurence French, A History of Policing in America: From Militias and Military to the Law Enforcement of Today (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2018) and, focusing on private policing broadly defined, Wilbur R. Miller’s A History of Private Policing in the United States (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 5 Frank Dikotte wrote a review article in which he linked the eugenics movement to the broader “race culture” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see his “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics” American Historical Review 103 (April 1998): 467–78; see also V. Mottier’s, “Eugenics and the State: Policy Making in Comparative Perspective,” in Allison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds. Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6 James Barrett and David Roediger, “The Irish and the ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants’ in the Streets and in the Church of the Urban United States, 1900–1930” Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (Summer 2003): 3–33; Eric Monkkonen, “A Disorderly People? Urban Order in the 19th and 20th Century.” Journal of American History 68 (No. 3 1981): 539–559; and William Jenkins, “Patrolmen and Peelers, Immigration, Urban Culture and the Irish Police in Canada and the United States,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28/29 (Fall 2002-Spring 2003): 10–29. 7 Good histories of the development of forensic science are hard to come by as most treatments spill over into sensationalist accounts of trial cases and into “true crime” (there are better histories for the UK and India), see Suzanne Bell’s Crime and Circumstance: Investigating the History of Forensic Science (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 8 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, xiii-xviii. 9 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, xxiii. 10 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, 200. 11 I rely heavily on Muhammed’s work here as it is by far the best treatment of the racist underpinnings of “crime” in the United States. For Philadelphia, see his brilliant chapter 4, “Preventing Crime: White and Black Reformers in Philadelphia,” in Condemnation of Blackness; see p. 153 for the quote. 12 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, 207–209, 249. 13 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, 239–243. 14 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, 226. 15 Not a lot of history has been written on the ICOP or the FOP; for a start on the FBI, see Willard Oliver’s The Birth of the FBI: Teddy Roosevelt, the Secret Service, and the Fight Over America’s Premier Law Enforcement Agency (New York: Rowman, 2021). 16 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, 272. 17 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1948), 779.

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Lisa Phillips 18 Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness, p. 13. 19 Tera Agyepong, “‘In the Belly of the Beast’: Black Policemen Combat Police Brutality in Chicago, 1968–1983,” Journal of African American History 98 (Spring 2013): 253–276. 20 Michael Lansing, “‘Policing Politics’: Labor, Race, and the Police Officers’ Federation of Minneapolis,” Minnesota History 67 (Spring 2021): 226–238. 21 Lansing, “Policing Politics,” 228–232. 22 Levine, 233–235. 23 Levine, 236. 24 Richard Kearny and Patrice Mareschal, Labor Relations in the Public Sector (New York: Routledge, 2019), 18. 25 Richard Kearny and Patricia Mareschal, Labor Relations in the Public Sector (New York: Routledge, 2019). 26 Tate Fegley, “Police Unions and Officer Privileges,” Independent Review 25 (Fall 2020): 169; and Aaron Bekemeyer, “The Labor of Law and Order: How Police Unions Transformed Policing and Politics in the United States, 1939–1985” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2021). 27 Mark Thomas and Steven Tufts, “Blue Solidarity, Police Unions, Race, and Authoritarian Populism in North America,” Work, Employment, and Society 34 (February 2020): 130. 28 Benjamin Levin, “What’s Wrong With Police Unions?” Columbia Law Review 120 (June 2020): 1343. 29 Rachel Harmon, “The Problem with Policing,” Michigan Law Review 110 (No. 5 2012): 761–817. 30 Thomas and Tufts, “Blue Solidarity,” 130. 31 Levin, “What’s Wrong with Police Unions,” 1377. 32 Levin, “What’s Wrong with Police Unions,” 1344. 33 The best contemporary treatment of these Foucault-ian connections is Derecka Purnell’s Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Astra House, 2021). 34 Levin, “What’s Wrong with Police Unions,” 1344. 35 Most of the literature focuses on solutions designed to address the racial gap, the misunderstanding between mostly White police officers and the Black men and women they apprehend, who continue to be overcriminalized. None of it looks at the combination of low pay and alternative incentives, emerging out of what have been highly politicized and racist contexts. See Monique Marks and Jenny Flemming’s “The Right to Unionize, the Right to Bargain, the Right to Democratic Policing,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605 (May 2006): 178–199 for an example of the “feel good” solutions, the type that I’m arguing against here; for an example of the new abolitionists’ arguments about the police functioning as a cross-class White alliance and how to combat the connections between cops, the business elite, and politicians. They argue for a broad-based union approach, one in which the police identify not with property protection and business and the state’s interests but with the rights of the broader citizenry, see Ben Brucato’s “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 61 (December 2014): 30–54.

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SECTION 3

Police Brutality and Race After World War II

8 THE POLICING OF BLACK RESISTANCE IN WORLD WAR II Margarita Aragon

During World War II, the United States’ participation in a war for freedom in Europe once again strained white Americans’ ability to manage racial apartheid at home. Between 1940 and 1944, there is record of at least 18 incidents of collective racial violence in American cities and towns.1 The summer of 1943 was particularly incendiary, with explosive unrest breaking out in Beaumont, Texas, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Harlem. Writing in the journal Common Ground, Louis Martin, editor of the Black newspaper the Michigan Chronicle, observed that “The paradox of the American people fighting racist tyranny abroad while the majority sanction the doctrine of white supremacy and racial discrimination at home has seared the souls of black folk.”2 Anti-black racism restricted the employment opportunities of Black migrants and in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit, and legal and extra-legal practices of residential segregation worked to sequester incoming Black migrants into increasingly crowded and brutally policed “Negro districts.” Compounding these conditions was the often brutal and always humiliating regime of anti-black segregation in the nation’s military, which profoundly embittered Black people across the nation and necessarily generated the grounds for perpetual confrontation between Black soldiers and authorities. Black civilians and soldiers rejected the conditions of Jim Crow domination—in the form of organized activism, in print, through cultural forms that rejected the norms of white supremacy and subordination, as well as through spontaneous individual and collective acts of physical resistance—with an energy that deeply disturbed federal and local authorities.3 The struggle against police brutality, a deeply rooted and longstanding source of anger and protest, again became acute in this context, as the democratic rhetoric of the war emphasized the outrage of apartheid at home. In both Harlem and Detroit, as we will see below, confrontations between Black people and police preceded the eruption of violence. As alluded to above, the constraints of racial quarantine in the military heightened tensions between Black populations and police. That military police and civilian police alike assiduously sought to enforce spatial, symbolic, and social subordination upon Black soldiers, enlisted in the nation’s “Army of Democracy”, epitomized the constricting version of citizenship on offer to Black people as a whole. In various ways, hostile policing was an essential factor in igniting instances of unrest during World War II; lethal brutality as well as the lethal inaction that facilitated the violence of white civilians and servicemen, pervaded the police response to unrest. In this chapter, I examine three instances of wartime social unrest: the so-called Lee Street Riot in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1942 in which Black soldiers engaged in violent struggle against white military and civilian police; the riot in Detroit in June 1943, in which fights between white and DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-12

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Black youths on a June afternoon in 1943 unleashed a surge of white civilian and police violence; and disorder in Harlem six weeks later when the shooting of a Black soldier by a white policeman sparked an uprising against white police and property. Though distinct in the manner in which they unfolded, the policing of these moments of unrest reveal an underlying racialized order in which Black people’s claims to citizenship, indeed their very presence in the national polity, were treated as transgressions to be contained.

Surveilling Resistance The eruption of unrest and racist violence during World War II, as well as the state’s response to Black protest, extended patterns and dynamics that were also present during the First World War. The outbreak of violence a generation earlier had already demonstrated that police violence would enforce racist spatial boundaries and facilitate extra-legal anti-black violence. Many of the instances of violence in that period had also been precipitated by the actions of police.4 Black people’s denouncement of the violence wielded against them, and particularly their calls for active self-defense, were viewed by federal authorities as perverse and incendiary. Rejection of racial subordination, rather than lynching and pogroms in themselves, as Arthur Waskow notes, were treated as “equivalent to an attack on law, order, and Americanism.”5 During World War I, as part of a broader repression of radicalism and dissent, the government initiated an extensive surveillance apparatus that identified African Americans as a potential well of subversion. The Bureau of Investigation, the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, the Post Office, and the State Department all contributed to the effort to investigate and police Black civilians, soldiers, civic leaders and press, operating under the thesis that, as historian Mark Ellis puts it, Black leaders, spurred on by radicals and Bolsheviks were “abusing American democracy and institutions, encouraging their hitherto placid followers to demand things that white Americans will not grant them.” In other words, it was the reckless refusal of racial caste that caused riots and unrest, such as that which erupted in 1917 and 1919, in which white mobs attacked Black communities around the country.6 While the Radical Division that Hoover headed in 1919 was disbanded in 1924, Roosevelt reinstated the FBI’s remit for domestic intelligence in 1939 and expanded its manpower. During the war years, FBI agents were using informants, bugs, and wiretaps to surveil Black organizations and communities across the country. In 1943, J. Edgar Hoover presented a confidential “Survey of Racial Conditions” to the White House, based upon reports collected over a two year period of “forces with foreign influences and with anti-American ideology working among the Negro people of the country as well as exploiting them.”7 Agents’ reports are filled with details of Black communities’ complaints about racism, which agents referred to as “perceived” or “alleged” grievances. Anger at police brutality was a recurring theme in FBI reports. “One of the chief causes for complaint on the part of Negroes,” an agent stationed in New Orleans noted, “as pointed out by the Negro press, is the alleged inequality of that race before the law; that is, discrimination against the Negro in the enforcement of law. In this area, practically all issues of Negro newspapers reflect items bearing on this topic or touching on alleged instances of police brutality.”8 As in World War I, the FBI continued to treat the rejection of racism as anti-American and a threat to law and order. In this regard, a wide range of sentiment and activity was deemed of interest to intelligence officers. As well as potential influence of Axis agents and communists, mass meetings, whether individuals were buying inordinate amounts of weapons, and whispers of unrest, the FBI also spent investigative efforts to uncover whether Black women domestic workers in the South were organizing to “[demand] their own terms for working” and using the slogan “A White Woman in the Kitchen by Christmas.”9 The FBI’s treatment of Black resistance to racism, in print or in deed, as evidence of potential subversion was mirrored more widely in the government and the mainstream white press. 98

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Accusations that the Black press were inciting the Black masses into discontent were voiced by Southern politicians, the Roosevelt administration and the War Department. In fact, Black editors were much less radical than the masses of their readers. As the controversial writer George Schuyler commented, “The masses of Negroes are far more ready to fight and die than their leaders and spokesmen.” Black editors described themselves as “push[ing] down,” “ton[ing] down,” and channeling the rage of the people with militant rhetoric that acknowledged the breadth and depth of racism while also attempting to encourage Black participation in the war effort and to deflect energies away from civil disobedience, direct protest against segregation, and draft refusal.10 That so many white Americans were convinced that a supposedly “extremist” press was whipping up discontent among a population that presumably would otherwise have been content with the sequestrations, violence, humiliations, and impoverishment of Jim Crow reflects the extent to which they themselves took these conditions as neutral and natural.

Alexandria, January 1942 “The instant he puts on the uniform of his country, the Negro becomes a deadly plague carrier, to be quarantined, isolated at all costs from his white comrades in arms.”11 The massive mobilization of the Armed Forces, and the social and physical movements this entailed, generated the social upheaval in which the period’s unrest unfolded. Sailors, soldiers, and military police were active in the summer’s largest urban disorders. Most spectacularly, in Los Angeles, thousands of white servicemen joined white civilians in attacking Mexican and African Americans, pulling them from public transport and entering homes in Mexican neighborhoods as police looked on and then arrested the victims. Rioters claimed to be cleansing the city of zoot suiters, stripping the clothing, often of teenage boys, and beating them in the streets.12 Black soldiers also actively responded, as we will see, to police violence in Harlem and Detroit. To the alarm of authorities and the FBI, Black soldiers stationed at Fort Custer seized rifles and commandeered several trucks in an attempt to aid the Black people of Detroit.13 In the South where most Black troops were trained during the war, military police patrolling the cities and towns nearby bases enforced the strictures of Jim Crow upon Black soldiers. But the fact of military apartheid enraged Black civilians around the country and fueled militant dissent. Warren Schaich notes that Black soldiers “clashed violently” with white military police, white police, white civilians, or some combination of the three in 11 of the 18 incidents of unrest that occurred during the war.14 This had specific significance for policing, as regimes of military and civilian oppression bled into each other, igniting resistance. The humiliation of Black soldiers and the violence to which they were subject became a flashpoint for unrest, from Black soldiers themselves, as well as Black civilians, as I discuss in the context of Harlem. As Charles H. Houston pointed out in a 1943 editorial, military segregation reflected a balancing of fears, chief among them “the inability to continue to subordinate a Negro population containing large numbers of Negro combat veterans.”15 The vast majority of Black troops were used as laborers; less than a quarter were used in combat. Reluctant to send Black troops overseas for a large part of the war, many Black units found themselves being transferred from one domestic training camp to another, subject to constant pointless marching and backbreaking manual tasks. Largely excluded from the symbolic capital of masculine blood sacrifice of combat, the blood of African American donors was first rejected by the Red Cross and then accepted only on a segregated basis to be administered only to Black members of the armed forces.16 After visiting Black soldiers at several military bases, the journalist P.L. Prattis of the Pittsburgh Courier, stated that “Every Negro soldier has his private stock of stories relating to beatings and clubbings administered to Negro soldiers by the military police. They loathe them.” He also emphasized the close relationship between civilian and military police in anti-black violence: 99

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“backed by city police [MPs] do not hesitate to beat up and kill Negroes in the streets and in the jails.”17 Prattis highlighted the dearth of Black military police and the fact that Black men who did serve as MPs were often unarmed. At Camp Livingston, while white MPs were armed with revolvers, Black MPs carried sticks. At Fort Benning, Black MPs carried empty holsters. The Pittsburgh Courier printed pictures of Joe White, a Black sergeant beaten by a white MP in a bar in Alexandria, Louisiana, for being “drunk and disorderly.” White was subject to further assault by a white sergeant after being jailed, who told him that once Black men put on a uniform, “you forget how to talk to a white man.”18 Black soldiers were often treated, implicitly or explicitly, as transgressing the normative racialized and gendered social order, precisely because of the potential claim to masculine authority invested in the uniform they wore. Such conditions inevitably provoked resistance. As the years wore on, Black soldiers were increasingly less willing to put up with injustices and were initiating conflicts rather than bearing their receiving end.19 In response to reports of growing tension, the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, created an Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies to investigate. Their report reveals the extent of the problem: Disaffection among Negro soldiers continues to constitute an immediately serious problem. In recent weeks there have been riots of a racial character at Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi; Camp Steward, Georgia; March Field, California; Fort Bliss, Texas; Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky; and at San Luis Obispo, California. At many other stations there is a smoldering unrest which is quite likely to erupt at any time.20 The Black press reported incidents of soldiers battling with white military police, and destroying off and on-base restaurants that refused to serve them. Historian Harvard Sitkoff notes that though the war department actively suppressed evidence of Black revolt, labeling deaths due such conflicts as “combat fatalities” or “motor vehicle accidents,” “army statisticians,” nevertheless, reported an unusually high number of casualties suffered by white officers of Negro troops and at least 50 Black soldiers killed in race riots in the United States. 21 In one of the larger incidents of unrest involving large groups of military personnel, what the War Department would refer to as a “riotous disturbance” broke out in Alexandria, Louisiana, in 1942, between Black soldiers who were stationed at nearby Camp Livingston and white military and civilian police. A number of Black soldiers were shot and 3,000 were arrested.22 On a Saturday evening, when the city was full of visiting servicemen, a white MP attempted to arrest a Black soldier on a busy street in a Black neighborhood. Black troops reacted with anger. City police, state troopers, MPs and white civilians engaged with perhaps several thousand Black troops along a stretch of four or five blocks. The former employed tear gas and firepower, the latter “bricks, rocks and sticks.” Black civilians were also trapped in the fray, including a woman named Mary Frances Scales who was shot in the hip.23 Louisiana Weekly, a local Black paper, asserted that the soldiers had protested the arrest because they “were resentful of the continuous goadings of ruthless military police” and embittered and disgusted by segregation and a “million other discriminatory acts.” It stated that military and civilian police used the disorder as a longed for opportunity “to shoot and beat Negro soldiers, as well as a chance to remind Negro civilians that that this is still the South.” It is striking that the majority of white military police involved in the incident, who were from the 32nd Division Military Police Company, were primarily from Wisconsin and Michigan. The War Department’s official report found that thirty Black soldiers had been injured, 13 by gunshot. While the War Department asserted that no fatalities had occurred, local witnesses believed that the bodies of slain Black soldiers had been disappeared by authorities.24

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Detroit, June 1943 “The entire record, both of the riot killings and of previous disturbances, reads like the story of the Nazi Gestapo.”25 June was a particularly intense month of conflict in 1943. White workers at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, and the Packard Motor Company in Detroit staged walk-outs to protest the upgrading of Black workers to skilled positions, one of dozens of such actions taken in the war years. Black officers were ejected by 50 armed white MPs from a theater at Camp Forrest in Tennessee and Black soldiers and white MPs clashed at Camp Stewart in Georgia.26 The summer’s deadliest riot, which some insisted was more akin to a pogrom, erupted in Detroit on June 20.27 Nearly a hundred thousand people had gone to Belle Isle, a popular public park. Fights broke out throughout the day between white and Black youth. In the evening as thousands of people crossed the Belle Isle Bridge connecting the island and Detroit, a fight between a white man and a Black man exploded into a larger conflict, with men rushing into join the fight, including 200 white sailors. Throughout the next day, groups of white people roamed Woodward Avenue, a main thoroughfare in the city, looking for Black people to assault, with stones, sticks, knives, and guns. They stopped street cars to seize Black passengers. In some instances they overturned Black people’s cars and set them alight. They attacked Black people on the steps of city hall. These actions were unrestrained, and therefore, encouraged by the police.28 P.L Prattis described the scene in the Pittsburgh Courier: What were the police doing when Negroes were being beaten in the Negro district? Arresting Negroes. What were the police doing when street cars were stopped by the mob and Negroes moved and beaten? They were arresting Negroes. What were the police doing when automobiles bearing Negroes were stopped, turned over and demolished and their occupants beaten? They were arresting Negroes. 29 More than 1,000 of the 1,362 people jailed during the riots were Black.30 Alongside the power of arrest, the police also deployed armed force against the Black people of Detroit. Thirty-four people were killed in the riots, 25 of whom were Black. Of those, 17 were killed by police. Unsurprisingly, the police did not kill a single white person.31 Marshall noted that in contrast to the “persuasion” employed with white rioters, as they set fires, overturned cars, and assaulted people, police used “night sticks, revolvers, riot guns, sub-machine guns and deer guns” against Black people they accused of looting. Rather than posting officers in front of stores on Hastings Street to protect them from looting, Marshall wrote that the police sporadically drove up and down the street in squad cars, jumping out “with drawn revolvers and riot guns to shoot whoever might be in the store. The policemen would tell them to ‘run and not look back’.” Some so instructed were shot in the back and by-standers were clubbed. “To police, all Negroes on Hastings Street were ‘looters.’” In one instance, a Black soldier in uniform did not run fast enough when police instructed a group of people to “run” and they clubbed him from behind with nightsticks. His life was saved by a Black woman who saw the assault from her window and organized several others to help her take him to a hospital.32 This wave of police murder and assault was part of a bigger picture of forcibly constricting the presence of Black people in the city. Both before and during the riots in Detroit, the police abetted white citizens as they fought to invigorate the anti-black boundaries in the city. The year before the riots, white protestors, with “rocks sticks and other weapons” congregated to prevent Black tenants from moving into the newly constructed Sojourner Truth Housing Project. In his investigative piece on the riots, Marshall wrote that the policing of this conflict, in which police supported the illegal activities of the mob, encouraged the escalation of anti-black violence. Rather than dispersing

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the white mob trespassing on property that belonged to the Federal government and was being leased to Black tenants, the police dispersed the Black residents, preventing them from entering their own homes. They searched Black people and the cars of Black people who entered the vicinity of the project. “White people were neither searched nor disarmed by the police … White hoodlums were justified in their belief that the police would act in the same way in any further disturbances.”33 In days after the riot, police again treated the mere fact of Black residence within the city as a transgression. They raided a Y.M.C.A dormitory, racially abusing residents, and shooting one resident, Julian Witherspoon, a premedical student. Residents were forced to line up against a wall while the premises were searched. In the days after the riots, Black participants in a meeting convened by the Mayor’s office complained that Black people were being confined, “with all but the Negro district [having been] practically declared ‘off limits’ for Negroes.” While police “roughly handled” them and warned them to “get off the streets,” white people were permitted to roam at will on nearby Woodward Avenue and were not stopped from congregating in groups.34 Mirroring the response of police immediately after the unrest to forcibly contain Black people in the “Negro districts,“ the Attorney General Francis Biddle was purported to have recommended to President Roosevelt that “careful consideration be given to limiting- and in some instances putting an end- to Negro migration into communities which cannot absorb them, either on account of their physical limitations or cultural background.” Under fire from the NAACP and Black press, Biddle offered vague denials, stating that no such plans were being made, though he iterated that “migrations necessarily contain seeds of future dislocation” and that “responsible officials” should be cautious in how they fulfilled their manpower requirements.35 Like the aggressive containment of the Detroit police, Biddle’s plea for “careful consideration” constructs the very presence of Black people as a force of social corrosion to be restricted.

Harlem, August 1943 Several weeks after the murderous violence in Detroit, a Black woman named Marjorie Polite argued with a white police officer named James Collins in the lobby of the Braddock hotel. According to one account, Polite had been dissatisfied with her room and was demanding a refund when the officer remonstrated her for being disorderly. Polite shouted profanities at Collins who then attempted to arrest her. Another Black woman, 40-year-old Florine Roberts, a domestic worker from Connecticut, and her son Robert Bandy, a military policeman on leave, intervened. In the struggle that followed, Bandy seized Collins’s nightstick and struck him on the head with it. As he turned to leave, Collins shot him in the back, the bullet hitting him in the shoulder. Bandy was not seriously injured and Collins escorted him to the hospital.36 Rumors soon swept Harlem that a white police officer had killed a Black soldier in front of his own mother. Having witnessed the riots as a 19-year-old, James Baldwin described the rumor as an “instantaneous and revealing invention.” While Bandy had not been mortally wounded, Baldwin observed that the people of Harlem “preferred the invention [that a soldier was killed by a shot in the back] because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.” Rage at the humiliation and violence that Black soldiers were subjected to touched the lives of all Harlem residents, unifying “the diverse social groupings of the ghetto”: “The churchly women and the matter-of-fact, no nonsense men had children in the Army. The sleazy girls they talked to had lovers there, the sharpies and the “race” men had friends and brothers there.”37 Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, sent a letter to Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, to tell him that the disorders were ignited by “the fury born of repeated, unchecked, unpunished, and often unrebuked shooting, maiming, and insulting of Negro troops, particularly in the southern states.”38 Though White emphasized “the southern states,” the treatment of Black troops in the South could clearly not be separated from the anti-black police violence endemic everywhere in the 102

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nation—a fact illustrated in the power of the story of Bandy’s killing. The idea of a white police officer shooting down a Black soldier in New York captured the quotidian brutality with which the ghetto was policed as well as the national humiliation of Black soldiers. It is telling that both Black servicemen and civilians responded rapidly to the news of the killing. An FBI agent surveilling conditions in New York reported that “300 negro civilians and soldiers gathered and demonstrated” and that “[s]hortly thereafter approximately 200 negro soldiers and sailors also demonstrated” in front of the Harlem police station.39 The fact that the rebellion mobilized so quickly reflects Harlemites’ long standing disgust with the policing to which they were subject. In May of 1942, after the police shot and killed a mentally disordered Black man who allegedly attacked two policemen, a crowd of 75 Harlem residents gathered in protest in front of the hospital where the man had been taken.40 A social rebellion against brutal policing had already broken out in the city eight years previously. A committee appointed by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to investigate the 1935 Harlem Riots concluded that “the insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression” was a contributing factor to the unrest. “The police should be regarded by a community as friends; in Harlem the police are regarded as enemies.” The report urged that police be instructed to officers obey the law in their treatment of the people of Harlem; to be given “thorough instruction in the law as to the limitations of their rights and the few occasions on which they may use violence”; that a board of Black and white citizens be formed to hear complaints about police; and that officers who violate the law be punished.41 As they rose up again to denounce the police shooting of a Black soldier, the people directed their rage at white property and white police. They launched projectiles—bricks, ashcans, bottles—at the police. Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote that “[w]whatever missile could be found” went hurling through the shiny plate glass windows of the stores along 125th Street, stores which depended exclusively on Black patronage but refused to offer Black people jobs.42 White joined La Guardia to drive through the angry streets repeating over a loudspeaker that the rumor that a Black soldier had been killed was false. They urged people to go home with a moralizing warning that both alluded to and implicitly legitimized anti-black racism: “Don’t destroy in one night the reputation as good citizens you have taken a lifetime to build!”43 Before the unrest was contained, people broke more than 4,000 plate glass windows and ripped open more than 1,500 stores, causing five million dollars’ worth of property damage. Baldwin, whose father had died just before the unrest, later recalled driving to the funeral through a “wilderness of smashed plate glass.”44 City officials were eager to differentiate the riot from Detroit’s and to assert its “non-racial” nature. It was not a “race riot,” they argued, but an outbreak of hoodlums and delinquents. In one of the radio broadcasts he made during the riot, whose aim, according to Nat Brandt, was to soothe white people in the rest of the city, La Guardia asserted, “the people of West Harlem know that they have no cause to complain.”45 Arthur Garfield Hays, who sat on the Citizens’ Committee on Harlem, which had investigated the 1935 riots in the city, denounced the La Guardia administration for ignoring the committee’s recommendations to act upon police misconduct and aggression. In a letter printed by the New York Times, he asserted that while “wretched housing, unduly high rents, lack of recreation grounds, [and] discrimination in the industry against colored people” were part of the intolerable tensions to which Harlemites were subject, brutal policing had again driven the people to violent protest. Despite his anger at the Mayor’s neglect to address the festering issues of police brutality, Hays asserted that the police had acted “efficiently” in their handling of the riot.46 La Guardia’s management of the riot and the manner in which it was policed earned widespread praise, including from Black leaders. In contrast to the Mayor of Detroit who remained behind closed doors as white rioters beat Black people on the steps of City Hall, La Guardia was lauded for inserting himself on the scene. Before the riot had even begun, he had the Police Commissioner send two officers to 103

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Detroit to observe and to inform strategies in New York that would prevent the same mistakes being made. 47 After the riots, Walter White lauded the “remarkable” attitude of the police who poured into Harlem to quell the unrest. Unlike in Detroit, “during all those troubled hours,” he did not hear them using racist epithets or displaying “any other manifestation racial animosity. They were simply concerned with restoring order.”48 As he prepared for potential disturbances after Detroit, La Guardia emphasized that he would not tolerate police brutality and asserted that the police would “protect all citizens regardless of race or color.” Meetings between the Mayor, city officials and some Black leaders produced guidelines that during any disturbance police should use force only “when necessary,” and that shooting and tear gas should be a last resort. The Police Commissioner Valentine continually reminded patrol officers that their “language and actions” would be scrutinized and that they should “remain calm, cool and collected; act firmly but courteously.” Not everyone agreed that the policing of the riot was restrained and professional. Historian Carl Suddler recounts the responses of a group of Black youth speaking to a reporter shortly after the riots. They reminded him that it was the actions of the police that caused the uprising in the first place: “That cop shot a soldier in the back and we ain’t satisfied.”49 While the boys incorrectly insisted that Bandy had been killed, the underlying point that a policeman had shot a Black soldier who was not posing a threat to life demonstrated how readily police used lethal violence in Harlem and revealed the racialized order they maintained. This is also illustrated in the repression of the unrest. The supposedly restrained policing of the riots, devoid of overt racial animosity (according to White), was nevertheless deadly to its Black subjects. As they “restor[ed] order,” police shot and killed five people for taking property from the broken stores, in one instance some pork, in another a suitcase.50 In the socialist paper The Militant, George Breitman, writing under his pen name of Albert Parker, highlighted the point that the order being restored was the root of the problem. He critiqued prominent Black leaders and a large part of the Black press for joining in with the call for “the restoration of ‘law and order’” and for “denouncing thousands of Harlemites as hoodlums, vandals, irresponsible elements, etc.” “Virtually all the Negro papers hailed the behavior of the New York police- the same police whose brutality to Negroes was one of the chief causes of the outbreak. They seem highly elated and relieved that ‘only’ six died, most of them at the hands of the police.” Breitman rejected the characterization of those who rioted as “hoodlums,” insisting that the riots were a “spontaneous protest” enacted by a people “revolting against victimization by the police” and the wider brutality of Jim Crow capitalism.51

At the Summer’s End In the aftermath of the summer prominent strains of state discourse were explicitly or implicitly blaming Black people for the violence to which they were subject. In Detroit, a coalition of civil rights and labor groups urged authorities to convene a grand jury to investigate the causes of the riot and the deaths it caused. Instead the governor convened his own fact-finding committee made up of Republican law officers who had been involved in the handling of the riot. After hearing only police testimony, they found all the police killings to be justified, though as Harvard Sitkoff points out, only a court or grand jury had the right to classify a homicide as legally “justifiable.”52 They attributed racial tensions to “Negro agitators who ‘constantly beat the drums of: Racial prejudice, inequality, intolerance and discrimination,’” with their “presumed grievances” and complaints of “alleged Jim Crowism.” The report was heavily criticized by most of the press, but the riot was nevertheless declared a “closed incident.”53 Less overt than Republican city and state officials in Michigan, the Roosevelt administration’s silence on the riots effectively legitimated police killings and the structural violence of Jim Crow. Roosevelt refused to address the summer’s riots in one of his fireside chats and the administration killed a proposal in the Senate for a Congressional investigation. Sitkoff notes that the actions taken 104

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by the federal government amounted to “press releases [that] emphasized the recent gains of Negroes,” clarifying the procedure for local officials to call in federal troops in the case of future riots, and approving Hoover’s recommendation to give draft deferments to urban police officers.54 In October, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote an article in the Negro Digest in response to the summer’s unrest. Roosevelt, who had herself been accused by angry white Southerners of encouraging race riots because she disapproved of segregation and entertained Black guests at the White House, lectured Black people about the importance of gratitude and patience. If I were a Negro today … I would realize that if my ancestors had never left Africa, we would be worse off as “natives” today under the rule of any other country than I am in this country where my people were brought as slaves … .I would not do too much demanding. I would take every chance that came my way to prove my quality and my ability and if recognition was slow, I would continue to prove myself, knowing that in the end good performance has to be acknowledged … .I would accept every advance that was made in the Army and Navy, though I would not try to bring those advances about any more quickly than they were offered … . Evil emotions injure the man or woman who harbors them so I would try to fight down resentment, the desire for revenge and bitterness. 55 Like the overt anti-black racism of the officials in Detroit—one of whom asserted that the “racial conflict has been going on the country since our ancestors made the first mistake of bringing the Negro to the country,” and therefore arguing that it was pointless to try to do anything about it—Roosevelt’s patronizing advice implicitly treats Black people’s presence in the United States as a difficulty.56 Her proposal of a tenuous and as yet to be fully earned belonging in the national body (one’s worth must be “proven”), that required great care to not overstep its welcome, resonates with the FBIs paranoid and overtly repressive assessment of Black resistance. In such discourse, as in the mass arrests and shooting of Black soldiers who objected to brutality, in the blaze of police violence in Detroit and the supposedly ‘restrained’ police killing in Harlem, Black people themselves are managed as the source of disorder, rather than the structures of violence and quotidian brutality they refused.

Notes 1 Warren Schaich, “A Relationship between Collective Racial Violence and War,” Journal of Black Studies 5 (No. 4 1975): 386. 2 Louis Martin, “Prelude to Disaster: Detroit,” Common Ground 4 (1943): 25. 3 Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” Journal of American History 58 (No. 3 1971): 662; and Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 4 Schaich, “A Relationship between Collective Racial Violence and War,” 380–396; Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In: 1919 and the 1960s (Garden City: Doubleday., 1967); and Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). 5 Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, 191. 6 Mark Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government during World War I, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001): xvi, 18, 74–75. 7 Robert A. Hill, ed., The FBI’s Racon: Racial Conditions in the United States During War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 75. 8 Hill, FBI’s Racon, 327. 9 Hill, The FBI’s Racon; and Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Roosevelt Administration and Black America: Federal Surveillance Policy and Civil Rights during the New Deal and World War II Years,” Phylon 48 (No. 1 1987): 22. 10 Lee Finkle, “The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest during World War II,” Journal of American History 60 (December 1973): 696–697.

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Margarita Aragon 11 Dwight Macdonald and Nancy Macdonald, The War’s Greatest Scandal: The Story of Jim Crow in Uniform (New York: March on Washington Movement, 1943), 9. 12 On the Zoot Suit Riots see: Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot; Eduardo Pagán Obregón, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 13 “Report of the Detroit Field Division,” in The FBI’s Racon: Racial Conditions in the United States During War II, ed. Robert A. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 139. 14 Schaich, “A Relationship between Collective Racial Violence and War,” 385. On military segregation more generally, see Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2004); Phillip McGuire, Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993); and Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents, Vol. V, Black Soldiers in World War II (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc, 1997). 15 Charles H. Houston, “Critical Summary: The Negro in the U.S. Armed Forces in World Wars I and II,“ Journal of Negro Education 12 (No. 3 1943): 364. 16 Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 11; MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces, 104; “Snow Cleaners, Cotton Pickers,“ Crisis 50 (March 1943): 72; Thomas A. Guglielmo, “’Red Cross, Double Cross’: Race and America’s World War II-Era Blood Donor Service,” Journal of American History 97 (June 2010): 63–90. 17 P.L. Prattis, “Brutal White MPs Stir Trouble in Army Camp,” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 June 1941, 1. 18 Prattis, “Brutal White MPs Stir Trouble in Army Camp,” 1, 4; and P.L. Prattis, “Sample of Work of White Military Police in Southern Amy Camps,” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 June 1941, 12. 19 Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 366. 20 Memorandum, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy for Chief of Staff, 3 July 1943, Subject: Negro troops, cited in: MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces, 121. 21 Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,“ 668. 22 Macdonald and Macdonald, “The War’s Greatest Scandal: The Story of Jim Crow in Uniform,“ 2–3. 23 William M. Simpson, “A Tale Untold? The Alexandria, Louisiana, Lee Street Riot (January 10, 1942),” Louisiana History 35 (Spring 1994): 138–141. 24 Ibid., 140, 139. 25 Thurgood Marshall, “The Gestapo in Detroit,” The Crisis 50 (August 1943), 232, 246–247; and “Suspend Officer in Y Shooting,” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 July 1943, 8. 26 “The roll of shame … Recent events leading to rioting,” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 June 1932, 4; and Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 153–154. 27 George S. Schulyer, “Views and Reviews,” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 July 1943, 13. 28 Marshall, “The Gestapo in Detroit,” 232; Alex L. Swann, “The Harlem and Detroit Riots of 1943,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 16 (1971–1972): 75–93; “U.S Troops sent to Detroit as Race Riot Continues to take more lives,” New York Age, 26 June 1943, 1; and Harvard Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land: The Long Struggle for Racial Equality in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), 43–65. 29 P.L. Prattis, “The Horizon,” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 July 1943, 13. 30 William G. Nunn, ‘Detroit Police Accused,” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 July 1943, 8. 31 Swann, “The Harlem and Detroit Riots of 1943,” 85. 32 Marshall, “The Gestapo in Detroit,” 232–233. 33 Ibid. 34 “We can’t cross Woodward Avenue!” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 June 1943, 1. 35 “Biddle Explains,” New York Age, 21 August 1943, 6; and “Biddle denies migration ban,” The Crisis, 50 (September 1943): 280. 36 Laurie F. Leach, “Margie Polite, the Riot Starter: Harlem, 1943,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 40 (Fall 2007): 25–48, 173. 37 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 110. 38 Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 110; and “Along the N.A.A.C.P Battlefront,” The Crisis 50 (September 1943): 281. 39 “Report of the New York Field Division,” in The FBI’s Racon: Racial Conditions in the United States During War II, ed., Robert A. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 209. 40 Nathan Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 166–167; and Swan, “The Harlem and Detroit Riots of 1943,” 82–83.

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The Policing of Black Resistance in WW II 41 Arthur Garfield Hays, “Letters to the Times: Riots in Harlem Analyzed,” New York Times, 6 August 1943, 14 42 Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 235. 43 Ibid., 237. 44 Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 112. 45 Brandt, Harlem at War; and Swan, “The Harlem and Detroit Riots of 1943,” 88–89. 46 Hays, “Letters to the Times: Riots in Harlem Analyzed,” 14. 47 Brandt, Harlem at War, 172–174. 48 White, A Man Called White, 239. 49 Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York: NYU Press, 2020), 63 50 Brandt, Harlem at War, 197. 51 Albert Parker, “Who was to blame for the Harlem Outbreak?” The Militant, 14 August 1943, 3; and Albert Parker, “Outbreak in Harlem was caused by Jim Crowism,” The Militant, 7 August 1943, 1. 52 Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land, 57. 53 Ibid., 56–57; and “Riot Report Blames Negroes,” Crisis 50 (September 1943): 280. 54 Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land, 78–79. 55 O’Reilly, “The Roosevelt Administration and Black America,” 22; and Eleanor Roosevelt, “Freedom: Promise or fact?” Negro Digest 1 (1943): 8–9. 56 Sitkoff, Toward Freedom Land, 56.

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9 AMERICAN POLICING AND THE STRUGGLE FOR BLACK CIVIC RIGHTS Jonathan Simon

Introduction: The War on Black Civic Rights To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression … The atmosophere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality.1 In the years accompanying and following the great judicial and legislative victories of the modern Civil Rights movement, Black Americans experienced an extraordinary wave of police violence and aggression, the legacies of which continue to haunt American society to this day. The baseline of police aggression was always high. The arrival of Black Americans in the large cities of the North and South during the great migration of the twentieth century was greeted from the start by open discrimination in housing and employment, violently enforced when necessary by White vigilante violence and police brutality.2 Growing up in North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s, civil rights activist Ericka Huggins routinely observed “police beating someone to the ground.”3 But as the legal support for segregation policies dejure and de facto eroded, police violence against Black people and communities shifted and intensified as did violent resistance from these communities. It was in this context that police brutality became more than just a question of unjustified police force, but of police force used to deny Black Americans the experience of public equality promised but not delivered by legally enforced civil rights. What this chapter calls the policing of Black civic rights generated a “cycle” of police violence and violent resistance that reached a peak in the period 1968 through 1972. Police in this period redeployed from resisting Black civil rights, i.e., individual assertions of equal rights to work, own property, or engage in commerce, and toward resisting Black civic rights, i.e., collective assertions of equal public standing in the civic life of the larger community. Police violence did not have to be lethal or otherwise extreme in order to invoke police brutality and a violent response Historian Elizabeth Hinton identified nearly 2000 uprisings in nearly 1000 segregated Black communities during these years, mostly against “policing of ordinary, everyday activity.”4 As the judicial and legislative victories of the civil rights movement opened new public spaces to the Black community, such as formerly all White public high schools, parks, and shopping districts, Black citizens sought not just equal access as individuals but collective rights to respect and pride. These everyday unwanted encounters with the law hit Black citizens at the seam where the promise of formal equality as individuals, met the right to equal civic participation in the life of the city. In their totality they formed a system of civic degradation that reminded Black citizens that they remained on a lower social level regardless of formal legal equality.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-13

Struggle for Black Civic Rights

As the war on crime took hold in the 1970s and expanded in the 1980s, the “cycle” of police brutality and violent uprisings was gradually repressed. Later twentieth century uprisings generally differed in emerging from examples of extraordinary and deadly police violence amplified by a clear failure of the legal system to do justice as in Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1991, and Cincinnati in 2001.5 But if the cycle of violence created by the policing of Black civic rights has largely ended, its legacy lives on in high levels of gun violence and low levels of trust in policing that exist in historically segregated Black neighborhoods across the United States today. This chapter focuses on “civic rights,” a form of rights talk with a strong history in American political life going back to the eighteenth century, but which has largely been eclipsed by their close relation, “civil rights.” Civil rights are classically those that involve a right to equal treatment in the market place and in the legal system. While they can be thought about in terms of groups, they are legally invested in individuals. Civic rights classically have a group or collective aspect as for example the right to participate in a jury, or bear arms in the militia. More broadly they involve rights to occupy public space as a collective for purposes of civic engagement ranging from political rallies (whether permitted or not) to music festivals and unofficial sports competitions. Civic rights have long been subordinated by historians and legal scholars in their studies of this period to demands for civil rights; which better fit the deeply individualistic dominant ideology of the United States. They are related to but distinct and broader from political rights like the right to vote in elections. Historically, Black people, along with indigenous people, were denied all three types of rights, civil, civic, and political rights. The legal victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, including judicial wins like the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 decision striking down school segregation, and 1967 decision striking down laws barring inter-racial marriage, and legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, left Black civic rights the most contested zone of social equality and the increasing focus of policing. This chapter argues that the enduring intensification of police violence in the late 1960s and since is best understood as an attempt to resist the Black demand for civic rights. Equal opportunity for Black citizens as individuals would become a public law value in the United States, accepted however grudgingly and gradually by its police forces, but police violently rejected accepting collective Black civic participation and pride. Police brutality represented a systemic strategy of “civic degradation” to address the hunger of Black communities for social equality in American civic life after the 1960s.6 This dynamic helps explain the long-term estrangement of Black communities from the police in the post-civil rights era, and the short but intense period of violent Black resistance to police in the 1970s. The elision of civic by civil rights also helps explain the enduring failure of White political institutions from the Kerner Commission to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (even when led occasionally by Black individuals), to see police brutality as a reality rather than a perception or belief by Black people.

Civic Rights Distinguished from Civil Rights, Natural Rights, and National Rights Historian Elizabeth Hinton’s analysis of the wave of uprisings in segregated Black communities across America between 1968 and 1972 reveals that a great deal of this violence was in response to police actions perceived as denying Black people civic equality in an America that had officially recognized their civil rights: “The routine stop and frisk that attacked people’s dignity, the breaking up of community gatherings, uniformed officers in the hallways of under-resourced public schools and more.” Describing these Black rebellions as “community based,” and concerned with “employment, housing, education and law enforcement” Hinton summarizes their logic as an expression that as communities, that is through collective action, they would “no longer be treated as second class citizens.”7 Police violence, and Black resistance to police violence, became a medium for 109

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rejecting Black “civic agency” and proving that Black people were “unwilling or incapable of performing their civic obligations.”8 As Sargent Shriver, a member of the Johnson administration and head of the Peace Corp tried to explain to President Johnson in the midst of riots that threatened to upend his administration’s “war on poverty,” Black communities increasingly wanted not just individual rights but “equal access to the fruits of participating citizenship.”9 Seeing police violence against Black communities, and violent responses by those communities, in the context of a struggle for “civic rights” requires us to distinguish civic rights from other important and related forms of rights talk and struggle with long histories in the United States, especially civil rights, natural rights, and national rights. While there are important overlaps, civic rights are most distinct from civil and natural rights because they are collective in nature, and most distinct from national rights because they operate mostly below the political level of national sovereignty and realized fully in terms of city life (thus civic). Struggles for civic rights, even while at times violent, aim not at over-throwing or replacing the legal system, but at demanding equal incorporation into the legal system. Civic rights in the Anglo American tradition reached their zenith prior to the framing of the Constitution as a tradition of popular legality that has continued to influence law and society since that time. In a sense, it is a counter tradition to our normal model of constitutional rights as exemplified in most of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution (sometimes referred to as the “Bill of Rights”). The key distinction of civic rights is that they are part of a citizen’s general relationship with society and thus come with complementary obligations.10 Civic rights at the time of the US Constitution, generally consisted of “the rights and obligations associated with a citizen’s duty to society: participation in government as a political official, participation in the legal process as a juror, participation in the electoral process as a voter, and participation in the militia.”11 While most constitutional rights (to own property and not have it taken without just compensation or freedom of religion) do not come with any particular obligations or duties. The trend has been to transform once civic rights into civil rights, such as the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms which courts and legal scholars had long argued to be limited by its famous militia clause but which the Supreme Court held to be an individual right in Heller v. District of Columbia striking down a District of Columbia law criminalizing possession of a gun in a person’s home and defining the right protected by the Second Amendment as an individual one not requiring participation in a militia.12 A second distinction is that while civil rights are generally exercised individually (or at least do not require a larger relational context) civic rights were individual rights but usually involved a relationship to a larger collective. In the Anglo-American legal tradition this is perhaps most exemplified by jury service where the citizen participates with other citizens in “pronouncing communal judgment and imposing the force of the community on those who violated its legally established norms, or-in the case of bearing arms-against those who threatened its safety. It was, that is, an individual right exercised collectively.”13 Perhaps the oldest tradition in rights talk involves “natural rights” that emerge from a religion or nature. This tradition was famously invoked by the Declaration of Independence but receives little if any recognition in the Constitution. The former document laid out a case for abolishing an existing political society (that of British rule over its North American colonies). The latter established a new distribution of sovereignty within an independent nation. Ever since natural rights talk has remained a language of revolution, or restoration, justifying a group of people in taking up arms against one legal system, but with the intent to establish another. In the United States, this kind of natural rights talk has persisted most among insurrectionary movements seeking to defend their social status against efforts by the legal system seen as threatening to it (whether by enforcing private property rights or civil rights for minorities). While civic rights, unlike natural rights, point toward law and legal institutions, understanding the struggle for civic rights by subaltern groups requires us to widen the lens and consider a broader 110

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array of participatory political action and civic engagement. As political theorists Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen point out in their study of youth movements and new technology, “many of the struggles to shift public attention to new issues or frames and to challenge the balance of power in public life take place outside of traditional institutions of civic and political life.”14 Movements for civic rights (and police resistance to them) can be also distinguished from (although they may often appear concurrently with) demands for “national rights,” i.e., rights talk associated with national liberation movements seeking to throw off colonial powers. Sandip Hazareesingh has argued that it is important to distinguish the “concrete demands for civic rights that accompanied, but were by no means identical with, the struggle for national selfdetermination.” For Haarezsigh who studied resistance to British colonial power in early twentieth-century Bombay, civic rights are about the ability of subaltern groups to assert and express themselves in the public space of cities. “Historically, cities and civic rights have been indissolubly linked, the dynamic arena of the city providing an amenable social space for the original experiments and practices of modern citizenship.”15 This is particularly important because much of the Black liberation struggle in the United States and internationally during the period in question (1950s through the 1970s) sought to identify itself with anti-colonial and national liberation struggles being waged in Africa and Asia in the post-World War II period. Perhaps most famously the Black Panther Party, but also in varying degrees the Nation of Islam, signalled the aspiration for a revolutionary or religious overturning of what in their view was America’s irredeemably White supremacist national identity.16 At the sametime the everyday praxis of these movements, ranging from breakfast programs for school children in high poverty neighborhoods, to selling Muhammad Speaks on the street corners of historically segregated Black neighborhod, are perhaps best seen as assertions of Black civic rights within the nation state. Black nationalism in the middle twentieth century was largely a struggle for Black civic rights in the arena of cities like Los Angeles and Oakland, California, like Chicago, Illinois, and New York, New York. The extraordinary police violence directed at the Panthers and at the Nation of Islam, was justified at the time by defining them as a threat to national security and associating them with the lethal violence of White terrorism directed against civil rights. But as the policing of everyday life in Black communities became more aggressive in this period, it was not so much the national security threat that provoked the police response as that to White dominance of public space. As Chief William Parker of the Los Angeles Police Department warned the public shortly after the Watts uprising of 1965, that by 1970 “Forty-Five percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro.”17

Policing Black Civic Engagement If the civil rights movement’s legal victories in Congress and the courts often stopped short of guaranteeing full civic rights (and with them substantive social equality), they did open up access to public spaces in the cities through which civic rights could be glimpsed and sought. Police violence was particularly key in responding to Black assertion in three of these spaces: streets, parks, and schools. Black citizens were increasingly willing to respond with violence to what they perceived as police denial of their civic equality. In the nearly 2000 uprisings of the late 1960s and early 1970s studied by Hinton, some 40 thousand people were arrested and more than 10,000 injured.18 Black communities resisted not only with fists and rocks, but at times also with gun fire and arson. Although defined by police and political authorities as an attack on the law and legal institutions, this arc of violence is better understood today as a response to the use of policing and punishment to degrade their access to civic participation as equals. 111

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The Streets Prior to the civil rights movement, Black people were limited in their ability to access and occupy public streets by Jim Crow laws in the South and de facto segregation in the North. Police played a central role in enforcing both. The legal victories of the movement opened up access to the streets as a matter of civil rights to Black people as individuals, but their efforts to collectively exercise this right was contested by the police. Increasingly Black citizens challenged this regime with deliberately provocative steps to claim the civic right to appear in public. An interesting moment of the growing demand for civic rights by Black and sometimes Latino citizens, and the police response to it in the era before civil rights were extended was the so-called “zoot suit” wars of the 1940s.19 As World War II demand for their labor placed Black and Latino workers in once “whites only” factory jobs in the nation’s largest cities, many sought to claim not only civil rights but what we’ve been calling a “civic right,” in this case the right to occupy public streets in open expression of their equal status as workers and consumers. The “zoot suit,” a term for eye-catching styles worn by Black and Latino men in urban areas “became a metaphor for Black activities that seemed subversive to the White order and attracted police attention and even new criminal legislations.”20 Police, sometimes supported by White members of the armed services, responded by harassing and arresting Black and Latino men wearing clothes considered defiant and they fought back. The zoot suit wars may have anticipated the wave of civic struggle that was to come. But the revolution in civil rights, particularly the expansion of criminal procedures rights to protection for unwarranted police intrusion under the Fourth Amendment, and its enforcement with the exclusionary rule undermined the ability of police to arrest those deemed out of order or place at will.21 A victory for civil rights had opened the door to increase Black demand for civic rights, i.e., to a respected place in the urban social order. One way the legal system adjusted to the challenge civil rights posed to police repression was the adoption of “stop and frisk” laws authorizing police to coercively encounter citizens on the street even without probable cause they had committed a crime, as long as they had “reasonable suspicion” based on the place and behavior observed (a standard allowing virtually limitless confrontation as long as an officer can articulate a suspicion by the time they come to court if ever).22 New York adopted the first such law in 1964. “Resistance from the organized Black community was immediate,” including traditional Black civil rights organizations but also the new organization that Malcolm X had created to step away from the Nation of Islam and adopt a more openly civic rights orientation, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.23 The new policing, while in line with civil rights as defined by the Supreme Court of the United States, affronted Black citizens aware that their civic rights were being ignored and repressed. This helped establish a feedback loop leading to seemingly unanticipated violence against police. As Hinton describes it, people “rebelled when the police appeared out of nowhere and for no apparent reason” thus violating their civic right to peacefully enjoy the public streets without harassment.24 But this kind of unexpected police intervention is exactly what stop and frisk laws authorized and later the war on drugs would authorize. If police brutality figured so largely in the thinking of mid-twentieth century Black citizens and in their movements for civic and civil rights, it is not because it was historically extreme as violence but in an age of civil rights it became the most pervasive public obstacle to the civic participation they demanded to obtain social equality. Aggressive policing, much of it mobilized to counterbalance the extension of civil rights, attacked Black citizens precisely at the crease of civic engagement, where they should enter and appear in public collectively as Black citizens. As Simon Balto says of Black Chicago “black experiences with the CPD [Chicago Police Department] were confrontations with brute institutional racism within the nominally public realm.”25 In cities like Chicago, police operated as a double barrier to civic engagement, punishing Black collective appearances in public with violence, and visibly denying Black residents equal access to one of the most easily identifiable “public resources” next to schools.

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Parks and Recreation Closely related to the civic rights and dignities of citizens on their streets, was the enjoyment of parks and other areas of public recreation. While never banned from using public parks or streets in the North, Black citizens had long been limited in their use by policing and checked from being a dominant presence outside of a few segregated areas on the streets or in those parks. One of the ways that culture and civil engagement came together in the 1960s to reflect Black aspirations for civic equality was in music festivals oriented to Black music (of course also popular with youthful White audiences). But even when authorized by city authorities, these park festivals were often treated as near emergency threats by local police departments. A significant example was the Watts Summer festival in the turbulent year of 1969, which was officially sanctioned by the City of Los Angeles, and hosted in Will Rogers Park in the heart of Black and Latino dominant South Central Los Angeles. Despite the official authorization of the festival, the LAPD “had blanketed the area surrounding the park during the festival.” They allowed the festival to complete its program but when thousands of music fans stayed in the park afterwards continuing to party, police in black SWAT style crepe uniforms and automatic weapons swept in.26 Use of parks and streets for drinking, partying, and unauthorized parades or sporting events provides a significant example of the difference between civic and civil rights. No one has a civil right to enjoy technically illegal freedoms in the streets or parks like public drinking or parading without a permit. If the police choose to permit one group to do so, but enforce the law strictly against another, no one’s civil rights have been violated, but their civic rights clearly have. As Black citizens expanded their use of streets and parks in the 1960s and 1970s, their pursuit of equal treatment was not limited to legal activities. They wanted the same tolerance for minor, and one might say, civically oriented illegalities (like unauthorized parades or parties celebrating community identities or values). Numerous uprising or riots of the 1960s and 1970s were sparked by police enforcement actions that were read by Black community members as denying them the kind of consideration that White citizens had long counted on. As Hinton observed, “they erupted when police failed to extend to residents the common courtesies afforded to whites (allowing white teenagers to drink in a park but arresting Mexican American teens for the same behavior.”) This put police on an increasing collision course with Black civic aspirations. The war on crime encouraged them to initiate interactions “to find potential criminals or rioters.”27 Public housing projects, themselves an important part of the remaking of urban territories around the transformations associated with the civil rights revolution, also created new spaces of recreation in public and for policing civic engagement. One uprising was sparked when some 40 White police responded to festivities in the all Black Sierra Vista housing project. The community later retaliated by luring two officers into the project and holding them against their will, requiring a mass mobilization of police from nearby towns to resolve the situation, with an agreement, negotiated (but later repudiated by the police) to keep police out of the projects except for major crime reports.28 Whether in a park, the common areas of housing projects, or the breaking up of a football game on the streets, Black people in America were responding to the policing of ordinary activities, like social gatherings, family disputes, and evictions as challenges to their equal status, even though they rarely could point to specific civil rights that were being violated. Instead, it was an accurate sense that police were challenging their ability to engage civically as the equals of Whites, that turned these seemingly minor incidents into violent uprisings.

Schools The desegregation of public schools was one of the first and foremost demands of the civil rights movement. Violent confrontations, often led by White communities resisting desegregation, often

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followed. But where they were successful in being enforced, desegregation orders sometimes led to Black uprisings as students encountered not formal segregation, but what amounted to civic degradation in the form of both institutional exclusion and excessive policing. One of the most striking patterns uncovered by Hinton’s research on Black uprisings is how often they arose around the issue of Black exclusion from cheerleading squads.29 Compared to the great issues of civil rights, inclusion on cheerleading squads might seem trivial,30 but as a demand for civic rights it was in fact anything but. For the majority of Americans then and now who never graduate from college, the high school years are not only a rehearsal for civic participatory life but the real thing. Being on student council, the newspaper, acting in a school play, and especially being a star athlete or a cheerleader was as much public civic recognition as most people would ever achieve. In all but a tiny number of adult lives, recognition and celebration of achievement and experience is virtually completely private, within the firm or family. Black high school students had no problem recognizing that having no Black person selected for the squad was as decisive a statement of social inferiority as segregation itself. The question of pride was not simply tied to beauty or talent contests. Black students in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania responded with boycotts and protests after White students showed disrespect during an assembly for what was then called “Negro History week.” Meanwhile schools that remained majority Black were subjected to even more aggressive policing and isolation anticipating the schools to jail pipeline that would emerge in subsequent decades.31

Conclusion Police violence against Black and other racialized minority communities in the 1970s, and the violent response from some members of the Black community to the police in those years, are best seen not as a backlash against legal victories for Black civil rights, but as an effort to repress Black struggles for civic rights, i.e., rights to collective agency in the public spaces and institutions of cities. Understanding the distinction between civic rights, and other kinds of rights claims, including civil rights, natural rights, and national rights, is crucial for making sense of this turbulent time in American history and its implications for the present. Although civil rights and civic rights are often intertwined in specific constitutional rights, civic rights are marked by their necessary connection to public objectives and collective relationships. The tendency of modern law and constitutional law in particular, to individualize and privatize our understanding of rights has elided the distinction, but it remains valuable. Civil rights victories do not guarantee the achievement of civic rights as was demonstrated by the success of White resistance in the South to desegregation orders through simply closing schools or public amenities. Nor does the absence of effective civil rights prevent historically marginalized groups from demanding and attaining a measure of civic rights, as demonstrated by the movement for public tolerance in the urban space for queer people decades before any notable legal victories for sexual minorities.32 Recovering a distinctive recognition of civic rights is also a way to resuscitate civil rights law that has been narrowed to the point of irrelevance in many areas of importance to social equality. It is also important to recognize the struggle for civic rights of Black and other marginalized Americans, including violent struggle against the police, as a form of resistance to civic degradation, and distinguish it from the forms of populist insurgency that often invoke the language of natural rights to justify the use of violence against law enforcement and in open defiance of laws and legal institutions perceived as denying them a status they traditionally enjoyed. While it may have reached its peak at the same time as the Constitution in the late eighteenth century, this tradition is hardly dead as reflected in the long twentieth century influence of the Klan and as recently as the January 6, 2021 in the insurgent riot at the United States Capitol by supporters of former President Trump in which

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law enforcement officers were targeted and assaulted. In its response to radical Black liberation movements of the 1960s and since, law enforcement has often invoked their equivalence with this largely White populist tradition as a justification for repressing them violently. Both share a willingness to use violent resistance against legal authorities and institutions and both have at times invoked the image of a revolutionary recreation (or perhaps restoration) of law with its natural rights rhetoric. Yet as argued above, these movements and other expressions of violent resistance in segregated Black communities during the 1970s and periodically since are better seen as movements for civic rights, that is rights that are ultimately compatible with and engage with law and legal institutions. In brief, populist insurgent movements use violence to disrupt laws and legal institutions that challenge their exclusive status by including formerly subordinated others while civic rights movements by Black communities and other marginalized groups use violence to protest laws and legal institutions that exclude them from civic participation and undermine their “ability to make claims on the state.”33 The goal of civic rights struggle is to facilitate equal civic engagement and an equal stake in the law.

Notes 1 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington: USGPO, 1969), 22. 2 Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel HIll: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 3 Tony Platt, Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 110. 4 Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2021), 10. 5 Ibid., 15. 6 Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Imprisonment and Welfare in 1970s America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 6. 7 Hinton, America on Fire, 3, 8. 8 Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 6; and Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen, “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics,” in From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 35–55. 9 Hinton, America on Fire, 9. 10 David Thomas Konig, “The Persistence of Resistance: Civic Rights, Natural Rights, and Property Rights in the Historical Debate over the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms,” Fordham Law Review 73 (No. 2 2004): 539–547. 11 Saul Cornell and Nathan DeDino, “A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control,” Fordham Law Review 73 (No. 2 2004): 508. 12 Heller v. District of Columbia, 554 U.S. 570 (2007). See also Konig, “The Persistence of Resistance.” 13 Konig, “The Persistence of Resistance” 541. Emphasis added. 14 Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen, “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics,” 37. 15 Sandip Hazareesingh, “The Quest for Urban Citizenship: Civic Rights, Public Opinion, and Colonial Resistance in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay,” Modern Asian Studies 34 (No. 4 2000): 797, 799. 16 Manning Marable, A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X (New York: Penguin Books, 2011); and Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 17 Quoted in Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 46. 18 Hinton, America on Fire, 9. 19 Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime LA (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 20 Marable, A Life of Reinvention, 62. 21 The key decision was Mapp v. Ohio (1961) which held that the exclusionary rule was constitutionally mandated when evidence collected against a person’s Fourth Amendment rights was attempted to be put into evidence to prove the case against them. Other decisions held many state vagrancy laws to be

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

unconstitutionally vague, which also stripped police of one of their easiest legal bases for arresting anyone who appeared to be out of place. The most famous was Papachristou v. Jacksonville (1972). See Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961); and Papachristou v. Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972). This was held constitutional under the Fourth Amendment in Terry v. Ohio (1968) provided the police articulated reasonable grounds for their suspicions and limited their detention and search to the objectives of checking those suspicions without endangering themselves or others. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968). Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say, 158. Hinton, America on Fire, 25. Balto, Occupied Territory, 9. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 74–75. Hinton, America on Fire, 20, 25. Ibid., 55, 57–59. Ibid., 145–147. In the Burlington case, the fighting over cheerleading led to demands for power sharing with Black students, the rejection of which led to more violence. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 148. Both struggles, for Black and queer civic rights (and the intersectional connections between them) were distinctively urban and both ultimately expressed themselves in uprisings or “riots” to use the terminology of the legal system itself. Anna Lvovsky, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough, 14.

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10 WALKING THE TIGHTROPE OF SELF-DEFENSE Imagery, Rhetoric, and Commemoration of the Black Panther Party Cheryl X. Dong

After his release from prison, Huey P. Newton wrote his memoir, fleshing out in its pages his thoughts on the Black experience of state violence through the term, “Revolutionary Suicide.”1 Newton borrowed heavily on the ideas of Herbert Hendin, a psychologist and expert in suicide. Hendin argued that African Americans were more prone to suicide.2 For Newton, this predilection reflected harsh realities that Black people, especially Black men, had to confront. Lack of economic opportunity and the daily violence of poverty and racial discrimination took a toll on the mental health of their communities.3 In creating the Panther conception of “Revolutionary Suicide,” Newton drew on his own personal experiences with law enforcement as well as the experiences of many members of the Black Panther Party. He theorized that it would be better to die with purpose, fighting the causes of Black oppression, like police brutality, than to die as a “reaction” to the harsh realities of inequality in America. Newton defined “Revolutionary Suicide” as fundamentally hopeful and desirous of life while accepting the possibility of death with meaning.4 Like all theories of victimization, Newton’s concept of “Revolutionary Suicide” walks a fine line between celebrating death as an end in itself and purposeful death for the cause of liberation. Newton’s later writings on “Revolutionary Suicide” reveal anxieties that members of the Party had taken the concept too far and had become trapped into a fatalistic struggle where they expected, and even welcomed, death by police.5 Newton categorized this mindset as championed by Eldridge Cleaver and as potentially disastrous for the fate of the Party and for the communities it sought to serve. After 1971, Newton placed the concept of survival as the highest goal of the Black Panther Party. Revolutionary change would come, but only if the people managed to survive the current onslaught by law enforcement. This impulse for community survival marked the shift of the Party towards grassroots community organizing and its survival programs, like their free breakfast programs and medical clinics.6 Under this constellation of priorities, “Revolutionary Suicide” still represented fundamental recognition members inherently risked death and/or imprisonment in the face of police brutality and systemic racism. However, Party members were supposed to struggle to live and organize.7 Yet “Revolutionary Suicide” remained central to the Panthers’ identity despite these shifts in organizing strategy. How they thought of themselves was wrapped up in stories of suffering,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-14

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imprisonment, and death. These stories provided a narrative of their struggle, the impetus for further work, and a collective memory tradition to commemorate those they had lost. It provided space to work through trauma caused by the collective experience of violence.8 “Revolutionary Suicide” was a lived experience and a call to action. For those who were imprisoned or trapped within the legal system, the Panthers utilized the profile of these cases to garner donations, public support, and outrage for their cause.9 The concept of “Revolutionary Suicide” presents an entrypoint into how the Black Panther Party conceptualizations of police brutality represented both rupture and continuity with past traditions of Black resistance. The Civil Rights Movement as defined by the traditional non-violent movement of 1954–65 drew on Gandhian non-violent philosophy to render visible the brutality and barbarism of Southern police. Non-violent activists practiced extreme discipline and assumed public dignity in the face of police violence that highlighted the extremism of Southern sheriffs like Bull Conner for the sympathy of northern and international audiences.10 In contrast, the Black Panther Party took a more assertive stance to the issue, calling for self-defense rather than non-violence. In Huey P. Newton’s own writings, he emphatically rejected the idea of non-violence, arguing for the urgency and necessity of self-defense: “There is a world of difference between thirty million unarmed, submissive Black people and thirty million Black people armed with freedom and defense guns and the strategic methods of liberation … .only with the power of of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality perpetuated against them by the armed racist power structure.”11 By defining an activist stance of self-defense versus non-violence, the Black Panther Party marked a fundamental shift in strategy in how activists would deal with police brutality. The Panthers significantly expanded the definition of who could be considered a victim of police brutality. An unintended consequence of non-violent strategy was to enshrine the non-violent victim as the only legitimate victim of police brutality. Activists like Rosa Parks became an unreachable model of quiet dignity against whom all other victims were judged.12 By adapting a position of self-defense, the Panthers argued that not only did Black Americans have the right to fight for their survival against a racist police state, but that respectability and passivity were not required attributes to be considered a victim. By doing so, they gave voice to radical critiques of conceptions of Black criminality.13 The Panthers created room to think about the nuances of race, gender, and class inequalities in how different populations experienced over-policing.14

Origins of Self-Defense Popular narratives of the Civil Rights Movement suggest a hard break between the traditional nonviolent movement of the South and the later, militant northern movement defined by Black Power. This narrative is familiar and expedient for those dedicated to the myth of a “good” southern movement versus a “deviant” northern movement that devolved into violence.15 It serves a political purpose by implying that the strategies of the civil rights movement are more important than its aim of bringing down an entrenched and violent regime of white supremacy. In this view, the southern movement was cooperative and interracial, above all else. It assured erstwhile white allies that integration would occur on their terms and that any Civil Rights Movement that did not center the feelings and leadership of white people was somehow aberrant.16 The destruction of this myth necessitates hard questions about why the nation needed it. A new generation of scholars are asking just those questions by challenging the geographic limitations of the Civil Rights Movement and by looking at how Black Power’s origins can be traced as much to the southern movement as to the northern urban experience. Imani Perry has argued that the South in 118

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popular memory functions as a repository for the racial sins of our nation and has often been imagined as outside and unique to it.17 By challenging these geographies, we can see issues like police brutality and racial inequality as national rather than regional problems and the responses of Black people as nuanced and complex. Working-class Black people have long embraced the gun as a means of self-defense from the violence of Jim Crow. Men like Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense and Justice took a pragmatic approach to the gun by recognizing the reality of racial violence in the South and the necessity for civil rights workers to protect themselves and their communities.18 While Robert F. Williams was ultimately thrown out of the NAACP and the United States, men and women like him played an integral role in the southern movement by pushing its boundaries and challenging the scope and goals of the movement. They might have accepted the effectiveness of non-violence as a tactic in some situations, but they did not embrace it as a philosophy because it did not make sense in their lived experience. Their activism revealed that the goal of the movement was to dismantle an entrenched regime of white supremacy in the South that touched every aspect of social life and was undergirded by unimaginable legal and extralegal violence. That violence precluded the possibility of a solely non-violent, demonstrative movement. Robert F. Williams and Amzie Moore recognized the need for self-defense, especially when the television cameras turned off.19 The Black Panthers’ ideology of self-defense and self-reliance emerged out of a southern tradition that ran parallel to and enabled the non-violent movement.20 As children of the Great Migration, Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale inherited a Southern tradition of reliance on the gun for survival and self-defense.21 The difference was that the Black Panther Party openly celebrated that connection as a tool for liberation while the Southern Civil Rights Movement hid its own strategic use of self-defense underneath the public performance of non-violence.22 Although it is easy to criticize the limitations of Black respectability and non-violent strategy from the perspective of the Black Panther Party, its existence was rooted in the politics of the Jim Crow era and the brutal carceral traditions that emerged from it. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad argues, as Black Americans moved to urban areas during the Great Migration, white progressives associated poverty and suffering of these new migrants from the South with an inherent criminality, putting into place social and economic barriers that reified beliefs about Black inferiority.23 In the face of that viewpoint, Black respectability became a shield and a tool for survival. Despite its many imperfections, the discourse of Black middle-class and elite respectability challenged the stereotype of Black criminality and provided a rhetorical strategy for poor Black men and women to lay claim to their humanity in a criminal justice system that fundamentally denied it.24 Within this context, non-violence as a strategy reinforced claims to respectability and its widespread adoption reflected the limitations of self-defense as a strategy for survival in the nadir of race relations. Self-defense continued to be used in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the rural South where ownership of a gun and reliance on communal networks of help ensured the survival of a number of individuals fleeing white terror.25 However, the reality of white violence in events like the Wilmington Coup of 1898, the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa Race massacre, and the Brownsville Affair informed a retreat from the politics of self-defense as escalating white violence brought on harsher punitive measures.26 In the case of Brownsville, the soldiers’ rumored resistance to white racism resulted in the dishonorable discharge of 167 Black infantrymen.27 In the face of unremitting white violence, self-defense came with risks that limited its adoption by Black communities both North and South. This earlier tradition of self-defense, led and inspired by Black veterans, informed the rise of a later generation of activists during the Civil Rights Movement.28 The Black Panther Party’s adoption of self-defense as a viable strategy in 1966 came as a result of the Civil Rights Movement in the South. After the long struggle of the early twentieth century, the rapidity of change brought on by non-violent resistance opened up the possibility of self-defense as a viable option for mass adoption.29 The Black Panther Party was not the first or only organization 119

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to advocate for self-defense. Organizations like the Nation of Islam and the Organization for AfroAmerican Unity provided much of the ideological basis for the Panthers’ approach to revolutionary politics and even their communication style.30 However, it was the Black Panther Party’s national prominence and ability to capture the media’s imagination that differentiate their approach to selfdefense from that of earlier organizations.

The Panther Image and Approach to Self-Defense The Black Panther Party understood from early on the power of media to create iconic images and they exploited it. In the most enduring and iconic photograph of Huey P. Newton, we see the cofounder of the Black Panther Party seated in a wicker chair that embraces him like a throne. Newton stares into the camera, as if challenging the viewer with his fierce glare. He is wearing the traditional uniform of the Black Panther Party: a black leather jacket, white button-up shirt, and beret. In one hand, he holds an African spear while the other grasps a shotgun. At his feet lies a zebra skin rug with shotgun shells scattered around the gun. African shields frame the shot on either side. Photographer Blair Stapp took the image at Beverly Axelrod’s house at the behest of Eldridge Cleaver.31 The composition of the image owed much to Cleaver’s sense of the power of symbolism, although the specific placement of the shields was a decision made by Huey P. Newton himself. As Bobby Seale later explained, “So this [the shield] is really what Huey P. Newton symbolized with the Black Panther Party – he represented a shield for black people against all the imperialism, the decadence, the aggression, and the racism in this country.”32 The photograph made its debut in the second issue of the Black Panther Community News Service alongside articles written by Newton and the Black Panther Ten-Point Platform.33 Newton’s image reflected a new Black masculinity, one that emphasized male heroism, warrior culture, and discipline. Newton’s Black male would not perform passivity and subservience, but would stand up for his rights and assert his right to self-defense if necessary.34 The image walked a tightrope that the Panthers struggled with: they had to balance both the call for self-defense against the criticism that they promoted a nihilistic vision of violence and criminality. It echoed the challenge of “Revolutionary Suicide” as a feasible strategy for liberation. The Panthers’ longtime photographer, Stephen Shames, characterized the Panther “look” as evocative of the nineteenth century white frontiersman standing against the challenge of wilderness.35 The Panthers’ adoption of that symbolism flipped that white supremacist image on its head, casting the Black man in the role of defender of civilization against the lawlessness of white supremacy. The photograph of Huey P. Newton quickly became a bestseller, fueling the Panthers’ rising popularity and creating an icon out of Newton.36 It also became an image from which the Panthers struggled to escape from because the mainstream media misappropriated it as the specter of the Black male brute and rapist.37 The struggle over the photograph of Newton represented a microcosm of how the Black Panther Party’s approach to self-defense challenged police brutality in new ways while reifying established discourses about Black criminality. In one of the major criticisms of the Black Panther Party, the Panther’s dedication to revolutionary politics brought a criminal element into their organization, fueling an escalating conflict with police that ultimately brought about their downfall.38 Yet this media-driven discourse about criminality ignores the critique that the Panthers made with their activism and their imagery. By positing Black self-defense as heroic and masculine, they created an alternative space to consider different responses to police brutality that proposed a more nuanced view of Black victimhood. The Panthers trod a fine line between demanding justice for those wronged and transforming the passive Black victim into a heroic icon of Black masculinity that would stand up to protect family and home in spite of the stakes. Present-day activists struggle with the pornography of violence against Black bodies created by videos of police assaults.39 The Panthers 120

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provided an alternative over 50 years ago that rejected a passive image of Black trauma and instead celebrated Black resilience and resistance in the face of state violence. In addition to the Panthers’ robust photographic record, the revolutionary artwork of the Black Panthers like Emory Douglas and Tarika Lewis created an enduring style that gave heft and influence to the activism of the Panthers. These artists constructed a symbolic shorthand to convey simple, direct messages about the impact of police brutality on Black communities and to challenge the authority of the state to police marginalized communities.40 In particular, Douglas’s illustrations of the pig as a stand-in for police formed the basis of a discourse that revealed the extreme violence that police often brought to bear on Black communities across the nation. The imagery of the pig in uniform covered with flies disrupted the concept of police honor by exposing the casual cruelty and lack of respect that police routinely afflicted on poor and racially marginalized communities.41 Douglas’s pig illustrations became iconic. Other revolutionary groups adopted the imagery to critique different agents of state violence, including the imperialism of United States Armed Forces abroad in Vietnam.42 The style of the Black Panther Party reflected their confrontational attitude, tactics, and rhetoric. In the first issue of the Black Panther Community News Service, the new organization ran a front-page exposé of the murder of Denzil Dowell by the Richmond police. Their reporting on Dowell flipped the usual police headline on its head by centering the testimony of Dowell’s family before that of the police.43 In eleven points, the Panthers rebutted the official police narrative by pointing out inconsistencies between the official version of events and the observations of eyewitnesses and the coroner’s office. Police shot an unarmed Dowell six times, claiming he had tried to resist arrest and attempted to flee the scene. The Panthers questioned the need for his death and pointed out that he had a hip injury and could not have resisted arrest as police accused. They questioned discrepancies in the time of death and a suspicious delay between when police killed Dowell and the arrival of additional officers to the scene.44 Following their coverage of the Denzil Dowell case, the Black Panther Party made their first national public appearance by marching on the state capital of Sacramento armed with shotguns on May 2, 1967. The high profile stunt had two objectives: to bring media attention to the case of Denzil Dowell and to protest the Mulford bill, which would ban open carry of firearms, a bill proposed by state legislator Don Mulford to specifically target the Black Panther Party’s police patrols. The two issues had melded into each other, with the Richmond police speaking in favor of the bill as fallout from the notoriety of the Dowell case and discomfort with Panther patrols.45 The march on Sacramento was meticulously planned to avoid confrontation. Between 23 to 30 Panthers marched on the state capital with Bobby Seale. Due to Newton’s legal troubles and unpredictable personality, he had been left in Oakland. Following state law, those who were armed with shotguns had live rounds in the magazine, but not the chamber of the gun itself. They filed briefly into the Assembly itself before reading a statement prepared by Huey P. Newton and leaving. Although Seale described some tense encounters in the Assembly, the Panthers left the capital unimpeded and were only arrested on the highway, far from the prying cameras of media that had tailed them in the state capital itself.46 The march on Sacramento and the campaign for Denzil Dowell represented in direct action what the art and imagery of the Black Panther Party promised. The Black Panther Party would use confrontational tactics and would not remain passive in the face of white police resistance but would fight back in self-defense. It was a liberating stance, one that the Panthers intended to be consumed by Black audiences who shared their assumptions about the perceived problematic passivity of nonviolence. To borrow Huey P. Newton’s words, “The street brothers were important to me … There was in them an intransigent hostility toward all those sources of authority that had such a dehumanizing effect on the community.”47 Newton defined his specific audience as young Black men who were children of the Great Migration and had been abandoned by state authority to the 121

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post-industrial slums of urban America. Over-policed, under-resourced, and underrepresented, they were the lumpenproletariat that the Panthers hoped to revolutionize. It was their language that the Panthers co-opted in their discourse about self-defense.48 The recruits that joined Panther ranks voiced this same disaffection with non-violent organizing. According to Wayne Pharr, a Panther from LA, “I saw King as part of the ‘old guard,’ a southern black preacher who advocated integration and nonviolence … But Malcolm X was from Detroit, and he spoke more to the urban, young people, he talked about nationhood and Black Nationalism.”49 Hazel Mack from Winston-Salem NC characterized her introduction to the Panthers, “I was right there at the time when they killed Martin, killed Malcolm … I was looking for something. A way to fight back. A way to say I don’t agree. A way to say I don’t, I’m not going to acquiesce to what’s happening. And the Party came along … ”50 Aaron Dixon, Captain of the Seattle chapter framed his decision to join the Party as recognition of life-or-death struggle, “I relate to what Harriet Tubman said when she said, ‘Black people have only two things to choose from and that’s freedom and that’s death,’ because there’s no point in living when you know that your race, your people are being destroyed systematically in a genocidal fashion.”51 Pharr, Mack, and Dixon shared their mutual dissatisfaction with the non-violent movement and an urgency for change that they found within the Black Panther Party. The Panthers’ challenge to police brutality and framing of that struggle in fatalistic terms mirrored the urgency felt by Pharr, Mack, and Dixon. The Panthers challenged traumatizing and passive depictions of Black victimhood. They advocated for victims of police brutality that did not fit easily categorized boxes of Black respectability and directly challenged the authority and legitimacy of police use of force through the bold and provocative symbolism of the pig. They made these images for poor and disadvantaged young Black people like themselves, and they need to be read from that perspective.52 When considered from that gaze, the Black Panther Party offered a revolutionary approach to police brutality that turned scrutiny back at the issue on hand: the extralegal behavior of the police rather than the perceived respectability of the victim.

The Case of Bobby Hutton: Understanding Panther Politics through Death Beginning in earnest in 1968, the Black Panther Party became the target of sustained state surveillance and police harassment. The growth of surveillance resulted as much from the popularity of the Black Panther Party’s community survival programs as they did the Party’s militant stance.53 J. Edgar Hoover issued a directive on the FBI’s Counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) on March 4, 1968 in the aftermath of a potential alliance between SNCC and the Black Panther Party. The infamous document warned against the rise of a “Black Messiah.” While not naming the Panthers directly, the document provided tacit approval to a range of extralegal harassment and infiltration activities by the FBI and local authorities. As Robyn C. Spencer argued, the purpose of this campaign was not only to destroy the organization, but to control its effectiveness by siphoning off allies and seeding distrust within the organization through a campaign of misinformation and violence.54 Barely a month after Hoover issued the COINTELPRO directive and two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis, Oakland police shot and killed Bobby Hutton and wounded Eldridge Cleaver in West Oakland on April 6, 1968.55 In the first Black Panther newspaper account of the shootout, the Panthers claimed that police had ambushed Cleaver, Hutton, and eight other Panthers in an attempt to send Eldridge Cleaver to prison for his political activity. In Cleaver’s own words, “It is my opinion that this is the latest in a series of attempts to liquidate the leadership of the Black Panther Party by the Oakland Police Department … they had moved directly against me, shooting me, and attempting to kill me. I think that this is a calculated plan that is being carried out.”56 Bobby Hutton was the first Black Panther member killed by police, he was also their first recruit and had been only 17 when Oakland police gunned him down 122

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in front of 1218 28th street. Over 50 police officers cornered Cleaver and Hutton in the basement of the house and engaged in a two-hour siege. They shot over a thousand rounds of ammunition into the basement and tear gas canisters. Both Cleaver and Hutton had surrendered when police opened fire, killing Hutton immediately and wounding Cleaver in the leg.57 The Panthers’ response to this first death provided a template for how they would respond to later assassinations and showed how they would grapple with the complexities of memorialization and remembrance in the midst of a crisis of leadership and relentless attack from law enforcement. These challenges shaped how the Panthers created the narrative of Hutton’s death and how it changed over time. In the immediate aftermath of the April 6, 1968 shootout, the focus of the Black Panther Party was on the imprisonment of Eldridge Cleaver. As Kathleen Cleaver wrote at the time, “Of course, we knew that death could come at any minute and we were always prepared to face the ultimate.”58 After his arrest, police subjected him to additional police beatings, torture, and denial of medical care. The Cleavers and the Party believed Eldridge Cleaver’s life to be under imminent threat and that shaped their decision making in the months following. Cleaver decided to flee overseas into exile rather than to face trial, eventually landing in Algiers in the summer of 1969.59 Cleaver’s political and legal troubles informed how the Panthers would interpret the shootout through the political lens of being “under siege” by law enforcement.60 They needed to mount a cogent political response that would make explicit law enforcement’s campaign of violence specifically targeting the Black Panther Party and connect that campaign to the larger issue of unequal policing in Black communities. The shootout happened at a moment of escalating tensions in Oakland, CA, and around the nation as well. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, setting off a wave of urban rebellions nationwide.61 The Black Panther Party walked a fine line between calling for justice and aggravating an already tense situation. For nearly a month after the shootout, they published no official response, communicating through their lawyers and through local events. On April 7, 1968, Bobby Seale spoke at a pre-planned rally and barbecue for Black Panther Party and Peace and Freedom Party electoral candidates. At the rally, Seale pleaded for calm, urging attendees towards calculated political action and self-defense over further clashes with the police that might leave more dead. “The Black Panther Party isn’t going to get hundreds of our people shot up, killed, and wounded. Even though they murdered Bobby Hutton and we don’t like it, Bobby Hutton was a freedom fighter.”62 At the same time, the Panthers worked hard to organize the funeral and seize the narrative of what had happened. The funeral became a political event. The Black Panther Party invited Marlon Brando, James Forman, Betty Shabazz, and Rev. Earl Neil among others to give remarks after a private service.63 In his eulogy, Neil drew an explicit connection to the deaths of Emmett Till, Charles Parker, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that it was Civil Rights activism, not membership in the Black Panther Party that had caused Hutton’s death, “Membership in the Black Panther Party did not murder anyone, nor did it kill Bobby Hutton.”64 When Bobby Seale spoke, he situated Hutton into a similar constellation of Black activists, “Martin Luther King in his own way, Malcolm X in his own way, Marcus Garvey in his own way, Du Bois in his way, Nat Turner in his way, Lumumba in his way, Ho Chi Minh in his way, Castro in his way, all are trying to get the hog out of the stream for people who want freedom in this world!”65 The Black Panther Party’s leaders and allies used Hutton’s funeral to make explicit connections between Hutton’s death and the fates of other revolutionary heroes. They did not draw a hard break between Black Power, earlier struggles for Black freedom, and Third World revolutions in their analysis of Hutton’s life and death. Nevertheless, Hutton provided a counterpoint to King as “a coherent insurgent alternative to political participation in the United States.”66 The Black Panther Party obtained entry into 1218 28th street, taking and publishing photos of the basement with its tear gas canisters and bullet holes for their newspaper.67 They opened the 123

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house for community tours, inviting people inside to see the brute violence of the scene, a tactic they would use again.68 James Baldwin described the scene of the shootout: I went to Oakland to visit the house where Hutton was killed, and Cleaver wounded. The house where the Panthers were is wedged between two houses just like it … The house, particularly the basement, where the people were, looks like something from a search-anddestroy operation. The warehouse across the street, where the cops were, doesn’t have a scratch on it: so much for the official concept of a shoot-out. When I was there, there were flowers on a rock, marking the spot where Bobby fell: the people of the neighborhood had made of the place a shrine.69 Other attendees at the funeral made similar observations of skepticism towards the police’s version of events: “All of them had tear gas in their eyes … If you do you don’t know what’s going on and if you come running out of a house with your gushing eyes, you don’t know what you are.”70 Despite the Panthers’ objections, the Grand Jury returned a verdict of “justifiable homicide” in the slaying of Bobby Hutton.71 Knowing that they would not get a fair hearing in court, the Black Panther Party held their own “Bobby Hutton Tribunal” to put the police on public trial for the death of Hutton. The document pushed back against claims that Hutton was on drugs or drinking. It actively asserted his right to selfdefense as well as his right to surrender peacefully. In the testimony, Bobby Seale claimed that Hutton had already been searched and beaten by police officers who knew that he was unarmed before they shot to kill.72 He graphically described police jamming guns into the rectums of Hutton and Cleaver in a symbolic act of rape. The narrative produced by the mock trial injected nuance into Hutton’s death. It situated the shootout into a larger narrative about police violence in Black neighborhoods and sharply criticized attempts to criminalize victims of police brutality.73 The Panthers’ narrative placed Hutton’s manhood front and center and critiqued the police’s sodomy of the victims within a context of lynching and its sexual violence.74 Finally, the trial critiqued the tired police defense of justifiable homicide by juxtaposing the hundreds of bullets shot by police into the building with the ludicrous claim that those same officers felt fearful for their life.75 The use of mock trials would be reused in later Panther cases to shed light on the extreme biases of official court proceedings.76 After Cleaver’s break from the Party in 1971 over the issue of self-defense, the narrative of Hutton’s death became more complicated. Cleaver advocated an aggressive stance against police brutality while Newton wanted to back away from direct confrontation and refocus attention on community programs.77 The Panthers erased Cleaver from the narrative of Hutton’s death even as Newton placed blame on Cleaver for leading the Party into a nihilistic and violent confrontation with the police. After Cleaver revealed in 1980 that he and Hutton had been out looking for trouble with police the night of April 6, 1968, the critiques became more vociferous.78 In her memoir, Elaine Brown wrote of her encounter with Cleaver in 1970, “Eldridge was a man who had stood naked before the police, walking away with a surface wound to his heel, while Bobby Hutton, half his size and age, had been mowed down before his very eyes.”79 Brown’s narrative wrote back a sense of Cleaver’s supposed cowardice and duplicity into a moment before the official NewtonCleaver split. David Hilliard’s memoir largely follows the same narrative interpretation—as a participant in the shootout, Hilliard framed Cleaver as an agitator that led Hutton and himself into a fatal confrontation. Hilliard claimed that Cleaver pressured himself, Hutton, and other Panthers to ride out with him that night. Hilliard blamed Cleaver while not diminishing the police’s role in the tragedy, providing a harrowing, first hand account into the shooting.80 The Panthers in later years celebrated Hutton’s life as much as they celebrated his death, using both to critique the plight of Black neighborhoods in West Oakland and to emphasize their shift to 124

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grassroots community political organizing post 1971. In an article calling for community control of police in West Oakland, the Black Panthers compared the police response to Bobby Hutton to the police response to a burglary in the Lake Merritt section of Oakland. In Lake Merritt, police took particular care to make sure that they damaged no private property in the pursuit of the suspects and the middle-class residents. In contrast, the shootout that killed Bobby Hutton ended in wanton destruction of property. The house at 1218 48th street remained empty because the owner could not afford to refurbish her house.81 In this article, the Panthers criticized the police as serving the capitalist interests of property rather than citizens. They asked difficult questions about who could be considered a citizen and thus worthy of protection. The Panthers used Bobby Hutton’s death to lay claim to physical as well as political space in West Oakland. In 1972, the Panthers launched Bobby Seale’s campaign for mayor of Oakland and Elaine Brown’s campaign for city council from a West Oakland Auditorium. The Panthers launched the “chicken in every bag” program on that day and Seale promised to change the name of DeFremery Park to Bobby Hutton Memorial Park if he won the mayor’s office.82 While Seale lost the campaign, the Panthers continued to refer to the space as Bobby Hutton Memorial Park and it became an important touchstone of Black Panther Party memorialization. In the decades since the dissolution of the Party, David Hilliard helped organize an annual Bobby Hutton Day and gave bus tours of Black Panther sites in West Oakland, where Bobby Hutton Memorial Park and the story of Hutton’s life and death took center stage.83 In 2016, the city of Oakland finally acknowledged Hutton’s continued importance to Black communities in West Oakland by renaming a grove of trees in DeFremery Park as Bobby Hutton Grove.84 The move transformed the vernacular use of space by residents of West Oakland into official commemoration.85 Official commemoration of Hutton gave legitimacy to the Panthers’ stance on self-defense, given the controversy that surrounded Hutton’s death. In retrospect, it seemed that the Panthers had successfully walked the tightrope between “Revolutionary Suicide” and a reactionary politics of self-destruction. The transformation of Bobby Hutton’s story from 1968 to the present encapsulates the many contributions that the Black Panther Party made to modern understanding of police brutality. They rendered visible the incredibility of police narratives of “justifiable homicide” and the biased nature of court proceedings against poor Black people. Crucial to that critique is the claim that Hutton did not have to be a perfect victim and that passivity was not even desirable. Huey P. Newton characterized Hutton as a “man-child”—both an idealistic young teen who wanted to give back to his community and a warrior who made his death more meaningful through his resistance to the police.86 Hutton’s commitment to self-defense did not grant police permission to shoot without compunction. Instead, the police’s decision to shoot became more horrific because Hutton decided to surrender. In the Panther narrative, the actions of Oakland police can only be characterized as racially hateful and inspired by criminalized images of the Black man. Finally, the celebration of Hutton’s legacy on the physical landscape of West Oakland where he lived and died tied his story to the continued struggles of the community against poverty, racialized policing, and lack of political and economic power. Bobby Hutton Memorial Park became a physical claim to the geography of the city in a community that has historically been denied claim to social, cultural, and political space.

Redefining Victimhood On September 7, 1974, Joan Little surrendered to the State Bureau of Investigation in Chapel Hill, NC on charges of first degree murder after a drawn out manhunt. Little had been serving out a sentence for burglary in Beaufort County Jail when Clarence Alligood, a white jailer, sexually assaulted her. Little managed to kill Alligood with an ice pick in a brief struggle before escaping from the jail.87 Following her arrest, local activists started a Joan Little Defense Fund headquartered in Durham, NC. They brought together an alliance of mainstream and radical Black Power groups to 125

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her defense including: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Young Socialist Alliance, and the Black Panther Party among others.88 Although the Black Panther Party was only one part of the alliance to free Joan Little, their participation in the case was one of the last significant projects of the North Carolina Chapter of the Black Panther Party.89 More importantly, the Joan Little case owed a crucial debt to the theory and practice of the Black Panther Party. The Panthers were not the only Black Power organization that theorized about Black humanity in the face of police brutality. Nevertheless, their ideology energized the case and Little herself credited the Panthers with bringing her to political consciousness.90 Joan Little did not meet the requirements for Black respectability that had so dominated Black political and social life before the Black Power Movement.91 The mainstream media viewed Little through the lens of the “Black Jezebel” stereotype. Joan Little had a strained relationship with her mother and stepfather, which led her to flee her broken home. After her arrest, prosecutors insinuated that she worked as a prostitute and used her previous criminal record against her. In the prosecution’s view, she could not be a victim of sexual assault because she had no respectability.92 In court, Little’s searing testimony made visible the dialectics of rape for Black women.93 When pressed by the prosecutor as to why she did not initially fight back against Alligood, Little argued, “I did not. But if you had been a woman, you wouldn’t have known what to do either, you probably wouldn’t have screamed either because you wouldn’t have known what he would have done to you.”94 Little’s testimony made clear the terror of rape and the limited choices she had at her disposal at the time. The defense argued that Little’s troubled past did not diminish the trauma and violence she experienced. Little’s treatment in prison was not an isolated case, but part of a long pattern of sexual abuse against women by police and jailers. The defense called other women to testify to the routine sexual abuse and humiliation that they suffered at the hands of prison guards. Her acquittal after a jury deliberation of only 78 minutes represented a landmark victory for women of color in rape cases.95 Although it is easy to celebrate Little’s acquittal as an unproblematic triumph, Christina Greene urges us to consider the nuances of the case so that we do not erase the real discrimination facing poor women of color in the criminal justice system.96 This was a point that radical activists who rallied around Joan Little understood well. As Angela Davis wrote, “Joan Little may not only have been the victim of a rape attempt by a white racist jailer; she has truly been raped and wronged many times over by the exploitative and discriminatory institutions of this society.”97 Davis understood that Little was as much a victim of structural poverty and discrimination as she was of singular sexual assault. For Davis, Little’s supposed lack of respectability was not something to be simply overcome but understood as shaping the circumstances that resulted in her assault by Alligood. Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Elaine Brown, echoed Davis’s critique when she claimed that Joan Little had “acted for us all,” drawing a direct connection between Little’s experience and the experiences of other Black women writ large.98 Far from being an ending point, the Joan Little trial allows us to consider the ways that the Black Panther Party and the ideology that they embodied carried into the organizations that succeeded them. In the Denzil Dowell case and the Bobby Hutton case, the Black Panther Party situated the victims into a context of structural racism that depended much on the experience of poor Black communities in West Oakland. They were not only the victims of police brutality, but the victims of a cruel system that robbed them of economic opportunities and placed them in a community that lacked civic services but was over-policed. As early as 1967, the Panthers articulated that understanding when they called for the incorporation of an independent city for Black residents in Richmond, California, citing “Bad roads, dilapidated housing, rampant unemployment, inferior education, brutal cops, cop cars … bad sewers, bad lighting, no drainage system, no say-so over the 126

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decisions that control our lives … ”99 The Black Panthers married their structural analysis of the challenges facing poor Black communities with unrelenting Black pride and dedication to selfdefense. They created a language to challenge and criticize police brutality that was unapologetic and rooted in the politics of Black Power, laying the groundwork for future movements. Some 50 years later, it is easy to criticize the Black Panther Party for where they erred. At times, their flamboyant rhetoric and celebration of the lumpen proletariat led them to ignore truly problematic elements within their ranks, including criminal activity, drug use, and misogyny. They also struggled to grapple with “Revolutionary Suicide” and the reactionary politics of nihilism that sometimes accompanied their uncritical celebration of the ghetto.100 Implicit in “Revolutionary Suicide” is a death wish that was difficult to contain and transform into an active politics of liberation.101 None of this should diminish the exceptional ideological work that the Panthers accomplished. In arguing for self-defense through the lens of “Revolutionary Suicide,” the Panthers politicized the suffering and death of victims of police brutality who had previously been ignored. They made a radical claim for the humanity of Black people regardless of class, respectability, and gender politics. “To Die for the People” took on meaning by making visible the traumatic and oppressive conditions of Black poverty, of which police brutality was only the tip of the iceberg.

Notes 1 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin Classics Edition Reprint, 2009), ix-x. 2 Herbert Hendin, Suicide in America: New and Expanded Edition (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995), 132–135; Lacy Banks, “Black Suicide,” Ebony Magazine, May 1970, 76–78; J. Herman Blake, “The Caged Panther: the Prison Years of Huey P. Newton,” Journal of African American Studies 16.2 (2012): 236–248; and Huey P. Newton, “Revolutionary Suicide: The Way of Liberation,” in The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, ed. David Hilliard (Oakland: Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008), 129–130. 3 Newton, “Revolutionary Suicide: The Way of Liberation,” 130–132. 4 Ibid., 133–134. 5 This uneasiness with “Revolutionary Suicide” vs. “Reactionary Suicide” was present at the very first death experienced by the Panthers: that of Bobby Hutton in a raid that also led to the exile of Eldridge Cleaver. The actions of Cleaver came under special criticism in Newton’s and Seale’s memoirs because they viewed it as unnecessary antagonism that worked against the goals of the Party. For their accounts, see: Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 354–358; and Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1970), 149–156. 6 Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College November 18, 1970,” in To Die for the People, 20–21; and Martin and Bloom, Black Against Empire, 354. 7 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 129–131. 8 See for just a few examples, Newton’s various eulogies to the Panther dead and statements on the New Haven Panther Trials: Newton, “Prison: July 12, 1969,” in To Die for the People, 221–224; Newton, “Eulogy for Jonathan Jackson and William Christmas August 15, 1970,” in To Die for the People, 225–226; Newton, “On the Capture of Angela Davis October 17, 1970,” in To Die for the People, 232–233; Newton, “Lonnie McLucas and the New Haven 9: August 29, 1970,” in To Die for the People 227–231; and Newton, “Eulogy for Sam Napier,” in To Die for the People, 234. 9 This included calls for donations and other support including rallies and protests as well as angry and sensationalized headlines. See for example: “Special Issue on Nationwide Harassment of Panthers by Pig Power Structure,” The Black Panther Party Community News Service, January 15, 1969, 1; “Free the NY 21 Bail Money Needed,” The Black Panther Party Community News Service, April 20, 1969, 11; “New Haven Defense Pact,” The Black Panther Party Community News Service, October 18, 1969, 4. 10 Hill gives a good description of the discipline and training that activists during Freedom Summer had to participate in to effectively utilize non-violent strategy. He also explores the nuances of their own thinking on the matter. Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 20–22. 11 Huey P. Newton, “In Defense of Self Defense,” The Black Panther Community News Service 1, no. 3 (June 2020): 1967.

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Cheryl X. Dong 12 Jeanne Theoharis book on Rosa Parks uses the memory of Rosa Parks to argue against this view of the “perfect” activist that can be acceptable to conservatives and looks instead at her legacy of radicalism. Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks (New York: Beacon Press, 2013), vii-xvi; ’ Julian Bond, “The Media and the Movement: Looking Back from the Southern Front,” in Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed. Brian Ward (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 16–4. 13 Bloom and Martin identified FBI and police suppression as specifically attacking the political possibilities that the Panthers represented for those left out of the non-violent CRM. They also include a good discussion of the origins of the academic argument that the Panthers were nothing more than a glorified criminal organization: Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 5–14. Metaf Hermachis and Dan Berger discussed the centrality of the Black Panther Party to understanding Black August and the fight for prisoner’s rights: Metaf Harmachis, “Black August: Organizing to Uplift the Fallen and Release the Captive,” in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party, ed. Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 221–228; and Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in th Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 64–67. 14 Cheryl D. Hicks, Saidiya Hartman, Annelise Orleck, Lisa Levenstein, Carl Suddler, Garrett Felber and many others have shown that Black working class people, particular Black women, have consistently made claims to their humanity to combat state sanctioned violence, discrimination, and discipline. In these narratives, Black working class people’s challenges for their humanity almost always fall on deaf ears. This tradition of truth telling in the face of power was adapted by the Panthers and made visible in new ways due to their media presence and notoriety. Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019; Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (New York: Beacon Press, 2006); Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York: New York University Press, 2019); and Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 15 Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past, Journal of American History 91.4 (2005), 1233, 1254; Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, 1995). While the argument popularly known as the “civil rights declension” narrative was originally put forward by Bayard Rustin, a number of prominent historians and even movement activists have repeated it: Bayard Rustin, “”Black Power” and Coalition Politics,” (New York: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1966), 35; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, (Berkeley: University of California Press 2nd Edition, 2007); Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, (New York: Free Press, 1986); David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1986); and John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2015 reissue). 16 James H. Cone gives one of the most cogent philosophical summations of how white mainstream liberals in the 1960s viewed the argument between violence vs. self-defense. Cone critiques the problem of assigning complete moral authority to King while dismissing Malcolm X’s philosophy of self-defense: James H. Cone, “Martin and Malcolm on Violence and Non-Violence,” Phylon 49.¾ (2001): 173–183; and James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare; A movement activist who advanced a similar critique on non-violence and argued for the practicality of self defense is Charles E. Cobb: Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 17 Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation (New York: Harper Collins, 2022). 18 Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Hill, The Deacons for Defense. 19 Hill, Deacons for Defense, 29, 262. 20 Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 37–67. 21 Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 6–7; and Martin and Bloom, Black Against Empire, 42–44.

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Walking the Tightrope of Self-Defense 22 As Lance Hill argues, the Deacons for Defense and Justice later adopted the public imagery of self-defense, but they started out as security for non-violent protestors: Hill, Deacons for Defense, 2. 23 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–14. 24 Darlene Clark Hine and Deborah Gray White in particular identify the ways that Black women used respectability politics as a shield. Although the use of respectability politics Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 58; Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894–1994 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 24, 37; and Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. 25 Clarissa Myrick Harris, “The Origin of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, 1880–1910, Perspectives in History, November 1, 2006, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-onhistory/november-2006/the-origins-of-the-civil-rights-movement-in-atlanta-1880-1910; Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 123–128; and Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What is it Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the US Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 84–86. 26 William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); and David F. Kugler, 1919: The Year of Racial Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27 Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 60. 28 Kugler, 1919, 299–310. 29 Murch, Living for the City, 9; and Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 33–34. 30 The Panthers thought of themselves as the heirs of Malcolm X. They based their Ten Point Platform on the weekly statement in Muhammad Speaks “What Muslims Want, What Muslims Believe” and drew explicit connections between the BPP and the OAAU. Murch, Living for the City, 130–131; and “Remember Brother Malcolm, Black Panther Community News Service, May 19, 1969, 5. 31 Blair Stapp, “Untitled (Huey P. Newton),” Oakland Museum of California Collections, http:// collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/2010546028, accessed 1 December 2021. 32 Seale, Seize the Time, 103. 33 “What We Want Now! What We Believe,” Black Panther Community News Service, May 15, 1967, 3. 34 Edmund P. Morgan, “Media Culture and the Public Memory of the Black Panther Party,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party, ed. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 324–374. 35 Stephen Shames, Interview by Author, February 17, 2019. 36 Morgan, “Media Culture and the Public Memory of the Black Panther Party,” 351; and Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 315. 37 Morgan, “Media Culture and the Public Memory of the Black Panther Party,” 336; and Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 300. Examples in mainstream media include: “The Panther and the Law,” Newsweek, February 23, 1970, 26; “Too Late for the Panthers?” Newsweek, December 22, 1959, 26; and Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Magazine, June 8, 1970. 38 Hugh Pearson, Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Boston: De Capo Press, 1994), 39; and Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016), 342–343. 39 Hannah Giorgis, “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain, The Atlantic, April 17, 2021, https://www. theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/black-horror-racism-them/618632/. 40 Emory Douglas and Sam Durant, The Art of Emory Douglas: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (New York: Rizzoli, 2007); and Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 41 Douglas, Black Panther, 106–107. 42 Douglas, Black Panther, 96–101; and Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers, 91–92. 43 “Why Was Denzil Dowell Killed?” Black Panther Community News Service, April 25, 1967, 1. 44 “Why Was Denzil Doweel Killed?” Black Panther Community News Service, April 25, 1967, 2. 45 “The Truth About Sacramento, The Black Panther Community News Service, May 15, 1967, 1, 5; and Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 57–58. 46 There are multiple accounts of this protest. The three that most shaped my understanding of it from the Panther perspective are: Seale, Seize the Time, 153–163; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 153–159; “The Truth About Sacramento, The Black Panther Community News Service, May 15, 1967, 1, 5; and Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 57–58.

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Cheryl X. Dong 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

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Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 74–75. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 74–79; and Murch, Living for the City, 3–11. Wayne Pharr, Nine Lives of a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2014), 41. Hazel Mack, Interview with Author, January 25, 2019. Aaron Dixon, Interview by James Johnson, July 11, 1970, transcript, Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, http://depts.washington.edu/civilr3/pdf/Dixon_Interview_med.pdf. Stephen Shames, Interview by Author, February 17, 2019. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 106–107. Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 113. There have been numerous narratives of Hutton’s death. The most helpful ones to me are: Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 119–124; Austin, Up Against the Wall, 165–168; and Murch, Living for the City, 162–168. Quoted in Eldridge Cleaver, “Statement,” Black Panther Community News Service, May 4, 1968, 3; and Eldridge Cleaver, “Affidavit No. 2, Carton 1, Folder 61, Subseries 2.3 Political Writings 1965–1985, Eldridge Cleaver Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. “Panthers ambushed–One Murdered,” Black Panther Community News Service, May 4, 1968, 4; Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 119; and Austin, Up Against the Wall, 165–168. Kathleen Cleaver, “On Eldridge Cleaver,” Ramparts 8 (June 1969), 1. “Memo to Director, FBI from SAC San Francisco,” Eldridge Cleaver, FBI File #100-HQ-447251 Section 14, FBI Files on Black Extremist Organizations, Part 2: Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., https://congressional.proquest. com/histvault?q=101788-003-0351&accountid=10598. Based on Panther newspaper coverage of the moment, they clearly believed Cleaver’s life to be under imminent threat and covered the story accordingly, placing the call for Free Eldridge before acknowledging the death of Hutton: “FREE ELDRIDGE,” Black Panther Community News Service, May 4, 1968, 1. Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 115–116. Seale, Seize the Time, 136. KPFA (Radio Station: Berkeley, CA), Bobby Hutton Funeral and Memorial Service (Part 2 of 2), Pacifica Radio Archives, North Hollywood, CA, https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-7h1dj58r5c. “Over 2,500 Attend Funeral,” Black Panther Community News Service, May 4, 1968, 16. Cordell Carlton, “Brando and Panthers at Bobby Hutton’s Funeral” (video), April 13, 1968, accessed April 13, 2015, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/188783. Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 122. The house was owned by a couple named the Allens who lent their support to the Party after the death of Hutton: Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power, 187–188. The BPP gave similar tours of the apartment where Fred Hampton was assassinated, they also filmed the scene: The Murder of Fred Hampton, Directed by Mike Gray, (Facets Multi Media, 1971), DVD. Quoted in James Baldwin, No Name on the Street (New York: First Vintage International Edition, January 2007), 132–133. KPFA (Radio Station: Berkeley, CA), Bobby Hutton Funeral and Memorial Service (Part 1 of 2), Pacifica Radio Archives, North Hollywood, CA, https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-7h1dj58r5c. “Justice Undelivered: Open Letter to the Grand Jury,” It’s About Time: BPP, Accessed January 8, 2022, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Announcements/pdf/Justice_Undelivered.pdf. “Bobby Hutton Tribunal,” Folder 252253-022-0192 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Files on Human Rights and Bobby Hutton, Subgroup A. Atlanta Office, Series VIII Research Department, General Files, 1959–1969, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers 1952–1972, Proquest History Vault, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252253-022-0192&accountid=10598; FBI corroborated this account in their own files: Memorandum to the Associate Director from Legal Counsel February, 2, 1977, Eldridge Cleaver, FBI File : 100-HQ-447251 Section 30, FBI Files on Black Extremist Organizations, Part 2: Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=101788006-0001&accountid=10598. “Bobby Hutton Tribunal,” Folder 252253-022-0192 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Files on Human Rights and Bobby Hutton, Subgroup A. Atlanta Office, Series VIII Research Department, General Files, 1959–1969, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers 1952–1972, Proquest History Vault, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252253-022-0192&accountid=10598.

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Walking the Tightrope of Self-Defense 74 Robyn Wiegman, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 3 (January 1993): 445–467. 75 “Bobby Hutton Tribunal,” Folder 252253-022-0192 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Files on Human Rights and Bobby Hutton, Subgroup A. Atlanta Office, Series VIII Research Department, General Files, 1959–1969, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers 1952–1972, Proquest History Vault, https://congressional.proquest.com/histvault?q=252253-022-0192&accountid=10598. 76 The most prominent example would be the mock trial held for Fred Hampton, footage of which can be found in: The Murder of Fred Hampton, Directed by Mike Gray (Facets Multi Media, 1971), DVD. 77 Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 368–370. 78 Kate Coleman, “Souled Out: Eldridge Cleaver Admits He Ambushed Those Cops,” New West (May 19, 1980), 17–27. 79 Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 225. 80 David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1993), 188. 81 “Community Control of Pigs is Answer to Ending Brutality,” Black Panther Community News Service, October 24, 1970, 5. 82 Murch, Living for the City, 191. 83 David Hilliard Giving the Black Panther Tour, Black Thought and Culture Database, Alexander Street, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C3154360. 84 Mark Hedin, “Hutton, Black Panthers honored with grove’s naming,” East Bay Times, October 5, 2016, https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/10/06/hutton-black-panthers-honored-with-groves-naming/. 85 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 13–14. I am also thinking of Kenneth Foote’s work on the commemoration of sites of tragedy and consider Bobby Hutton grove to be an example of Designation with more attention to nuance of heterogeneous populations and different reactions: Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 16 86 Huey P. Newton, “Bobby Hutton: The Man/Child Remembered,” Black Panther Community News Service, April 7, 1973, 2. 87 Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 202–203; and Emily L. Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 16 88 Thuma, All Our Trials, 21; and McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 214–215. 89 The Black Panther Party claimed credit for spearheading the rally and fund raising for Little’s defense at the beginning of the trial, Little later visited BPP Headquarters in Oakland: “1,000 Rally for JoAnne Little at Trial Opening,” Black Panther Community News Service, July 18, 1975, 1; JoAnne Little Talks with the Black Press,” Black Panther Community News Service, centerfold, 25. 90 “Miss Little Appears on the Coast and Thanks the Black Panthers, New York Times, August 28, 1975; and “JoAnne Little to Address Oakland Victory Rally,” Black Panther Community News Service, August 25, 1975. 91 McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 210–211. 92 Thuma, All Our Trials, 19; and McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 214–216. 93 To borrow a phrase from Angela Davis: Angela Davis, Joann Little: The Dialectics of Rape (New York: National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, 1975). 94 Quoted in McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 84. 95 McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 225. 96 Christina Greene, “She Ain’t No Rosa Parks”: The Joan Little Rape-Murder Case and Jim Crow Justice in the Post-Civil Rights South,” Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 440–441. 97 Angela Davis, The Dialectics of Rape. 98 “JoAnne Little to Address Oakland Victory Rally,” Black Panther Community News Service, August 25, 1975. 99 “Panthers Demand Independence for N. Richmond Area,” Black Panther Community News Service, June 20, 1967, 1. 100 Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power, 122. Robin D.G. Kelley argued that gangsta rap created a similar politics of nihilism at its worst even as it launched power critiques on the marginalization of inner-city Black men from the political economy. Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels, 305–313. 101 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 129–131.

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11 “I DON’T MIND DYING” Police Violence, Resistance, and the Urban Uprisings of the 1960s Max Felker-Kantor

In the aftermath of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, African Americans pointed to the role of police violence in sparking and fueling the moments of unrest. The police, Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Loren Miller explained after the 1965 Watts uprising, operated as an arm of the state that occupied Black neighborhoods and enforced a racially segregated and hierarchical social order. “When night falls in the ghetto,” Miller observed, “nobody is left except the residents and the police officers who seem to the ghetto dwellers to be an army of occupation sent there to conserve a way of life that seems to enforce the code of the majority that insists on racial separatism.”1 Or, as James Baldwin explained in response to calls for “law and order” following the Harlem uprising of 1964, “Whose law, one is compelled to ask, and what order? There is a very good reason for the Negroes to hate the police in Harlem … their role in Harlem is simply to corral and control the citizens of the ghetto, and protect white business interests. They certainly do not protect the lives or property of Negroes.”2 If Miller and Baldwin pointed to the police as an occupying force that used violence to enforce a racialized “law and order,” policymakers, government commissions, and the police themselves ignored the central role of the police as purveyors of violence and the police power as a central grievance motivating participants in urban rebellion. The Kerner report, released by Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1968, pointed out that a routine police action sparked nearly all the 1960s urban uprisings. But portraying the police as a mere spark missed how African Americans—those who were policed—had specific grievances with the daily practices of law enforcement and the use of the police power to maintain a racialized and hierarchical social order through a violent program of occupation and repression prior to, during, and after the uprisings. Because the Kerner report did not view the police as the linchpin upholding racial order and, by implication, the uprisings as a protest against that racial order and its enforcers, the commission’s analysis of urban unrest and solutions to it focused on procedural reforms to change officer behavior and weed out “bad apples.” It did not question the police power, the structure of the police, or the significance of state violence carried out by the police in the uprisings.3 As Miller and Baldwin suggested, the problem was rooted in how the police power was bound up in perpetuating white supremacy. To fully understand the meaning of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, as a result, requires taking police violence and power in cities and African American life seriously.4 Investigations into the causes of the urban uprisings emerged as soon as they ended.5 Following studies by sociologists and social scientists, a generation of urban historians began to rethink the 1960s unrest in the context of the urban crisis and the structural changes in the political economy of 132

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-15

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cities.6 Scholars of the Black freedom struggle also made important contributions by placing the unrest within broader cultures of activism.7 Many of these studies, with some exceptions, point to the police as a precipitating factor in the urban uprisings but do not center police violence or the police power. Recently, scholars of the carceral state have explored urban uprisings with varying attention to the police power. Most notably, Elizabeth Hinton’s work focused attention on how the political response to urban rebellions resulted in the expansion of policing and mass incarceration.8 While this scholarship has broadened understandings of the relationship between the 1960s urban uprisings and the politics of law and order, most of these studies place the police as one among many factors and do not contextualize the uprisings as anti-police protests that grew out of specific, daily grievances with the postwar deployment of the police power in cities. To fully understand the urban uprisings of the 1960s requires historically specific understanding of the relationship between Black communities and the police and the role of police violence played prior to, during, and after the uprisings.9 Centering the police power—the broad authority of government to ensure the social welfare, peace, and order—exposes three central features of the long, hot summers of the 1960s. First, the police power in the United States was bound up with white supremacy and enforced racial hierarchy and segregation. To construct and maintain a racialized social order, the state empowered the police to engage in a violent program of occupation, repression, and abuse in Black communities.10 The uprisings, in turn, were anti-police protests challenging the very structure and enforcers of that racial order—the police. Through their participation in the uprisings, African American residents asserted that they would defend themselves from police violence. As participants in both their words and actions revealed, redress of their grievances required a rethinking and transformation of policing and the police power itself. Finally, the challenge to police authority did not go unaddressed by the state. Law enforcement reasserted dominance and control during and in the immediate aftermath of urban unrest in what was effectively a revanchist assault on Black communities. The police capitalized on the emerging crisis to construct a narrative of the unrest as a criminal threat and the result of a breakdown in law and order to bolster their martial capacity in the following years. Expanded police power, in short, resulted in more police violence not less. Police violence set the historical context for the urban uprisings of the 1960s. It emphasized the perpetuation of a racialized social order based on white control and containment of Black people and spaces. The daily actions of the police in African American communities shaped the context for the urban uprisings and specific grievances with the police power turned the outbursts into antipolice protests. Following these moments of resistance, and in dialectical fashion, the police used the crisis to enhance their authority and resources in the following years, which created the conditions for future antipolice protest and resistance.

Police and Enforcing Racial Order in Post-War Cities Police violence was a common experience for Black residents in Northern and Western cities during the Great Migration. More than individual instances of police violence or abuse, the police were integral to producing and maintaining a hierarchical racial order. “When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos,” Martin Luther King, Jr. explained. “Day-in and day-out … his police make a mockery of law.”11 The police, as King pointed out, did not protect and serve but enforced the “white man’s law” to ensure containment and control. Malpractice, as a result, was a common feature of policing in Black neighborhoods. Abuses ranged from false arrests, illegal searches, disproportionate use of stop-and-frisk and frisk rousts, verbal harassment and discourtesy, station house beatings, and shootings.12 In Los Angeles, one study found that 71.3% of Black men felt the police were disrespectful and 65.6% believed officers used excessive force when making arrests.13 Similar attitudes and practices existed in other 133

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cities. Forty-three percent of respondents in Harlem and 82% in Detroit believed there was some form of police brutality.14 Perhaps no other finding summarized African Americans attitudes toward the police than a survey in Newark which found the most frequently used description of police officers was “brutal.”15 Police violence, in short, was not limited to isolated instances but an endemic part of law enforcement’s broad assertion of the police power in Black neighborhoods. Reforms aimed at preventing crime added to the problem. Preventive patrol, a form of saturation policing in which officers aggressively targeted, searched, and arrested people and vehicles in “high crime” areas to deter crime before it occurred disproportionately impacted African Americans. The passage of no-knock and stop-and-frisk preventive patrol laws in New York, according to Carl Suddler, did not reduce crime but contributed to views of the police as an occupying army.16 In Detroit, the establishment of the Tactical Mobile Unit (TMU) led to the detaining and searching of more than 150,000 people a year while making only a few thousand arrests.17 Almost inevitably, these preventive patrol measures criminalized Black communities which led to hostility aimed at the police. The police, in other words, produced the very conditions they were empowered to contain. While police saturated Black communities with officers to maintain racial order, they did little in the way of providing adequate services or protection to Black residents. Black people in Chicago, Simon Balto argues, “were continuously at risk within their neighborhoods anyway (under protected).”18 Police were slow to respond to calls for service, if they came at all. “Furthermore, since the police, not at all surprisingly, are abysmally incompetent,” James Baldwin noted, “for neither, in fact, do they have any respect for the law, which is not surprising, either—Harlem and all of New York City is full of unsolved crimes.”19 Police often ignored or actively pushed vice into Black neighborhoods, allowing white men to engage in sexual violence targeting Black women who were presumed to be sex workers.20 The lack of protection led African Americans to demand equal police service in hopes of addressing violence in their communities.21 But it also produced contempt for the law and the police, as underprotection was, alongside brutality, another means by which the police power upheld the racialized social order—the protection of white supremacy and capital that Baldwin described. As the Kerner report summarized, “surveys have reported that Negroes in Harlem and South Central Los Angeles mention inadequate protection more often than brutality or harassment as a reason for their resentment toward the police.”22 The racial makeup of police departments added to this resentment. In 1963, for instance, only 95 out of 2,591 officers in the Detroit Police Department were Black while the city was nearly onethird African American. As a Detroit Urban League report concluded, “The Detroit Police Department is apparently not willing to meet the problems of prejudice and discrimination which exist in their recruitment and assignment of Negro police personnel.”23 Policing reflected this allwhite makeup. The “Harvest of American Racism” report, which was rejected as too radical by the Kerner Commission, called the police, “one of the most conservative (reactionary) and racist institutions of white society.”24 Los Angeles Police Department officers lived up to that reputation, referring to the predominantly African American neighborhood covered by the 77th Division as “the L.A. Congo” and often used the acronym LSMFT for “Let’s shoot a motherfucker tonight. Got your n---- knocker all shined up?”25 A profound lack of accountability reinforced the us-versus-them attitude of the police. As antipolice brutality attorney Hugh Manes reported on Los Angeles, police “committed no less than sixty-four homicides” between January 1, 1964, and July 31, 1965. The coroner’s jury found all but two of the killings justifiable. In 27 of the cases the suspect was shot in the back or side. Twenty-five were unarmed, 23 were burglary or robbery suspects, and “four had not committed a crime when shot.” Civil rights activists and Black residents attempted to push city officials to hold the police accountable for such violence to little avail. The Los Angeles NAACP, for instance, protested police brutality and pushed for a civilian review board in the 1950s only to be repeatedly brushed aside by chief of police William Parker.26 The Detroit NAACP made similar complaints of the DPD’s 134

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abusive practice and lack of accountability or oversight. The DPD’s Citizens Complaint Bureau received 105 complaints of some form of abuse, misconduct, or “improper police procedure.” Only eighteen complaints were partially or fully sustained.27 The lack of accountability undermined respect for the police which produced resistance in Black communities. Opposition to the police often took the form of attempted rescues by African American crowds of individuals who had been taken into custody in what was a dialectic of police violence and resistance. There were at least eleven such instances in Los Angeles between 1961 and 1964. The police “conduct themselves with an arrogance and contempt for the Negro citizen that seems calculated to invite violence,” Manes explained. “But the point is that when fear and mistrust—and some feeling of racial superiority—wears a badge, the community is endangered.” The police, in short, exacerbated tensions and produced opposition as anti-police crowds were “indicative of a smoldering resentment against police atrocities.”28 The dialectic of police violence and resistance preceded many of the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Following the NYPD killing of two Puerto Ricans in November 1963, the Puerto Rican community rose up in protest and even occupied a NYPD precinct. As one activist recalled, “The police was afraid of the large volume of people that got in. We were peaceful, but we exhibited a very firm stance.”29 Another incident occurred in April 1964 when a group of African American and Puerto Rican boys knocked over a fruit stand in Harlem, leading to police beating of the boys as well as onlookers. Days later when a white couple who owned a store in Harlem were attacked (one killed), the police rearrested six of the boys involved in the fruit stand "riot." Coercing confessions from the boys in a case that would last decades—known as the “Harlem Six”—the actions of the police exposed what most Blacks and Latinx residents already knew, the police were, as James Baldwin described, an occupying army.30 Three months later, a police killing of a Black youth in Harlem sparked the first major uprising of the 1960s. Similar episodes occurred in Detroit, most notably in 1966 when conflict erupted on the city’s East Side. On August 9, 1966, a Big Four police cruiser attempted to disperse a group of African American men near the corner of Kercheval and Pennsylvania Avenues. When three of the men refused, the police attempted to arrest them for balked to provide identification, a scuffle ensued. Onlookers shouted “Whitey is going to kill us!,” “This is the start of the riot!,” and “Police brutality!,” leading to the gathering of a crowd. The DPD responded quickly, bringing in more than 150 officers as part of the department’s anti-riot plans. If many local officials credited the DPD for preventing a riot, for many Black residents the Kercheval “mini-riot” was the product of saturation patrol, indiscriminate use of stop-and-frisk tactics, and, according to Alvin Harrison, Director of the Afro-American Youth Movement, “years of oppression.”31 For many African American observers, the possibility for civil unrest was not if but when. And the cause would not be a mystery. As one Black rioter told a researcher in Detroit: “Only the police can start a riot. If you want to get a riot started, you have to wait for the police to do something.”32 The combination of an all-white, unaccountable police force produced a combustible mix. To anyone paying attention, the potential for rebellion, especially by 1967, should not have been much of a surprise.

Urban Uprising as Anti-Police Protest Routine police practices sparked most episodes of unrest during the long, hot summers of the 1960s. While the Harlem uprising of 1964 began with the killing of James Powell by an off-duty officer, Watts began after the LAPD arrested Marquette Frye and his brother following a traffic stop, Detroit exploded after a raid on a blind pig, an unlicensed, after-hours bar, and Newark after the police arrested cab driver John Smith. If the police, journalists, and public officials across the country could not understand why routine police action produced unrest, for Black communities it was painfully obvious. Black residents in Newark, for example, made it plain that the beating of a cab driver was 135

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merely an example of the systemic problem of racist police abuse and violence. As Newark activist Robert Curvin reported on a meeting between Black residents and the police, one woman reportedly stated: “We don’t want to talk about Smith; we want to talk about what we see here happening every day, time and time again.” As in other cities, the Newark uprising was the result of a pattern and practice of police violence. Deep-seated anger with the police was evident in the first major uprisings of the 1960s. In Harlem, for instance, the interaction between the police and Black residents exposed the ways the police had become outsiders. Police pleaded with participants, “Why don’t you go home?” A response from the crowd alluded to the way in which the police were the intruders, operating akin to a colonial force of occupation in a space they saw in need of pacification: “We are home—this is our home, baby.”33 Participants in Watts clearly saw the uprising as part of a battle with the police. “The—cops are gone now, but they’ll be back and when they do we’ll be ready for them,” one Watts participant stated. “I got a gun just like them and if they want to shoot it out it’s alright with me.”34 Amidst the unrest chief of police William Parker antagonized the Black community by responding with overwhelming and excessive force and employing openly racist remarks, suggesting, “one person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” Participants responded in kind with anger directed at Parker. As one Black resident stated, “I wish Chief of Police Parker would come out here. I’d like to throw a brick at his —.”35 Such antipolice sentiment was common across urban uprisings. As succinctly summed up by the Harvest report, “The clearest anger is directed toward the police.”36 Antipolice protest during the days of rebellion was gendered. Black men and youth, in particular, saw the battle with the police as part of a broader reassertion of masculinity after years of being treated with impunity by the police. Black men were often targets of stop-and-frisk practices and a broader presumed criminality that made them unable to fully control their lives. As one participant in the Watts uprising told observers, “The cops think we are scared of them because they got guns, but you can only die once; if I get a few of them I don’t mind dying.” Other Black male youth put their grievances within the longer history of police malpractice. “What the hell do you expect me to do? They [the police] have been picking on me all my life.”37 In Cincinnati, Black men reasserted their manhood by verbally assaulting officers. Arrest records revealed that 450 were arrested for using obscenity or challenging the police. A gendered reading of the uprising and police violence also shows that the battle with the police was a way for Black men to reassert their ability to protect Black women. In the years prior to Cincinnati’s 1967 uprising, for instance, the NAACP took statements after the beating of Gwendolyn Brooks in 1962, in which Black men expressed an inability to defend her from the attack by a police officer and his canine unit.38 The arrest of Marquette Frye and his brother was the mobilizing incident in Watts but what further incensed the crowd was the rough handling of Frye’s mother and beliefs that officers attempted to arrest a Black woman in a barber’s frock who observers thought was pregnant.39 Black men saw the uprisings as an opportunity to assert their ability to defend Black women against police violence. Black women also participated in the protest against the police. In Detroit, 38.6% of self-reported participants in the rebellion were women, though only 10.7% of those arrested were female. One observer in Cincinnati noted that “In a number of locations where windows were being broken and looting was taking place, women carrying babies could be seen watching the activity.” The police singled out Black women whose participation in the uprisings transgressed traditional gender roles for arrest. When two young Black women responded to an officer asking them to disperse by parading “down Main Street in a loud and boisterous manner, using foul and lewd language,” they were arrested for juvenile delinquency. Black women, in short, were central to the rebellions against police violence but were often rendered invisible by observers who portrayed participants as young men.40 Participants were not only willing to engage with the police but also expressed specific grievances focused on the nature of police power in Black communities in at least two ways. First, it was a 136

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response to daily and specific police practices that had accumulated over decades. As one Black participant in the Newark uprising, William Furr, told a Life reporter before being killed by the police during the uprising. “We ain’t rioting’ agains’ all you whites. We’re rioting’ agains’ police brutality … When the police treat us like people instead of treating us like animals, then the riots will stop.”41 An even more poignant statement of the anti-police meaning of the unrest came in Watts. A young participant told Bayard Rustin, “We know that those policemen are scared of us. We had for once to prove to them that they were scared of us, because they come walking in here six at a time and beat us up whenever they want.”42 Second, it was a rejection, by Black youth in particular, of the police role in producing a racialized social order. One boy told Rustin, “What that Bluecoat Whitey doesn’t know is that when he comes in here and tells me not to sell pot, when he isn’t going to let me work when I’m able to work and want to work, when that sonofabitch asks me to be lawful, he’s trying to take my goddam job away from me.”43 Indeed, young Black participants expressed a nuanced understanding of law and order. One participant in Cincinnati told reporters, “We’re not concerned about the law and order anymore because you make the law and you keep the order.”44 For many participants, then, the uprisings represented a victory over the forces of oppression that had long operated as an occupying army maintaining a segregated metropolis. As one participant in the Detroit uprising commented, “For the first time in our lives we felt free.”45 A similar sentiment was present in Watts. Youth involved in that uprising made the point explicit. As Bayard Rustin described an interaction with Black youth during a tour of South Central with Martin Luther King, Jr. after the Watts uprising, “At a street-corner meeting in Watts when the riots were over, an unemployed youth of about twenty said to me, ‘We won.’ I asked him: ‘How have you won? Homes have been destroyed, Negroes are lying dead in the streets, the stores from which you buy food and clothes are destroyed, and people are bringing you relief.’” The youth’s reply was significant: “We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us. The police chief never came here before; the mayor always stayed uptown. We made them come.”46 But to the forces of law and order the meaning of the unrest was much different and law enforcement used the crisis to reassert the police power.

Vietnam Here: Police Riot and Retaliatory Violence The police quickly escalated violence in response to antipolice protest. They responded with “official violence” against participants. As unrest waned, the police sought retribution. “As Negro-initiated acts of lawless violence declined, those of the police increased,” the Harvest report outlined. “Policemen on the street discontinued wearing their badges, and tape was placed over Scout car license plates and numbers so as to assure anonymity for officers. Outright atrocities by police and guardsmen and indiscriminate shootings and beatings occurred.”47 All sense of police professionalism vanished as officers sought to reestablish their authority. Police in Detroit, for instance, sought to reestablish their “dominance and control” and “to teach the bastards a lesson.” Or, as one observer noted, it had become “a riot of police against blacks.”48 To the police, reasserting order was akin to counterinsurgent warfare in Vietnam. As Parker described the situation in Los Angeles, it was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.”49 The war in Vietnam had come home, and the police described themselves as part of a counterinsurgency taming the streets of urban America. As LAPD Inspector Daryl Gates summarized, “the streets of America’s cities had become a foreign territory … we [the police] had the responsibility for maintaining order.”50 When unrest erupted in 1967, officials employed similar war metaphors and an urban “jungle” in need of pacification. As New Jersey Governor Hughes stated during the Newark uprising, “The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America.”51 Or, as the Detroit News described Detroit, “It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot-blackened streets.”52 Such racialized depictions of urban neighborhoods as 137

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“jungles” and “foreign territory” in need of pacification legitimated the use of violence in the eyes of the police. The restoration of order relied on overwhelming force. Local police forces were bolstered by sheriffs, state police, highway patrol, and National Guardsmen. In Los Angeles, the response consisted of 934 LAPD officers, 719 sheriff’s deputies, and 13,900 guardsmen.53 Similar responses characterized Newark and Detroit. In Newark, the governor sent in 3,000 National Guardsmen and 500 state police officers to backup local police.54 Detroit witnessed an even greater martial response. Over the course of the unrest, more than 17,000 law enforcement officers, including five thousand U.S. Army troops, occupied the city.55 It quickly became apparent that the police would use all necessary force to reestablish control. Officers operated in a retaliatory and retributive manner to, as one Watts resident suggested, “put these black people back in their places.”56 Or, as one elderly Black woman in Harlem stated, “they want to kill all of us. They want to shoot all the black people.”57 Reestablishing the racial status quo thereby defined the police response. Police violence functioned as more than a means to restore order. It was retaliatory. As LAPD chief of police Parker summarized, “We’re on top and they are on the bottom.”58 In Los Angeles, retaliatory violence focused on the Nation of Islam Temple on August 18, just after the curfew was lifted. Over 100 LAPD officers attacked the mosque after receiving an anonymous tip that Black men were carrying weapons into the mosque. Officers engaged in an all-out assault on the mosque, invading the building, firing over 500 rounds, and arresting more than 40 people. One LAPD officer posed with a stolen pin of Elijah Muhammad’s picture pinned on his uniform following the raid, a physical and symbolic echoing of Parker’s statement about the reassertion of police power.59 As the ACLU’s Ed Cray summarized, the raid was “nothing more or less than the infliction of private punishment on those whom the police themselves disliked.”60 The LAPD was bent on teaching a lesson to a community that had risen up against it. Police revanchism was a common feature of the long, hot summer of 1967. In Newark, the police were especially concerned with what they believed were Black snipers targeting police. The fear of Black snipers, however, was more fabricated than real given the low number of injuries or deaths of police officers during the rebellions. Rather, the police-constructed image of the Black sniper provided cover for retaliatory police violence.61 As Tom Hayden, the SDS leader and community organizer who had moved to Newark in 1964, observed, “The force used by police was not in response to snipers, looting, and burning, but in retaliation against the successful uprising of Wednesday and Thursday nights.”62 In Newark, after a crowd of protestors surrounded the police station where the cab driver had been arrested, the police, according to Curvin, “began to wade into the crowd,” with “their clubs swinging.”63 Retaliatory police violence went beyond beatings, assaulting, and arresting participants. It also targeted Black property. Stories of police destroying Black-owned businesses with “Soul Brother” signs emerged in the aftermath. One Black minister in Newark told the Newark News, “the non-rioting Negroes are more afraid of the police than the rioters” due to the retaliatory actions of the police.64 Nowhere was the intent of revanchist violence to teach Black communities a lesson more overt than in Detroit. As a Detroit Urban League representative told the Kerner Commission, “the police seemed to feel as if they had a license to retaliate.”65 The Ann Arbor News quoted an officer stating, “Those black son-of-a-bitches. I’m going to get me a couple of them before this is over.” The police crackdown culminated in the police murder of three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel on July 26, 1967. Following days of violent unrest, DPD officers, National Guardsmen, and state police officers, led by officer David Senak, who had already killed one Black resident during the uprising, invaded the Algiers Motel following reports of sniper fire. In the process, officers ransacked the hotel and brutalized guests. When Senak and another officer came upon Fred Temple in a room they fired “almost simultaneously,” killing Temple. The night culminated with officers ordering all the remaining guests to face a wall in the lobby and engaged in what journalist John Hersey called the 138

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“death game.” Vicious beatings of motel guests ensued and Senak and other officers pulled men one by one into individual rooms to be interrogated at gunpoint. Senak asked offers, “Want to shoot a nigger,” and gave one young officer a shotgun and said, “You shoot one.” Police murdered two more Black teenagers, Aubrey Pollard and Carl Cooper, in the early morning hours of July 26. The trial of the officers in the case ended in acquittal. Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African American mayor, told the Detroit Free Press, that the acquittals “demonstrate once again that law and order is a one-way street; there is no law and order where black people are involved, especially when they are involved with the police.”66 The consequences of the police riot were high. In Watts, at least 34 were left dead, in Newark, 23, and in Detroit 43. Nearly all riot deaths were at the hands of the police and ruled justifiable homicide.67 Occupation also produced mass arrests, totaling 3,853 in Watts, 7,231 in Detroit, and 1,510 in Newark.68 Summary justice ensued as arrestees were not allowed access to lawyers, not notified of the charges against them, denied or had extremely high bail set, and faced severe sentences of one year to life for looting.69 For many Black residents, police violence and unaccountability during the unrest reinforced their view that the police were illegitimate and did little more than represent white authority and repression. According to one youth in Watts: “The police used to be a man with a badge, now he’s just a thug with a gun.”70 Police retribution did not end with the reestablishment of law and order, however. In the following months and years, the police invited in a martial infrastructure and surveillance state aimed at containing Black residents and activists.

Year of the Cop: Victimization and Expanded Authority Numerous state-level commissions, such as the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (the McCone Commission) and The New Jersey Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder, investigated the causes and solutions to urban uprisings in the aftermath.71 But the most prominent investigation in response to the long, hot summer of 1967, was the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders led by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Widely cited and discussed, the Kerner report highlighted the role of the police as the spark to the urban uprisings. “Almost invariably,” the Commission noted, “the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action.” Of the more than 2,000 rebellions in cities large, medium, and small, between 1964 and 1972, nearly all of them were sparked by an episode of police abuse or harassment.72 The Commission noted, “to many Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes.”73 Portraying the police as a spark to unrest and a symbol of racism, however, belied the limits of the liberal view of police violence and power undergirding the commission’s analysis and recommendations. At its core, the Kerner commission accepted the legitimacy of the police. The commissioners recognized and accepted that the police were agents of the state empowered to enforce the social order—the police power. “Law and order must always be the first order of business,” police chief Herbert Jenkins, a “liberal” commissioner, explained. “The highest value of the law is the keeping of the peace. I am convinced that the police powers of the local, state, and federal governments can quickly put down any act of civil disobedience. We should, of course, make it clear to those so-called ’militants’ that the full force of the law will be brought to bear on any and all violators of the law.” In other words, the commission accepted “all the values of American society as it is presently organized,” unable to contemplate that from the perspective of participants the police and the law were not agents of peace or safety but of racial control, an occupying army and the force of oppression.74 The proposed solutions, defined as the problem of police-community relations, reflected this narrow view. The Kerner commission report did not say anything about changing the structure of the police or seriously consider demands for community control of the police. Remedies focused on enhancing training to improve officer conduct, diversifying police departments, providing adequate 139

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police protection, more effective complaint procedures, policy guidelines to address areas of tension, and improved community support for law enforcement.75 As a result, the Kerner report suggested the problem of policing could largely be reined in by improved individual behavior on the one hand and greater capacity and fairness on the other, something law enforcement capitalized upon. By positioning themselves as the victims of the unrest rather than its perpetrators, the police looked to capitalize on the crisis by garnering more resources. Demands for equipment and authority were common sense for many law enforcement officials as they looked to take advantage of the opportunity produced by the unrest. “And if we don’t take advantage of it, if we in law enforcement do not take advantage of what exists in the United States in 1967, we are crazy,” LAPD Chief Tom Reddin told Kerner investigators, “because we are never going to have it so good again. This is the year of the Cop … everything you want you get. And I say I want more, and I should be getting it.”76 Such attitudes were commonplace. In a series of hearings held by the Senate’s Judiciary Committee after the 1967 unrest, law enforcement officials called on congress to support the police. As the Cincinnati chief of police told the committee, “There is not a police department in the country that is large enough to handle a full-blown riot. If you have heard the expression, ‘The thin blue line,’ when these things break out, you realize how thin that thin blue line is. We need help and we need it very badly.”77 Politicians and the white public came to the defense of the police. In New York, Mayor Wagner held up the police mission as sacrosanct. “The mandate to maintain law and order is absolute, unconditional, and unqualified,” and went on to warn that “defiance of or attacks upon the police, whose mission it is to enforce law and order, will not be condoned or tolerated by me at any time.”78 Many politicians played on the idea that nothing was wrong with the police as a system but was merely a problem of individual officers—what would become the proverbial “bad apples” defense. In response to complaints focused on the police department in Newark, for instance, Mayor Addonizio brushed them aside, stating, “If you have a barrel of apples, you’re bound to find a bad one in it.”79 Yet, as the Christopher Commission would conclude after investigating the LAPD following the beating of Rodney King in 1991, the claim by chief of police Daryl Gates that the beating was an “aberration,” ignored the deep subculture of racism and “us versus them” attitudes in the department.80 The white public, ignoring the systemic problems and racism of law enforcement, also backed up the police, mostly by supporting greater use of force. Following the 1968 uprisings a CBS poll found that “90% of whites believed the police should be tougher responding to riots.” As a result, the most popular response among whites was “increasing the size of the police force” and “instituting stronger repressive measures.”81 Unsurprisingly, the police looked to capitalize on such support. The Detroit Police Department, for instance, made a request totaling $2,131,225 included radios; scrambling equipment; 700 shotguns; 1,000 carbines; 100 stoner rifles; 1,200 gas masks; 4,000 gas grenades; 2,000 gas projectiles; 5,000 Mace gas dispensers; 25 gas guns; 500,000 rounds of ammunition; 1,5600 flak vets; and fifty scout cars. One Kerner staffer thought that they were requesting enough “to wage a moderate size war.” The request would be whittled down by the Common Council but the DPD got most of what it desired.82 Requests for police equipment were not limited to Harlem, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark. After the 1968 uprising in Pittsburgh, for instance, the mayor appropriated funds for 190 additional police officers, half of which would receive anti-riot training and be placed in special units to prevent and respond to future disorder. The police force grew from a force of roughly 1,600 to 1,853 in 1969. “The city’s strategy,” argues Alyssa Ribeiro, “was ‘containment’ rather than ‘cure.’” Unsurprisingly, tensions between Black residents and the police deteriorated in the months and years after the unrest, and complaints of police brutality reached a peak in 1971 and 1972.83 Lyndon Johnson facilitated the growth of police power and equipment in response to urban unrest through his declaration of a War on Crime. Most notably, the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968 established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which funneled money to police departments and produced a more powerful, more insular, and more idolized police.84 The LEAA led 140

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to a vast expansion of federal resources to the police in the years after the urban uprisings, setting the foundation for the growth of the carceral state.85 If the police positioned themselves to garner more resources after moments of urban unrest, the actions of the police during and after the 1960s rebellions led many Black residents to perceive the police as abusive and illegitimate. Police violence, in other words, led to a crisis in policing that produced rounds of reform that expanded police power in subsequent years.

Conclusion Police were the central purveyors of violence during the urban uprisings of the 1960s and set the stage for the expansion of police power, authority, and violence in subsequent years. Moving beyond individual instances of brutality, the routine police action that sparked unrest, and descriptions of the lack of restraint or overreaction of the police during the unrest requires focusing on the structural position of the police in cities and their role as the linchpin ensuring the racial status quo. Indeed, viewing the police as independent political actors enforcing a racialized social order through violence and repression is key to understanding the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Bayard Rustin recognized the key point in his analysis of the Watts “manifesto.” “But what is more important to understand is that even if every policeman in every black ghetto behaved like an angel and were trained in the most progressive of police academies, the conflict would still exist,” Rustin summarized. “This is so because the ghetto is a place where Negroes do not want to be and are fighting to get out of. When someone with a billy club and a gun tells you to behave yourself amid the terrible circumstances, he becomes a zoo keeper, demanding of you, as one of ‘these monkeys’ (to use Chief Parker’s phrase), that you accept abhorrent conditions. He is brutalizing you by insisting that you tolerate what you cannot, and ought not, tolerate.”86 Crucially, Parker’s attitude expressed during Watts—“we’re on top, they’re on the bottom”—exposed the police power as the retaliatory force of the white power structure that not only fueled the urban uprisings of the 1960s but also sought to reassert that racialized vision of law and order. The police were the enforcers of a hierarchical racial order, and the failure of public officials, most prominently the Kerner commission, to understand the uprisings as protests against that order and the police role in maintaining it left serious questions unanswered. Black grievances with systemic police practices went largely unheard and unaddressed. Rather, the police capitalized on the crisis to solidify their independent authority and martial capacity in ways that built the carceral state. And the consequences for Black communities were real. “The announced function of the police, ’to protect and serve the people,’ becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice,” Angela Davis observed in 1971 following the years of unrest. “They are there to intimidate Blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives.”87 The lack of systemic analysis of the role of police violence during the uprisings enabled the expansion of policing in the following decades. The support for law and order created the possibility for the police to position themselves as independent, powerful authorities in cities. The fallout is one that we continue to see in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 Loren Miller, “The Fire This Time (Prepared for Delivery, San Jose American Civil Liberties Union, November 19, 1965)” (November 16, 1965), Box 29, Folder 9, Loren Miller Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 2 James Baldwin, “James Baldwin on The Harlem Riots,” New York Post, August 2, 1964. 3 Matthew W. Hughey, “Of Riots and Racism: Fifty Years Since the Best Laid Schemes of the Kerner Commission (1968–2018),” Sociological Forum 33, no. 3 (2018): 619–42. Daniel Geary, “What the Kerner

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4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Report Got Wrong about Policing,” Boston Review, May 10, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/us/danielgeary-kerner-report-got-policing-wrong. I use uprising and rebellion interchangeably in this chapter to point to the centrality of the anti-police protest of the 1960s uprisings. For a discussion of terminology related to urban uprisings see Heather Ann Thompson, “Understanding Rioting in Postwar Urban America,” Journal of Urban History 26, no. 3 (2000): 391–402. Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (New York: Liveright, 2021). For an argument about using the term “riot” instead of “uprising” or “rebellion” see Kwame Holmes, “Beyond the Flames: Queering the History of the 1968 D.C. Riot,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). Nathan Edward Cohen, The Los Angeles Riots: A Socio-Psychological Study (Praeger, 1970). Marx, Gary T. “Civil Disorder and the Agents of Social Control.” Journal of Social Issues 26, no. 1 (1970): 19–57. Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). Louis H. Masotti and Don R. Bowen, eds., Riots and Rebellion: Civil Violence in the Urban Community (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, 1968). Joseph Boskin, “The Revolt of the Urban Ghettos, 1964–1967,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (1969): 1–14. Andrew Kopkind, “White on Black: The Riot Commission and the Rhetoric of Reform,” in Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968, ed. David Bossi and Peter Rossi (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 226–59. Joe R Feagin and Harlan Hahn, Ghetto Revolts; the Politics of Violence in American Cities (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Robert M. Fogelson, Violence As Protest: A Study of Riots and Ghettos (Westport, Conn: Doubleday & Company, 1971). Janet L Abu-Lughod, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Michigan State University Press, 2007). Thomas J Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996). Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997). Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2001). Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Thomas J Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008: Random House, 2008). Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016). Hinton, America on Fire. Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Ashley M. Howard, “Prairie Fires: Urban Rebellions as Black Working Class Politics in Three Midwestern Cities” (Ph.D., United States—Illinois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012). Michael W. Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Place of publication not identified: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising (Cambridge University Press, 2018). For other studies of smaller cities see Thomas J. Sugrue and Andrew P. Goodman, “Plainfield Burning: Black Rebellion in the Suburban North,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 4 (May 1, 2007): 568–601. Cathy Lisa Schneider, Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Alex Elkins, “Stand Our Ground: The Street Justice of Urban American Riots, 1900 to 1968,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 2 (2016): 419–37. Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire is on exception that shows how police violence and community violence exist in a cyclical relationship. On the police power see Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000). Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009). Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” APA Monitor 30, no. 1 (January 1999), https://www.apa.org/monitor/features/king-challenge. Ed Cray, The Enemy in the Streets: Police Malpractice in America (New York: Doubleday, 1972). Cohen, The Los Angeles Riots. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and Julian E. Zelizer, The Kerner Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 304. Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder, “Report for Action” (State of New Jersey, February 1968). Leonard Zeitz, “Survey of Negro Attitudes toward Law,” Rutgers Law Review 19, no. 2 (1965): 302. Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 126.

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“I Don’t Mind Dying” 17 Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, “Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era,” University of Michigan Department of History and U-M Carceral State Project (blog), December 2020, https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/page/home. 18 Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, Justice, Power, and Politics (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 1. 19 James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966. 20 Anne Gray Fischer, “‘Land of the White Hunter’: Legal Liberalism and the Racial Politics of Morals Enforcement in Midcentury Los Angeles,” Journal of American History, March 2019, 868–84. 21 James Forman, Jr, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). 22 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and Julian E. Zelizer, The Kerner Report, 161. 23 Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, “Detroit Under Fire.” Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2001), 37. 24 Robert Scott Shellow, ed., The Harvest of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 97. 25 Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD, Justice, Power, and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 23. 26 Hugh R. Manes, “Policemen With Guns” (1966), Box 39, Folder 2, Hugh Manes Papers, Collection 1854, UCLA Special Collections. 27 “Police Brutality Complaints Reported to the Detroit Branch,” The Crisis, October 1958. Alex Elkins, “Battle of the Corner: Urban Policing and Rioting in the United States, 1943–1971” (Temple University, 2017), 199. 28 Manes, “Policemen With Guns,” 28. 29 Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 71. 30 Suddler, Presumed Criminal. James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966. 31 Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, “Detroit Under Fire.” 32 Fine, Violence in the Model City, 338. 33 Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer, 84. 34 “Chronology” (n.d.), Volume II, Reel 1, McCone Transcripts - Microfilm. 35 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 28–29; Quote about Parker: “Chronology” (n.d.), Volume II, Reel 1, McCone Transcripts - Microfilm. 36 Shellow, ed., The Harvest of American Racism, 70. 37 “Chronology” (n.d.), Volume II, Reel 1, McCone Transcripts - Microfilm. 38 Howard, “Prairie Fires,” 241, 238–39. See also Holmes, “Beyond the Flames.” 39 Horne, Fire This Time. 40 Howard, “Prairie Fires,” 247, 250–51. 41 Hayden, Rebellion in Newark, 51, 53. 42 Bayard Rustin, “Some Lessons from Watts” in “Bayard Rustin Writings on Riots in the 1960s,” Bayard Rustin Papers, 001581-018- 1251, ProQuest History Vault. 43 Rustin, “Some Lessons from Watts.” 44 Howard, “Prairie Fires,” 221, 192. 45 Fine, Violence in the Model City, 161. 46 Bayard Rustin, “The Watts ‘Manifesto’ & The McCone Report,” Commentary, March 1966. 47 Shellow, ed., The Harvest of American Racism, 26. 48 Fine, 195. Fogelson, Riots as Protest, 109. 49 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 29. 50 Daryl F. Gates, Chief: My Life in the LAPD (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 110. 51 Robert Curvin, Inside Newark: Decline, Rebellion, and the Search for Transformation, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 107; McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, 113. 52 John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 22. 53 Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, “Violence in the City—an End or a Beginning?: A Report” (Los Angeles: Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965). 54 Curvin, Inside Newark, 107. 55 Joel Stone, ed., Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies (Detroit, MI: Painted Turtle, 2017). 56 Robert Oliver, n.d., Watts 1965 Oral History Collection, Southern California Library for Social Science Research.

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Max Felker-Kantor 57 Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer, 90. 58 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 29. 59 Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 156, 165–167. 60 Cray, Enemy in the Streets, 183, 194. 61 Hinton, America on Fire, 97–8. 62 Hayden, Rebellion in Newark, 53. 63 McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, 112. 64 Hayden, Rebellion in Newark, 49–50. 65 McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, 116. 66 Danielle McGuire, “Murder at the Algiers Motel,” in Detroit 1967: Origins, Impacts, Legacies, Joel Stone, ed. (Detroit, MI: Painted Turtle, 2017), 177, 181–2. 67 Curvin, Inside Newark, 118. 68 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and Julian E. Zelizer, The Kerner Report; Kevin J. Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (NYU Press, 2007), 136. 69 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 30–1. Hugh R. Manes, “The Meaning of Watts,” Lincoln Law Review 1, no. 1 (December 1965): 17–27. 70 Shellow, ed., The Harvest of American Racism, 40–41. 71 Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, “Violence in the City—an End or a Beginning?: A Report” (Los Angeles: Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965). Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder, “Report for Action.” 72 Elizabeth Hinton’s recent study has shown that there were at least 2,239 urban rebellions between 1964 and 1972. Hinton, America on Fire, 313. 73 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and Julian E. Zelizer, The Kerner Report, 210. 74 Andrew Kopkind, “White on Black: The Riot Commission and the Rhetoric of Reform,” in Cities Under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964–1968, ed. David Bossi and Peter Rossi (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 230. 75 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and Julian E. Zelizer, The Kerner Report, XXX. 76 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, “Proceedings of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders” (November 2, 1967), Box 38, Folder 15, Urban Policy Research Institute Records (UPRI), Mss. 011, Southern California Library (Los Angeles, CA). 77 “Antiriot Bill - 1967: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary on H.R. 421, Part 1” (1967), 66. 78 Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer, 177. 79 Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder, “Report for Action,” 21. 80 Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, “Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department” (Los Angeles: The Commission, 1991). 81 Levy, The Great Uprising, 200, 99. 82 Fine, Violence in the Model City, 394. 83 Alyssa Ribeiro, “"A Period of Turmoil”: Pittsburgh’s April 1968 Riots and Their Aftermath,” Journal of Urban History, April 9, 2012, 5, 6–10. 84 Cray, Enemy in the Streets, 10–11. 85 Hinton, From the War on Poverty, 2. 86 Rustin, “The Watts ‘Manifesto,’” 32. 87 Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (London; New York: Verso, 2016), 32.

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SECTION 4

Police Brutality Against Immigrant and Ethnic Groups

12 VIGILANTE POLICING IN ASIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITIES IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES Stephanie Hinnershitz

On February 8, 1924, three physicians, a few local reporters, and an Army representative watched through the window of a makeshift gas chamber while Gee Jon’s head bobbed gently up and down after guards released “a spray of liquid hydrocyanic gas … into the stone death chamber.” Moments earlier, Gee—a 26-year-old Cantonese man who arrived in the United States around 1907 and almost immediately fell into a life of crime in San Francisco’s Chinatown—silently wept while a guard strapped him into a chair in the small chamber. “Brace up!” the guard yelled at Gee while he struggled to maneuver the convicted murderer’s hands and ankles into the straps. Four guards had earlier resigned from their positions when informed that they would be taking part in the first execution by lethal gas in America; those who remained were either indifferent or perhaps happy that a member of the Hip Sing Tong met his fate.1 Hip Sing was one of the major tongs—or gangs—that specialized in the trafficking of liquor and drugs in the West. These criminal syndicates offered men like Gee an opportunity to scratch out a living and develop a sense of belonging. These opportunities also meant that men like Gee were expected to do their leaders’ bidding which in his case meant murdering launderer Tom Quong Kee, a 74-year-old member of Hip Sing’s rival tong, Bing Kong. The two tongs had been at war with each other for two years over territorial drug distribution between California and Nevada, racking up deaths, including Gee’s execution. His death signaled a victory for police who had battled the reverberations of tong wars and Chinese criminals for decades.2 Gee’s actions placed him in the gas chamber, but police brutality toward Chinese immigrants in the West during the nineteenth century explains why he and other Chinese often found their place in this criminal landscape. While Chinese who first arrived in the United States during the mid1850s became the targets of White supremacist attacks up and down the West Coast and into the interior of the Rocky Mountains, law officials’ support of vigilante justice that targeted Asians as part of a “yellow peril” (Figure 12.1) meant that mobs lynched, wounded, and expelled Chinese from their communities—driving those who survived to seek protection where they could find it. Anti-Chinese racism and White supremacy reigned in the West long before Gee Jon’s execution and inaction was the brutal police response to the pleas for help from vulnerable Asian communities. Police cooperation with the forces of “vigilante justice” has a long legacy in the United States. White lynch mobs who terrorized Black communities in the South following the Civil War became a fixture of a Jim Crow legal system. Before a Black man or woman sought justice in court—either DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-17

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as a defendant or a plaintiff—lynch mobs kidnapped their victims, brutally beat them, and displayed their battered bodies as a reminder that White justice prevailed. Newspapers often covered these community affairs, and photographers captured the hideous spectacle of the murderers—men and women, young and old—and their accomplices smiling directly into the camera. Police stood down and allowed this grotesque display of power to reach its inevitable conclusion, or participated in the event themselves. Their presence—either through direct participation or approval—condoned vigilante violence.3 Earlier, Americans relied on “frontier justice” to instill law and order amongst the land of Indigenous peoples as the US government further encroached on their territory. During the colonial era through the antebellum period, governors and other law officials deputized individuals to participate in scalping Native Americans, relying upon mobs to carry out the orders when a well-organized law enforcement presence was not yet established. This codification of vigilante justice paved the way for similar atrocities as Americans moved westward during the nineteenth century and when official “Indian Wars” pitted the US Army against the tribes of the Great Plains.4 Frontier justice was a specific type of police brutality that would aid and abet the anti-Asian movement. Violent attacks were an important part of the genocidal toolkit of White supremacists in the West. But lynching and physical attacks inflicted upon the Chinese by deputized mobs gave way to systematic methods of intimidation that expelled entire Chinese populations from Western communities with little to no physical attacks—a strategy endorsed by local officials and facilitated by police. Unable to turn to law enforcement for assistance, Chinese turned to tongs and syndicates whose members were mistreated and abused by police once in custody. The Chinese migrants’ lack of legal recourse as a result of racist laws and discriminatory practices in the West which denied them the right to a fair hearing created a legally unobstructed cycle of violence bolstered by police indifference and brutality. Long before the Chinese arrived in the United States, the West, or frontier, was a diverse region that represented a meeting point for ethnic, racial, and class groups in the pursuit of economic growth and survival. Americans romanticized the notion of the frontier as a “safety valve” for settlers who pushed beyond unofficial boundaries often based on geographic as much as social and political barriers. After the French and Indian War, American colonists believed they had earned the right to the land they helped the British to subdue. But the Proclamation Line of 1763, a boundary established by the Crown to reduce the number of sentinels needed to protect the Americans from skirmishes with Native Americans and to maintain a tepid peace with tribes after the War, was a slap in the face to Americans looking to settle beyond the Line. Such borders did little to quell the desire for expansion, and clashes with the Native Americans who already inhabited the land characterized early American frontier policy after the Revolutionary and became part of the politics of the War of 1812. As the nation entered the Industrial Revolution, hungry for markets and land, resources in the West drove further settlement, leading to the images of covered wagons and families staking their claims. White settlers believed that they were merely fulfilling the manifest destiny of Anglo-Saxon Protestants conquering the untamed and heathen land, but those who already occupied the territory did not accept these beliefs.5 Mining, timber, and access to water routes that were commercially viable fueled violence and war in the West as ethnic and racial diversity shaped the region. Genocidal measures taken by the White settler government in California to subdue the land resulted in enslaved Native American tribes working in mining to benefit White elites. Using violence to remove Native Americans established a precedent that would resonate throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. And as the nation inched closer to the Civil War, debates over slavery brought tensions between White southerners and White abolitionists to a head as competition over land and access to it as well as the labor opportunities defined the political spectrum of the antebellum era.6 Into this landscape arrived the Chinese. Migrants from China lived in the United States since at least the early 1800s but beginning in the 1840s, Chinese traversed the Pacific and arrived in greater 148

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numbers, finding employment in the burgeoning mining industry in the West as well as railroad construction. The Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that pitted the Taiping revolutionaries against the established Qing dynasty, ravaged China between 1850 and 1864 and created massive political unrest. In 1860, the Qing government also lifted previous restrictions on Chinese emigrants, spurring mass emigration. Chinese left for economic opportunities in South America and Australia, but the United States also offered rumors of riches to be found on Gold Mountain. A wave of primarily Chinese men traveled to America seeking to make money to send home to their families and eventually return to China richer than they left. In the process, Chinese migrants contributed to the growing population in the West. San Francisco was the largest Chinatown settlement (the city grew from 1,000 in 1848 to more than 20,000 by 1850 when more Chinese began to arrive) and on the eve of the Civil War, more than 31,000 Chinese settled in the United States, most in California.7 The arrival of the Chinese coincided with the westward migration of Whites as well as the northern migration of Latinos, creating a “place of conquest” where “the contest for property and profit has been accompanied by a contest for cultural dominance” among multicultural settlers.8 A region brimming with resources and opportunities was in reality largely controlled by capitalists and those looking to turn a quick profit in land speculation, leaving manual labor as the main source of income in the area. When dreams of striking it rich as independent miners fanned out, White, Chinese, and Mexican migrants stayed on the land and eked out a living by turning to lower-paying manual jobs while also competing for the depleting resources that the Native Americans had relied on for centuries. The Chinese were able to corner certain markets like cooking and laundering clothing for men in the small towns that sprung up around mining sites, but competition for jobs became fierce closer to the Civil War. The myth of the frontier as a place of possibility and vast expanse overshadowed the reality: the West was a region of scarcity for those without access to economic or political power.9 In response to rising complaints of the unfair competition from minorities, California took a series of legislative and judicial steps to limit the economic rights of migrants. The California legislature unanimously passed the Foreign Miner’s Tax in 1850 that required miners who were not American citizens to pay twenty dollars every month to continue their trade. While the act technically targeted any foreign miner regardless of nationality, enforcers only applied the law to Latino and Chinese miners; miners from Europe evaded the tax. French, Chilean, Peruvian, and Mexican miners in Sonoroa County, California protested the legislation, alarming White settlers in the region, and California lawmakers responded by lowering the tax to four dollars a month. Socially, White supremacists turned their already existing anti-Chinese sentiments toward a more active and exclusionary movement. Tensions long existed between White and Chinese miners in the small communities that grew around reported lodes. In 1852, sixty White miners terrorized a group of Chinese migrants panning for gold along the American River in California, assaulting 200 Chinese men who shared a claim at Mormon Bar. The terrorists then continued down the river—attacking and driving out over 500 Chinese miners. Similar occurrences happened—with no restrictions in the new mining towns—throughout California during the 1850s. Jean Pfaelzer describes a “race war” in Shasta County between 1858 and 1859 when White miners continued to terrorize Chinese miners who steadfastly held their ground. Beyond the mining wars, however, Chinese were seen as valuable employees in other industries willing to do a variety of jobs. The exhaustion of mining riches abated the violent competition when Whites fled the mining camps. For a few years, the Chinese purges ended, and Chinese migrants were left alone as they moved into other industries such as railroad construction. In 1854, however, the state of California attacked the Chinese migrants’ ability to pursue legal justice. Section 14 of an “An Act concerning Crimes and Punishment” passed by the California State Assembly in 1850 specifically stated, “No black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a White man” in a court of law, reflecting decades of racism that 149

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grew alongside the territory when it entered the United States as a free state the same year. Because the Act did not explicitly bar Chinese from the same action (and reflected later attempts at states across the country to classify Chinese in a racial hierarchy), Chinese often took advantage of the loopholes to sue for economic damages, sometimes successfully, other times not. But in criminal cases, the outcome was often different.10 In 1853, a jury convicted George Hall of murdering Ling Sing, a Chinese miner, in Nevada County, California. Chinese witnesses provided strong testimony against Hall and convinced the jury of his guilt. Hall appealed his conviction to the California Supreme Court, charging that the Act clearly denied Chinese the right to testify because they were not White. The California Court ruled in favor of Hall and issued statements that were riddled with racist rhetoric that reflected growing anti-Asian sentiment in the West. Justice Hugh Murray delivered the majority opinion that would be similar to the arguments White supremacists would use later. The Chinese, as the Court argued, could not be counted on for testimony as they were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior … ” The Court had a ready-made justification for its decision: anyone who was not White was not eligible to naturalize in the United States under the Naturalization Act of 1790. Legislation bolstered the racist ideas of the Justices in California and relegated the Chinese immigrants to an unprotected class of people.11 On the eve of the Civil War, California and the West continued to grow and benefit from government subsidization of economic development, bringing more people to the region and adding to an already volatile mix. The railroad industry had a significant impact on the development of the land beyond the Mississippi. Chinese, Irish, Native Americans, and other groups—all employed in various forms of coerced and free labor—worked during the height of the Civil War to complete the transcontinental railroad that connected the East to the West. Americans celebrated the completion of the marvel in 1869 and congratulated the mass of Irish laborers who earned a name for themselves while working on the project. In reality, much of the worst-paid and most dangerous work was performed by Chinese workers, including dynamiting the sides of mountains to create tunnels. The West continued to flourish alongside the railroads traversing the nation, and more groups poured into the region including Black migrants fleeing the wreckage of the Civil War and the brutal racism that followed; southern Whites looking for economic recovery after the end of slavery; newly-arriving immigrants from the West Coast; and the steady stream of Chinese immigrants still coming to the United States. Whereas the Chinese did not pose a direct economic threat when jobs were more plentiful, attitudes toward the migrants shifted following the Civil War.12 By the end of the 1860s, a rising anti-Chinese sentiment merged with the Democratic Party’s vow of “No Negro or Chinese Suffrage.” After the Civil War, Whites from the South migrated to California and were able to begin staking a claim to the political riches of the state. Considering the large numbers of White working-class males, there was political power to be gained by fanning the flames of anti-Chinese hate. Supporting legislative discrimination against the Chinese through targeted taxes and unconstitutional rules and regulations on business permits were ways for state politicians to gain White, working-class votes. Laws limiting the economic competition of Chinese abounded, supported by local politicians and their constituents. This movement was a “legislative war” against the Chinese, which included California Governor George Perkins declaring March 4 a legal holiday for anti-Chinese demonstrations and prohibiting Chinese from fishing. At the local level in Santa Cruz, the city adopted an ordinance that stated that “no person shall carry baskets or bags attached to poles carried upon back or shoulders on public sidewalks,” forcing Chinese to walk in the streets. The Chinese later successfully appealed this measure, but the trend was established: the state began to criminalize being Chinese. Despite protections for Chinese in the United States guaranteed by trade negotiations with China and the Fourteenth Amendment—which provided due process and equal protection to all who lived in the United States, not just citizens—such legal guarantees were often overlooked as politicians vied for the support of the White working class.13 150

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The growing criminalization of anything Chinese would contribute to brutal anti-Chinese violence by the mid-1870s. Historians have long debated the truth behind the popular concept of the “Wild Wild West,” or the frontier as a place of rough-and-tumble gunmen provoking showdowns at saloons over the simplest of disagreements. Scholars like Thomas DiLorenzo and W. Eugene Hollon have argued that “although the West is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life,” their research “indicates that this was not the case.” The general orderly contracts entered into by miners in California before there was formal governmental authority over much of the land or an active official presence are proof of the respect of private property, while private agencies and “land clubs” stepped in to maintain the peace and create an orderly society when conflicts arose. When government bureaucrats failed to effectively police actions like cattle theft, “protection agencies” staffed by “expert gunmen” would enforce the respectable codes of the cowboys and settlers, ensuring that violence was avoided by the use of violent intimidation itself, creating more of a “calm, subdued West” than a wild one that occupies the American imagination.14 But this is a rather narrow view of violence on the frontier—one that ignores the plight of the Chinese. As other historians who have focused on the prevalence of lynching and racially-inspired violence against Mexican immigrants, women, and Native Americans (often bolstered by the federal government’s own wars on Native American tribes before and after the Civil War) noted, pacts to unofficially charge and prosecute criminals like cattle “rustlers” and thieves largely benefitted Whites.15 “Frontier justice,” the kind praised by Teddy Roosevelt as the type of muscular dedication to what is just without the need for government oversight, often targeted minorities, challenging the notion that miners were fair men who respected the rights of all miners.16 The miners’ brutal attacks on the Chinese that fit the bill for “frontier justice” in defending the workingclass values of White men against foreign intruders would inspire more vigilantism in the West. Without a strong law enforcement presence save for the Federal Marshalls and state and local governments that sometimes felt far removed from the more remote areas of the region, it is no surprise that vigilante justice created a sanctioned environment for violence. San Francisco’s own Committee of Vigilance formed in 1851, consisting of middle-class White businessmen who realized that the city’s booming population made it nearly impossible for the official police to arrest criminals and control crime, rose to power by targeting the Sydney Duck Gang, a criminal syndicate of Australian immigrants. The Committee executed members of the gang and called for the deportation of other innocent immigrants, all in the name of controlling corruption and crime. The Committee dissolved in 1856, but the lesson remained: The people of the West could join together to deliver justice—however they perceived it.17 The rumors of Chinese vice and immorality also provided ample opportunities for the existing police forces in the West to target Chinatowns as dens of iniquity. As a largely bachelor society, Chinese men gathered for gambling and drinking in their quarters, and prostitution as well as “opium dens”—both of which catered to White as well as Chinese customers—were part of the landscape of Chinatowns in western cities like San Francisco. This was behavior that cut across class, racial, and ethnic lines, but the idea that these vices accompanied Chinese migrants and then infected good, White men worked its way into national discourse, one which already identified Chinese as degenerate in their abounding vices, disruptive in their rejection of Christianity, and filthy in their disregard for hygiene. Chinese had the potential to make America morally as well as physically ill (as Chinese would later be charged with spreading diseases from tuberculosis to the plague outbreak in San Francisco in 1900). When San Francisco outlawed smoking opium in 1875, law enforcement—bolstered by the ordinance--raided Chinatowns looking for evidence of smoking, gambling, and prostitution (though they did not have to do much searching since their White compatriots were some of the most loyal customers).18 Nevertheless, federal laws as well as local ordinances provided motivation for targeting Chinese communities, particularly at the economic level in hopes of dissuading settlement. In Oakland, 151

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California, the city council declared war on Chinese laundries. Chinese men were able to find an economic niche in the West by doing “women’s work” or laundering clothes for both Chinese and White customers. Seeing this as a site of economic sustainability, cities and towns along the West Coast began to pass ordinances that fined or imprisoned those who operated laundries in dilapidated structures or without specific licenses or certifications. Anti-laundry ordinances became a common attempt to purge the cities of Chinese migrants. The city of Watsonville, California made it a misdemeanor to open a laundry within the town limits, while Merced classified Chinese laundries as an unhygienic public nuisance and required all to be relocated outside of the town within ninety days. Enforcing these ordinances required police surveillance of Chinatown, making the law enforcement an arm of the brutality and racism of the government and vice versa.19 In other areas where police presence was virtually non-existent, vigilante groups of private citizens enforced certain ordinances that targeted Chinese immigrants. Similar to the southern Black Codes of the post-Civil War era that limited the rights of freed people, conduct codes in the West functioned to further criminalize the very presence of Chinese and create a need for constant enforcement. In Chico (a settlement in Butte County, California) farmers employed more Chinese migrants than White workers (many of whom came from the South). White men referred to Chinese as “plantation laborers,” charging that they worked for “slave wages” under poor conditions. When the United States slipped into an economic depression during the early 1870s, White men scrambled to find job opportunities amongst the professions they once declared beneath them. The Chinese—who had long rejected mining as a viable living while White men returned to the mines when no jobs could be found—served as domestic servants for the more prosperous residents of Chico, ran laundries, and also grew and sold vegetables in markets. In response, White men in the region formed “visiting committees” which, as the name suggests, “went calling” to the White land and business owners who employed Chinese, threatening to “annihilate” any who did not give in to their demands to fire Chinese workers. The mayor of Chico, as well as local law enforcement, knew that these visiting committees were growing, but did nothing to stop them. Meanwhile, the Supreme Order of the Caucasians (a Whites-only fraternity) posted “public enemy” lists that described behavior including “defending an Asiatic against a White in a court of law” or “removing a White man or woman or black man or woman (native born) and instat[ing] an Asiatic in his place” as grounds for boycotting and arson. Tensions reached their peak in March of 1876 when a more violent subsect of the Order set fire to Chinese businesses and murdered Chinese migrants. In the end, the police eventually arrested twenty-nine vigilantes, but only four men who pleaded guilty to arson were convicted. And rather than death by hanging, only four men were sentenced to twelve to twenty-five years in the San Quentin State Prison.20 Anti-Chinese violence also made its way into the West’s urban settlements. In 1871, a Los Angeles police officer was patrolling the city’s Chinatown quarters when he discovered an altercation between two Chinese men over one of the few women in the city; both claimed that she was their respective wife. Shots rang out and the officer died from gunshot wounds. The police department interpreted the shooting as proof that Chinatown was soon to become a hotbed of violence and deputized local citizens to search the area for criminal Chinese. A mob of White and Mexican men terrorized Chinatown, forcing residents out of their homes, setting fire to their businesses, and expelling them from the city, but not before lynching eighteen Chinese men. Only two men were convicted of murder and the incident served as an inspiration for other city dwellers to do the same. In these cases, the police counted on vigilantes to assist them in controlling the Chinese while serving their “frontier justice.” What began as individual attacks turned into widespread targeting of Chinese communities.21 Meanwhile, at the national level, politicians argued about the place of Chinese immigrants in the country. Democrats charged that Chinese migrants posed a dire threat to the White working man and thought the Republican Party was so devoted to maintaining diplomatic ties with China that it overlooked the coming storm. Members of the Workingmen’s Party of California, founded in 1876, 152

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cried “The Chinese Must Go!” in their meetings in San Francisco and used the threat of violence to make it a reality during a massive anti-Chinese riot in the city in 1877. Democrats used the economic anxiety of White rioters like the Workingmen’s Party to push for dealing with the Chinese “invasion” of the West. Republicans, in turn, argued that the Democrats and their virulent West Coast constituents inflamed racial tensions by passing anti-Chinese state and local laws that made it nearly impossible for the federal government to maintain necessary trade relations with China. Exaggerated and false tales of Chinese crime, opium addiction, kidnapping of White women for prostitution and disease filled newspapers from coast to coast, and conversations about restricting—and eventually excluding— Chinese migration to the United States filtered from the chambers of politicians to the American public Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1 Caricature of Yellow Peril, “The Yellow Terror In All His Glory”, 1899, Private Collection, Public Domain

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In 1879, advocates for restricting immigration in Congress passed a law limiting the number of Chinese arriving to the U.S. to fifteen per ship, and though President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed it out of concern for existing treaties with China, those who proposed it rallied around the need to further restrict migration. Republican members of Congress certainly sympathized with the concerns of Democrats on the West Coast but feared that giving in would harm trade relations with China. Hayes sent diplomat James Angell to China to hammer out a compromise, resulting in an agreement that China would severely restrict the number of migrants coming to the United States in return for the United States allowing special classes (students, diplomats, religious figures, and merchants) entry while prohibiting manual laborers. The Angell Treaty would become the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 (it would become technically exclusionary in 1888), a victory for Democrats and those who supported excluding Chinese migrants for economic as well as racist reasons.22 But violence continued even after legal exclusion. Between 1885 and 1887 alone, there were more than 150 known and attempted expulsions of Chinese from communities in the West. In 1885, a disagreement between White and Chinese miners who worked for the Union Pacific Railroad in Rock Springs, Wyoming resulted in the destruction of the Chinese quarter of the town and the murder of twenty-eight Chinese men at the hands of an armed White mob. Later a group of 559 Chinese miners submitted a petition detailing the destruction of their home and the violence they encountered to President Grover Cleveland. When they arrived, they “saw only a burnt tract of ground to mark the sites of their former habitations. Some of the dead bodies had been buried by the company, while others, mangled and decomposed, were strewn on the ground and were being eaten by dogs and hogs … ” The U.S. Army escorted the Chinese back to Rock Springs, but the damage caused during the massacre was devastating.23 Rather than quelling anti-Chinese fervor or stemming violence, the Chinese Exclusion Act appeared to heighten the tensions and create more violence. Chinese still arrived in the United States either through careful coaching, paying off corrupt immigration officials, or entering via northern and southern borders. As before, the idea of Chinese entering illegally only emboldened vigilantes to enforce immigration laws as they saw fit, not differentiating between Chinese who arrived before the 1882 Act or were citizens and assuming that all Chinese were unfit to be in the United States. A White mob—including police—in Tacoma, Washington expelled its entire Chinese community during the same year as the Rock Springs massacre. The mayor of Tacoma, Jacob Weisbach, often sided with racist White mobs looking to rid the West Coast of Chinese migrants. He watched as Chinese arrived in his city and the state to work on the Northern Pacific Railroad and remained in Tacoma after it was completed, creating Tacoma’s Chinatown. Viewing exclusion as an indication that the nation supported his anti-Chinese views, Weisbach called a citizens’ meeting at the Opera House in Tacoma on February 21, 1885. There he discussed with over 900 attendees a resolution to expel the Chinese from his city and prevent anyone from employing Chinese (echoing earlier statutes from the public enemy lists of Rancho Chico). Weisenbach further excited residents wishing to see an end to Chinese settlement in their city by organizing and presiding over a statewide anti-Chinese Congress in Seattle. Attendees and representatives—including mayors from towns and cities across Washington—agreed that all western Washington White residents would expel Chinese by November 1, establishing an “ouster committee” of private citizens to notify all Chinese that they were to be removed. These deputized terrorists carried out an order that clearly violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of Chinese living in the United States. On November 3, 1885, a mob of 500 people—sanctioned by the city government and including police—forced 200 Chinese from their homes and marched them to the Lakeview Station. Once there, the mob placed them on trains to Portland—where the Chinese would eventually meet a similar feat as in Tacoma. The following day, the committee set fire to Tacoma’s Chinatown while the fire department and police watched. Newspapers responded with mixed reactions. Those on the 154

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West Coast cheered while others in the east were horrified at the lack of a police presence or federal action as well as the potential damage done to diplomatic ties between the United States and China. Despite the outrage and state-level attempts to indict both Weisbach and twenty-seven members of the community, no one was charged (in fact the only one who was arrested was a Chinese man who, ironically, the police suggested was responsible for arson). Rather, the twenty-seven vigilantes were celebrated across Washington as heroes with parades and balls, and many of those who participated went on to hold powerful positions in local government. The Washington Standard praised the action of the men, noting that “no Chinaman was abused and no violent deeds were committed.” The editors hoped that “the determined action of the people will not be without its lesson: that there are bounds to toleration of … those who defy our laws and corrupt and debase the community in which they live, cannot go.”24 The success of the Tacoma Expulsion inspired similar events throughout the West, with vigilantes replicating what was known as the “Tacoma Method.” The system rested upon ensuring that no physical harm came to the Chinese and that the expulsion was relatively orderly thanks to the cooperation of the police and local law. An anti-Chinese riot ripped through Seattle one year later and resulted in martial law being established to restore order and requiring the presence of the police. Later, expulsions occurred throughout the West during the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth, with mobs running out Chinese in other rural communities, Sikhs in Bellingham, Washington in 1907, and Filipinos in Watsonville, CA in 1930. Police brutality in the form of sacrificing the lives of the Chinese to White mobs while refusing to protect them from harm assisted in this destruction. Police often left policing in the hands of known racist and vigilante groups, condoning their practices and upholding a White supremacist system rather than protecting the Chinese.25 But the Chinese fought back. Chinese in Amador County, California formed an armed militia to protect their community from White mobs while Chinese miners in Shasta County California banded together and went on strike rather than submit to the whims of the White vigilantes who threatened them. When Chinese could not turn to law officials, they were forced to tend to matters themselves, an action that—ironically—often brought more surveillance and brutality from the police themselves.26 Preparing for self-defense also relied on community-level organizations. The most wellknown—the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA)—consisted of six “companies” representing six different districts from China. Migrants established the CCBA the same year as the Exclusion Act and served largely as a mutual aid society. Based in San Francisco (though others would develop in cities across the United States), they were overseen by respected merchants in the business community and pulled resources to send the bodies of dead home for burial, organized loans, and raised money for those who were sick. They also collected legal funds for lawsuits. Petitioning local officials, seeking the assistance of the Chinese government, and organizing boycotts of White and discriminatory businesses also fell within the political realm of the justice sought by the Six.27 But there were other organizations that operated within the shadow of the Six: the tongs. Tongs (meaning “hall” or “meeting place,” but more colloquially referred to as gangs) were secret fraternities similar to the benevolent associations but took on a criminal element as Chinatown grew, anti-Chinese violence increased, and the Six focused on boycotting racist laws against Chinese. The tongs organized around protecting interests in vice and turfs as well as smuggling in Chinese after exclusion. They also held sway over merchants by promising them an extra layer of “protection” against other gangs and White mobs. “Hatchet men” for each tong would engage in protracted “wars” over trade, women, and other ventures. These wars eventually spread across the country as tongs grew and members migrated to cities like New York, Cleveland, and Boston. The press extensively covered the tongs after the Chinese Exclusion Act as proof of the heathen and criminal elements of the Chinese.28 In response, San Francisco police established their own Chinatown Squad in 1878. Following the San Francisco Riot in 1877, the mayor of San Francisco realized that the police department was not 155

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equipped to deal with the Chinese problem—be it from the criminal elements of the Chinese or the mobs that ended up taking justice into their own hands. Special officers assigned to specific quarters of the city, including Chinatown, proved insufficient and often accepted bribes to allow Chinese gambling dens and brothels to remain open. Alfred Clark, Clerk of the Chief of Police of San Francisco, stated “Nearly every Chinaman breaks the laws and the ordinances of the city, but we cannot catch them so as to convict.” Enter the Squad. Consisting of a sergeant and four to six patrol officers in plainclothes, the Chinatown Squad’s goals were to police the Chinese as a group particularly prone to crime, more so than the Italians and the Latinos who lived in quarters close by. When not conducting tours of the iniquity of Chinatown (a common side hustle for members), the Squad turned its attention to weeding out members of tongs by enforcing even the most petty of ordinances like “obstructing” sidewalks or a ban on washing balconies after a certain time, resulting in the squad using a variety of tactics that would become tools of the trade for special teams violently entering homes and smashing priceless furniture and belongings while indiscriminately arresting Chinese with no evidence of criminal activity.29 As the tongs gained more members in different cities, members competed for access to markets and territory, leading to the tong wars that lasted from approximately the late 1800s to roughly the 1930s. Feuds between rival tongs were bloody and protracted, making for salacious headlines. But they also made for a heavier police presence that did little to discriminate between members of the tong and the city’s general Chinese population. In Cleveland on September 22, 1925, 65-year old Mark Ham who owned a laundry in the city’s small, yet thriving Chinatown alerted police to a murder. Ham watched two men slip in and out of a building across the street from his apartment. Suspecting the men were up to no-good, Ham went into the building to investigate and found Yee Chock dead in his bedroom. Whoever had attacked the man left bloodied knives at the scene of the crime. The Cleveland police and director of safety, Edwin Barry, long looking to rid the city of its Chinese population, believing them to be a race that brought gambling and other vice to his city, followed Ham to the headquarters of the Hip Sing Tong. Once there, Ham began pointing to members of the tong as men who he thought resembled those he had seen fleeing the murder scene. Ham took great pride in leading the police to the Hip Sings; he and Chock were members of their rival, the Ong Leong tong.30 For Barry, Chock’s death was a green light to begin the process of expelling the 700 Chinese from Cleveland. Reminiscent of the Tacoma Method, Barry ordered the chief of police to “arrest every Chinaman in the city of Cleveland” and the squad began hauling out every “frightened Oriental” in businesses on Ontario Street. Once 612 of the 700 Chinese of Cleveland were in jail—a cross-section of the Chinese including high school boys, college students, and others unaffiliated with the tongs who were packed into cells and berated by federal agents over their immigration status—the police kicked in the doors of every Chinese business. They expected to find evidence of gambling, prostitution, and other vices but discovered squalid living conditions indicative of the poverty many Chinese men lived in. Still, Barry took the opportunity to argue that the buildings should have been condemned and ordered every business and residency in Chinatown burned to the ground.31 Treatment of the detained Chinese leaked out to the public, sparking criticism of Barry’s actions. Believing the Chinese to be a “clannish sort,” Barry argued the indiscriminate arrests—without search warrants or probable abuse—were necessary. “It’s no use questioning them because they can’t talk English. But they know who did the killing, and every Chinaman we can get our hands on is going to stay in jail until the slayers are turned up.” But a local religious leader denounced Barry’s actions, claiming, “The spectacle of a city like Cleveland dragging to jail men, women and children of all types and occupations, students and merchants, simply because they belong to the Chinese race, is pitiful.” Eventually, many of the Chinese appealed their imprisonment to the local appellate court where judges ordered most released, with Judge Maurice Levine explaining, “Black, yellow or 156

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White, no one can be held without legal right.” Once released, members of Cleveland’s Chinatown merchant class successfully filed petitions blocking condemnation and saving their property while 150 Chinese residents formally issued a manifesto on their treatment at the hands of the police: “Men, women and children, students, teachers, and merchants, were arrested and treated in a manner worse than that dealt to criminal suspects.” The petition demanded that the City issue a formal apology to the Chinese, that Barry be fired, and that they be compensated for damages to their property. The Chinese never received their demands, but Barry did issue a half-hearted apology—specifically to Chinese students, still insisting that most of Cleveland’s Chinatown were members of tongs. And Mark Ham? He confessed to the murder of Chock himself, though the city suspected a framing by his rivals or those within his own tong. A few days later, prison guards found him dead in his cell, hanging from a bedsheet he had tied to a pipe, a much different death than fellow Hip Sing member, Gee, met during his execution a year earlier in Nevada.32 With the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924 which barred Asian migrants from coming to the United States and the push to rebrand Chinatowns across the country from crime-ridden cesspools to tourist attractions, the prominence of the tongs dissipated by the mid-twentieth century. America celebrated the decline of tong war violence as well as the tactics of the police, regardless of brutality. Gee’s life of crime and his execution were part of a history of police neglect of the Chinese from the earliest days of their arrival in the U.S. Police brutality against the Chinese in the West assumed two forms, one being malignant neglect, allowing White vigilante mobs to police the Chinese as they saw fit, and the other strong-arm tactics against tong members as well as those who were not. Chinese violence in the twentieth century was the outgrowth of the branding of an entire people and their communities as criminals and the need for self-defense and protection when police forces refused to assist. When Gee gasped for his last breath, he was an example of how police brutality in the West defined the Chinese experience and upheld a system of White supremacy that continues to shape the experiences of Asian Americans today.

Notes 1 Loren Chan, “Example for the Nation: Nevada’s Execution of Gee Jon,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 18, no.2 (Summer 1975): 90–106. 2 Chan, “Example,” 95. 3 See Noel A. Cazanave, Killing African Americans: Police and Vigilante Violence as a Racial Control Mechanism (New York: Routledge, 2018); Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009); Sherrilyn A. Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007); and Crystal Nicole Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009). 4 Benjamin Madley, “Rexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historigraphy, and New Methods,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (February 2015): 98–139. 5 Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 17, 20–22. 6 Grandin, End of the Myth, 60–62, 84–85. 7 Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Home, Dreaming of Gold: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), 24, 26–27. 8 Patricia Nelson Limmerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1987), 27. 9 Limmerick, Legacy of Conquest, 28. 10 California State Assembly, “An Act Concerning Crimes and Punishments. First Session of the Legislature,” Statutes of California, State of California, Chapter 99, page 229. See Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007), 40–41 for more on Chinese resistance to discriminatory laws. 11 Michael Traynor, “The Infamous Case of People v. Hall (1854),” California Supreme Court Historical Society (Summer 2017), 4.

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Stephanie Hinnershitz 12 Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ed.s, The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Rail Road (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019), 16–18. 13 Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 257. 14 Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth v. Reality,” Independent Review 15, no. 2 (Fall 2010), 228–229; Brian W. Dippie, “American Wests: Historical Perspectives,” American Studies International 27, no. 2 (Oct., 1989): 3–25. 15 See Adam M. Sowards, “Reckoning with History: the Legacy of Lynching in the West,” High Country News July 13, 2018; Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1850–1953 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Lisa Arellano, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community and Nation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012) for more on lynching and vigilante justice in the West. Richard White also provides an overview of racial tensions and their consequences in “Race Relations in the American West” in American Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1986): 396–416. 16 Wyatt Kingseed, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Frontier Justice,” American History 36 (2002), 25. 17 Robert M. Senkewicz, Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986). 18 Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 21–23. 19 Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 257–258. 20 Ibid., 63–65, 73. 21 See Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Chinese Massacre of 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2012) for an overview. Paul R. Spitzzeri also places the massacre in the wider context of lynching in southern California in “Judge Lynch in Session: Popular Justice in Los Angeles, 1850–1875” found in Southern California Quarterly 87, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 83–122. 22 Beth Lew Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 49–50. 23 Williams, Chinese Must Go, appendix; Various, “Rock Springs Massacre Victims Plead for Justice,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed April 15, 2021, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/790. 24 Murray Morgan, Puget’s Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 245; “Exodus of the Chinese,” Olympia Washington Standard, November 6, 1885, 2. 25 Williams, Chinese Must Go, 157–162. Lee, Making of Asian America, 163–164, 186–187. 26 Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 260. 27 Ibid., 267. 28 Scott Seligman, Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown (New York: Viking, 2016), 39–40. 29 Darren A. Raspa, Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policing in Nineteenth Century San Francisco (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 210–213; California Legislation, Special Committee, The Chinese Question (Sacramento: D. W. Gelwicks, 1870), 69–70. 30 Erick Trickey, “The Tong Wars,” Cleveland Magazine, July 23, 2008. 31 Trickey, “Tong Wars.” 32 Ibid.

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13 LATINX POPULATIONS AND POLICING Lorena Oropeza

In the early morning hours of February 29, 2020, police officers in Las Cruces, New Mexico, pulled over a blue truck with three passengers inside. Antonio Valenzuela, 40, sat in the back seat. He appeared fidgety and nervous, police said. Finding an outstanding warrant for his arrest for a parole violation, they asked Valenzuela to exit the vehicle. He appeared to comply, but then bolted. Two police officers caught Valenzuela within 24 seconds and pushed him to the ground. They struggled to handcuff the uncooperative Valenzuela for a minute before Officer Christopher Smelser wrapped his arm around Valenzuela’s neck stating, “Alright, you know what? I’m going to fucking choke you out, bro.” He started squeezing. A minute and ten seconds later, Valenzuela’s snores could be heard on the body cam footage. “He’s out,” Smelser confirmed. He continued to apply pressure on Valenzuela’s neck for an additional 41 seconds. Six minutes later, when another officer arrived, he discovered that Valenzuela had no pulse.1 The death of Valenzuela in a small town one hour north of the US-Mexico border preceded by three months the death of George Floyd, who died on May 25, 2020, after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while onlookers watched in horror. In both cases, initial law enforcement reports emphasized that each man had resisted arrest and had been under the influence, the implication being that drug use had both impaired Floyd’s and Valenzuela’s capacity to breathe and made them more uncontrollable. In the face of harsh publicity, however, each city quickly reached wrongful death settlements: Las Cruces paid out $6.5 million to Valenzuela’s family; Minneapolis $27 million to Floyd’s. More surprising, given the wide latitude traditionally granted police officers when it comes to the use of force, both officers were arrested on murder charges. Chauvin was convicted in April 2021. In contrast, a judge dismissed the charges against Smesler in July 2022.2 Valenzuela’s death was only the latest in a much longer trajectory of police violence, often justified in the eyes of authorities, directed at Latinx populations.3 Recent studies aimed at quantifying Latinx vulnerability to police brutality suggest that the likelihood of Latinx people dying at the hands of law enforcement far outstrips that of Whites and approaches that of Blacks.4 Scholars have investigated aspects of this phenomenon primarily as it affects persons of Mexican descent, the oldest and largest Latinx group. Discrete studies have examined labor conflict, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-18

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repression of protest politics, and, of particular interest, the Texas Rangers and the Los Angeles Police Department.5 Still, no overarching theory that centers Latinx people within the broader history of policing has emerged. The major interpretations of the emergence of modern policing in the United States tell the story primarily in black and white. The first traces the rise of modern policing to the control of Black bodies. Scholars have pointed to the use of slave patrols in the South after the Civil War and have traced the influence of post-emancipation terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.6 An alternative interpretation, mostly focused on the urban North, points to the role of police in protecting the industrial order from the demands of a largely immigrant working class.7 The question arises: Where do Latinx people fit in? As a preliminary attempt to that question, this essay proposes that the racial and political complexities inherent in the category “Latinx” provide the key to explaining Latinx vulnerability to police abuse. Referring to any person who traces his or her ancestry to Latin America, the umbrella terms “Hispanic” and “Latinx” contain a multiplicity of racial backgrounds and historical experiences. Mexicans first entered the United States as a defeated and despised enemy in 1848. Fifty years later, Puerto Ricans, the next largest Latinx group, also entered the United States via conquest. Today, however, Latinx people are largely the descendants of people who immigrated to the United States. While near-constant migration has contributed to the stubborn perception of Latinx people as foreigners, politically the category has long included a mix of citizens and immigrants. Racially, the situation is equally complex: Latinos may be of Indigenous, African, or European heritage, or, as is commonly the case, some combination of any of these groups. As a result of these complicated circumstances, Latinx vulnerability to police brutality has operated along two sliding scales of vulnerability. To the extent that Latinx people have been racialized as non-white, they have been subject to patterns of police surveillance and mistreatment more commonly understood as directed at African Americans. To the extent they have been considered unwelcome foreigners, they likewise have been targeted by police for the violence. In essence, the history of Latinx-police relations brings together the two major theories regarding the origins of policing, that of controlling non-whites and that of controlling the have-nots, with the added emphasis that Latinx people historically have been policed twice over, by local law enforcement and by federal immigration authorities. Yet the Latinx experience with police encompasses more than victimization. Instead, the diversity contained within US latinidad also helps explain the wide range of responses to the problem of police brutality. Latinx people have leveraged fragile claims to whiteness as a form of selfprotection and, alternatively, protested police brutality as people of color. They have sought protection from consulates and claimed their rights as American citizens. They have sued police for mistreatment and become police officers themselves. However varied, and even at times at odds with each other, together these strategies underscore the determination of Latinx people of all backgrounds to carve a place for themselves as equals within a society that is as heavily policed as the United States.

Conquest One of the most famous border ballads tells the tale of Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican immigrant who through incredible daring and horsemanship in 1901 eluded a posse of Texas Rangers that at its height numbered hundreds of men. Falsely accused of stealing a horse, and a victim of misunderstanding rooted in mistranslation, Cortez was forced to flee after he killed a sheriff in selfdefense. In ten days and across more than 400 miles, he managed to stay a step ahead of his pursuers before finally reaching the relative safety of the border town of Laredo, where Mexican Americans comprised the majority of the population ensuring Cortez a trial versus an immediate hanging. The

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ballad celebrates Cortez’s skill and cunning in making this escape: “Then said Gregorio Cortez/ With his pistol in his hand/ “Ah, how many cowardly Rangers/ Against one lone Mexican!”8 Yet, beyond a triumphant tale of survival, the story of Gregorio Cortez is also one of unchecked police abuse. Gregorio Cortez escaped, but his brother died of the wounds he received from Texas lawmen during the initial encounter. Over the next few days, Rangers engaged in killing spree that left at least eight men dead. In one incident, Rangers shot one man, wounded another, and fractured the skull of a third with a rifle barrel. A fourth died only after being repeatedly strung up until the point of consciousness, and then revived, a form of torture meant to induce him to disclose the whereabouts of the Cortez gang. None existed. Nevertheless, a Cortez hysteria, inflamed by English-language news reports of Cortez leading a band of thieves and cutthroats, soon gripped south Texas.9 The association of Mexicans with criminality was one repercussion of the American takeover of Mexican territory a half-century before. At the end of the US-Mexico War of 1846-1848, as many as 100,000 Mexicans suddenly found themselves living in the new American Southwest. They encountered widespread land dispossession, a loss of political clout, and a rise in race-based antiMexican sentiment by victorious Americans that helped justify their mistreatment at the hands of law enforcement. Technically, the treaty that ended the war had recognized Mexicans in the ceded territory as whites by promising them American citizenship, a privilege then enjoyed only by White Americans. A promise of eventual equality inscribed in a treaty, however, mattered little against a set of pseudo-scientific theories popular in the United States at the time. Collectively called scientific racism, that divided the globe’s inhabitants into superior (light) and inferior (dark) populations. Worse for ethnic Mexicans given centuries of race-mixing in the Americas, scientific racism equated miscegenation with degeneration. The law enforcement twist on this set of theories was to presume that Mexicans constituted a dangerous, criminal element that merited harsh tactics like those unleashed against Cortez and his presumed followers.10 In making this assumption of inherent inferiority and even moral failure among Spanish-speaking people, a conquering US nation also turned to a centuries-old trope called the Black Legend that dated back to the 1500s when Protestants in Europe had denounced Catholic Spanish colonizers in the Americas as uniquely cruel, violent, slothful, decadent, and treacherous. Although a product of imperial and religious rivalries more than reality, the Black Legend endured, eventually encompassing Mexicans and other Latin Americans as the offspring of Spanish empire. In Texas, for example, the bloody battles and sieges that accompanied the quest for Texas independence in 1836, revived the Black Legend and infused it with the taint of defeat. Informed by scientific racism and the Black Legend, incoming Americans to the new American Southwest often thought the worst of Mexicans post-1848. According to these observers, they were an “unimprovable breed,” “an imbecile, pusillanimous race” as well as “lazy, ignorant … vicious and dishonest.”11 These prejudices reaped fatal consequences: nearly 600 ethnic Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928.12 Used to describe a population that included both immigrants and US citizens, the term “ethnic Mexicans” is particularly apt here because the assailants hardly restrained their work to Mexican nationals alone. Instead, the very concept of a “Mexican American” for decades after the US-Mexico War was, in the words of one scholar, an “oxymoron.”13 Although vigilantism has traditionally been viewed, and even romanticized, as a rough form of frontier justice in the absence of formal law enforcement, the opposite was true. Post-conquest, law enforcement played a central role in terrorizing the Mexican population. The worst of the violence occurred in Texas at the hands of the state’s Rangers. Originally founded in 1823 to protect Americans invited to settle in Mexican-held Texas from Native American attack, the Texas Rangers post-conquest transformed into an “army of occupation” targeting Tejanos (Mexican Texans) as well as Mexican immigrants. Officially, the Rangers were charged with protecting a region that featured a wide-open border and the movement of plenty of contraband across it. Among some Anglo-American cowboys and ranchers, for example, 161

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cattle rustling during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth reached nearly entrepreneurial heights.14 Only captured Mexicans, however, were subject to the ley de fuga, a form of summary execution in which Rangers released a prisoner only to shoot him in the back and claim that the suspect was shot while trying to escape, thereby neatly absolved law enforcement of any wrongdoing. Texas Rangers also indulged in what one historian called “revenge by proxy,” meaning if a fellow law officer was killed, Rangers indiscriminately and profusely killed in return.15 Already pervasive, police violence toward ethnic Mexicans reached stratospheric levels following the publication of the irredentist Plan de San Diego in 1915. Named after the town from which it originated, the plan sanctioned killing all “North American” men over the age of 16 as part of an allout race war aimed at recovering territory lost to the United States in 1848. Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, and possibly connected to revolutionary intrigue, the plan amplified already existing fears about the possibility of wartime violence spilling across the border. Yet by encouraging ethnic Mexicans to lash out at their oppressors, the Plan de San Diego spoke to local circumstances too. During the next several months, adherents of the plan, called seditionists, or sediciosos, burnt bridges, tore down telegraph wires, destroyed irrigation pumps, and ultimately killed 21 Anglo Americans.16 The response amounted to “ethnic cleansing,” in the words of historian Benjamin Heber Johnson.17 Suddenly, cross-border raids and banditry became a national security matter, and all ethnic Mexicans became suspect as potential enemies of the state. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, died in what locals called la matanza, the slaughter. Indicating the martial nature of the reprisal, only men were targeted. Their corpses decorated tourist postcards while reports of “border Mexicans” and “Mexican bandits” shot dead populated the pages of border newspapers.18 The shooting or hanging Mexicans without trial became so common that the name of Captain Henry Ransom of the Texas Rangers became a verb. To “Ransomize” meant, in the words of Monica Muñoz Martinez, “to kill [a prisoner] before conducting an official investigation into his guilt.”19 Such wanton violence by law officers earned praise, not rebuke, from their superiors. The chase was on to hunt down presumed Mexican criminals. Some ethnic Mexicans were guilty only of holding onto their wealth. In September 1915, for example, Ransom and two companions shot Jesus Bazán and his son-in-law, Antonio Longoria in the back. The two men, who had just visited Ransom to report the theft of some livestock, were both prosperous landholders as well as well-respected members of their community.20 That same month, Rangers under Ransom’s command murdered another outstanding Tejano citizen and ranch owner, Antonio Longero, along with his brother and father-in-law. Longero’s death conveniently put an end to a lawsuit over property rights between himself and an acquisitive developer who had been eyeing his property.21 The violence directed at property-owners extended beyond prosperous Tejanos and endured well after any threat posed by the Plan de San Diego had passed. In the dark morning hours of January 28, 1918, the Rangers rode into the tiny hamlet of Porvenir, near El Paso, and rousted from bed every able-bodied Mexican male there, fifteen in all, whose ages ranged from 16 to 64, and shot them dead.22 Later, the Rangers claimed the men were bandits and murderers. Disputing these accusations, the terrified survivors abandoned their homes and the land that they owned and fled to Mexico. Through such violence, police brutality accelerated not just political but economic conquest. Ethnic Mexicans protested the constant drumbeat of violence post-conquest. Spanish-language newspapers decried lynching as early as the 1850s.23 In the 1880s, Carlos Velasco, a newspaper editor in Tucson, Arizona, launched the first organization dedicated to ending police brutality against ethnic Mexicans, El Centro Radical Mexicano.24 In Los Angeles, Mexican-origin residents lodged multiple complaints of police misconduct between 1900 and 1919.25 Taking the lead here were members of El Partido Mexicano Liberal, a Mexican political party that took a more radical, anarchist turn north of the border. After a Cinco de Mayo event in 1917 ended badly, a PLM 162

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pamphlet denounced Los Angeles police for treating Mexicans like “beasts who must be managed by clubs.”26 Meanwhile immigrants fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution founded new organizations that addressed police brutality as part of a broader mutual-aid agenda. Emphasizing that lives were at stake, both La Agrupación Protectora Mexicana founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1911 and La Liga Protectora Latina founded in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1915 featured the word “protect” in their names.27 A final option, for immigrants at least, was to turn to the Mexican government for aid. The chaos of the revolution interfered with the ability of Mexico to aid its citizens abroad. Afterward, immigrants discovered that police violence on the US side of the border generally mattered less to the Mexican government than broader diplomatic aims. So the Porvenir families discovered. They first turned to their local consulate to no avail. Eight years after the massacre, they tried to seek redress through the General Claims Commission, a bilateral commission established in 1923 to sort claims that the United States and Mexcico held against each other. Postponed for decades, the Porvenir claims finally disappeared altogether when the two nations struck a debt accord in 1941.28 The perception of foreign status also undermined a quest for justice by an American outraged by the Porvenir massacre. From a prominent Tejano family, State Representative J.T. Canales had gone to high school in Kansas and law school in Michigan, married an Anglo-American woman, and left the Catholic Church for a Protestant denomination.29 Despite this biography of accomplishment and assimilation, his fellow lawmakers flatly rejected the evidence that he compiled of Ranger atrocities. Confronted with more than 1,600 pages of testimony from more than 80 witnesses, they preferred to cling to familiar notions of Mexicans as bandits. Equally important, they rejected Canales. To his colleagues, the crusading lawmaker was a Mexican “by blood” and therefore inevitably biased. No Ranger ever faced criminal prosecution as a result of Canales’ investigation. For daring to speak out, however, Canales found his loyalty questioned and his life threatened.30 ∗∗∗ Although the circumstances of US military invasion and annexation differed in the Caribbean in 1898, Puerto Ricans likewise experienced US conquest and subsequent police brutality. When the United States wrested the island from Spain at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, Americans told themselves, in another appearance of the Black Legend, that they were rescuing a people who were suffering under the bloody yoke of Spanish tyranny. Americans also spoke of bringing democracy to the island. Instead, racism and repression undergirded US rule. In general, US congressmen shared a low opinion of the capacity of self-government among tropical people. Unlike in Mexico, where indigenous ancestry predominated, moreover, Puerto Rico boasted a larger percentage of African-descent people, meaning that islanders confronted more anti-Black prejudice. Conveniently, US imperialist also tended to see any inclination toward independence as irreconcilable with the presumed politically immaturity of all Puerto Ricans.31 Not coincidentally, the first order of business for the United States was to establish a centralized police force, the Insular Police in 1899, followed by a military force charged with defending US rule on the island, the “Porto Rican Provisional Regiment of Infantry” in 1901.32 Not until 1917 did the United States grant islanders a limited form of American citizenship. Independence-minded islanders, however, still sought to be citizens of Puerto Rico. Some of the worst episodes of police violence on the island occurred because Puerto Rican police, following US orders, attacked Puerto Rican nationalists. Founded in 1922, the Nationalist Party sought to liberate the island from both political and economic subordination. Along with entering the political orbit of the United States, the island after 1898 quickly became a subsidiary of American business interests, primarily sugar. Worsening poverty that accompanied the onset of the Great Depression wiped away the “thin gloss of legitimacy” of colonial rule: labor strikes erupted across the island, many of them enjoying Nationalist support.33 In 1934, the newly-appointed governor of the 163

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island, Blanton Winship, made stabilizing the island—by crushing the Nationalist Party—a top priority. He militarized the Insular Police and issued members machine guns.34 In 1935, four party members were killed by police on the campus of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras near San Juan. In 1937, a massacre occurred in Ponce, on the other side of the island.35 With good reason, a US congressional investigation later blamed Winship for the loss of life. Nationalists had obtained a permit to conduct a Palm Sunday march, but that permit was revoked at the last minute on Winship’s order. When independence-minded Puerto Ricans announced that they planned to march in protest anyway, Winship issued another order that the Insular Police prevent the march from happening. Almost as soon as the first step was taken, a local police officer fired his gun in the air, which prompted some 200 other police officers who surrounded the protest site to start firing too. Over the next 13 minutes, 19 people were killed, the youngest a seven-yearold girl, and more than a hundred civilians were wounded. Other than two policemen probably killed by friendly fire, none of the dead were armed. The violence was so grotesque that it caught the attention of “continentals,” that is, Americans on the mainland, who launched multiple investigations. Although no one ever faced criminal charges for the loss of life that day, two years later President Franklin Delano Roosevelt removed Winship as governor.36 Doing so, however, hardly closed the chapter on police violence targeting independentistas. In a colonial context, only two options existed to end violence at the hands of American administrators and their police agents: either accept some form of US oversight or break away completely. The recognition of the island as a US commonwealth with a more significant measure of self-rule in 1952 failed to resolve the status question. While many Puerto Ricans favored this outcome, members of the Nationalist Party considered commonwealth status a betrayal. They continued to seek independence and continued to face enormous repression as a result. Such was the legacy of conquest in Puerto Rico.

Labor In 1924, the US Border Patrol was founded to police the movement of goods and people across a nearly 2,000-mile Mexican border and an even longer Canadian one.37 That same year, the US Congress passed a new immigration law that imposed strict quotas upon most parts of the world, the Western Hemisphere excepted. At first glance, these two events appeared to move in opposite directions: the first aimed to police all immigrants along the nation’s borders, and the second allowed Mexican and other Latin American immigrants into the country without numerical restriction. Yet the presumed role of these immigrants as cheap and disposable labor resolved the apparent contradiction. In the words of F. Arturo Rosales, US employers during the first decades of the twentieth century exerted a “web of control” over Mexican labor that began with rock-bottom wages and atrocious working conditions.38 Whenever Mexicans, and Mexican Americans too, dared to contest these conditions, whenever they dared to act in any way other than docile, police were there ready to reinforce and tighten that “web of control” through violence. The “web of control” began with the Border Patrol’s crusade against “wetbacks.” While the 1924 immigration law did not cap the number of Mexicans entering the United States, previous legislation in 1917 had subjected them to entry fees, literacy tests, and health exams. Then in 1929, another federal law made any violation of immigration legislation a criminal, versus civil, offense. From that point on, a specter of illegality clung to all ethnic Mexicans. Indeed, the term “wetback” arose after the 1917 legislation.39 Charged with enforcing immigration laws, the Border Patrol made sure that all ethnic Mexicans understood their precarious position within the country. Agents rarely drew distinctions amongst law-abiding immigrants, those who ignored immigration requirements, and US citizens of Mexican descent. “Yell at ’em in English, and if they don’t answer, shoot!” advised one Border Patrolman in Arizona in 1926.40 Another agent stationed along the border in Texas, where many former Rangers had migrated to the Border Patrol, endorsed harsh pre-emptive 164

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tactics to root out criminals. “I am really in favor of banging a suspect over the ears with a sixshooter and then asking when he crossed from Mexico,” he stated.41 As much the law of supply and demand favored an unrestricted flow of immigrant workers to keep wages low, many employers acknowledged that Border Patrol’s tactics of intimidation and violence presented an advantage too: frightened immigrants were less likely to protest or look for work elsewhere. “Immigration enforcement as labor control,” in the pithy phrase of Kelly Lytle Hernández.42 As they rode the rails into the interior of the country looking for low-wage seasonal jobs, the estimated one million Mexican immigrants who entered the country between 1900 and 1930 escaped the reach of the Border Patrol. Neither they, nor Mexican Americans, escaped police antipathy and abuse. Instead, the same racial tropes that had fed anti-Mexican sentiment for decades continued to flourish among police officers far from the border. In Chicago, for example, police officers not only paid tribute to the Black Legend, but they also recycled the pseudo-science of the nineteenth century. “They are quick on the knife and hot-tempered and do damage before you know it,” explained one officer to a curious social scientist inquiring about Mexican immigrants who had arrived in that city. Meanwhile, another Chicago officer blamed bad blood for bad behavior, theorizing that “Indian blood and Negro blood does not mix very well,” and worse, the proportions were off: Mexicans had “too much Negro blood.” Although far away from Texas, these Midwestern officers considered any Mexican a “born bandit.”43 Such attitudes reaped fatal consequences. Chicago police ledgers tracking “people who died at the hands of another human being (auto accidents and suicides included)” between 1921 and 1927 tallied 60 ethnic Mexican deaths. In ten of these fatalities, the deadly hands had belonged to police officers.44 The goal of maintaining public order gave police a wide berth to brutalize ethnic Mexicans. In Phoenix in 1913, a police officer arrested an uncooperative ethnic Mexican man for drunkenness, but then punched him so often and so brutally in the stomach that he died of his injuries.45 In Los Angeles, a Mexican immigrant was shot and killed by a police officer apparently for trying to hide a bottle of whiskey. A witness complained of “an infinite number” of similar incidents in which the police officer killed with impunity.46 In another early incident in Kansas City, police officers sent a clear message that Mexicans needed to stay put within their immigrant neighborhoods: they beat two Mexican men who were walking around downtown on a Sunday morning and then hauled them to jail on vagrancy charges.47 While Texas still ranked as the epicenter of anti-Mexican violence during the early twentieth century, public order enforcement in the interior of the country operated like immigration law at the border: a means of legitimizing anti-Mexican police violence in service of controlling a population wanted in this country as cheap labor only. Add labor unrest, and police had another reason to lash out at ethnic Mexicans. As early as 1906, an outrageous precedent was set when Arizona Rangers, modeled after their Texas brethren, crushed a strike at an American mining company inside of Mexico. The clash ultimately left 22 people dead. The mine owner blamed socialists and anarchists for the strike and the violence. The Partido Liberal Mexicano blamed the pro-American policies of the pre-revolutionary leader Porfirio Díaz. The party’s support of the strike gained its adherents and also the antipathy of the Díaz regime, which prompted some of the most radical members to flee north of the border. Working together, American and Mexican police officials harassed, surveilled, and ultimately jailed many of these PLM supporters in the United States, including party leaders and brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón. Convicted of violating US neutrality laws, the Magón brother were also considered “bad Mexicans” in the eyes of the police because of their anarchist politics and fervent critique of US society’s racism and worker exploitation.48 Indeed, to many law enforcement officials inside the United States, the sheer fact that ethnic Mexicans protested labor conditions at all served as proof that they were operating at the behest of foreign and dangerous ideologies. The onset of the Great Depression solidified that point of view. In Greeley, Colorado, for example, betabeleros (beet cutters) during harvest time typically toiled from 165

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sun-up to sun-down while living in flimsy shacks without plumbing or sanitation—another set of racial stereotypes conveniently painted Mexicans as accustomed to harsh conditions and content with less. In 1932, however, workers called a strike after employers unilaterally announced a massive pay cut. Together, police and employers were quick to blame “outside agitators,” who stood accused of intimidating workers and sharing propaganda that frightened them. When the jailing of these men, all Spanish-surnamed and probably workers themselves, did not break the strike, police tightened the “web of control” by attacking those organizers who had not been jailed. “Peace officers brandishing guns and clubs hunted down, captured, and arrested leading members” of the labor-organizing effort, in the words of Zaragosa Vargas. The strike failed.49 During the 1930s, California agriculture—absolutely dependent upon ethnic Mexican labor— emerged as the fiercest labor battleground with police on the side of the growers. Estimates are that Mexican workers comprised between 75 and 80% of the state’s farmworkers at the start of the decade. In 1933, a wave of agricultural strikes engulfed the state. In many of these clashes, local law enforcement dramatically expanded their ranks by deputizing growers and then refused to intervene when growers assaulted or fired upon strikers, sometimes with deadly consequences. In Lodi in 1933, for example, during a late-summer grape strike, “hundreds of well-armed deputized growers, businessmen, and [veterans] … viciously assaulted 100 unarmed strikers while the police stood idly by.”50 That October in Pixley, California, two hundred miles away, a caravan of some 30 growers descended upon a meeting of unarmed cotton strikers and opened fire at them, killing two Mexican men, all while California Highway patrolmen reportedly stood by.51 Later that same day, in the town of Arvin, roughly seventy miles further south, a group of deputy sheriffs and growers worked side-by-side to clear the cotton fields of strikers. When some refused to move, another clash ensued, with either a deputy or a grower pulling a gun and killing another Mexican worker.52 By the 1930s in California, previous fears of anarchism among Mexican immigrants as represented by the Partido Liberal Mexicano had been replaced by antagonism toward communism in part because the Communist Party provided the organizational backbone to many of the strikes that roiled the state. “Shoot to kill,” ordered Logan Jackson, the sheriff of neighboring Orange County and a grower himself, during a citrus strike in Orange County in 1936.53 “This is no fight between orchardists and pickers,” he insisted. “It is a fight between the entire population of Orange County and a bunch of communists.”54 That same decade, the Los Angeles Police Department became home to a special anti-communist group called the Red Squad. Akin to similar units in other big-city departments, LA’s Red Squad violently addressed labor dissent in the fields.55 In clashes with striking celery workers overwhelmingly of Mexican descent, in 1936, for example, Red Squad members clubbed and tear-gassed strikers and even kidnapped several union members as a prelude to delivering a beating that fractured arms and broke ribs.56 As two strikes in San Antonio, Texas, proved, police operated as “protectors of privilege” beyond the fields too. In 1933, the largely mexicana workforce at the Finck Cigar Company went on strike to protest tyrannical and unsanitary working conditions. Picketers faced “baton-wielding sheriff’s deputies” who successfully broke their line and, ultimately, their strike. Four years later, a strike among pecan shellers, another industry dominated by women workers, similarly witnessed strikers endure police abuse. For daring to picket, “[m]en, women, and children were run down, dragged, clubbed, and kicked by hostile police, many [of whom were] armed with three-foot-long axe handles.” The axes came courtesy of some 100 San Antonio firemen who had been deputized as police officers to end labor protests in the city.57 Of course, ethnic Mexicans on strike were hardly alone in enduring painful confrontations with law enforcement. In other places across the country, they suffered police brutality alongside fellow unionists from different ethnic and racial backgrounds.58 Indicative of their hyper-marginalization within US society, however, only Mexicans were subjected to immigration sweeps and roundups during the early 1930s. These campaigns underscored the extremely conditional welcome extended 166

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to Mexican immigrants. All along, employers had argued that one of the advantages of Mexican labor (specifically as compared to Puerto Rican labor in one case59), was that it was temporary. When the economy collapsed, it was time for all Mexican workers, no matter how long they had lived in the United States, to go to the land of their birth, even if that meant uprooting US-born children from theirs.60 The result was deportation and repatriation campaigns that, in the words of Edward Escobar, “terrorized the Mexican community.”61 Local law enforcement officers participated in these removal efforts by arresting strike leaders and other so-called troublemakers and turning them over to federal immigration authorities. Simply put, a Mexican immigrant who spoke in favor of workers’ rights risked formal deportation hearings.62 An expansive definition of police brutality rightly extends beyond the use of excessive force to include such instances of intimidation and psychological coercion by federal and local police forces.63 Despite the risk of assault or deportation, ethnic Mexicans attempted to end, or at least expose, police abuse in the decades before World War II. Immigrants often turned to a post-revolutionary Mexican consulate for help. Granted, that help was generally limited to repeatedly denouncing police brutality during the 1920s and 1930s. In a unique endeavor, Emma Tenayuca, best known for her leadership during the pecan shellers strike, called attention to the continuing problem of Border Patrol violence by staging a demonstration at a federal building in San Antonio in 1937.64 Meanwhile the first major Mexican American civil rights organization, founded in south Texas in 1929, tackled the problem of police abuse indirectly during the 1930s. Founding members of the League of United Latin American citizens, including J.T. Canales who had crusaded against Ranger violence ten years before, advocated claiming their rights as American citizens and, implicitly, securing the strategic recognition of Mexican Americans as “white.” By achieving both goals, they hoped not only to undermine the constant assumption that all ethnic Mexicans were foreigners but also, in an age of race-based segregation, gain a stronger legal footing to challenge the myriad of inequities they faced, including police brutality. Demographics appeared in their favor. By 1940, the ethnic Mexican population was majority US-born, a consequence of Depression-era repatriations and deportations combined with the demographic punch packed by the rise of the second generation.65 Yet to local law enforcement, the children of immigrant parents remained as foreign as their parents. Given their parents, the assumption of racial inferiority persisted too. More than ever, police agents dedicated themselves to enforcing the social and spatial distancing that segregation and racism had woven into the operation of urban life. Inevitably, they clashed with Latinx young people seeking to claim a space for themselves within the land of their birth.

Youth “Although a wild cat and a domestic cat are of the same family,” Lt. Edward Duran Ayres of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department argued in 1942, “they have certain biological characteristics so different that while one may be domesticated the other would have to be caged to be kept in captivity; and there is practically as much difference between the races of man.” Testifying before a grand jury convened to address the problem of Mexican American juvenile delinquency, Ayres deigned ethnic Mexicans particularly vicious criminals because of their genetic makeup. Forget the Black Legend: Ayres blamed indigenous ancestors, particularly the Aztecs and their practice of human sacrifice, for what he argued was the propensity of all ethnic Mexicans “to kill or at least draw blood.”66 Speaking as a member of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the Sheriff’s Department, Ayres revealed how little police attitudes toward ethnic Mexicans had changed a century after conquest: Ayres’ comments dripped with anti-Mexican sentiments; his position implied that all ethnic Mexicans in the United States were foreign. Despite being increasingly American-born, ethnic 167

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group members were still stigmatized as racially inferior and foreign. Moving from the margin to the mainstream, much less finding acceptance as equals, therefore eluded most ethnic group members. Instead, ethnic Mexicans experienced a form of assimilation that rendered them, in Catherine S. Ramirez’s powerful phrase, “outsiders on the inside.”67 Already accustomed to patrolling and monitoring Mexican immigrants in the city during the first third of the twentieth century, police easily took to the role of keeping ethnic Mexicans, and particularly American-born youth, in this marginal space during the second third. They brutally disciplined American-born youth who transgressed acceptable boundaries, who dared to question their “outsiders on the inside” status. In wartime Los Angeles, police clashed with young Mexican Americans who had developed a pachuco subculture associated with wearing a zoot suit. A decade later, During the 1960s, Latinx youth who joined social protest movements of the era likewise found themselves at the receiving end of police violence. From the perspective of police, here was a lesson that bore repeating across the decades. As Los Angeles historically boasted the highest concentration of Mexican-origin people in the United States, the city long before mid-century also became a place where racism and the suppression of transgressive ethnic Mexican youth culture frequently intersected. Like African Americans in the city, young brown men risked a run-in with police whenever they left their own neighborhoods and entered white-majority ones. Even staying put could be dangerous. In the early 40s, for example, police transformed one East Los Angeles playground into a place to beat and arrest ethnic Mexican teens.68 In another incident, a young soldier who was guilty only of walking down a street, found himself picked up and beaten by police officers who kept shouting, “marijuana.” In this case, the challenge may have been the army uniform and the symbolic equality it conveyed.69 During the greatest manifestation of anti-Mexican sentiment during World War II, the so-called zoot-suit riots, police abetted the perpetrators. In this oft-told tale, an initial fight between some Mexican American men and a few servicemen fed a rumor mill that led to hundreds of US military personnel, some of them wielding baseball bats, deciding to take to the streets of Los Angeles to teach “Mexican gangsters” a lesson. In this lopsided clash, the zoot suit, a flamboyant style of dress perfect for dancing the jitterbug and popular among young ethnic Mexican men called pachucos, became a target for punishment and evidence of criminality. During the mayhem, police escorted servicemen to places where young Mexican Americans gathered and watched approvingly from the sidelines as US servicemen beat and disrobed pachucos before sweeping in to arrest the victims of assault. At least one witness saw police kicking the victims.70 Meanwhile sensational press accounts cemented in the public mind a connection between ethnic Mexican youth and bloodthirsty, drug-addicted, and hypersexualized gang members.71 Not until the State Department intervened (underscoring how policymakers continued to equate Mexican ethnicity with foreign status) did the violence end five days later. The dawn of a new decade yielded one of the worst incidents of police brutality yet. On December 24, 1951, as many as 50 police officers beat seven young Mexican American men who had been taken into custody after fighting with police officers. The initial confrontation had stemmed from the decision of police officers to remove the seven men from a bar even though they were of the legal age to be there. Unfortunately for the seven, they were taken to a precinct where about 100 officers had been celebrating Christmas eve by drinking alcohol in violation of official policy. Worse, a false rumor had begun to circulate that an officer in another part of the city had lost an eye in a fight with ethnic Mexican youth. Determined to extract revenge, the police officers beat the men so badly that, through repeated blows, they managed to puncture one young man’s kidney and another’s bladder. The police officers slipped in the blood spilt.72 The Bloody Christmas incident emphasized the latitude that the LAPD had accrued to discipline and punish ethnic Mexicans. In 1934, a close outcome of a citywide vote left the police force in charge of all internal investigations meaning that no civilian board existed with the power to punish 168

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misconduct.73 By the 1940s, as part of a broader effort toward professionalism, law officers upheld policing as a form of practical social science boasting unsurpassed knowledge about how to combat crime and the ills of urban life. Thus, as much as Ayers’ testimony about bloodthirsty Aztecs in 1942 displayed overt racism and myopic view about who could be an American, he was also offering what was considered at the time expert testimony. A champion of professionalism, William Parker, LAPD police chief between 1950 and 1966, portrayed police as forming “a thin blue line” between civilization and chaos during his tenure. Parker’s “us vs. them” approach to policing relegated ethnic Mexican and African American youth to the chaotic side of the divide while negating any criticism of law enforcement as undermining their efficacy in fighting crime.74 During his tenure, Mexican Americans repeatedly decried police brutality on the printed page and formed organizations to protest and document instances of police abuse to little avail.75 Parker continued to protect his police officers from meaningful external oversight. Those involved in the Bloody Christmas beatings, for example, were minimally punished.76 Not surprisingly, Parker also affirmed race-based explanations of criminality: ethnic Mexicans descended from the “wild tribes” of Mexico; African Americans acted like “monkeys in the zoo.”77 Under this schema, higher crime rates amongst minorities were a function of their innate tendencies toward crime not of over-policing. “You cannot ignore the genes in the behavior pattern of people,” Parker insisted during the height of the civil rights movement.78 Such attitudes fueled and justified police brutality toward ethnic Mexican and African American youth well past Parker’s death in 1966. Across the country, Puerto Rican migration to the mainland ensured similarly troubled relations with big city police. Technically US citizens since 1917 but natives of a US colony, Puerto Ricans were, arguably even more so than ethnic Mexicans, “outsiders on inside.” Perhaps that is why relatively few migrated to the mainland until economic desperation mandated otherwise. A USsponsored industrialization project called “Operation Bootstrap,” which predicated the island’s economic development on jettisoning rural agriculturalists from the island, launched a great migration to the mainland. About one-third of the island’s inhabitants relocated to the continental United States between 1947 and 1970.79 During the 1950s alone, nearly half-a-million Puerto Ricans left the island, the vast majority settling in New York City.80 Impoverished, many Puerto Ricans remained so after entering a city, and a country, on the verge of deindustrialization. With few jobs available, some Puerto Ricans were forced to turn to welfare to survive. Others engaged in illicit activities within the underground economy. Soon a narrative of pathology, of “Puerto Ricans as junkies, knife-wielding thugs, and welfare dependents,” emerged.81 Indeed, when the sociologist Oscar Lewis wrote in the 1960s about the “culture of poverty,” a thesis that essentially blamed the poor for their lack of opportunities, Puerto Ricans in San Juan and New York served as a key reference point. (Mexican slum-dwellers served as another.)82 Members of the New York Police Department partook of these negative attitudes and formed their own. To one NYC precinct captain, the population still had much to learn about “their responsibilities as citizens,” by which he apparently meant respecting police authority.83 Meanwhile the visible African heritage of some Puerto Ricans, in a city where police “equated blackness with criminality and attempted to control black people through brute force,” meant that police usually approached Puerto Ricans with the same aggressive attitude that they displayed toward African Americans.84 In short, the conventional wisdom of police stigmatized Puerto Ricans as racially inferior, criminal, and alien, too, despite their US citizenship and, in the case of the children of migrants, lives spent on the mainland. Fatalities resulted. In November 1963, two Puerto Ricans were shot to death while in police custody after being arrested for loitering, the type of offense that spoke to the power of police to patrol the everyday lives of these city residents. The following February, another Puerto Rican, 18, was shot by police as he ran away from them. In early 1965 a new organization formed to counter 169

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the violence, the National Puerto Rican Civil Rights Association, reported that “in the preceding fifteen months, the police had killed nine Puerto Rican children and maimed six others.”85 A shooting death of still another Puerto Rican in 1967 by an off-duty officer unleashed a deadly riot in East Harlem in 1967. The following year, residents’ pent-up rage at police rocked the Lower East Side.86 The Young Lords sprang from a similar moment of urban unrest in Chicago. The city had been an alternative destination for Puerto Rican migrants of the 1940s and 1950s in the hope that they would encounter better conditions than in overcrowded New York. Instead, the ills of the barrio prevailed, including poverty, segregation, and alienation. Following an anti-police riot in the city in 1966, members of a Puerto Rican gang (with a few Mexican American members) called the Young Lords reconstituted themselves as a social movement to address structural inequities, including the problem of police brutality. Although most had spent their lives on the mainland, they took inspiration from the liberation movement on the island.87 For their efforts, the Young Lords faced constant police surveillance and harassment but countered with life-preserving caution and more organizing. Most notably, in 1969 in Chicago, two Young Lords attending a party were shot by police after an off-duty officer said that he heard a gunshot, went to investigate, and then claimed that one of the partygoers had approached him with a gun in hand.88 The Young Lords disputed that account and, in response, worked even harder to mobilize the Puerto Rican community not just in Chicago but in New York too. Proud of their African heritage, the Young Lords deliberately modeled themselves after the Black Panther Party and shared similar anti-police sentiments. Unlike the Panthers, however, they avoided confronting the police directly. Doing so, in the words of one activist, “would be tantamount to suicide.” Instead, the Young Lords denounced police brutality verbally and in print. Their newspaper, Palante, pointedly featured a “Pig of the Month.”89 Anti-police sentiments resounded within the Chicano movement too. The Chicano movement represented the most intense and widespread period of Mexican American political, social, and cultural protest against second-class citizenship in the United States in the history of the country. It arose from the decisions of thousands of young people to join forces to challenge deep-rooted injustices, including the problem of police brutality. As a cultural nationalist movement, movement participants took public pride in their culture and ethnicity. Tired of being “outsiders on the inside,” they rejected the very notion of assimilation. Instead, they celebrated their non-white and indigenous inheritance. One of the earliest Chicano groups in Los Angeles, for example, took to wearing brown berets because the color represented “the love and pride in our race and the color of our skin.” In 1968, the Brown Berets issued a 10-point plan that called for unity among all Chicanos foremost. Three of the ten points, however, specifically aimed to limit police power. Calling themselves the “shock troops” of the Chicano movement, the Berets saw their number one role as protecting other Mexican American activist youth from law enforcement abuse.90 Unfortunately, Chicano movement participants in Los Angeles needed that sort of protection. In 1968, high school students who participated in a series of protests demanding quality education found themselves beaten and arrested by LAPD. One young activist required brain surgery; another, just 13, suffered two broken vertebrae. Two years later, an anti-war protest march organized by National Chicano Moratorium Against the War, ended in death and destruction when the Los Angeles’ Sheriff’s Department, responding to a report of a drugstore theft, decided to use force to clear an entire park where thousands had peacefully gathered. Although law enforcement first ordered everyone to leave, not everyone heard. “Swinging clubs, they came, without a word, just swinging clubs and throwing [tear] gas,” wrote one observer. Before the end of the day, a tear-gas projectile fired by a deputy sheriff had slammed into the head of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter, killing him. Even before the march, Rosalío Muñoz, the moratorium committee chairman, had claimed, “I accuse the law enforcement agencies of the United States of instilling 170

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greater fear and insecurity in Mexican youth than the Viet Cong ever could.” For anti-war protestors, the violent conclusion of the moratorium march in 1970 made the Chicano anti-war slogan, la batalla está aquí, the battle is here, all too real.91 Chicano activists who directly challenged police power bore the brunt of police harassment, intimidation, infiltration, and violence. In a notorious incident in New Mexico, two members of a Chicano group called the Black Berets (who saw themselves as a more international and radical version of the Brown Berets) engaged in a fatal shoot-out with Albuquerque police in 1972. A selfidentified police informant/agent provocateur later testified that the police had engineered the circumstances that sent bullets flying.92 In March 1973, a police raid on a leading Chicano Movement organization called the Crusade for Justice left one young man dead and another shot in the back. According to police, the dead man, 23-year-old Luis Martínez, had been carrying a gun. According to Crusade members, he was assassinated for his anti-police stance.93 By then, the original LA-based Brown Berets had collapsed under the weight of police infiltration.94 Loosely affiliated chapters that had sprung up across the Southwest likewise struggled to survive. Brown Berets in San Antonio, Texas, for example, learned that their attempt to politicize “low rank Latins,” in the words of local police officers, often just invited more abuse.95 In Texas, the state’s long history of police brutality intersected with the youth-oriented Chicano movement but extended far beyond it. In small towns and big cities across the state during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, police beat and sometimes killed Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans of all ages for infractions as small as refusing to sign a ticket, laughing while reaching for identification, singing a song in jail, and sometimes for no reason at all. During the Chicano movement, in a flash from the past, the Texas Rangers bashed Mexican and Mexican American heads, specifically those belonging to farmworkers during a 1967 melon strike.96 The pervasiveness of police brutality prompted activists to keep running tallies of fatal encounters with police.97 In 1971, a 21-year-old fleeing a crime scene in Lubbock was shot dead.98 In 1973, a Dallas police officer played Russian Roulette with a 12-year-old child whom he suspected of stealing $8 from a cigarette machine. Santos Rodriguez died.99 In 1977, racism intertwined with a re-inscription of foreign status to take the life of a Houston man, and US citizen, who was arrested for intoxication. The arresting officers beat this Mexican American man so badly that the jailers, refusing to admit him, demanded that he be taken to the hospital. Instead, the police assailants drove him to an embankment next to a body of water and, jokingly calling him a “wetback,” pushed him in the water where he drowned.100 The use of the term “wetback” foreboded a new era in the long history of police brutality toward Latinx people. Beginning in the 1970s, a rapid rise in immigration from Latin America, both documented and undocumented, was met with a massive backlash. The backlash targeted not only Mexican immigrants but also Central Americans who began to arrive in large numbers during the 1980s. Proponents of the backlash collapsed notions of Latinx identity, undocumented status, and criminality to lament that an “immigrant invasion” was taking over the United States and spurring a crime wave in cities. Dedicated to defending civilization against what they perceived as immigrant and Latinx chaos, police at the border and in cities across the country militarized their operations.

War On June 18, 2020, a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy shot and killed an 18-year-old Salvadorean American, Andrés Guardado, in an alley behind an auto repair shop. According to the case report, two deputies were patrolling the area when they saw Guardado with a “weapon in his waistband,” gave chase, and then shot at him when he “produced a handgun.” A witness offered a contrary account. He said that he saw the two lawmen approach Guardado with guns drawn. He then saw Guardado run away, but before long the young man was on his knees with his hands behind his head. That was when, the witness said, he heard seven shots fire. During a subsequent coroner’s 171

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inquest, Deputy Michael Vega, who did the shooting, and his partner, Deputy Chris Hernandez, both pled the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any questions.101 Guardado, born in the United States into a family that had fled the violence of a civil war in El Salvador, was just one of thousands of Latinx individuals killed by police in recent decades. His death helped illustrate three reasons that tallies of Latinx deaths at the hands of police in reason decades were grim, disproportional, and rising.102 First, Guardado’s death emphasized the extreme leeway to employ violence that twenty-first century law enforcement enjoyed in their interactions with Latinx individuals after decades of police professionalization and militarization. Second, Guardado’s killing showed that even as the Latinx population became more diverse, new immigrants inherited the subordinated, racialized position that was a consequence of conquest. More than 150 years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the stigma of foreign status, whether real or perceived, and the tendency of law enforcement to see criminality as race-based, continued to cull Latinx lives. Third, Guardado’s death underscored the futility of the strategies that police have employed thus far to halt or reduce fatal police violence. Infusing with steroids the existing “us vs. them” police attitude toward the public, the militarization of city police forces began in the wake of the urban unrests of the 1960s. Police in cities that had experienced a breakdown in civic order borrowed from the military specialized weapons and tactics to combat this perceived new threat. SWAT teams arose across the country. Awash in an infusion of federal funds, the LAPD, for example, bought new computers, new communications equipment, lots of shotguns, and a rash of helicopters (the Department tried but failed to acquire a submarine).103 In that city and elsewhere, a war on crime during the 1960s was followed by a war on gangs in the 1970s, which was followed by a war on drugs by the 1980s. The metaphor of war made enemies of ordinary citizens suspected of wrongdoing, which included criticizing the police. Law enforcement officials proudly displayed zero tolerance toward those they deemed their enemies. They excused police brutality as necessary to defeat drug dealers and gang members, which police—and many members of the public—viewed as closely overlapping categories. That assumption was incorrect, but militarization continued against what LAPD Police Chief William Parker once called “the invasion from within,” meaning the presumed criminal threat emanating from black and brown neighborhoods.104 By the 1980s, the LAPD, now equipped with machine guns and a “tank-like vehicle” capable of crushing houses, waged war against Latinx and African American youth.105 Associated with the criminal “invasion from within,” Latinx people were also at the forefront of what critics of the rising number of people entering the country called the “immigrant invasion,” or the invasion from without. Indeed, to many police officers, the movement of drugs and people from Latin America were two sides of the same illicit coin. During the 1980s, the popularity of cocaine created an overland supply route that ran from South America through Central America, through Mexico and into the United States. At the same time, thousands of Central Americans, primarily from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, were entering the United States trying to escape the economic chaos and military violence of a war-torn region. Given that their numbers exceeded official immigration caps set by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and given the near impossibility of securing refugee status, many entered the country without documents. So did millions of Mexicans who likewise found themselves subject to new laws that ran counter to old migration patterns. Although the policy of most major police departments technically left immigration enforcement to the federal government, exceptions soon proved the rule of police brutality directed at Latinx immigrants. As Max Felker-Kantor emphasized in his study of policing in Los Angeles, the conflation of the terms “illegal alien” with “criminal alien” set the stage for repeated instances of police violence.106 While the first term referred to residency status alone, the second naturalized a link between undocumented Latinx immigrants with criminal activity. Thus, in 1970, while trying to find a 172

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murder suspect, police broke into a skid row apartment in Los Angeles where two Mexican nationals, cousins who spoke no English, were sleeping, and ended up killing them both. Neither young man had any connection to the crime in question.107 A decade later, broken window policies became a convenient excuse to arrest Latinx individuals for a minor infraction, such as street vending, and then, in an extension of long-established patterns of cooperation between local and federal authorities, turn that person, if undocumented, over to immigration officials. In 1989, one Mexican man had the misfortune of merely standing next to some street vendors when Los Angeles police suddenly grabbed him, kicked him, struck him with a nightstick multiple times, and then stood on top of him before threatening him with deportation and retaliation if he dared complain.108 Los Angeles, moreover, was hardly unique in its tough-on-crime policies that by the 1980s, encompassed a tough-on-suspected-criminal aliens approach too.109 In 1996, the enthusiasm shown by two Riverside, California deputy sheriffs to catch an “illegal” prompted them to engage in an hour-long high-speed chase, and then, once the truck they were chasing stopped, viciously beat a 32-year-old woman who had been a passenger in the cab of the truck. Television crews filmed law enforcement grabbing her by the hair, slamming her face against the hood of the car, and then throwing her on the ground to beat her.110 In neighboring Arizona, Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County Sheriff from 1993 to 2017, gained a self-proclaimed reputation as “American’s Toughest Sheriff” based upon his fierce opposition to “illegal immigration, crime, drugs, and everything else that threaten[ed] America.”111 For racially profiling Latinos during immigration rounds-ups in violation of federal law, Arpaio also gained a contempt of court conviction.112 Since 2000, police have reviled Latinx gangs as the most fearsome result of the confluence of both invasions, the criminal one from within and the immigrant one from without. Drive-by shootings and other acts of violence, extortion campaigns, the use of heavy weaponry, and evidence of crossborder drug operations fed police demands for increased militarization. The profiling of Latinx youth also continued based on what they wore and where they lived. While gang members also sported tattoos that proclaimed their membership and inspired fear among non-members, tattoos in general became a cause for suspicion. For their part, immigration authorities increasingly deported convicted immigrant Latinx gang members to the land of their birth no matter how young they were when they first left it. In the case of immigrant members of MS-13, or MaraSalvatrucha, that meant being sent back to El Salvador. Ironically, MS-13 was an entirely US-born creation, first formed by El Salvadorean newcomers seeking mutual protection against older, ethnic Mexican gangs in Los Angeles. Furthermore, the deportation of MS-13 member, only served to strengthen the transnational reach of the organization.113 Against this massive law enforcement response against gangs, initiatives at the local level to discourage gang membership, provide employment opportunities for ex-convicts, or encourage community policing, received a budget pittance. Police reform advocates promoted community policing in particular as a panacea to reduce crime and police abuse. In theory, community policing cultivates better relations between police and, in this case, residents of Latinx neighborhoods. Such neighborhoods after all are home to not only gang members but also to many victims of gang violence. Yet a comparison indicates societal priorities. In 2021, the US Department of Justice budgeted $139 million dollars in grant funding to local jurisdictions to support community policing efforts.114 Estimates are that Maricopa County taxpayers in the 2010s spent more than $140 million to pay for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s misdeeds as tallied in legal fees.115 Also revealing of American priorities, the US federal government spent billions in recent decades to militarize the border. Starting in the 1990s, scrap metal from the Vietnam War-era, mostly helicopter landing mats, was repurposed to construct the most formidable sections of the border wall.116 The number of Border Patrol Agents expanded exponentially, and money was invested in such equipment as drones, thermal imaging cameras, helicopters, stadium lights, and lightweight assault rifles for Border Patrol agents.117 In the summer of 1954, a one-time military-style 173

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deportation effort labeled Operation Wetback captured much press attention (although probably far fewer undocumented workers than proponents boasted).118 Yet starting in the 1990s, Border Patrol engaged in militarized enforcement operations on a nearly yearly basis with names ranging from “Operation Hold the Line” to “Operation Gatekeeper.”119 A sharp rise in police killings accompanied the militarization of the border.120 One study estimated that Border Patrol agents killed 110 people between 2010 and 2020.121 Another estimated closer to 200 dying in “encounters” with BP agents during the same time; that list included medical emergencies (50 deaths), and those who were killed in car accidents while being chased by a Border Patrol officer (74 deaths).122 Since 2010, Border Patrol agents also killed six Mexicans on Mexican soil. In three of these cases, the dead were teens who had been “rocking”—throwing rocks at agents through or over the border fence.123 And although the compilation of border deaths at the hands of Border Patrol agents is a relatively recent affair, fatal police violence at the border is not. In 1992, a Border Patrol agent shot a Mexican man who was running away from him, tried to hide the body rather than call for help according to his partner, and was acquitted twice of any wrongdoing.124 In 1997, the militarization of the border cost the life of a young Mexican American who was tending the family goats a mile north of the border. Esequiel Hernández carried his grandfather’s old rifle to keep wild dogs at bay. His killer was a US Marine who had been deployed to the border to beef up the Border Patrol’s interception efforts of drug smugglers and who was armed with an assault weapon.125 The Marine was also a Latino. So were Guardado’s assailants. So was at least one of the Border Patrol agents who killed a rock-throwing Mexican teen. These deaths, and others like them, suggest the limits of diversity to reduce police killings of Latinos. Today, estimates range that roughly 50% of all Border Patrol agents are Latinx.126 Similarly, partly in response to the social movements of the 1960s, the percentage of Latinx officers working as police officers and sheriff’s deputies has risen steadily.127 Yet the nature of police culture, the in-built absolution for abuse that a “us vs. them” approach inherently contains, and, also of note, the corruption that such unrestricted power breeds have repeatedly barreled past whatever good increased racial and ethnic representation might offer. A case in point: the Ramparts scandal that enveloped the LAPD in the late 1990s in which members of an anti-gang unit assigned to that division planted evidence, physically abused witnesses and suspects, framed people for crimes they did not commit, and stole drugs. Although officers of all backgrounds participated, a key player was Officer Rafael Perez who disclosed these criminal acts only after his own arrest for stealing six pounds of cocaine from the evidence locker.128 Investigators also discovered those police officers who followed this corrupt “Ramparts Way,” including Pérez himself, receiving matching tattoos—just like gang members. Federal oversight of the LAPD followed for five years between 2000 and 2005 but the problem was bigger than a single department.129 Twenty years later, and nearly coincidental with Guardado’s death, a rash of Latinx law enforcement gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department caught the attention of journalists and academics.130 A few months after the teen was killed, a deputy sheriff testified that Guardado’s Latinx police assailants were “chasing ink,” that is, trying to earn internal to the police gang membership, and the accompanying tattoo, by shooting someone.131 In response, the LA County Sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who was half-Puerto Rican, stalled and blocked the investigation of these two officers. Ironically, Villanueva had been elected in 2018 on a reformminded, anti-corruption, pro-community-policing platform informed by his doctoral dissertation, “Leadership Diversity in Law Enforcement.”132 ∗∗∗ That a survey of police brutality toward Latinx people includes Latinx abusers is no surprise. Look back to the Puerto Ricans insular police firing at fellow Puerto Ricans in 1933. More recently, during the 1990s, the island’s police force officially adopted a mano dura (literally “hard hand” but meaning tough) approach to crime, and soon gained infamy for outrageous violence and corruption 174

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against fellow Puerto Ricans. Although a federal consent decree in 2012 demanded the implementation of a series of reforms aimed at stopping constitutional violations and the use of excessive force, Black Puerto Ricans have complained in the years since that they are still subject to racial profiling.133 Even more telling, Afro-Latino immigrants from the Dominican Republic, who often try to enter Puerto Rico without papers as a sort of midway point before entering the mainland United States, have also complained of gravely disparate treatment.134 The irony is sharp. While Latinx have confronted police violence as foreigners or suspected foreigners, in cities across the United States, the experience of Latinx people with law enforcement has often paralleled that of African Americans. Statistics gathered nationwide make clear that both groups are much more apt to be killed by police than white Americans albeit not to the same degree. According to the Washington Post’s analysis of people shot and killed by police between 2015 and June 1 of 2022, the rate for Black Americans is 39 killed per million, the “Hispanic” rate stands at 28 deaths per million, while White Americans are killed at a rate of 16 per million.135 On one hand, the data suggests that Latinos benefit from a slim form of white privilege. On the other, the data, in this study and other, relies on categories that obscure the experiences of Afro-Latinos. In contrast, this essay attempted to highlight the diversity inherent within the Latinx population to track Latinx vulnerability to police brutality across time. One uneasy conclusion: Latinx officers who brutalize others have successfully assimilated in the most warped way possible. Yet they remain a minority. Since 1848, Latinx populations, as conquered people, as immigrants, as labor, and as youth, have much more often experienced police violence than perpetrated it. Looking toward the future, moreover, one of the most hopeful signs is the number of organizations that have been founded over the years in which black and brown folks (and some who straddle that divide) work together to address a common problem.136 The policing of Latinx people historically necessitates such solidarities that simultaneously bridge disparate racial identities, recognize the diversity within US latinidad, and interrogate patterns of police surveillance and violence in order to stop the killing.

Notes 1 Bethany Brunelle-Raja, “One Year Later: A look at the Antonio Valenzuela homicide and what’s happened since,”Las Cruces Sun News, March 1, 2021, https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/2021/03/01/ timeline-antonio-valenzuela-homicide-christopher-smelser-las-cruces-police/4561813001/. Thanks to Debbie Arce, Rebecca Brown, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Lisa G. Materson, and Vanessa Madrigal-Lauchland for helping me complete this article and most especially to Tom Aeillo for his patience. 2 Justin Garcia, "Judget dismisses murder charge in former Las Cruces police office Christopher Smesler’s triial," Las Cruces Sun-News, July 14 2022, https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/courts/2022/07/14/ judge-dismisses-murder-charge-in-christopher-smelser-trial/65373410007/ 3 In this essay, I try to employ the specific ethnic identifiers as much as possible. I employ the term “Latinx” to indicate the broader ethnic category. A relatively new term, “Latinx” is growing in popularity because it sidesteps the gendering inherent in any Romance language. I use it as an adjective to refer to a category that encompasses men and women alike. As its plural “Latinxs” is less familiar, however, I often revert back to “Latinos” to indicate the plural noun. The context should dispel any confusion. 4 Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins and Steven Rich, “Fatal Force,” Washington Post, Police Shootings Database, last updated May 6, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootingsdatabase/ 5 Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Ernesto B. Vigil, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas,

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(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Sally E Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); P.L Reichel, “Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type,” American Journal of Police 7:2 (1988): 51–77; Larry H. Spruill, “Slave Patrols, ‘Packs of Negro Dogs’ and Policing Black Communities,” Phylon 53:1 (Summer 2016): 42–66; Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Sidney L. Harring, Policing A Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2nd Ed., 2017); Sam Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). Américo Paredes, With a Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 196. Paredes, 83–8. Also see Cynthia Orozco, “Cortez Lira, Gregorio,” for the Texas State Historical Association, April 7, 2017, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/cortez-lira-gregorio. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). See Chapters 7–9 as they delve into scientific racism in the US context. Arnoldo de León, They Called them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Social History 37 (Winter 2003): 413. Linda Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 105. Wayne Gard, “Cattle Rustling,” Texas State Historical Association, October 8, 2020, t https://www. tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/cattle-rustling. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 90. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 123. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 123. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 233–234. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 92. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 76–81. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 114–115. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 121–126. Coya Paz Brownrigg, “Linchocracia: Performing “America” in El Clamor Público” California History 84 (Winter 2006/2007): 40–51. F. Arturo Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization Against Mexico Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999) 27. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 75–76. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 75–76. J.D. McBride “The Liga Protectora Latina: A Mexican-American benevolent society in Arizona.” Journal of the West 14 (October 1975): 82–90; Cristina Lizeth Urdiales, “La Agrupación Protectora Mexicana,” Texas State Historical Association, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/la-agrupacionprotectora-mexicana. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 139–147. Evan Anders and Cynthia Orozco, “Canales, José Tomás [J.T.],” Texas State Historical Association, June 17, 2021, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/canales-jose-tomas. Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 68 A series of editorial cartoons that appeared before and after 1898 is instructive here. The islands go from being portrayed as white damsels in distress before US intervention in the 1898 war to being portrayed as dark-skinned misbehaving children when resisting US rule. See Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). First Annual Report of Charles H. Allen, Governor of Puerto Rico (Washington: USGPO, 1901), 401. James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986) 136. Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony (New York: Nation Books, 2015) 73. “Four Killed in a Clash in a Puerto Rican Town,” New York Times, October 24, 1935, 15.

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Latinx Populations and Policing 36 Chapter 7 in Denis’s War Against All Puerto Ricans provides one of the most detailed accounts of the massacre. 37 Hernández, Migra!: A History of the US Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 38 Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!, 76. 39 Gerald R. Breitigam, “Welcomed Mexican Invasion,” New York Times, June 20, 1920, Section M, page 6. 40 Hernández, Migra!, 60. 41 Hernández, Migra!, 63. 42 Hernández, Migra!, 109. 43 Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 117. 44 Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!, 84. 45 Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!, 81. 46 Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!, 83–84. 47 Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!, 79. 48 Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 54–61; Also see Chapter 4 of Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2017). For a deeper dive into the Flores Magón brothers and the significance of their political work, see Hernández’s Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022). 49 “First Arrests in Beet Strike,” Longmont Times-Call, May 18, 1932, p. 1, retrieved at https:// bocolatinohistory.colorado.edu/newspaper/first-arrests-in-beet-strike-1932; and Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 73. 50 Ronald L. Filippelli, Labor Conflict in the United States: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Press, 1990), 81. 51 Kate Bronfenbrenner, “California Farmworkers’ Strikes of 1933,” Cornell University ILR School, https://hdl.handle.net/1813/75336. 52 Raymond P. Barry (ed.), “The California Cotton Pickers Strike-1933, Federal Writers Project, 1938”, 81. The entire document has been digitized by the Online Archive of California, https://oac.cdlib.org/view? docId=hb88700929&chunk.id=div00022&br. 53 Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 154. 54 Jesse La Tour, “The Roots of Inequality: The Citrus Industry Prospered on the Back of Segregated Immigrant Labor,” Fullerton Observer, December 17, 2019, https://fullertonobserver.com/2019/12/17/ the-roots-of-inequality-the-citrus-industry-prospered-on-the-back-of-segregated-immigrant-labor/ 55 Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 56 Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 98–99. 57 Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights 141. 58 Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights,1–3, for example. 59 “We Like Mexican Laborers Better”: US Immigration and Citizenship Policies in Puerto Rican Farm Labor Migration,” Centro: Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York, https://centropr-archive.hunter.cuny.edu/centrovoices/chronicles/%E2%80%9Cwe-mexicanlaborers-better%E2%80%9D-us-immigration-and-citizenship-policies-puerto. 60 Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity, 88. 61 Francisco Balderrama, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation during the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, Rev. Ed. 2006). 62 Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 49–50, 61–69, 81, 94, 97, 104, 110–11, 167, 208, and 256–257. See also Philip Stevenson, “Deporting Jesus,” The Nation, July 18, 1936, 67–169. 63 In 1998, Human Rights Watch offered this definition, as quoted on the first page of Clarence Taylor’s Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2021): “Police brutality is the use of excessive force by police on citizens when such force is unnecessary. Unjust shootings, severe beatings, intimidation, verbal abuse, and psychological as well as physical coercion are some of its most common forms.” 64 Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 131. 65 David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118–119. 66 Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) 47. 67 Catherine S. Ramirez, Assimilation: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 8.

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Lorena Oropeza 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot, 26 Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot, 40. Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot, 83. Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot, 42–43. Edward J. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department, Mexican Americans, and Police Reform,” Pacific Historical Review 72 (May 2003): 184. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas,” 176. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas,” 194–195; Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 20–22. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas,” 185; Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot, 27; Enrique M. Buelna, Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019), 66. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas,” 192. According to Escobar, of the 50 officers implicated in the violence, eight stood trial and “five of the eight were convicted, and only one served more than a year in prison.” Erwin Chemerinsky, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (New York: Liveright, 2021), 14. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 23. Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 3. “Puerto Rican Emigration: Why the 1950s? Emigration from Puerto Rico, 1900–1990,” LCW Lehman College, https://lcw.lehman.edu/lehman/depts/latinampuertorican/latinoweb/PuertoRico/1950s.htm Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords, 2. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: a Puerto Rican family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966); and Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961). Gertrude Samuels, “I don’t think the cop is my friend,” New York Times, March 29, 1964. Taylor, Fight the Power, 6. Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords, 73. “Puerto Rican Riots: East Harlem in 1967,” “Puerto Rican Riots: Lower East Side also in 1968,” Centro: Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York, https://centroprarchive.hunter.cuny.edu/digital-humanities/puerto-rican-labor/puerto-ricans-riots-east-harlem-1967; https://centropr-archive.hunter.cuny.edu/digital-humanities/puerto-rican-labor/puerto-ricans-riotslower-east-side-also-1968. Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012). The Young Lords are the focus of Chapter 5. Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords, 46; Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 187–190., Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords, 171. Ian Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003) 178, 187–188. Lorena Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era (Berkely: University of California Press, 2005), 108. Brian Behnken (@historyBrian), Twitter post, April 4, 2020, 1:27pm, https://twtext.com/article/ 1246535002524975105. See Chapter 11 of Vigil, The Crusade for Justice. Haney López, Racism on Trial, 203. David Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 41. “Sons of Zapata: A Brief Photographic History of the Farm Workers’ Strike in Texas,” page 25. This pamphlet has been digitized by the University of California, San Diego, https://libraries.ucsd.edu/ farmworkermovement/ufwarchives/elmalcriado/Frankel/Strike.pdf. Brent M. S. Campney, “‘The Most Turbulent and Most Traumatic Years in Recent Mexican-American History’: Police Violence and the Civil Rights Struggle in 1970s Texas Mexican-American History,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 122 (No. 1 2018): 37, 38. Joel Zapata, “Taking Chicana/o Activist History to the Public: Chicana/o Activism in the Southern Plains through Time and Space,” Great Plains Quarterly 38 (Fall 2018): 415. Brent M. S. Campney, “Police Brutality and Mexican American Families in Texas, 1945–1980,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 694 (March 2021): 111. Campney, “The Most Turbulent and Most Traumatic Years in Recent Mexican-American History,” 40.

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Latinx Populations and Policing 101 Media extensively covered the killing of Guardado, including the discrepancies between official law enforcement accounts and those of other witnesses. A copy of the autopsy report, which included the original case report by law enforcement, was released to the public by the Chief Medical Examiner for Los Angeles County. It can be found along with more details of Guardado’s killing on the web at Crystal Bonvillian, “LA County deputies who shot, killed teen Andrés Guardado suspended in an unrelated traffic case,” KIRO7, December 15, 2020. Also see, Crystal Bonvillian, “Andres Guardado: LA County deputy shot teen five times in the back, autopsies show,” KIRO7, July 13, 2020, https://www.kiro7.com/news/ trending/andres-guardado-la-county-deputy-shot-latino-teen-5-times-back-autopsies-show/LZHCZX6T 6BBD3MT4CQ7XDPEBEQ/. 102 Raza Killings Database Project/ Latino Education & Advocacy Days (LEAD), California State University at San Bernardino; https://www.csusb.edu/lead/raza-database-project; Los Angeles Times, “Homicide Report: Police have killed 968 People in Los Angeles County since 2000,” updated May 31, 2022; https://www.latimes.com/projects/los-angeles-police-killings-database/; Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins and Steven Rich, “Fatal Force,” Police Shootings Database, Washington Post, updated June 1, 2022, retrieved at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/; “Fatal Police Violence by Race and State in the USA, 1980–2019: A Network Meta-Regression,” The Lancet 398 No. 10307 (October 2, 2021): 1239–1255, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01609-3. 103 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 52, 94. 104 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 195; William H. Parker, “Invasion from Within,” in O.W. Wilson, ed. Parker on Police, “The Invasion from Within,” Parker on Police (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1957); Also see Joseph Darda, “The Thin White Line,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 19, 2018; https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-thin-white-line/. 105 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 195, 200. 106 See especially Chapter 7 of Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. 107 Oropeza, 165. 108 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 183–184. 109 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 12, 246. 110 Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz, “Alicia Sotero Vásquez: Police brutality against an Undocumented Mexican Woman,” Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social 4 (Fall 2004): 69. 111 The quotation stems from Arpaio’s own books, including Joe Arpaio and Len Sherman, Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff’s Takes on Illegal Immigration, Crime, Drugs, and Everything Else that Threatens America (New York: AMACOM, 2008). 112 Megan Cassidy, “Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio Found Guilty of Criminal Contempt,” Arizona Republic, July 31/August 1, 2017; https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2017/ 07/31/maricopa-county-sheriff-joe-arpaio-found-guilty-criminal-contempt-court/486278001/. The conviction was later overturned by President Donald J. Trump. 113 The literature on gangs and Latinx gangs is immense. A recent journalist take on MS-13 that grapples with some of the complexities involved, including the devastation wrought by US-sponsored violence in the region during the 1980s, focuses on personal stories. See Steven Dudley, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang (New York: Hanover Square Press, 2020). 114 US Department of Justice “Justice News” Press Release, “Justice Department Announces $139 Million for Law Enforcement Hiring to Advance Community Policing,” November 18, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/ pr/justice-department-announces-139-million-law-enforcement-hiring-advance-community-policing# :~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Justice%20today,COPS%20Hiring%20Program%20(CHP). 115 Laurie Roberts, “Joe Arpaio just cost you another $4.5 million, Arizona Republic, September 21, 2106; https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2016/09/21/roberts-arpaio-just-costyou-another-45-million/90786276/. 116 Victoria Hattam, “Imperial designs: Remembering Vietnam at the US–Mexico Border Wall,” Memory Studies 9 (No. 1 2016): 27–47. 117 For a brief overview see, Daniel E. Martínez, Josiah Heyman, and Jeremy Slack, “Border Enforcement Developments since 1993,” Center for Migration Studies, https://cmsny.org/publications/borderenforcement-developments-since-1993-and-how-to-change-cbp/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIyqrPkr739wIV txvUAR0WQAS2EAAYASAAEgLkJfD_BwE. For more on technological developments at the border, also see Deirdre Bosa and Deborah Findling,“How Tech Will be Used at the U.S-Mexico border wall,” April 11, 2017; https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/11/how-technology-will-used-to-in-the-us-mexicoborder-wall.html; Sidney Fussell, “The Endless Aerial Surveillance of the Border,” The Atlantic, October 11, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/increase-drones-used-bordersurveillance/599077/; Claudine Mononaco, “Dazzling Border Lights Worrying Astronomers,” Tucson

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118 119 120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127

128 129 130

131 132

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Citizen, July 2, 2007; and Daniel Brown, “US Border Patrol Agents are Carrying these Weapons of War to Stop the Migrant Caravan,” Business Insider, November 9, 2018; https://www.businessinsider.com/thewar-weapons-border-patrol-carrying-to-stop-migrant-caravan#border-patrol-tactical-units-bortac-arecarrying-m4-rifles-with-silencers-which-are-often-used-by-the-us-militarys-special-operators-on-secretmissions-and-holographic-sights-1. For a quick synthesis of the numbers, see Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Largest Deportation Campaign in US History is No Match for Donald Trump’s Plan,” The Conversation, March 8, 2017, https:// theconversation.com/largest-deportation-campaign-in-us-history-is-no-match-for-trumps-plan-73651. Martínez, et al, “Border Enforcement Developments since 1993.” Although outside the scope of this article, the militarization of the border also directly contributed to thousands of migrants dying in the desert in an attempt to avoid heavily patrolled segments of the border that blocked traditional routes through more hospitable terrain. The number can be found in the first paragraph of Martínez et al., “Border Enforcement Developments.” Southern Borders Communities Coalition, “Fatal Encounters with CBP since 2010” (CPB stands for US Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol), https://www.southernborder.org/ deaths_by_border_patrol. Southern Borders Communities Coalition, “Cross-Border Shootings by Border Patrol,” https://www. southernborder.org/_cross-border-shootings-by-border-patrol. The three teens whom Border Patrol agents accused of rock throwing and then shot dead were: Sergio Adrian Hernández Güereca, 15, who shot in Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, on June 7, 2010; Ramses Barron Torres, 17, who was killed on January 5, 2011, in Nogales, Mexico directly across from Nogales, Arizona, José Antonio Elena Rodriguez, who was killed on Oct. 10, 2012, also in Nogales, Mexico. Sebastian Rotella, “Ex-Border Patrol Agent Acquitted in 1992 Slaying: Los Angeles Times, Feb. 4, 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-04-mn-19149-story.html. Manny Fernandez, “US Troops Went to the Border in 1997. They Killed an American Boy,” New York Times, November 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/esequiel-hernandez-deathborder-mexico.html?searchResultPosition=1. The 50% figure appears in many news reports including this one: Britney Mejia, “Many Latinos answer call of the Border Patrol in the age of Trump,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2016, https://www.latimes. com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-citizens-academy-20180323-htmlstory.html. Gustavo López and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “How Hispanic police officers view their job,” February 15, 2017, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/how-hispanicpolice-officers-view-their-jobs/. In 2008, the LAPD was half-Latino, see Rachel Uranga, “More Latino officers than Whites in LAPD now,” Feb. 20, 2008, Los Angeles Daily News, https://www.dailynews. com/2008/02/20/more-latino-officers-than-whites-in-lapd-now/; the Los Angeles County appears to boast a similar percentage of Latinx officers. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles, 241. Matt Lait and Scott Glover, “Insignia of Rampart Anti-Gang Unit Raises Concerns,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 8, 2000, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-08-me-62143-story.html. “A Tradition of Violence: The History of Gangs within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, a 15-part investigative Series by Cerise Castle,” https://knock-la.com/about-us/. The 15-part series ran in the independent media outlet, KnockLA, in 2021 and then the story was picked up by other media. Also see a report by the Center for Juvenile Law & Policy, Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, “50 years of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department: Identifying Root Causes and Effects to Advocate for Meaningful Reform,” January 2021, https://issuu.com/media-lls/docs/cjlp_ report_lasd_deputy_gangs_010521. Center for Juvenile Law & Policy, “50 years of Deputy Gangs,” 11. “Alex Villanueva, LA County Sheriff,” a single-page celebratory biography distributed in December 2018, at the time of his swearing in, mentions his dissertation, a www.lasd.org/pdf/SHERIFF_VILLANUEVA_ BIO.pdf. Villanueva’s tenure earned him a New Yorker profile, Dana Goodyear, “The L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy-Gang Crisis, May 30, 2022. American Civil Liberties Union, “Island of Impunity,” Puerto Rico’s Outlaw Law Force,” June 2012, a copy of the pdf can be found at https://www.aclu.org/report/island-impunity-puerto-ricos-outlaw-police-force; A. J. Vicens, “You’ve Probably Never Heard of America’s Worst Police Force,” Mother Jones, February 27, 2015, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/puerto-rico-police-department-abuses-reform/. See also Marisol LeBrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019; and Natasha S. Alford, “‘They Believe We’re Criminals’: Black Puerto

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Latinx Populations and Policing Ricans Say They’re a Police Target,” The Guardian, Oct. 19, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/theybelieve-were-criminals-black-puerto-ricans-say-theyre-police-target. 134 Natasha S. Alford, “Police violence against Dominicans in Puerto Rico suggests systemic problem,” The Guardian, Oct. 10, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/10/police-violence-againstdominicans-in-puerto-rico-suggests-systemic-problem. 135 Julie Tate et al., “Fatal Force,” Police Shootings Database, Washington Post. 136 In addition to 1960s coalitions formed between black power groups and the Young Lords and Chicano movement groups, examples, sometimes populated with veterans of these earlier movements, iinclude the Black and Latino Coalition Against Police Brutality formed in NYC in 1979, Taylor, Fight the Power, 211; the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) formed in the mid-1970s in Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor, “The Coalition against Police Abuse: CAPA’s Resistance Struggle in 1970s Los Angeles,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 2, no. 1 (2016): 52–88. In my hometown of Richmond, California, members of the Oscar Grant Committee Against Policy Brutality and State Repression, named after the young African American man killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in 2009, offered support to the family of Richard “Pedie” Perez, who was unarmed when he was shot and killed by Richmond Police in 2014.

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14 ISLAMOPHOBIA Supplement for Anti-Black Racism and Policing Stephen Sheehi

In 2009, Imam Luqman Amin Abdullah was shot 20 times by FBI agents and mauled by their dog in Detroit. Abdullah was the imam of Masjid al-Haqq. He was formerly active in the black power movement and engaged in consciousness-raising and poverty alleviation in his community in Michigan. He was involved in the campaign to free Jamil al-Amin, the political prisoner formerly known by the name H. Rap Brown, who also founded the National Ummah, which by the description of the FBI, is “a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States.”1 Those familiar with the regimes of surveillance of Muslims and black consciousness activists in the United States before and after September 11, should not be surprised to learn that Imam Luqman was, literally, in the crosshairs of the Feds for some time. Spied on for years for his activism in Masjid al-Haqq, the FBI alleged that Abdallah was a “radical, fundamentalist,” who was a member of al-Amin’s National Umma. Unable to prove any allegations of Islamic militancy, the FBI alleged that Abdullah was involved in fencing stolen televisions with members of his congregation. This charge is illustrative of two decades of entrapping Muslims and decades of entrapping Black activists. Arun Kundnani opens up his book, The Muslims are Coming!, by introducing the story of Luqman, his political views and activism, the poverty of his congregation, and the process by which Abdallah was entrapped.2 In the interest of space, I will only stress from Imam Luqman’s story that the “stolen” televisions were, in fact, bought and provided by the FBI. One of the four government informants who were planted in Abdullah’s mosque—a white man posing as a convert—asked the Imam and others in the mosque to help him move the TVs he had stored in a warehouse in Dearborn. The warehouse (and truck) in actuality had been rented by the FBI to stage the ambush of Abdullah. At the time of the “arrest,” FBI alleged that Abdullah shot their police dog, although the dog was shot by munitions from an M4 (FBI gun) not from a Glock, which the FBI alleges that the Imam was carrying. While the dog was medevaced to the hospital and was in surgery within 15 minutes of being shot, Abdullah was left dead on the ground in a pool of blood, his corpse was handcuffed, and the warehouse was locked down.3 The state murder of Imam Luqman remains covered up with the collusion of the judicial system, which denied a series of requests for inquiries and investigations. I begin this chapter with the story of Abdallah because it opens up many discussions. More specifically, his story embodies a series of interlocking social and political facts that force us to think about the relationship between Islamophobia, race (in particular, blackness), and “law enforcement” and police brutality. The surveillance, targeting, and assassination of Imam Luqman introduce a series of elements that run throughout this chapter, none of which exist in isolation but rather in relation to one another. In 182

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fact, this chapter will call attention to the social, structural, and political elements that Abdallah’s stories lays bare. More specifically, this chapter will examine a series of historical, governmental, and social discourses in order to begin to draw out and make apparent the relationship between structural anti-black racism, Islamophobia, and police brutality that are in-built into the US political and civil society. Far from being discrete and disaggregated acts of violence, state policy, anti-Muslim “prejudice,” and cultural racist “ignorance,” we will see that discourses and policies of antiblackness, policing and Islamophobia are coordinated, ideologically and logistically, to form a pattern. To be direct, these discourses and policies are the following: a b c d

e

f

The targeting and sanctioned police murder of anyone solely for being black, if not also not being a black person submissive to white rule. The intentional targeting and murder of Black Power/black consciousness activists by US “law enforcement.” The use of Islamophobia as an ideological underpinning to justify the surveillance, targeted entrapment of Muslims, including Black American Muslims.4 The targeting and entrapping of black activists, black civilians, and Muslims (black and non-Black) in the United States through crude ‘security’ and judicial apparatuses that include the use of fabricated evidence, the deployment of federal informants, plants, and agent provocateurs, and contrived “sting operations.” The role of official reports–which are grossly racist and demonizing—to profile Black Americans and Muslims by federal, state, and local law enforcement to justify entrapment and surveillance. The collusion of the judiciary and legislative branches of state and federal government in facilitating the US-Mukhabarat state security apparatus and its systematic repression of black people.

The number of black power political prisoners, those released and those still in the American Gulag, who are Muslim in the United States, including Jalal al-Amin, Mumia Abu Jamal, Jalil Muntaqim, Jihad Abdulmumit, Dawud Abdur Rahman, Abdul Malik Ka’bah, Kamau Sadiki and Abdul Azeez (formerly Warren Ballentine), Malik Bey Smith, Hanif Shabazz Bey, and many others, must be noted. Alongside American Muslim political prisoners—including, but not limited to, Tarek Mehanna, Syed Fahad Hashmi, Aafia Siddiqui, Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammed ElMezain, James Cromitie, and the “Newburgh Four”—the high profile targeting, prosecution, and surveillance of politically engaged Blackamerican Muslims alerts us to the relationship between police violence against black people, about the vagaries of Islamophobia within that racist regime of institutional police brutality, and the ways in which Islamophobia and anti-Arabness work at the service of anti-black structures. Therefore, in this chapter, I am discussing the relationality of the state’s enforcement of white supremacy through the association of Islamophobia and blackness as the masterphobogenic index of race and locus of abjection as David Marriott says.5 More specifically, this chapter has three interlocking assertions. Namely, Islamophobia in the country now known as the United States is motivated specifically by the racialization of Islam within the context of anti-black racism. In the settler colony of the United States, Islamophobia serves as a socially acceptable refuge to cultivate and expand white supremacy. Islamophobia is operationalized by the state and civil society to crush black consciousness. Within this system of racial objectification and political repression, I would also like to propose—although I do not have the space to fully develop here—that this relationality (i.e., whiteness and the state in relation to Arabness, Muslimness, and blackness) is calibrated around suppressing and regulating “black consciousness” as Steve Biko would say, or “black presence” as Toni Morrison would say.6

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Islamophobia in the Service of White Supremacy In her chapter, “Whiteness and Arab Americans,” Sawsan Abdulrahim asks “In what ways can an examination of Arab immigrants’ interaction with race in the United States describe and shed light on ‘whiteness’?”7 Abdulrahman marks the positioning of Arab Americans in proximity to whiteness and antagonism or identification with blackness. To expand on this line of thinking about how blackness organizes racial formations in relation to whiteness and white supremacist power structures, I am arguing in the chapter that the sanctioned hate of Arabs and of Muslims in the decades after 9/11 has allowed black racism to partially and temporarily take refuge, perpetuate, commute, and eventually resurge within the white mainstream political polity—and eventually to re-emerge in the current form of white ethno-nationalism.8 What I am not saying is that anti-black racism disappeared and Arabs and Muslims took their place for a time being. Rather, what I am arguing is that Islamophobia functions as a supplement for anti-black racism and, in fact, to further anti-blackness by camouflaging the expanding legal and discursive authority of whiteness. Islamophobia-as an acceptable form of racism- has allowed the legalization of a security state. This proposition demands us then to reconsider the racial dimensions and structures in the history of anti-Muslim policing in the United States and understand its pedigree within the framework of anti-black policing. Scholar-activists such as Angela Davis, Mark Neocleaous, Mariame Kaba, and Geo Maher show us that social and ideological systems protect white supremacist racial hierarchy, state power, the ruling classes, and capital accumulation and private property.9 These scholars show us that these systems work to conscript the consent, indeed active approval and support, of civil society as well as state and non-state apparatuses. Within this same context then, the security state (militarization of local police, mass federal and local surveillance, the National Defense Authorization Act, Patriot Act, etc.) grew with the full support of the mainstream political establishment, organizing itself around the ever-present domestic terror threat of political Islam. It is not white innocence, ignorance, or a lack of imagination that resulted in the collusion of civil society and the federal government with the arming of local and state “law enforcement” with “obsolete/unneeded excess property turned in by U.S military units around the world.”10 We already know what is obvious: namely, how Islamophobia undergirds not only US imperialism and militarism abroad but also how “countering violent extremism” (CVE) discourses underwrite the predominance of the national security state, including the militarization of local and state police (through the 1033 Program and LESO) that result in state-sanctioned mass incarceration,11 hyper-policing, and murder of black people in the state now known as the United States.12 Therefore, when we see the militarization of all levels of government in “response” and “preparedness” in the “war on terror,” we understand how racist ideological formations (Islamophobia in concert with anti-blackness) choreograph segments of right-wing and liberal civil and political society to assist governmental and class interests that police and surveil black communities. Simone Brown’s Dark Matters, which reveals the intimate and, indeed, constitutive histories and systems of surveillance with black communities, allows us to reconsider Islamophobia in relation to state surveillance and, by extension, authorized police brutality.13 In the wake of this scholarship, we see how Islamophobia operates as a tool of anti-blackness, its guise, and its refuge precisely in service of a regime built on anti-black racism. In fact, Islamophobia as an ideological refuge allowed antiblack racism to consolidate itself. In other words, members of fascist groups like Patriots Pride have been active in groups like ACT! For America or Pam Geller’s Stop Islamization for years, proving that white supremacists organized around “Islamophobia” without any consequence for 20 years. Highlighting the intimacies, filiations, and shared pedigrees between “law enforcement” and these Islamophobic, right-wing groups is essential to understand the recent history of the relationship between anti-Muslim in anti-black racism, especially in relation to police brutality.

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The list of Islamophobic, white nationalist flunkies connected to law enforcement is long but two examples of recent hacks are illustrative. Namely, Cathy Hinner, former New York cop, runs a high profile ethno-nationalist online venue to peddle white nationalist conspiracy theories and John Guandolo is an Islamophobic ex-FBI agent (fired from the Bureau because he had illicit sex with the prosecution’s key witness during an investigation) who works to “train” any law enforcement agency willing to pay him to speak about the evils of Islam and Muslims.14 Many, including myself, have written that 9/11 re-produced and capitalized on anti-Arab racism to realign a US imperial agenda globally but also, empowered a security state domestically, allowing liberals, including black folks, to align with Islamophobia though it perpetuates the logic and forms of anti-blackness.15 In the years following 9/11, the Arab and Muslim “terrorist” would stand-in-for the figure/trope of the black militant and the black “criminal”. 9/11 provided a sanctioned targeting and hate of Arabs and Muslims with the support from mainstream USA, the very place from which the right-wing resurgence appears in 2016. To be clear, then, I am linking the expanded authority of white supremacist legal, political and ideological systems—that has resulted in the murder of black people by hyper enfranchised and militarized police—to the accepted “legitimacy” of Islamophobia as a mode of organizing political and civil society.

Islamophobia And Surveillance In 2007, a series of individuals, organizations, faith groups, and attorneys formed the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC)—based in New York—in response to the NYPD’s policy paper, titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” (chiefly authored by Mitch Silber and Arvin Bhatt from the NYPD Intelligence Division).16 While the ACLU successfully sued to have the report removed by 2016, the damage was done in that it formed the basis of what journalists Matt Apuzzo, Eileen Sullivan, and Adam Goldman, eventually exposed in a series of investigative articles in 2011–2012 revealed an expansive and broad program of surveillance that MACLC anticipated.17 Namely, in the decade following 9/11, the NYPD spied on and tracked Muslims and Muslim Americans not only in the five boroughs but also outside the city and, indeed, outside the state including New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. These operations were devised with the likely-illegal coordination and collaboration with CIA operatives. That is to say, an active CIA agent, David Cohen, was sent “on-loan” to coordinate the NYPD’s spying program. According to Apuzzo and Goldamn David Cohen “makes the rules,” which is likely against the National Security Act although the expansion of Executive Order 12333 and the Patriot Act since 9/11 have permitted the CIA and US domestic law enforcement room to maneuver, collaborate and share intelligence.18 The CIA-designed operations divided cities by “ancestries of interest” which included Black American and Black African Muslim communities.19 Despite the revelation that the NYPD illegally coordinated this spying program with the CIA, Raymond Kelly, Chief of Police at that time, never relented or apologized about the findings of the MACLC paper or Apuzzo’s investigations despite intense community “dialogue” and pressure to do so.20 While the saga of NYPD spying on Muslims is now well-known, we often forget its legal and ideological origins in Silber and Bhatt’s racist and hackneyed the Radicalization in the West, which has now been published by a small extremist anti-Semitic and Islamophobic white supremacist press and sold on Amazon. Among the many insightful commentaries about it, I would like to add and underline two particular points about Radicalization in the West, which serve as the ideological justification for spying but also highlight the racial element of the report and operation. The first observation is that the premise of the report clearly states that any location or locality where Muslims congregate (wherever Muslims live, socialize, learn, shop, pray, and organize, collectively or individually) constitutes “incubators of extremism.”21 Indeed, the “incubators” cross material and virtual space, and, specifically “are often embedded in legitimate institutions, businesses, clubs, and 185

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of course, in the virtual world of the Internet.”22 Muslims who had Americanized their names remained of special interest; there was no difference between a Muslim abroad or in the United States nor between a citizen, a naturalized citizen, or a non-citizen. The report stated, therefore, by mere fact of existing not-in-isolation and in isolation, the Muslim is an imminent threat. Secondly, what stands out in the 2007 NYPD report are the “typical signatures” that purportedly indicate whether a Muslim has adopted “Salafi” Islam and, therefore, is a legitimate suspect-terrorist.23 These “signatures” mark the transition from being an imminent, potential terrorist—inherent to every Muslim—to actually being a suspect-terrorist. This process becomes apparent in the figure of Imam Luqman. Two clearly racist "signatures" of note are “becoming involved in social activism and [involved in] community issues” and “giving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes.”24 Other signatures remain equally telling, including that the suspected Muslim becomes “alienated from one’s former life; affiliating with like-minded individuals” and “joining or forming a group of like-minded individuals in a quest to strengthen one’s dedication to Salafi Islam.”25 Yet, apart from the fact that normative developmental and social behavior are pathologized in the figure of the Muslim, the racial nature of the previous two “signatures” is revealing and instructive. These signatures operate along a chain of associations that invoke and mobilize a series of racist tropes. These anti-black tropes indicate a threat to white social order: the black woman social activists, the black male community organizer, or contrarily, the hip-hop gangster, the drunk and gambling (i.e., criminal) black man. In the NYPD report Radicalization in the West, each of these stock racist stereotypes transfigures into a perpetual suspect Muslim terrorist. If we search for a shared history and connection between anti-blackness, Islamophobia, policing, police brutality, and surveillance of both Muslim and black communities in the country now known as the United States, we do not have to look far. Indeed, the murder of Muhammad Abdul Muhaymin, a Black American Muslim, by Phoenix police, made such a connection obvious. That is, when Muhaymin, unhoused and suffering from mental illness, wanted to bring his service dog into a public bathroom, officers arrested him on an outstanding warrant for failing to appear in court for a misdemeanor drug-paraphernalia possession charge. In addition to the police suffocating Muhaymin, who pleaded “I can’t breathe,” the arresting officer mocked Abdul-Muhaymin when, dying, as he called on Allah to save him.26 Numerous instances of police brutality and violence against black Muslims can be found. Yet, this is not the argument of the chapter. Rather, I am arguing in the chapter for a larger ideological structure that connects policing, Islamophobia, and the security state to anti-blackness, surveillance carcerality and police brutality. That is, the Radicalization in the West report comes to be read as a policing manual. While it crosses numerous agencies and does not suggest policies or techniques, it produces discourses of policing the black, brown, and Muslim threats that must be controlled. Therefore, it operationalizes well-worn associative processes inherent to racism and profiling. This associative process—connecting the Muslim threat to the black threat—makes strong political, historical, and material links glaringly clear. Namely, it is not only obvious that Muslims and Blackamericans are collapsed in order to justify the surveillance of Muslim Americans. Rather, let us follow the association as provided by the racial nature of these “signatures” of terrorism, reading them against the actual history of FBI and NYPD surveillance. Let us consider the nexus of institutionalized anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and law enforcement through the systematic and expansive programs of spying, infiltration, discrediting, and “disrupting” black consciousness organizations since World War Two. While this chapter cannot go into the graphic details of the NYPD spying program, it must note that the NYPD sent “mosque crawlers” and “rakers” into Muslim communities to spy. They infiltrated mosques, Muslim civil rights groups, and student organizations with informants. They also staked out not only in Islamic centers but private and public university campuses, campus organizations (especially university Muslim Student Associations), civil rights organizations, Muslim elementary schools, daycares, and Muslim-owned stores, cafes, and restaurants. Most of us realize that the use of 186

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informants to infiltrate (spy on, instigate and entrap) by law enforcement has a direct genealogy to COINTELPRO (1956–1971). These surveillance and policing operations also remind us of the CIA’s own domestic operations, most notoriously but now virtually forgotten, Operation CHAOS, between 1967 and 1974, that spied on and collected information on black consciousness activists and anti-war organizers. It is essential to understand that, in many ways, the revelation of COINTELPRO-type (and Operation CHAOS) policies by the NYPD—repeated as standard FBI procedure and replicated in many metropolitan areas including Los Angeles27—only draw our attention to how surveillance has been legalized, especially since the Obama administration, through a post-9/11 national security framework including a series of now well-known federal legislation, not the least of which was the Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act.28 However, more importantly, the licensed and expansive logistical and legal framework of mass surveillance, organized by US carceral logic of which scholar-activists such Ruth Wilson Gimore speak, alerts us to the possibility that Islamophobia is the cloak that hides andfurthers the operations of state-sponsored anti-Blackness.29 Frameworks built around Islamophobia allow and collaborate with anti-Black racism to exist in public discourse and public policy in a post-Civil Rights United States. Islamophobic pretexts permit anti-black racism to incubate, infiltrate and spread during a time that explicitly anti-black racism may be in violation of civil rights laws or the remaining legal provisions that prohibit arbitrary surveillance (such as the Handshu Agreement), or rules that violate the bar of admissible evidence. I would also argue that Islamophobia, as a largely acceptable form of racism, conscripted liberals to enthusiastically support security legislation, federal CVE policy, and local law enforcement militarization that might otherwise be distasteful to them. In other words, outright white supremacist racism was permitted in the form of official state-sponsored (and bipartisan) Islamophobia since 2001. In previous work, I highlight the collusion and ideological alliance in public discourses about “Islamic terror” pumped into the mainstream by the culture industry, the news, government officials, the heroization of militarism against “irrational Muslims” and security discourses shared by both Democrats and Republicans.30 For a recent reminder, we only need to look at Trump’s Muslim Ban. While Democrats were so incensed by the overt racism of Stephen Miller and Team Trump, its legal origins and precedents are found in the Obama and Bush administrations, who enforced the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) that targeted foreign nationals from mostly Arab and Muslim countries for extra-close scrutiny even during their time in the US. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that membership in white nationalist groups increased by nearly fifty percent in 2018 and the number of hate groups in the United States has reached a thousand (not to mention the virtual world).31 It is my argument that this was possible because abject-racism was permitted in the form of Islamophobia since 2001. At the same time, this shared Islamophobia served as a mechanism of mobilization that allowed the right wing to organize within the Republican party, advancing a long racist agenda of its white supremacist base.32 For example, Republicans have spearheaded, at times with the cooperation of Democratic state legislators, specifically anti-Muslim legislation such as 201 Republican-sponsored anti-Sharia law bills have been introduced in 43 states; 6 states of which by 2019—Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee—passed laws targeting “anti-Sharia law” legislations.33

Equating Black Identity Extremists As Muslim In October 2018, Homeland Security decommissioned the Domestic Terrorism Unit, the CVE unit that watches white nationalists.34 This decommissioning dog signaled that the rightest agenda was now coordinated between all branches of government and spearheaded by the highest echelons of the judiciary, legislator, and Executive. In 2017, nine days before the fascist “Unite the Right” rampage in 187

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Charlottesville, the FBI issued a report not about white nationalist extremists but regarding “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE). That the “Black Identity Extremist” designation was re-generated in 2017 the year of the fascist march in Charlottesville is not coincidental. This was the same year that white supremacists were responsible for more than half of the FBI-determined “extremist murders” (while “Islamic extremists” accounted for less than ¼) according to the ADL.35 This report, in the tradition of Hoover and COINTELPRO, named BIE, including Black Lives Matter (BLM), as among the top threat to US internal security and particularly to US law enforcement.36 The report specifically locates the history of BIE “in the 1960s and 1970s in response to changing socioeconomic attitudes and treatment of [black people] during the Civil Rights Movement.”37 The report names a small handful of “BIE attacks on law enforcement.”38 Specifically, the report associates the alleged assailants with groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers.39 While the BIE moniker for black “terrorist” is not new, what is made clear by numerous governmental reports is that the surveillance and policing of Muslim communities play an operative role in the intensification of policing black communities, especially policing black consciousness movements. In 2009, the Virginia Fusion Center, one of seventy-three federal intelligence centers established to share intel between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, and the Department of Justice (DOJ)-issued a report that identified Black Extremist organizations. The report specifies two black Muslim organizations (including Jamal al-Amin’s National Ummah) as an incubator for “homegrown” black Muslim “anti-government” terrorism.40 While no connections are found, the report’s conclusions prominently speculate, and indeed names as a potential action item, whether there “are there any known links between Black Separatist organizations and radical Islamic organizations in Virginia?”41 The Virginia Fusion Center and FBI report fit within what must be called an established practice, if not only genre, of equating activism around black consciousness with political Islam. A number of reports in recent years, especially during the BLM organizing after the murder of George Floyd, highlight how the DHS identifies activists for BLM as a “Black Identity Extremists Group” and associates them with the threat of Muslim radicalization as a common practice.42 Again, we remember RaCon’s (Racial Conditions) similar allegations against Blackamerican Muslims and black consciousness organizations as posing a potential threat of being a pro-Japanese fifth column, therefore subject to intense police scrutiny. But also, even in the relatively liberal sphere, publications such as Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bendele make evident the degree to which the moniker of “terrorist” transmutes into “black activist” in “mainstream” policing, political, and media discourses.43

Islamophobia As Supplement For Anti-black Racism: A History To this point, we have seen how Islamophobia has been the vessel by which white supremacism has been advanced in the United States, how Islamophobia works in service of policing black and brown Muslim communities, how it invites police repression of black activists, and specifically how federal and state law enforcement explicitly identify activists for Black Lives as “Black Identity Extremists” and associate them with the threat of Muslim radicalization. Furthermore, this threat becomes more “credible” when the government locates BIE within a tradition of Black American Islam. Such a supposition is not fully original. Will Caldwell locates the 2017 BEI report in a history of the FBI targeting Black consciousness groups, namely COINTELPRO. As a side bar, let us keep foregrounding that one of the “signatures” for radicalization and potential terrorism is becoming involved in “social” and “community” activism. This allows us to realize that the discourse of policing Muslims and black people has a historical pedigree within US law enforcement governmental policy and white supremacist institutions. For example, Caldwell draws attention to a 1959 FBI Central Research Section’s study of the Nation of Islam. In this report, the FBI names the NOI as “The Muslim Cult of Islam.” Indeed, this was not the first instance of spying on Blackamerican Muslims, as Edward Curtis shows us with the Hoover’s FBI RaCon secret report tracking black resistance to 188

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racism and identifying this growing Black-American group of activists as a dangerously potential ally to the Japanese. Curtis notes that Elijah Mohamed was convicted for refusing to register for the draft during World War Two while Black Sunni Muslims from Addeynu Allahe Universal Arabic Association, a Sunni Black organization founded by Muhammad Ezzeldeen in 1938, registered as conscientious objectors.44 While this chapter does not engage in RaCon, it is important to understand it as one FBI predecessor to the “Muslim Cult of Islam” report. The 1959 report identifies the Nation as “a fanatic Negro organization purporting to be motivated by the religious princess of Islam but actually dedicated to the propagation of hate against the white race.”45 Reading the report closely amplifies Caldwell’s observation that, for example, the FBI ironically states that the NOI is an “anti-American and violent Cult” that arose from the “intense desire for racial improvement and recognition, and which based the unenviable position of the Negro on the treatment afforded him by the white people.”46 Illustrated with a number of photographs including Malcolm X with Elijah Mohamed and taking a particular interest in the radicalization of black women, the report continues that the NOI uses the White man as a “scapegoat” and their ideology is “tinged with primitivism that [has] almost regressed to savagery.”47 In locating the pedigree of this report, Will Caldwell remarks on its intellectual roots in a popular 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy by Lorthrop Stoddard.48 Stoddard was the most high-profile racist eugenicist. A member of the KKK, his later publication Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man, influenced Nazi propagandists and racial discourse as Stefan Kuhl notes.49 Despite being publicly humiliated in a nationally publicized debate with W.E.B. Du Bois about black inferiority, Stoddard and Madison Grant held governmental positions and wielded great influence, including as influential advisors in the Harding administration. While his overt white supremacy is known, Stoddard’s racist Islamophobia was central to his civilizational thinking. In the Rising Tide of Color, he concluded that only Western Civilization and Christianity are superior to and ordained to rule black people both in the United States and also in Africa. Indeed, for Stoddard, black people are the representative of all brown and black people, globally, in that, if awakened by Islam, they collectively embody the tide of the imminent tsunami of black Muslim consciousness. Particularly important to this current moment of Islamophobia, Stoddard references the work of the well-known nineteenth-century Orientalist William Gifford Palgrave, who is likely the first to theorize the “sleeper cell.” He comments that “no more zealous Moslems are to be found in all the ranks of Islam than they who have sojourned longest in Europe and acquired the most intent knowledge of its sciences and ways.” Stoddard’s understanding of Muslims, following Palgrave, is that they “are keenly alive in the ever-shifting undercurrents and divisions that distract the Christianity of to-day.”50 This makes Islam not only admirable, but also, a most formidable proselytizing force in the world, ever “advancing along its far flung frontiers”; its most “signal victories” to be found among “the negro races of central Africa.”51 The Muslims, therefore, have a “tendency toward an understanding between Asiatic and African races and creeds” in order to consciously forge “a Pan-Colored alliance against white domination.”52 For the eugenicist, this threat is amplified in that the Arabs and Africans have mingled and “swapped blood” with each other. To the black African Muslim, “the fierce, warlike spirit inherent in Mohammadism is infinitely more attractive than is the gentle, peace-loving, high moral standard of Christianity: hence, the rapid heady [Islam] is making in central Africa.”53 Speaking of colonization of African, “In so far as [the black African] is Christianized, the engross savage instinct will be restrained and he will be disposed to acquiesce in white tutelage. In so far as he is Islamized, the negro’s warlike propensities will be inflated, and he will be used as a tool of Arab Pan-Islamism seeking to drive the white man from Africa and make the continent his very own.”54 Marking the pedigree of anti-black and Islamophobic discourses in the racist, eugenicist thought of Stoddard is not a rhetorical or textual act. We are reminded that these pseudo-scientific discourses that Orientalist Palgrave, racist “public intellectual” Stofford, and eugenicist Madison Grant (the propagator of the “Nordic race” theory) remained in a currency not only with the mainstream 189

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but were referenced decades after World War Two by US “law enforcement”. Furthermore, speaking to the current decade where resurgent white supremacist movements in what is now known as North America have connected logistically, ideologically, politically, and discursively with European fascists, Stoddard’s civilizational discourse is strongly reminiscent and, no doubt, a progenitor of the “Grand Replacement” theory of Renaud Camus and the “Eurabia” theory of BatYaor (Giselle Littman). This theory, squarely emerging from the contradiction of European liberalism, repurposes anti-Semitic and racist tropes to modernize anti-Muslim discourses, especially in France, the Netherlands, and Britain. Anders Breivik, Norwegian Islamophobic mass-murderer, cites Grant at length in his white supremacist manifesto. With the mainstream of white nationalism in the settler colonies of North America, the Grand Replacement theory is central, albeit often unnamed, within the White nationalist discourse in the United States, most prominently heard in the “Unite the Right” chant: “Jews Will Not Replace Us”. Therefore, we understand the ways that Islamophobia advances (in subterfuge or overtly) anti-black theories in the US settler-colony. This is especially evident when considering the prominence of the “replacement theory” in the work of US Islamophobes Robert Spencer and Pam Geller, who, most recently, have been pushing the theory that Black Lives Matter has intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, “radical Islam,” Chavezista Venezuela, and Antifa.55 To be clear: I am not saying that the FBI intentionally teaches Stofford’s and Madison Grant’s anti-black and Islamophobic theories, although scholars, including myself, have shown that the FBI and local police are known to use blatantly racist and Islamophobic material in their training. Indeed, the Bureau is an unambiguoulsy racist institution that enforces white supremacist order in the country now known as the United States. What is important for this chapter is to identify Stafford as a symptomatic progenitor of replacement theory that intertwines the fear of a black planet with the fear of a Muslim planet. Indeed, the figure of Muhammad Ali, as Sohail Daulatzai shows us, clearly illustrates this structural system in the FBI and American authorities’ “fear and containment” of the “Green Menace.”56 This symptomatic reading allows us to view the ideological and institutional relationship of the 1959 FBI report on Black Muslims (most prominently the NOI) to the 2017 FBI report on “Black Identity Extremists” —and, most importantly, how those reports dovetail with avowed white nationalist discourses that undergird policing of both Black and Muslims communities. It bears repeating that the anti-black pedigree of Islamophobia—and the work that Islamophobia does to perpetuate anti-Black racism—are propagated by the same “law enforcement” organization, first in 1959 and then in the 2017 report. Indeed, the NOI and Moorish Science Temple (the contemporary offshoot Moorish Sovereign Citizens) appear in both the 1959 and 2017 FBI reports, not to mention the RaCon report. It is not surprising then to learn that the FBI conducted a sustained surveillance, infiltration, and sabotage campaigns of not only the NOI but also the Moorish Science Temple, demonstrating, as Sylvester Johnson writes, a “deeply rooted and institutionalized pattern of behavior” by the FBI towards Muslims and Black folk.57

Patterns: Islamophobia and the Anti-black Mukhabarat State Many have discussed the racialization of Islam as a long history and within the context of post-9/11 US Empire.58 Building on these realizations, however, this chapter has proposed that Islamophobia is motivated specifically by the racialization of Islam with anti-black racism. This relationship, the service of Islamophobia to further anti-blackness, is integral to policing in the US settler colony and its body politics. I am not arguing that Islamophobia is not real and that Muslims truly are not targeted by police. Quite to the contrary, the point is that public discourse has actively endorsed the surveillance, suspension of civil liberties, and incarceration of Arabs and Muslims in ways that would have been otherwise unacceptable to mainstream liberal settler society. It is this “accepted” and legitimized form of racism, within the longue durée of calibrating white supremacy in the United States, 190

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that Islamophobia provides the subterfuge for the continuation, incubation, expansion, and dissemination of anti-Black racism. Less prominently in this chapter, I am positing that the evidence of the state’s profiling of Muslims arises from a fear of Blackness, an understanding of how a politicized black consciousness threatens White rule—as seen further by how Islam is policed in prisons and in communities. As the racist Stofford discloses to us, Islam is a threat only in as much as it approached, as Silvia Chan Malik states, as “a politicized stance of antiracist resistance”; therefore, as a liberatory religion against white supremacy, a religion that might disrupt quiescence to white tutelage.59 Therefore, “law enforcement” plays a central role in controlling, containing, and eliminating this threat. I conclude this chapter by acknowledging this work is only a beginning to understand how the figure of the Muslim has been used as the gateway for white nationalist radicalization and how Islamophobia, especially in the two decades following 9/11, enabled the retrenchment of white supremacist politics in the US mainstream polity and within “law enforcement” agencies and practices. Islamophobia is then a symptom (indeed a socially-political condoned symptom) of anti-blackness in the US, not an off-shoot from it. But also, Islamophobia is a safe harbor in which the security-police state was able to increase its militarism, its judicial system was able to hone its use of special administrative measures, and a safe harbor where white nationalist fascists could further mainstream racist discourse, that would be turned back again onto the black American community. While we are forced to understand the Muslim position of exception in the US carceral state, as Natsu Saito shows us, we conclude by extending the associative relationship between Muslim, Arab, and Black positionalities within structures and institutions that maintain white supremacy.60 This process of association allows us to perceive patterns of repetition; to perceive a pattern of state surveillance of black communities, in which Islamophobic security discourses, and federal, state, and municipal law enforcement collapse with Muslim communities. The associative process allows us to perceive a pattern of the relationship between the profiling of Muslims and the profiling of black people, between “flying while Muslim” and “driving while black.” We are able to perceive a pattern of the discursive and operational threads that run through the 1950s and 2010s FBI and law enforcement reports and RaCon, COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS, and post-9/11 reengineering of civil liberties that place Muslims and black people at the center of the US mukhabarat state. This relational method is not only discursive and ideological. The associative process allows us to perceive the pattern of the material relationship between the systematic incarceration of black people by police and the judiciary and the systematic surveillance and incarcerations of non-black Muslims by law enforcement and the judiciary—all under the pretense of maintaining social order. Cumulatively, then, the associative process allows us to perceive the pattern of the material and ideological relationship between local, national, and global policing; between the murder of black people by police and the murder of Muslims by white colonial settlers, white imperialist armies, and white supremacists, whether through brutal embargoes, settler occupation, military invasion and occupation, planes and drones. Islamophobia is a symptom and accomplice of anti-blackness. Islamophobia offers legal, ideological, and discursive cover and protection where the security-police state is able to increase its militarism, its judicial system is able to hone its use of “special administrative measures” (SAM), and a sanctuary where white nationalist fascists could further mainstream racist discourses, that would be turned back again onto the black American community through policing, legislation, and white supremacist vigilantism.

Notes 1 US Attorney’s Office, Press Release, “Eleven Members/Associates of Ummah Charged with Federal Violations: One Subject Shot Fatally During Arrest,” Detroit Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Oct. 28, 2009; found at https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/detroit/press-releases/2009/de102809.htm. For information about Imam Luqman’s extrajudicial assassination, Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (New York: Verso, 2014), 1–5; and see Stephen

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Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2010), 163–168. For more recent articles that revisit Abdullah’s case, see Murtaza Hussein, “Killing of Detroit Imam in 2009 Described as “Nothing Less Than a Cover-Up,” The Intercept, Aug. 5, 2015; found at https://theintercept. com/2015/08/09/family-detroit-imam-killed-police-files-lawsuit-supreme-court also see “Radical Islamic Group Mosque Imam Killed in FBI Shootout,” in Homeland Security Today, Oct. 20, 2009l found at https:// www.hstoday.us/industry/daily-news-analysis/updated-radical-islamic-group-mosque-imam-killed-in-fbishootout/ Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming!, 3–5. Hussein, “Killing of Detroit Imam in 2009”; and Niraj Warikoo, “FBI’s Killing of Detroit Muslim Leader 10 Years Ago Haunts Communities,” Detroit Free Press, Oct. 29, 2019; found at https://www. freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/10/28/ten-years-fbi-imam-luqman-abdullah-death-dearborn/ 2451750001/. I use the term Blackamericans following scholars such as Sherman Jackson Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). David Marriot. Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2007) and David Marriot. On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). See Steve Biko, I Write what I Like: A Selection of His Writings (Oxford: Heinemann, 1987); and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007); 5. I thank Sawsan Abdulrahim for pointing out Playing in the Dark to me in the issue of “black presence” in Sawsan Abdulrahim ““Whiteness” and the Arab Immigrant Experience,” in Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber Eds. Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizen to Visible Subjects (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008): 133, 144. Abdulrahim, “‘Whiteness’ and the Arab Immigrant Experience,” 133. See Stephen Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011). Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011); Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021); Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (New York: Verso Books, 2021); and Mark Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order (London: Verso, 2021). George W. Bush, who expanded the Defense Authorization Act (then renewed by Congress), established the 1033 Program (also known as Law Enforcement Support Office or LESO) to militarize local, state, and other law enforcement offices with heavily tactical, armament, and military equipment under the aegis of “homeland security” but used for quotidian police action and violence. For official information about 1033 Program/LESO, see the Defense Logistics Agency, DLA Disposition Services, 1033 Program FAQs page, found at https://www.dla.mil/DispositionServices/Offers/Reutilization/LawEnforcement/ProgramFAQs. aspx#q1 For a recent article connecting 1033 Program to the suppression of Brian Barret, “The Pentagon’s Hand-Me-Downs Helped Militarize Police. Here’s How,” Wired, June 2, 2020; found at https://www. wired.com/story/pentagon-hand-me-downs-militarize-police-1033-program. For “white innocence,” see Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); and Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). For a complex theoretical reading of the intrinsic desire of US settler colonial society to produce then manage if not eradicate racial, sexual and “cultural” difference as primary to the legitimacy and futurity of settler-sovereignty, see C. Heike. Schotten, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). See Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: The Cultural Logic of Empire (New York: Verso, 2021); Sheehi, Islamophobia; and Nazia Kazi, Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018). For a wonderful contrapuntal work considering gendered and queer resistance to forms of the terror-war, see Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). For a profile of Cathy Hinner, see Southern Poverty Law Center, “Women Against Islam,” June 10, 2015; found at https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/women-against-islam; and Gus Bova, “John Guandolo is on a Crusade to Turn Texas Cops Against Muslims,” Texas Observer, Dec. 4, 2018; found at https://www.texasobserver.org/john-guandolo-texas-cops-against-muslims/ It is essential for me to stress again that Islamophobia and anti-Blackness are ideological formations that conscript but also are reproduced by liberals and often leftists as well as conservatives and rightists. See, for a critique of liberalisms collusion with Islamophobia, Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Islamophobia 16 Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, NYPD Intelligence Div., (New York City, 2007); found at https://seths.blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/NYPD_ReportRadicalization_in_the_West.pdf. 17 Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 18 Apuzzo and Goldman, Enemies Within, 24. Also see, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas,” Associated Press, Aug. 23, 2011, found at https://www. nbcnewyork.com/news/local/with-cia-help-nypd-moves-covertly-in-muslim-areas/1926933/ 19 Diala Shamas and Nermeen Arastu, “Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and its Impact on American Muslims” published by Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC) and Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), and Asian America Legal Defense Fund, CUNY School of Law (2013), 7; found at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/maclc/mapping_muslims.pdf. We all need to acknowledge the incredible importance of this report. 20 At the same time, the FBI, the DoD, and local and state law enforcement hired known Islamophobes (such as Guandolo, Robert Spencer and a host of others including opportunistic “native informants” such as Zuhdi Jasser and Lebanese fascist pseudo-academic Walid Phares) to “train” agents on how to deal with the Muslim American community by assigning books like The Arab Mind. Additionally, the FBI Enforcement Communications Unit has circulated a polemical PowerPoint presentation to “educate” field officers about Islam, a religion that “transforms counties into seventh century Arabian ways.” See Spencer Ackerman, “FBI’s ‘Islam 101’ Depicted Muslims as 7th-Century Simpletons,” originally in Wired, found also at Gawker.com, July 27, 2011, found at http://gawker.com/5825427/fbis-islam-101-depicted-muslims-as7th+century-simpletons. 21 Silber and Bhatt, Radicalization in the West, 17. 22 Silber and Bhatt, Radicalization in the West, 17. 23 Silber and Bhatt, Radicalization in the West, 31. 24 Silber and Bhatt, Radicalization in the West, 31. 25 Silber and Bhatt, Radicalization in the West, 31. 26 Terry Tang, “Video shows Muslim man’s faith mocked during fatal arrest,” Washington Post, August 20, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/video-shows-muslim-mans-faith-mocked-during-fatalarrest/2020/08/20/e3c3d892-e313-11ea-82d8-5e55d47e90ca_story.html. 27 For one story on the LAPD spying campaign, see Richard Winton, Teresa Watanabe, and Greg Krikorian, “LAPD Defends Muslim Mapping Effort,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 200”; found at https://www. latimes.com/local/la-me-lapd10nov10-story.html. 28 See Louise Cainkar, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009;) and Elaine Hagopian, Civil Rights In Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2004). For an excellent collection of discussions regarding the politics, legislations and contestations around the legal enshrining of Islamophobia (especially during the Trump era) see Khaled Beydoun and Cyra Akila Choudhury, Islamophobia and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). For a discussion on the use of Islamophobia within the criminal prosecution of ‘terror suspects” see Wadie Said, Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 29 Ruth Wilson Golden, Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 30 See, for a sample, Sheehi, Islamophobia, Also, see Kumar, Politics of Empire, and Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming. For a discussion of media representation that demonize Arabs and Muslims as natural terrorists, see Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2012) and the classic Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northhampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, 2012). For a thorough discussion of the network of donors, think tanks and political activists that work assiduously to mainstream Islamophobia tropes, analysis and legislation, see Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims (London, Pluto Press, 2017). 31 Liam Stack, “Over 1000 Hate Groups Are Now Active in the United States, Civil Rights Group Says,” New York Times, 20 February 1919, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/hate-groups-rise.html; 32 While the social phenomenon of whiteness and capitalism in the era of globalization is at the heart of the transformation, much good work has been done on the “radicalization” of the Republican Party since Reagan, see for examples, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Julian Zelizer, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021); and

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For a thorough overview and primer to the campaign, see “Anti-Sharia Law Bills in the United States,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Feb. 5, 2018: found at https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/05/ anti-sharia-law-bills-united-states and https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pastelegislate/many-state-bills-one-source-behind-the-push-to-ban-sharia-law/ Betsy Swan, “Homeland Security Disbands Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit,” Daily Beast, April 2, 2019; found at https://www.thedailybeast.com/homeland-security-disbands-domestic-terror-intelligence-unit. For full report, see ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2017,” Anti-Defamation League, January 17, 2018; found at https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/murder-andextremism-in-the-united-states-in-2017. FBI, Counterterrorism Division, Report: “Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers,” Intelligence Assessment (unclassified report), 3 August 2017. “Black Identity Extremists,” 6. “Black Identity Extremists,” 3–4. “Black Identity Extremists,” #13 p. 10 and #31 p. 11, respectively. Virginia Fusion Center, “2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment,” Virginia Dept of State Police March, 2009; 50. “Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment,” 50. Alice Speri, “As Black Activists Protested Police Killings, Homeland Security Worried They Might Join ISIS,” The Intercept, April 8, 2019; https://theintercept.com/2019/04/08/black-protesters-terrorismthreat-isis/ and Alice Speri, “Fear of a Black Homeland,” The Intercept, March 2019; found at https:// theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/. Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018). Edward E. Curtis IV, “The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and its post-9/11 Variations,” in Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, Carl Ernst, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 93. For a detailed discussion of RaCon in which Blackamerican Muslims figure prominently, see Robert Hill, The FBI’s RaCon: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1995). Will Caldwell, “Looking Back to COINTELPRO in the Age of “Black Identity Extremism,”” Sapelo, Oct 10, 2019; found at https://sapelosquare.com/2017/10/10/looking-back-to-cointelpro-in-the-age-ofblack-identity-extremism. FBI Central Research Section, “The Muslim Cult of Islam.” Subject: Nation of Islam (1959), De-Classified FBI report (Documents 6/26/55); found at FBI [on-line’ Vault: https://vault.fbi.gov/Nation%20of %20Islam/Nation%20of%20Islam%20Part%201%20of%203; 1. Kumar also briefly discusses the report, Kumar, Politics of Empire, 59. “The Muslim Cult of Islam,” 55. Caldwell, “Looking Back.” Also, see Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1920). Stefan Kuhl The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); 61–63 and 38. Stoddard, 59. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 65 Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 70. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 95. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 97. One can only peruse their co-authored book (with a forward by John Bolton) to anticipate how their Islamophobia and anti-Black racism intermingle. See Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (New York: Threshold Editions, 2010). Indeed, Spencer (and Geller’s) racism is life long, but in regards to Spencer blending the threat of black militancy to Islam, see his discussion of “Islamberg” in New York state (as well as the “sleeper cell” theory), Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns Or Bombs (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2008), 177–78. For a more recent racist confessional connecting his views of Islamophobia with black liberation, LBGTQ+ advancement, and progressive issues, see Robert Spencer, Confessions of an Islamophobe (Nashville: Post Hill press, 2017). For more information about Spencer, Geller and other racist mainstreamed Islamophobes, see Sheehi, Islamophobia, Kumar, Politics of Empire, and Lean, Islamophobia Industry.

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Islamophobia 56 See Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxviii. 57 Sylvester Johnson, “The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America, 1926–1960”, in The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11, eds. Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman (Berkeley: UC Press, 2017), 55–66; and Karl Evanzz, “The FBI and Nation of Islam” in The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11, eds. Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman (Berkeley: UC Press, 2017), pp. 148–167. 58 Most effectively, Nazia, Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics; Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); and Sahar Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021). 59 Silvia Chan-Malik, “‘Common Cause’: On Black-Immigrant Debate and Constructing the Muslim American,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Religion 2 (No. 8 2011): 12. 60 Natsu Taylor Saito,.Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York: NYU Press, 2010). Also, see Said, Crimes of Terror; Aziz, The Racial Muslim; and Beydoun and Choudhory, Islamophobia and the Law.

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15 FROM A. MITCHELL PALMER TO JOE MCCARTHY Police Brutality in the Fight Against Communism Regin Schmidt

The period from the Red Scare (1919–1920) to the era of McCarthyism (1950–1954) was characterized by a pronounced current of anti-communism in the United States. A powerful anticommunist movement lobbied the authorities to repress communist activities. Federal, state, and local authorities enacted legislation, established investigating committees, deported alien radicals, and purged the government of disloyal employees, all in an effort to combat the communist menace. In the vanguard of the anticommunist campaign were the nation’s law enforcement institutions—the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Red Squads, and state and local police departments. In this chapter, police brutality is defined as the use of excessive force against demonstrations and public meetings; the use of violence and vandalism during arrests and searches and seizures (often without warrants); mistreatment during imprisonment; holding the prisoners incommunicado; and the threat of or use of violence during interrogations in order to force a confession (the so-called third degree). Police forces during the early twentieth century were heavily politicized and corrupt, and the use of the third degree was, according to one contemporary study, “employed as a matter of course in most states.”1 Scholarly research into police brutality against communists and other radicals is limited; the exception is the role of the FBI during the Palmer raids in 1919–1920, which have been described in the literature about the FBI.2 Consequently, this study is based on manuscript collections, declassified FBI records, congressional hearings and reports, as well as newspaper articles and secondary works. In order to understand the attitude of law enforcement toward the emerging communist movement after the Russian Revolution, I will first sketch the police’s confrontation with the anarchist and syndicalist movements from the late nineteenth century until World War I. Next, I have chosen to study in some detail two dramatic events (the Palmer raids and the Detroit raids), which involved alleged police brutality, and which illustrate how the authorities contained the criticism of law enforcement. Finally, I will demonstrate how the use of force was substituted by the more subtle methods of surveillance and counter-intelligence during the era of McCarthyism.

A Tradition for Police Brutality: Anarchism and Syndicalism Police forces had been engaged with radicals for more than 30 years before the Red Scare. The starting point for this story might be dated to the Haymarket Riot on May 4, 1886, in Chicago.

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During a demonstration protesting the killing of two workers by the Chicago police during a riot, a bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing five police officers. Police responded by shooting into the crowd, which returned the fire, taking the lives of two more policemen and three civilians. According to the latest study of the case, the bomb attack was part of an anarchist plot to attack the police throughout the city.3 The events in Chicago ignited an anarchist scare and led to a nationwide manhunt for anarchists and sympathizers. The Chicago police, furious about the attack, eagerly repressed the anarchist movement, arresting 150 suspects without warrants and shutting down an anarchist paper. Most of the anarchists in America were immigrants, and the Haymarket Riot helped to construct the picture of the bearded alien with a bomb.4 During the following decades, the tit-for-tat between the anarchists and the authorities gradually escalated. While anarchists attacked symbols of the system—in 1892 Alexander Berkman shot industrialist Henry Frick and nine years later Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley—the police often brutally repressed the movement. Across the nation, anarchist meetings were broken up, speakers arrested and protesters clubbed.5 Another victim of early antiradical repression was the Industrial Workers of the World, which espoused syndicalist ideas. During the “free speech” fight in 1909–1913, hundreds of members were arrested, confined in unheated locales, and fire-hosed with ice-cold water; an investigator for the California governor compared the level of police brutality to that of Czarist Russia.6 Following the American entry into World War I in 1917, the Socialist Party became a target of repression, as local police broke up meetings and arrested leaders, and federal agents raided the party’s national office and confiscated files.7

Preparing for the Palmer Raids During the war, the federal government strengthened the legislation aimed at radical aliens. The Immigration Act of 1917 gave the authorities the power to deport any alien, who espoused anarchist ideas. The following year, Congress extended the immigration provisions to aliens “who are members of or affiliated with any organization that entertains a belief in, teaches, or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States … or that advocates or teaches the unlawful destruction of property … ”8 This “guilt-by-membership” clause enabled the authorities to deport aliens solely on the basis of proven membership of an anarchist organization and not of individual guilt. This paved the way for mass deportations of a whole class of undesirable non-citizens. The Palmer raids (named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) took place in the context of the Red Scare in 1919–1920. The fear of radicalism was fueled by the Russian Revolution, wartime passions, anarchist bombs, labor unrest, and race riots, as well as patriots, veterans, businessmen, and officials looking to return to “normalcy.” The first step toward the raids occurred in Seattle, Washington, following the collapse of the brief general strike in early 1919. Agents of the Bureau of Investigation (the later FBI) had compiled a list of radical aliens during the strike,9 and on February 13 federal agents assisted by members of the Sheriff’s office raided the IWW Defense Committee offices and arrested 26 members. Aliens were handed over to the immigration authorities for deportation proceedings.10 Police in Oregon, California, and New York joined the act by raiding IWW premises and arresting members.11

“The New Type of Aggressiveness” On November 7, 1919, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, BI agents assisted by local police raided offices of the Union of Russian Workers (URW), regarded by the authorities as an anarchist organization with an alien membership, in a dozen cities. According to official figures, 1,182 persons were arrested, more than half of them without a warrant.12 197

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Later, a number of aliens claimed they had been mistreated by the federal agents during the raid against the Russian People’s House in New York City. One representative example is that of Nicaoli Melikoff, who remembered that he was ordered to leave a classroom by detectives: “Outside of the class-room there were two detectives standing and everyone that passed out of the room was beaten. I was struck on my head, and being the last one to go out, was attacked by one detective, who knocked me down again, sat on my back, pressing me down to the floor with his knee and bending my body back until blood flowed out of my mouth and nose. … After this, I was thrown down stairs where I fell with my head down to the ground floor … ”13 The existing BI files throw no light on the matter, as the agents’ reports are silent on the subject. However, contemporary newspaper accounts support the charge of brutality. It should be noted that these papers generally supported the raids and the suppression of radicals. For example, The New York Times reported on the URW raid in New York City: “A number of those in the building were badly beaten by the police during the raid, their heads wrapped in bandages testifying to the rough manner in which they had been handled.”14 The New York Herald summarized the raid: “Windows and doors were broken, heads were battered and furniture was smashed in the swift and thorough hunt for evidence against the plotters.”15 The paper added that those who refused or were slow to follow the order to descend the stairs from the upper floors, “were just as smartly pushed down.”16 The following day, when 33 aliens, who had been arrested during the raid, arrived at Ellis Island for deportation proceedings, The New York Times noted that most of them had “bandaged heads, black eyes, or other marks of rough handling …” Those released by the authorities showed similar signs of police brutality: “Most of them also had blackened eyes and lacerated scalps as souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which has been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds and suspected Reds.”17 One informer, code-named “DD,” confirmed that the federal agents and the police had vandalized the premises during the raid. When he visited the Russian People’s House later, he found the printing machines broken and the type thrown on the floor, whereas all the literature had been destroyed, partly by the authorities and partly by the URW itself.18 While the raid in New York seems to have been the most violent, URW members were mistreated in other cities. According to their subsequent statements, aliens, who had been arrested in Bridgeport, Connecticut, were detained for months in a jail in Hartford, while they were beaten and threatened with hanging.19 The brutal treatment meted out to the suspected radical aliens may be explained by the fact that the federal agents were under considerable pressure to obtain confessions of membership in the URW from the suspects; that the Department of Justice had been criticized for passivity in the face of the radical threat; and that the mistreatment might strike fear into the hearts of other radicals.

“Violence Toward Any Aliens Should be Scrupulously Avoided” On the night of January 2, 1920, BI agents assisted by local police carried out nationwide raids against the meeting places of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party. Following the 198

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preliminary examinations, the Bureau transferred 2,435 suspected alien communists to the immigration authorities.20 While the Bureau’s instructions to the field offices cautioned that “Violence towards any alien should be scrupulously avoided,” the agents were also impressed with the importance of obtaining confessions before the next morning.21 However, the Bureau had made few preparations for the large number of prisoners who overwhelmed the capacities of local authorities. In Boston, the prisoners were taken to Deer Island, where they were kept under insanitary conditions, with no mattresses or blankets, and exposed to the cold. In Detroit, 800 prisoners were held in a windowless corridor in the old Federal Building for several days, before being moved to an old army fort, where they claimed they were brutally treated by the guards.22 Two cases of alleged brutality deserve mention. The Italian immigrant Gaspare Cannone was arrested without a warrant on March 30, 1920, in connection with the investigation into the anarchist bombs the previous year. He was taken by BI agents to the Bureau field office in the Park Row Building in New York City. Here he was put through the “third degree” in the form of beating and kicking, in order to identify suspects in the bombing cases. Photographs taken the next day show Cannone with a clear black eye. The Italian refused to sign a statement, which was produced by the agents, and so the agents forged his signature on the statement.23 Earlier that month, another Italian immigrant and anarchist, Andrea Salsedo, had been arrested in the same case and taken to the field office. He, too, was beaten by the agents in an attempt to extract information, and witnesses, who saw Salsedo later, noted his bruised face and blackened eyes. Together with a comrade, Roberto Elia, who had also been given the “third degree,” Salsedo was confined in the field office for eight weeks, during which he began to speak about his anarchist comrades. Early in the morning on May 3, he committed suicide by jumping from a window on the 14th floor of the building.24

“These Splendid Men, These Real Americans” The aftermath of the Palmer Raids throws light on the traditionally difficulty in bringing federal agents or police officers, who have mistreated suspects, to justice. As the Red Scare subsided in 1920 and Palmer’s deportation plans unraveled, the raids came under increasing scrutiny. The most serious critique was formulated by a group of 12 prominent lawyers, among them Felix Frankfurter, Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and Roscoe Pound, who accused the Department of Justice of having committed “continual illegal acts.” In a report backed up by affidavits, photographs, and newspaper articles, the lawyers alleged that, among other offenses, “Great numbers of persons arrested, both aliens and citizens, have been threatened, beaten with blackjacks, struck with fists, jailed under abominable conditions, or actually tortured.”25 In June 1920, Attorney General Palmer was given an opportunity to answer the charges against the department during hearings before the House Rules Committee. His defense was the classic response to accusations of mistreatment by officials: since it was a question of word against word, naturally the word of the officer must be believed and the suspect’s allegation must be rejected: “Of course, Mr. Chairman, when we come to the matter of proof as to charges of this character you have on the one side the testimony of the alien himself, and you have on the other the testimony of the sworn agents of the Bureau of Investigation: sworn officers of the law and officers of the Government.”26 Noting that he chose to believe the words of the agents, whom he described as “these splendid men, real Americans” and “extremely high-class men,”27 he produced signed affidavits from the agents, denying any wrongdoing or mistreatment of the aliens during the raids or the subsequent imprisonment and interrogation. In addition, Palmer entered into the record a large amount of radical 199

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literature and official reports in order to back up his assertion that the raids had been conducted in the service of a higher cause – the defense of the American government. While the House Rules Committee did not take any action, this was not the end of the matter. During the early months of 1921, as the Wilson administration was leaving office, a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings into the Palmer Raids. During the hearings, a report publicized by the Commission on the Church and Social Service of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America was entered into the record. The report was written by Constantine A. Panunzio, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was based on his visits to detention centers, interviews with aliens, and the examination of 200 deportation case files. He confirmed the allegations about the harsh conditions in Hartford and Detroit, and he found that 91 aliens had been arrested without a warrant, and 17 had testified at the deportation hearings that “they were pounded with clubs, blackjacks, handcuffs or were threatened into submissiveness at the point of a revolver, either at the time of arrest or in the course of the preliminary examination.”28 Attorney General Palmer repeated that it was a matter of the aliens’ words against the officers’, and that he had no difficulty in preferring the officers’ denials:29 “The charges of brutality, of forgery of names, and thefts of money, and inhuman treatment, of dragging people out of their beds without clothing, and all that kind of thing, have been effectively, absolutely contradicted by the record and by the affidavits of persons who were concerned therein. I do not believe there has been shown a single case of substantive proof of any of those charges against the manner in which this work was carried out by the Department of Justice.”30 He added that if some of the agents had mistreated the aliens, this was understandable in view of the circumstances: “If one or two of them, overzealous or perhaps outraged as patriotic American citizens – and all of them were – by the conduct of these aliens, stepped over the bounds and treated them a little roughly, or too roughly, I forgive them.”31 The nation had been in an emergency and faced with the radical tide, the officers had acted in the national interest. Moreover, Palmer averred, he and the officers had been urged by an alarmed public to strike at the radical aliens: “I say I was shouted at from every editorial sanctum in America from sea to sea; I was preached upon from every pulpit; I was urged – I could feel it dinned into my ears – throughout the country to do something and do it now and do it quick, and do it in a way that would bring results to stop this sort of thing in the United States.”32 Thus, the federal agents had only acted when they had been pressured by the public, and the aliens were themselves responsible for the treatment they received. The committee had little taste for condemning the actions of the Department of Justice, and they accepted the Attorney General’s argument that the allegations made by the aliens could not be trusted. Republican Senator Thomas Sterling, while regretting that the confinement in Detroit had been accompanied by “unnecessary hardships,” refused to believe that the aliens had been treated brutally without provocation during the raid against the URW in New York.33 Democratic Senator Thomas J. Walsh, while much more critical of the actions of the Department of Justice, also rejected the claims of the aliens, noting that some of them belonged to “that class that rancorously array themselves against all government and cultivate fault-finding with its ministers as a fine act.”34 For 200

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two years the committee debated the matter, and at one time Senator Sterling confided to Senator Walsh “that it were better the affair were forgotten and no report made by the Committee.”35 And so it finally ended: On January 29, 1923, a majority of the Committee on the Judiciary decided “that under the conditions now existing it is inadvisable to make a report at this time.”36 As Beverly Gage has noted, the absence of radical aliens from the hearings demonstrated the degree to which they were excluded from the permissible debate.37 The inquiry took place while a current of nativism swept over the nation. Henry Ford spread the word about the Jewish menace, the second Ku Klux Klan reemerged as a movement of several million white Protestants, and Congress enacted legislation which in effect put an end to immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.38 The controversy surrounding the Palmer Raids did have long-term consequences for the Bureau of Investigation. Following the directions of Attorney General Harlan F. Stone, the Bureau ended its surveillance of political activities, it was professionalized and scientific crime-fighting methods were introduced. It crafted an image of an effective and law-abiding organization as opposed to local police forces, which were traditionally known for being inept, corrupt, and under undue political influence. As FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, appointed by Stone in 1924, later told his mentor, the FBI had endeavored to take leadership in the field of law enforcement when it met opposition from “the old line school” who believed “that brawn should prevail over brain; that the third degree had a place in law enforcement; and also that many unethical and undesirable tactics were imperative to use in order to get results.” Hoover stressed that the FBI had successfully opposed such methods.39

The Police Unleashed When the Bureau of Investigation curtailed its surveillance of political activities in 1924, local police departments picked up the slack. During the roaring 1920s, they had little to do in this area, although they continued to raid offices, break up meetings and arrest communist and socialist speakers. In rare instances, radicals were deported from the county or beaten in jail.40 With the coming of the Great Depression police were mobilized to combat the growing unrest and protests against unemployment. Police forces used various disorderly-conduct, disturbing-the-peace, criminal syndicalism, sedition, and insurrection statutes to crack down on radical activities, and the number of meetings that were broken up by police rose from 52 in 1929 to 121 the following year. In Oklahoma City police used tear gas to break up protest meetings, in Seattle police used fire hoses to evict squatters, and in Chicago police clubbed teachers, who protested the lack of wages.41 During the war on anarchism, several major police departments had established Anarchist or Bomb Squads to deal with the menace. These entities were now reconstituted as Radical or Intelligence Bureaus (also known as Red Squads) and charged with keeping tabs on local radicals. In particular, these forces reacted with violence against demonstrations organized by the Communist Party.42 In New York City, the Radical Bureau led by John A. Lyons, regularly engaged in clashes and mass arrests of demonstrators and cooperated with federal agencies to identify alien radicals. On March 6, 1930, police directed by Police Commissioner Grover A. Whalen attacked a demonstration against unemployment organized by the communists, indiscriminately clubbing and beating the protesters.43 In Chicago, Police Lieutenant Make Mills’ Radical Bureau harassed demonstrations organized by the communist Unemployment Councils by driving patrol cars into the assembled crowds, clubbing the participants or (in a few instances) shooting at the protesters. The Philadelphia Radical Bureau repeatedly broke up demonstrations, brutally beating protesters with nightsticks and executing mass arrests. In Detroit, the Special Investigation Bureau attacked a hunger march organized by the Auto Workers Union, using tear gas, mounted charges, and clubbings. This antiradical campaign culminated in early 1933 with police shootings, beatings, mass arrests, and mistreatment of prisoners. Finally, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Intelligence Bureau led by Captain William F. Hynes routinely broke up communist and other radical demonstrations and raided communist 201

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premises. In October 1931 members of the Bureau invaded a protest meeting in the Philharmonic Auditorium and dispersed the audience employing gas bombs and clubbings, and on January 3, 1932, the detectives stopped an unemployment demonstration by, according to one account, wading into the crowd “with clubs, slingshots, and brass knuckles, beating many of them indiscriminately to the ground.”44 By the middle of the thirties, the political situation had changed, the support for the New Deal was widespread, and the atmosphere became more tolerant. Police brutality against radicals diminished, although the occasional leftist, unemployed or student felt the policeman’s nightstick.45

The FBI Raids in Detroit 1940 During the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, some 2,000 Americans enlisted on the loyalist side and fought in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Some of the volunteers were communists while others were anti-fascists. The Department of Justice received a number of complaints since the enlistment for a foreign war constituted a violation of Section 22, Title 18 of the U.S. Code.46 This presented the Roosevelt administration with a political dilemma, since many liberals opposed the prosecution of the loyalists, while many Catholics supported it; both groups were part of the Democrats’ base.47 In response, Attorney General Homer S. Cummings instructed the department to initiate careful investigations in order to determine if any cases might lead to a conviction.48 One of the cases involved the enlistment of the Spanish loyalists in Detroit. Following the completion of an investigation by the FBI, a Grand Jury in early February 1940 returned an indictment against 16 persons, charging them with conspiracy to engage in the enlistment of persons to fight in a foreign conflict. On February 6, FBI agents in a coordinated operation arrested 12 suspects, ten in Detroit, one at the border to Canada and one in Milwaukee. What happened during and after the raids became the subject of a contentious controversy about the FBI’s attitude toward civil liberties. According to the suspects, the federal agents had “terrorized” them during the raids. The agents arrived at the suspects’ homes at five o’clock in the morning, waking them by demanding access to the homes and in one instance forcibly gaining entrance by breaking down the door. Squads of agents entered, instructing the suspects to get out of bed and dress. Refusing to reveal what crimes they were charged with, the agents handcuffed the frightened suspects and drove away with them without informing their families where they were taking them. Meanwhile, agents searched the premises without warrants. According to the suspects, they were put through the third degree at the FBI offices in Detroit. Upon arrival, they were stripped and examined, whereupon they were “grilled” for hours by teams of agents and pressured to provide information regarding the case as well as their union activities and friends. During the whole time, they were held incommunicado and refused access to an attorney. Not until the agents had completed the interrogations, at three o’clock the next afternoon, were the suspects allowed to speak with a lawyer, although surrounded by FBI agents. Manacled and chained together, the suspects were marched to the courtroom, where excessive bail was set by the judge. Being led out, they were photographed while chained together and looking like dangerous criminals. Sent to the nearby federal penitentiary, they were treated as convicts, and their families were denied permission to see them.49 The Detroit case was taken up by Senator George W. Norris, who wrote Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, requesting him to investigate the activities of the FBI. Norris referred to the widespread complaints about the Bureau’s mistreatment of the prisoners, arguing that the effect “has a tendency to coerce him, to break him down, to disgrace him unnecessarily, and is, it seems to me, indefensible.” According to the senator, the treatment could be described as “third-degree methods” and “methods which are inhuman and brutal.”50 Initially, Attorney General Jackson defended the FBI, characterizing the Bureau as “an efficient, professional, and non-political investigatory service” 202

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and rejected the need for an inquiry, noting that “I find nothing to justify any charge of misconduct against the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”51 This did not deter Senator Norris from pursuing the matter further, and he informed the Attorney General about the content of some of the complaints. Once again describing the FBI’s methods as “third degree methods” with the intent “to break down, to intimidate, to frighten them,” Norris urged Jackson to initiate “an impartial investigation” of the affair.52 Faced with the detailed allegations of misconduct, Jackson apparently felt he had little choice. He was possibly influenced by the fact that liberal news outlets called for curbing the FBI, and that the public debate was getting out of control, threatening to damage the Bureau and its mission to combat subversive activities during the world crisis.53 On March 14, Jackson announced that he had appointed Assistant Attorney General Henry Schweinhaut, head of the recently established Civil Liberties Unit of the Department of Justice to reexamine the facts surrounding the Detroit case and report to him.54 While the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, had little choice but to support the investigation, at the same time he endeavored to defend the Bureau against its critics. He argued that the FBI agents had acted courteously during the arrests and that the Bureau had merely followed standard procedures and regulations.55 He pointed out that some of the suspects in the Detroit case were communists and had previously been arrested by the police, thereby inferring that their testimonies were unreliable. In particular, he made sure to inform the Attorney General that one of the suspects, a young woman, was a member of the Communist Party who was known to be promiscuous and engage in interracial sex, clearly something to be condemned according to the director.56 Finally, Hoover claimed that the criticism levelled against the FBI was a “’smear’ campaign” which had originated at a secret meeting of the Communist Party with the aim of hampering the Bureau’s exposure of the party’s subversive activities.57

“Whitewashing” the FBI When Henry Schweinhaut submitted his findings on the Detroit raids to the Attorney General, he confirmed most of the allegations, but in substance cleared the FBI agents of any wrongdoings. He found that the early morning arrests were “perfectly justifiable,” judged that the forced entry was “reasonable,” described the disorder following the searches as “inevitable,” found that the use of handcuffs was “sound,” concluded that the suspects were “adequately informed” about their rights, described the refusal to see their families as the result of “a misunderstanding,” argued that the physical examination was “not only justifiable, but desirable,” rejected the claim that the prisoners were exposed to news photographers as without any basis, and refused to make a decision on the charge of excessive bail as it was a judicial question. In particular, he rejected any allegations of brutality or use of the third-degree: “Specific allegations of mistreatment or improper conduct on the part of the Agents are few, and they are so inconsistent with the general pattern of the arrest procedure that they can be given little credence.”58 Schweinhaut only leveled mild criticism against the agents’ searches and seizures without warrants, the short time has given the prisoners to confer with their attorney, and the use of chains by the US Marshals.59 Schweinhaut’s report left the critics disappointed. Senator Norris called it a “whitewashing” and warned that if permitted to continue, the FBI’s methods would “mean the destruction of human liberty in the United States.”60 He darkly suggested that Schweinhaut’s investigation had not been completely impartial and that “Mr. Hoover has been designated to make the investigation of Mr. Hoover.”61 The American Civil Liberties Union likewise criticized the report for excusing methods which instead 203

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ought to be met by “the severest condemnation.”62 The lawyer Max Lowenthal, who was an eager New Dealer and advisor to Harry Truman (and the later author of a highly critical study of the FBI), summed up his impression of the report: “Stripped of the language and tone of the report, favorable to the F.B.I., the report admits half a dozen or more of the more serious of the charges made against the F.B.I. in the Detroit case. A number of the other serious charges are not even discussed in the Schweinhaut report.”63 Lowenthal singled out the fact that the agents held the prisoners incommunicado for particular severe condemnation. So, too, did the Detroit suspects’ attorney, Ernest Goodman, who called the actions “not only illegal; they are fraudulent and deceitful.”64 In a 22-page rebuttal to the Schweinhaut report, the attorney pointed out that the intention of the “intensive grilling” was to obtain confessions: “Although the third degree is normally associated with physical force, the courts have held that it can also consist of continuous and protracted questioning under circumstances which tend to break down the morale and spirit of the prisoners.”65 Goodman also left little doubt about the importance of the Detroit case. In most cases of police brutality, the victims were “poor, weak, and defenseless” and they were denied justice. But in the Detroit case, where national interest had been raised, it was important to “vigorously and publicly” condemn the methods used, something which would act as “a deterrent to similar violations everywhere and gives courage to victims to defend themselves by invoking the Constitution as a living protective force.”66 Why didn’t the Civil Liberties Unit of the Department of Justice use the opportunity to condemn police brutality? Attorney General Robert Jackson’s answer to the critics was that it was far better that the investigation of subversive activities was left with the FBI, a “responsible” agency, which showed a healthy respect for civil liberties.67 Jackson pointed out that since Hoover took over as director in 1924, “not one case has been reversed by an appellate court because of ‘third degree’ or other improper treatment of defendants.”68 The Attorney General noted that the FBI “is far more closely circumscribed in its activities and much more regardful of civil liberties than many local police or prosecuting organizations have been.”69 Thus, the FBI was the responsible law enforcement alternative to local police and prosecutors. There was a deeper reason for the Attorney General’s defense of the FBI’s methods. In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt instructed Hoover to make a general survey of subversive activities in the United States, including fascism and communism. This was the justification for the FBI’s renewed surveillance of subversive activities.70 In 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt authorized the FBI to take charge of all investigations into “espionage, sabotage, and violations of neutrality regulations” and called on all law enforcement agencies to turn over information regarding these matters to the Bureau.71 In the eyes of the Roosevelt administration, the FBI played a vital role in the defense of national security during the evolving world crisis, and it was imperative that the public’s confidence in the Bureau was not weakened. Consequently, the administration strove to curtail the criticism of the FBI’s actions in Detroit in February 1940.

The End of Police Brutality During World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, communists and other left-wingers endured little repression from the authorities. This changed as the Cold War 204

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heated up in the late 1940s. However, the repression that took place on federal, state, and local levels did so in the form of legislation banning communist activities, loyalty oaths, and investigative committees. There were few instances of mass arrests or police brutality against alien radicals. One example was the arrests in 1948 of some 100 alien communists with a view toward deportation. On September 4, 1949, the Westchester police in upstate New York participated in the violent assault on the audience at a concert in Peekskill arranged by the Communist Party. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, a few communist meetings and demonstrations were broken up and their participants dispersed or arrested.72 When Senator Joseph McCarthy on February 9, 1950, in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, accused the Department of State of knowingly harboring a number of communists, he inaugurated the era that came to bear his name. In short, McCarthyism was the use by the Republicans of the issue of treason to defeat the Democrats in the election of 1952. While McCarthyism dominated the political scene in Washington for four years, police brutality against alien communists became rare. While the Communist Party of the United States withered away, the FBI initiated a Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which used extralegal methods to combat the party.73 Instead, the civil rights movement and, later, in the sixties, the peace and student movements became the new victims of police brutality.

Notes 1 Dean A. Strange, Worse Than the Devil. Anarchists, Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 199–205; William Douglas & Krista D. Forrest, Understanding Police Interrogation: Confessions and Consequences (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 11–17; and “The Third Degree,” Harvard Law Review 43 (February 1930), 617–623, quote 618. 2 For an early and highly critical study, see Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (New York: 1950); for a defense of the FBI, see Don Whitehead, The FBI Story. A Report to the People (New York: Random House, 1956); for a recent account, see Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, FBI. A History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007). 3 Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Haymarket Conspiracy. Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 4 Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America. From 1870 to 1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 38–42. 5 Ibid., 66, 78–79, 94. 6 Ibid., 86–87. 7 Ibid., 119, 126–127; and James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America 1912–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, (1967) 1969), 140–145. 8 Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 55–56. 9 Simmons, Telegram to Allen, February 9, 1910, OG 91928, Record Group 65, National Archives, Washington, DC. 10 W. B. Thayer, “Re: I.W.W. Defense Committee,” February 14, 1919, ibid. 11 Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 146. 12 Schmidt, Red Scare, 268. 13 Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice (Washington, DC: National Popular Government League, 1920), 19. 14 New York Times, November 8, 1919. 15 New York Herald, November 8, 1919, clipping in BS 202600-184, RG 65, NA. 16 Ibid. 17 New York Times, November 9, 1919. 18 DD, Reports, November 11 and December 1, 1919, BS 202600-184, RG 65, NA. 19 NPGL report, 11–16. 20 Schmidt, Red Scare, 291. 21 Frank Burke, “Confidential Instructions, Dec. 27, 1919,” reprinted in NPGL report, 37–40. 22 NPGL report, 22–23, 42–43.

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Regin Schmidt 23 Ibid., 31–36. 24 Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti. The Anarchist Background (Princeton.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 182–195. 25 NPGL report, 3, 4. 26 U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Rules, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges Made Against Department of Justice by Louis F. Post and Others, Hearings, 66th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), Part 1–3, 74. 27 Ibid. 28 Constantine M. Panunzio, ”The Deportation Cases of 1919–20”, in, U. S. Congress, Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice, Hearings, 66th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921), 334, 335–336. 29 Ibid., 6, 84, 421–425. 30 Ibid., 573. Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., of Harvard University testified during the hearings about the difficulty of proving instances of police brutality: “Of course, each side is probably somewhat biased. I mean, without making any imputation against the officials, they are in the nature of police, and anybody who has argued a case to a jury knows that the testimony of policemen is taken somewhat at a discount, because they have somewhat of the professional spirit.” (Ibid., 183) 31 Ibid., 581–582. 32 Ibid., 580. 33 Report. Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice (Senator Sterling), 20, 22, 33, box 107, George W. Norris Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 34 Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice (Senator Walsh), 1, box 106, Norris Papers, LC. 35 Thomas Walsh to Hon. H. Lowndes Maury, April 28, 1922, box 278, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, LC. 36 Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, “Committee Minutes Relating to ‘Charges of Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice”, 2, ibid. 37 Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded. A Story of America In Its First Age of Terror (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2009), 239. 38 John Higham, Strangers in the Land. Patterns of Nativism in America, 1865–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 264–330. 39 J. Edgar Hoover to Harlan F. Stone, April 23, 1940, box 17, Harlan F. Stone papers, LC. 40 Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 177–178. 41 Ibid., 201–204; and William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream. A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), 56. 42 These secret units have left few traces of their activities. The exception is the Red Squad of the Chicago Police Department, which was forced by a court order to deposit its files from the period 1930 to 1986 in the Chicago Historical Museum. 43 Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege. Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1990), 47–48; and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Crisis of the Old Order. The Age of Roosevelt 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957), 166. 44 Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 49–64; quotation from p. 61. 45 Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 231–233. 46 Brien McMahon, “Memorandum for the Attorney General”, February 9, 1938, box 100, Homer S. Cummings Papers, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. 47 Brien McMahon, “Supplemental Memorandum for the Attorney General”, February 10, 1938, ibid. 48 Homer S. Cummings, “Memorandum for Mr. McMahon”, February 21, 1938, ibid. 49 Civil Rights Federation of Michigan, FBI Detroit. The Facts Concerning the FBI Raids in Detroit (Detroit: Civil Rights Federation, 1940), 4–8, box 93, Robert H. Jackson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 50 George W. Norris to Robert H. Jackson, February 22, 1940, box 106, Norris papers, LC. 51 Robert H. Jackson to George W. Norris, March 1, 1940, box 105, Norris papers, LC. 52 Norris to Jackson, March 10, 1940, ibid. 53 “Our Lawless G-Men,” The Nation, March 2, 1940; “Card for Mr. Hoover,” The Nation, March 23, 1940; “What the FBI Is Doing,” The New Republic, May 9, 1940; “Hoover Needs a Master,” New York Daily News, March 13, 1940; and “It’s Time to Squelch Government Spies,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 13, 1940. 54 “Suggested Statement At Press Conference”, March 14, 1940, box 106, Norris papers, LC. 55 J. Edgar Hoover, ”Memorandum for the Attorney General,” March 2, 1940, box 93, Jackson papers, LC; Hoover, “Memorandum for the Attorney General,” March 25, 1940, ibid.; and Hoover, “Memorandum for the Attorney General,” April 12, 1940, ibid.

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From A. Mitchell Palmer to Joe McCarthy 56 J. Edgar Hoover, “Memorandum for the Attorney General”, March 27, 1940, ibid.; Hoover, “Memorandum for the Attorney General”, March 29, 1940, ibid. 57 J. Edgar Hoover to Harlan F. Stone, April 23, 1940, box 17, Harlan F. Stone papers, LC. 58 Henry Schweinhaut, ”Report to the Attorney General Concerning Investigation of Arrests and Subsequent Procedure in Detroit Spanish Recruiting Cases,” n.d., 15, box 105, Norris papers, LC. 59 Ibid., 10, 12, 14. 60 Congressional Record, May 7, 1940, 8699, 8700. 61 George W. Norris to Henry A. Schweinhaut, May 20, 1940, box 106, Norris papers, LC. 62 American Civil Liberties Union, “Press Service. For Immediate Release,” n.d., ibid. 63 Max Lowenthal, “The Schweinhaut Report on the Detroit Case,” n.d., 4–5, box 107, Norris papers, LC. 64 Ernest Goodman to Henry A. Schweinhaut, May 9, 1940, 14, box 107, Norris papers, LC. 65 Ibid., 17. 66 Ibid., 21. 67 Robert H. Jackson to Roger N. Baldwin, April 6, 1940, box 93, Jackson papers, LC. 68 Robert H. Jackson to George W. Norris, May 3, 1940, box 106, Norris papers, LC. 69 Robert H. Jackson to Arthur Garfield Hays, March 8, 1941, box 93, Jackson papers, LC. 70 J. Edgar Hoover, “Confidential Memo,” August 24, 1936; Hoover, “Confidential Memo,” August 25, 1936; and Hoover, “Strictly Confidential Memo,” September 10, 1936, in Athan Theoharis, ed., From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991), 180–183. 71 J. Edgar Hoover, “Press Release to All Law Enforcement Officials,” September 9, 1939, ibid., 184. 72 Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 348–360. 73 Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI, 169–170.

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SECTION 5

Police Brutality and Protest in the Era of Vietnam

16 BEHIND THE BILLY CLUB Chicago Police and the Violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention Frank Kusch

The Democratic National Convention of 1968 was the stage not only for the seminal domestic battle of the 1960s but is emblematic of a long history of police violence against citizens on American streets. The legacy of those chaotic days remains searing and contentious, with little agreement other than the events reflect a national reality. Few emerged from the now infamous week-long clash in Chicago unscathed, better, more thoughtful, or more prepared as to what to do next. Chicago in ’68 was a failure of national and civic leadership, coupled with poor judgment and questionable tactics on the part of law enforcement commanders, and a glaring, violent overreach by far too many police officers. Not relegated to history, the events on the streets outside the convention hall have energy and relevance decades later, clinging to cultural memory, at times with clarity and insight, but often rigid and trapped. Thrust between the right during citizens to dissent and the need for “law and order,” police actions that week have become an example for law enforcement of what not to do. In the raw aftermath, both the officers and those they battled reduced the other side to caricatures, where common humanity is not remembered, expected, nor even desired. Even in the most challenging circumstances, as the spring and summer in Chicago in 1968 clearly presented, those charged with upholding the law and keeping the peace face an enormous burden. Police emerged from the convention with a collective black eye, judged by investigators and journalists as “stormtroopers in blue” and rioters.1 While the nation watched with a critical eye, Chicagoans largely disagreed with the assessments reached by government investigators. Indeed, Chicago police had as many supporters as detractors. Where they did not have sympathy was in the local and national press core, a result for which they only had themselves to blame. As the evidence shows, officers rarely distinguished between violent protestors and journalists, a situation that underscores long-held divisions between law enforcement and its monitors. In 1968, police officers viewing members of the media through the same lens as the antiwar movement and the counterculture contributed not only to the scale of violence that week but shaped our memory of that seminal event. Antiwar leaders and journalists wrote of their experiences, but the police did not. This chapter includes their perspective or a “view from behind the billy club.”2 It is a view fueled by disquieting and perhaps disproportionate rage with their uneasy place in history. Despite repeatedly crossing the line between protection and punishment, they managed not to shoot a single person or take a single life during that violent convention week.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-22

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The trouble for police, however, began well before the epitaph was written on that week in August of 1968. The flashpoint was the searing condemnation officers received from Chicago city hall in the bloody aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Critics excoriated police as being too soft on rioters. The cruelty of April set the cops on a collision course with the convention that summer.

Shoot to Kill It was not like 1968 needed help to send it into a generational tailspin. Amid a costly war in Vietnam and a domestic war raging on American streets, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis on April 4 was a lit match in a tinder box, as dozens of American neighborhoods went up in flames—Chicago was not immune. In the days and weeks following King’s assassination, arson demolished twenty city blocks, while break-ins and looting were widespread.3 As 5,000 Army troops arrived to help restore order, Mayor Richard Daley set a 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew for everyone under the age of twenty-one.4 By the end of April 7, Chicago police had arrested two thousand people for looting and arson.5 Police largely acted with restraint and few charges of undue force emerged. Major Daley praised his police department for an “outstanding job in trying times.”6 Such utterances were short-lived. Criticism soon mounted that the mayor failed to curtail the arson and widespread looting. Among the critics was State Senator Charles Chow (D) from Chicago. “I would like to see the law enforced at all costs, and I don’t care whose toes are stepped on.”7 Citizens also expressed their displeasure. The Tribune reader’s forum included numerous instructions on how Mayor Daley should handle riots in the future. “Let’s change the rules,” wrote one outraged Chicagoan. “No decent person wants looting. All over the world, the order ‘shoot to kill all looters’ has always been the only effective deterrent to this dastardly crime. Make it clear that all looters are to be shot on site.” The Tribune’s editorial board echoed this sentiment, implying that the mayor and the police could have done more. “Until the army restored order, we had anarchy in Chicago.”8 Stung by the criticism, Daley made headlines when he ordered the police department to “shoot to kill” arsonists and “shoot to maim or cripple” looters.9 The mayor also publicly rebuked superintendent of police, James B. Conlisk Jr., suggesting he would “surely take action to improve the police department.”10 Chicago’s police superintendent wasted no time sending a terse directive over the department’s Teletype to all unit commanders: “Arson, attempted arson, burglary, and attempted burglary and forcible felonies. Such force as is necessary including deadly force [gunfire] shall be used to prevent the commission of these offenses and to prevent the escape of perpetrators.”11 The President of the Fraternal Order of Police Joseph J. LeFevour and former superintendent O.W. Wilson both publicly supported the mayor’s stance.12 City officials received more than 10,000 letters backing Daley by a count of 15 to 1.13 “He’s talking my language,” said Chicago city alderman Vito Marzullo. “If the order had been issued April 5 there would have been less trouble, and it would have been ended quickly.”14 Indeed, the fiery city boss sent shockwaves through his police department, as officers knew there was an expectation that next time their behavior would not only be scrutinized, but it would have to be different.15 It did not take long for a new hard line on disturbances to be put to the test. On April 27, a peace march from Grant Park to the Civic Center Plaza turned to a bloody battle as officers under the command of Superintendent James Conlisk moved in, pushing the gathering crowd off the Plaza grounds and onto nearby Washington and Clark streets, deploying mace when they faced resistance. Commander James Riordan later complained to the media that “many policemen were kicked, pummeled and spat on.”16 Witnesses claimed that it was the cops who lost control, as they also attacked spectators and local area shoppers. Among the victims was Sun-Times

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photographer Jack Lenahan who was struck by police batons after trying to photograph a woman knocked down by an onrush of officers. The assistant city editor with the City News Bureau was also hit in the head during the scuffle with police.17 Some of the locals encouraged police to, “Sock it to ’em.”18 As Cal Noonan—already a fifteen-year veteran of the department, recalled “Look, this was no big thing happening on the streets that April; the superintendent [James Conlisk] had got his hide tanned in public by Daley, and the thumb was on us to make sure that it didn’t happen again. And everyone knew that the big show [the Democratic National Convention] was on that summer. We were under pressure to shut down the movement in Chicago.”19

The Yippies are Coming Paranoia, and even hatred, of elements of the antiwar movement, bloomed in city hall and in the ranks of the police department prior to the convention. Central to the concerns were the Yippies. Led by Abbey Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, they championed a revolution by drugs and sex and issued outrageous statements all designed to attract media attention. As Todd Gitlin observed, “Abbie and Jerry Rubin, like Abbott and Costello, might as well have been sent over from Central Casting.”20 The Yippies had made it clear early on that they were going to provoke anarchy in the streets of Chicago, including their well-publicized threats that included placing LSD into the city’s water supply. Yippie antics, the opposite of what activist leaders Tom Hayden and David Dellinger planned as they struggled to secure march permits, were taken seriously by Chicago cops. As former officer Norm Nelson recalled, “Let’s put it this way, we were ready for those SOBs.”21 As a result, Mayor Daley refused all permits for marches and parades, despite the efforts of Hayden and activist Rennie Davis who argued that they would lower the threats of violence between protesters and police. Organizers also learned that police would enforce a strict 11:00 p.m. curfew. Davis and Hayden even failed in their last-ditch efforts to gain permission for protesters to sleep in the parks.22 As the City of Chicago mobilized for combat, Daley Bellicosely declared “No one is going to take over the streets.”23 The usual police contingent of 6,000 officers on the streets grew to 11,900 on twelve-hour shifts, up from the usual eight. The city requested the mobilization of 5,649 Illinois National Guardsmen, with an additional 5,000 on alert bolstered by up to 1,000 FBI officers, and military intelligence officers. Waiting for signs of trouble in the suburbs would be six thousand Army troops, including members of the elite 101st Airborne Division.24

Convention Eve On August 24 and 25, the weekend before convention week officially got underway, trouble began with the cops and protestors in the city’s Old Town neighborhood and adjacent Lincoln Park. An ugly Saturday night of street violence spilled into Sunday. Vicious clashes ensued on the streets and park entrances throughout the neighborhood, prompting numerous calls for police backup as violence got out of control.25 While the crowds initially backed off in these skirmishes, many appeared emboldened to fight leading to additional battles.26 On both Saturday and Sunday nights the 11.00 p.m. curfew was a major contributor to the violence, forcing large numbers of people onto the streets.27 On Sunday, a crowd of approximately 700 marched out of the park into the middle of LaSalle, moving south, arm in arm, chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.”28 Crossing State Street, the crowd headed onto Michigan Avenue, blocked traffic, and pounded, rocked and stomped on cars, only dispersing when met head-on by a wall of police blocking the Michigan Avenue Bridge. As officers advanced across the bridge, some broke ranks and charged at fleeing demonstrators. Caught in the middle of the action was Sun-Times photojournalist Duane Hall

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wearing a helmet, press credentials, and carrying two cameras. Hall was clubbed in the left jaw and shoulder and had his camera broken while attempting to photograph an officer pursuing a demonstrator.29 On Sunday, the worst of the violence did not begin until ninety minutes following the 11:00 p.m. curfew when the bulk of police presence coalesced on the edge of Lincoln Park where they watched the remaining 1,500 demonstrators and others who had regrouped after skirmishes on the streets. A police official instructed those remaining that they had thirty seconds to clear out before officers would use force to remove them.30 Shouting, “Get the Bastards” the cops charged, driving everyone before them onto Clark Street, and striking some journalists who failed to disperse with the rest of the crowd.31 Veteran officer Al Ogilvie was surprised by the unpredictability of the crowds, as they mounted counterattacks as soon as they were dispersed by police. “It’s what scared the heck out of us a bit on Saturday … and more so on Sunday later on,” says Ogilvie. “They became very aggressive and came after us.”32 It is a view supported by witnesses. As some later told government investigators, they saw crowds openly defy the police. “The thing about this crowd was that since it thrived on confrontation it behaved in a way much different than any other crowd I’ve ever seen … . the police would break peoples’ heads but the crowd would not run away. [It would] regroup and surge back to the police and yell more epithets, as much as saying: ‘Do it again.’”33

Convention Week Begins On Monday, the “word came down” from commanders that arrests were to be frequent and obvious. As retired Chicago cop Archie Pasis remembers: “It was made clear to us that when we made arrests, it was going to be in a place where it got a lot of attention, and people could see that we were not going to screw around.”34 Throughout the afternoon there were numerous instances of violence between police and protestors, much of it concentrated in Grant Park across Michigan Avenue from the Conrad Hilton Hotel where Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy were staying.35 The gathering grew in both size and ferocity as it settled in across from the Hilton, while to the north, protestors gathered in Lincoln Park to hold rallies and wait for nightfall and the impending 11:00 p.m. curfew. According to several former cops, the rule was to keep the demonstrators from claiming the streets. “The kids were to be in the park until 11:00 p.m., and after a thirty-minute reprieve, they were to disassemble peacefully, and break apart, not congregating in groups, not marching on the delegates’ hotels, nor to the convention site,” recalled former officer Tom Freeborn. “When they left the park to march, we were told to block them, disperse them, and, if needed, to make arrests.”36 “Monday night” wrote Norman Mailer, “the city was washed with the air of battle.”37 The evening started off poorly for police when a protester squirted an acidic fluid into the eyes of an officer sitting in a cruiser at 2041 Lincoln Park West; the officer required treatment at Henrotin Hospital.38 Former officer Sheldon Bartowski recalled that Monday night was hell. “It was worse than I thought; people running yelling, throwing bricks, spitting … . it was impossible to keep control of these ever-shifting crowds.”39 There were numerous skirmishes between 9:00 and 10:00 pm, as another group, approximately one thousand strong, set out of Lincoln Park, moving down Wells Avenue, chanting antiwar slogans.40 As some officers held the middle of the street blocking it, a squad of about a dozen others knifed into the marchers, batons swinging.41 The majority of the crowd, however, dispersed quickly, most heading back to Lincoln Park where they remained until the 11:00 p.m. curfew and the next showdown with police.42 As they did on the weekend, police appeared to target the press for abuse, clubbing a photographer and reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times, a cameraman for both CBS and NBC, and a correspondent 214

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and photographer from Newsweek.43 These attacks came even after superintendent James Conlisk ordered an investigation into his officers’ conduct on the streets Sunday night and reminded officers that it was in their “best interest of the department and the City of Chicago that there be a harmonious relationship between the news media representatives and our personnel.”44 One local ABC reporter learned first-hand from an officer he knew, that the “word is out to get newsmen.”45 Several officers thought that the entire “press thing” was blown out of proportion. As Steven Latz recalled, “Most of the guys could have given two shits about them; they were just another body on the street to be moved.”46 Indeed, government investigators later found that many officers did not attempt to distinguish between demonstrators and the journalists who were covering them.47 As staff from Time pointed out, “No one could accuse the Chicago cops of discrimination. They savagely attacked hippies, yippies, New Leftists, revolutionaries, dissident Democrats, newsmen, photographers, passersby, clergymen, and at least one cripple.”48 Back in Lincoln Park as the 11:00 p.m. curfew approached, demonstrators hastily erected a barrier consisting of everything from park benches to garbage cans, to prevent the inevitable clearing of the park.49 Fifteen minutes past curfew, police issued a warning by loudspeaker. “The park is now closed,” a warning they repeated at 11:45 p.m. With the decision to clear the park at midnight, the police moved into position.50 Officers became edgy while poised at the line. As former police officer Joe Pecoraro recalled, “You don’t know what to expect—they were throwing billiard balls—you hope some nut doesn’t start shooting—you keep your fingers crossed.”51 Following a final bullhorn warning at 12:30 p.m., the police closed on the defiant protestors.52 While officers again appeared to also go after journalists, reporters from Ramparts noted that the police “were completely out of control … the attack was indiscriminate.” Demonstrators fought back, hurling rocks and bottles as they jammed into the tri-corner of Wells, Clark, and LaSalle, before moving down Wells Street to get away from the charging police, coughing and cursing as they fled. Police, however, had blocked exit routes.53 Although, police declared Lincoln Park clear at 12:28, all the park people were on the street, angry, frustrated, hurt, and looking for revenge.54 Officers, many of them no longer wearing ID tags, pushed the crowd until it reached Wells Street and North Avenue, where it dispersed. Journalists again faced police violence as they covered fleeing demonstrators. Nearby streets saw numerous pitched battles, blocked exits by competing lines of police, and panicked, fleeing demonstrators, batons cracking against skin and bone. If police genuinely intended to keep the peace on Monday night, they failed miserably.55 Tuesday morning’s page 5 headline in the Sun-Times’ read “Probe Police Beating of Newsmen: Another Photog Clubbed by Police,” while the Daily News front page stated: “Cops Assault 17 Newsmen.”56 The Sun-Times editorial blasted the police for the attacks on journalists, and criticized the practice of police removing their identification tags, allowing them to behave like “bullying anonymous thugs,” while the Daily News cautioned, “all citizens should be law-abiding, including the cops.”57 Daley, however, blamed journalists, adding, “We ask that the newsmen follow the orders of police, too.”58 While Conlisk promised to “investigate deviations” of individual officers, it appears that little of any consequence was done to curtail police on press violence other than additional warnings.59 By evening, the violence on the streets began again. Just before 11:00 p.m., 1,000 demonstrators left Lincoln Park for a peaceful march south to Grant Park. There were no arrests, while a crowd of about 500 stayed behind and dug in.60 Defying the curfew, police fired volleys of tear gas at the remaining demonstrators before moving into the park and pushing the crowd onto the neighboring streets. As protesters fled, they threw rocks, bricks, and bottles at advancing police. A brick struck one officer in the chest.61 The violence on both sides was sometimes vicious: an officer dragged a young man by the hair, struck him with his nightstick, and kicked him in the head, while protesters stoned a police cruiser as 215

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it moved south on Clark Street. With all the windows smashed in, demonstrators advanced on the stalled cruiser, throwing “stones and bottles with all their might through the shattered windows at the officers.” One of the officers fled the patrol car and ran into a passageway where he was stoned as he stood pinned against the wall of a building. His fellow officer rushed to his rescue; he drew his service revolver and the crowd finally dispersed. The officer did not fire his weapon.62 With the crowds converging from both the north and the south, police beefed up their reinforcements by the Hilton, standing five-deep in some places along the street. While the crowd yelled, “Peace now!” some began to throw bags and balloons full of urine and feces.63 At 1:15 a.m., Conlisk’s Deputy Superintendent James Rochford grabbed a bullhorn and announced that the crowd could stay in Grant Park overnight provided they remained peaceful. The crowd greeted his words with the only cheer police received all week.64 The cops that were there, however, were exhausted, some of them on their feet long past the end of their shift. Even though they had been on twelve-hour shifts since Saturday, some, by Tuesday night, had been on duty between fifteen and seventeen hours.65 Ray Mihalicz recalls the struggle: “It was not good; it’s hard to think clearly when you’ve been at it for that long—and it does not do wonders for your temper—maybe some of your judgment slips. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it can have an effect.”66 Shortly past 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Chicago police received a reprieve from the Illinois National Guard, and while many were relieved there was also concern that the Guard might not be able to withstand the abuse. “I tell you who we were worried about, when they brought in the Guard,” said retired officer Joe Pecoraro. “These were kids with a rifle in their hands, the National Guard, we thought, holy Christ, I hope they don’t start shooting anybody. They got a warning, but I don’t even know if their rifles were loaded. I thought they might start a real war … .”67 The worst day of violence, however, still lay ahead.

The Whole World Is Watching Chicago police took over for guardsmen in front of the Conrad Hilton by mid-morning Wednesday, and by 1:00 p.m., the guard set up a command post on the roof of the Field Museum, situated just south of Grant Park on the lakefront, and overlooking the band shell. The 2nd Battalion of the 127th Regiment was stationed on the east side of the museum, while the 129th Infantry manned the west side. The city granted activists their only permit of the week to hold a rally in the park from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. The crowd swelled from “a low of one thousand to somewhere between eight and ten thousand.”68 With police and national guardsmen virtually surrounding the park, helicopters crisscrossing overhead, seething anger from the crowd, instigators on both sides, and the crowd’s stated intention to march on the amphitheater, violence was only a matter of time. The spark Wednesday came during a speech against the draft when a man in an Army helmet climbed the flagpole to the left of the band shell and began to lower the American flag. Pacifist David Dellinger took the microphone and told the man to lower it to half-mast in honor of the wounded demonstrators. As officers, both uniformed and plainclothes moved in to arrest the man, some in the crowd began to scream, “Pigs! Pigs! Kill the pigs!” before turning on officers, throwing chunks of concrete, bricks, sticks, cans, bags, and balloons filled with paint and urine, eggs, tomatoes, and sticks. Speakers on stage implored the crowd to stop as they were hitting their own people.69 One demonstrator tried to grab an officer’s gun as he fell to the ground. Police fought back, their batons swinging in wide arcs. As Rennie Davis was pleading with the crowd to sit down and be calm, he was struck from behind by an officer and knocked unconscious.70 As the crowd pelted the officers with bricks and chunks of concrete in return, some officers began to shout at nearby reporters. “Take a picture of those bastards. Show people what they are doing.” Police retreated for cover under fire of flaming rags, shoes, sticks, and a bag of what was 216

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thought to be bloody sanitary napkins. A nearby police car was pelted with bags of human excrement. On stage, Dellinger looked on aghast. “Be calm!” he pleaded with the crowd. “Don’t be violent.” As if to prove to Dellinger the hopelessness of his words, someone in the crowd yelled out, “We have two more days to burn Chicago.”71 At 4:30 p.m., Dellinger, clearly disheartened over the ugly spectacle, announced that there would be an attempt to march on the amphitheater, a demonstration that he hoped would be non-violent and non-confrontational. But with the city already expressly denying such an occurrence, Dellinger’s plan had little chance of success.72 While the veteran activist tried to negotiate with Deputy Superintendent Rochford, it was clear that he was not going to get what he wanted. “There was no way this side of hell that we were going to allow them to march on the delegates,” said retired cop Paul Juravinski. “Rochford wasn’t an idiot. Not a chance.”73 Meanwhile, a crowd of approximately two thousand had congregated in front of the Hilton, with another five to six thousand pressing against the amassed forces circling Grant Park. The National Guard fired tear gas into the surging frantic crowd. People ran, choking, some vomiting.74 At the corner of Michigan and Balbo by the Hilton, two lines of police faced the more tenacious of the marchers who had made it through the tear gas. “I remember thinking, ‘oh shit,’” said cop Walter Jorgenson, “here they come again.”75 Police also lined two blocks of Grant Street opposite the hotel, while another police line stood on the Hilton’s east side, before forming a diagonal line across Michigan at Balbo to prevent the new arrivals from the street into the park. Demonstrators came equipped with helmets and gas masks. Some carried rocks, bottles, homemade javelins, bricks, ice picks, and golf balls studded with spikes.76 As two mobile network TV units moved into position, the crowd filled the intersection of Balbo and Michigan, overflowing into the adjacent streets. Traffic ground to a halt. Tear gas hung in the air. At 7:00 p.m., some officers tried to get people off the streets by ordering them to the curbs. Each time they retreated the crowd reclaimed their turf.77 At just past 7:30 p.m., a crowd began to form to march on the Amphitheater, the site of the convention, yelling, “One, two, three, four; stop this damn war”; “Dump the Hump”; “Daley must go”; “Prague, Prague, Prague!”; and the “The streets belong to the people, the streets belong to the people.” A large police unit then moved in the east on Balbo towards Michigan Avenue. Some in the crowd shouted “Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!” at the advancing police, throwing rocks, bottles, and eggs. In formation, police knifed into the core of the crowd, forcefully swinging their batons. Glasses flew from a man’s face; another shielding his head from potential blows ran into a traffic sign. Protestors fell over each other to get away from the police onslaught. As the officers advanced, one shouted at the crowd, “Move! I said, move, goddamn it! Move you bastards!”78 The crowd had nowhere safe to go as they were pushed into a second line of police on the south side of the Michigan-Balbo intersection. At that point, police began to give orders that contradicted those from police on other lines. “It was fucking mayhem,” recalls officer Harold Pancik.79 At three minutes to eight, with the crowd screaming, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching,” Chicago police swept in from opposite directions, slicing into demonstrators and journalists alike, batons swinging. Seemingly, everyone became a target: demonstrators, both longhaired and clean-cut McCarthy kids, women, journalists, and innocent bystanders. Police struck people from behind as they ran and as they fell.”80 Police officers counter that their use of force was not indiscriminate and that the media showed only one side. “The damn press, they always saw what they wanted to see,” recalls former officer Mel Latanzio. “But never us getting kicked in the balls when we were making an arrest—there was a reason we were chasing some of those SOBs.”81 Other cops argue that they never lost control or refused to obey commanders, but in the confusion, there were conflicting orders. As former officer Terry Novicki recalled, “You had to choose which orders to follow, because I, for one, heard two or more orders that contradicted each other within a few seconds”.82 As an independent observer from the Los 217

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Angeles Police Department stated, “The leadership at the point of conflict did little to prevent such contact and the direct control of officers by first-line supervisors was virtually non-existent.”83 As the clock inched towards eight o’clock, under the glare of television camera lights, police and demonstrators battled into position in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. In the chaos, a group of about 200 protestors trapped near the glass front of the hotel’s Haymarket Bar, thrust there by opposing efforts to clear the intersection. Officers inexplicably moved in, spraying mace liberally into the ensnared crowd. “Oh no, not mace,” one woman cried out in fear. As the police had cut off avenues of escape, some tried in vain to regroup and push their way out; each time, police moved in and broke them into smaller groups, where they were set upon and beaten with batons and sprayed with mace.84 Suddenly, the weight of the trapped group crashed through the Haymarket’s window. “An atmosphere of unreality pervaded the scene,” wrote Sun-Times reporter Hugh Hough. Some with blood streaming from their heads managed to flee into the hotel lobby where police pursued them, knocking over tables and chairs. Blood flowing from baton blows and chards of broken glass, they fled as police continued to chase demonstrators through the hole in the glass chasing their quarry through the bar’s inner entrance and into the hotel’s lobby. Activist Terry Southern watched in disbelief. “The cops rushed in after them. ‘Get the hell outta here!’ a cop was yelling, which they were trying to do as fast as possible. But something was wrong with one of them, a thin blond boy about seventeen. ‘I can’t walk,’ he said. ‘You’ll walk outta here, you little son of a bitch!’ said the cop and clubbed him across the side of the head with his stick. Two of the others seized him by the shirt and started dragging him across the floor of the bar and through the lobby.”85 A police captain on the scene yelled: “Clear the lobby,” and the officers went to work knocking seven people to the lobby’s plush red carpet, now stained with blood.86 Looking down from his suite in the Hilton, Senator McCarthy said the scene looked “like the battle of Cannae.”87 In formation, the police then moved further down Balbo, forcing most of the crowd back into Grant Park, as the National Guard continued to block the Balbo Street Bridge. Police then advanced north on Michigan to keep the street open and clear of demonstrators. Two hundred National Guard reinforcements, called over from Soldier Field, blocked Balbo at Michigan, and stood parallel to the Hilton and Grant Park. With the perimeter secure, about fifty police officers continued their move north on Michigan Avenue, pushing demonstrators as they went. Journalist Lance Morrow noticed that police “moved with surprising speed and a nimble fury like that of a rhinoceros attacking. A flying wedge of blue drove down Balbo into the noisy, ragged flesh on Michigan … .”88 Police officers on Wednesday night were “avenging thugs,” writes Todd Gitlin. “They charged, clubbed, gassed, and mauled—demonstrators, bystanders, and reporters … in the heat of their fury, the police took little or no trouble to distinguish between provocateurs and bystanders.”89 Contrary to police assertions, however, some journalists did report violence by demonstrators, albeit much of it after the fact. Time observed demonstrators hurling “bricks, bottles and nail-studded golf balls at the police lines.”90 By 10:30 p.m., the National Guard again moved in to replace fatigued police in front of the hotel while protestors backed off in the face of the overwhelming force. Many drifted back into the park, while around 4,000 sat down across from the Hilton, some singing, “God Bless America.” By 12:30 a.m., the crowd had shrunk to 1,500.91 Before midnight, Pennsylvania’s delegates put Hubert Humphrey over the top in a first-ballot victory, 1,761 to 146.92 As news reached the crowds, boos resounded throughout the park, as demonstrators knew that the peace plank under candidate Eugene McCarthy was dead.93 On Thursday, recriminations of the previous night’s violence were bitter. On NBC’s Today Show, host Hugh Downs wondered if there was any other word more apt to describe police than “pigs.”94 President of the American Newspaper Guild, William J. Farson, called police action against 218

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journalists “unprovoked and brutal.”95 Veteran reporter and columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote “the performance of the police of Chicago on Michigan Av. last night was one of the worst I have ever seen.”96 An editorial in the Daily News was just as scathing. “Just now the paramount danger is not from hippies, yippies, or other demonstrators; it is from an establishment that has lost sight, temporarily at least, of the right of all the people to their fundamental freedoms.”97 An article in Chicago’s American suggested that police were waging a personal war on the press. The paper’s phone lines, however, were jammed with calls supporting Daley and the police.98 By the time Hubert Humphrey accepted the nomination of his party as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, the fallout from the previous night overshadowed everything. On the streets, there was little fight left in the crowd, and seemingly little left to fight over. The violence that did occur never matched the fury of the previous three nights.99 When Friday finally arrived, observed columnist Mike Royko, “the Democratic Party limped out of Chicago.”100 The political fallout at the time mattered little to members of the Chicago Police Department or to the people of Chicago as convention week ended. By the following day, residents described the city as “unbelievably peaceful.”101 No national reporters or television crews were on hand to capture the final demonstration in the city that Sunday afternoon. It was a spontaneous expression by 300 Chicagoans out in the rain to thank the police for their convention week efforts. Cop Harold Pacnik remembers the kind words and believes his fellow citizens joined officers in their delight watching antiwar protestors leave the city. “There were no tears shed when those SOBs left town,” says Pacnik. “I don’t remember anyone regretting anything. Not one damn thing.”102 Retired police officer Ken O’Connor agreed, but like others, he expressed some regret. “We could have behaved better; we did some things that were wrong. Maybe as bad as some of us behaved, we gave the rotten apples of that otherwise, I think, well-meaning generation, a good old spanking and we stopped the meltdown. And maybe we could have been better people, too … .”103 Pacifist David Dellinger, in retrospect, was saddened by Chicago. “The Chicago Convention protests were the test and the Movement failed the test.”104 Years later, Jerry Rubin spoke of the folly of the situation. “In the summer of 1968 a group of us went to Chicago to try to get a police permit for a revolution … . We didn’t get a permit.”105 Rubin was also thoughtful about the police and their actions, suggesting that “the violence that took place in Chicago was very symbolic. There were no permanent injuries, there were no deaths … . People were clubbed, but the stitches healed. As Abbie says, ‘All the violence of the Sixties put together doesn’t add up to a weekend in Beirut.’”106 Tom Hayden suggested later that the massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square made convention week look like “a Pacifist Tea party.”107 There is, however, no avoiding the vicious reality of police behavior. Chicago in ’68 provided an overwhelming accumulation of evidence that showed officers repeatedly attacking protestors whose only “crime” was expressing the right to assemble and protest the actions of the state. The summary punishment via baton on the streets against violent agitators was widespread, and at times disproportionate to the provocation. The evidence also clearly shows that this behavior was not relegated to a few officers but was carried out by hundreds, and supported, or ignored, by thousands of others who knew better. As former police officer Marlin Rowden recalled, “Let’s face it; we knew we were supposed to thump the crap out of them, to teach them not to mess with ‘Daley’s city’. We did it right across the board—evenly, a good whacking, but just short of causing lasting damage, so none of us would lose our pensions. I know this; lots of guys know this but won’t admit it.” Officer Tim Markosky agrees, adding, “That’s why there were few commanders telling the members to stop. Only those who began to realize how bad it would look under the glare of TV lights were telling members to back off. The rest were letting it happen. It was controlled and sanctioned mayhem.”108 Mayor Richard Daley not only sanctioned the violence but, in fact, demanded it. Daley also restricted marches and assemblies, and prohibited demonstrators from sleeping in the park after

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11:00 p.m., actions that materially contributed to the violence, placing his police and the protestors in a terrible and dangerous situation. Given this untenable state, it is remarkable that the twelve thousand police officers on duty that week kept their guns holstered in the numerous violent street battles with anti-war protestors and managed not to shoot, kill, or permanently injure anyone. This suggests they knew what they were doing, far from “unrestrained thugs” who had gone “crazy” and “rioted.” In some ways, this fact makes the police look even worse. If they were not caught up in the emotional excess of crowd provocation, then their ability to restrain themselves, while beating protestors and journalists alike, reveals a chilling intentionality. Those who wore press credentials that week retaliated against the violence they faced via print and broadcast and the legend of that week grew exponentially. A report submitted to Lyndon Johnson’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, noted: “What is truly unique about Chicago … is not the occurrence of police violence. Rather, it is the extent and quality of media coverage given to the actual events … .”109 Ultimately, while neither the hyperbolic media view of “storm troopers in blue” nor the Walker Report’s conclusion that the police “rioted” are accurate, it is the officers, their commanders, and especially their civic provocateurs who are most responsible for their tarnished legacy. Unfortunately, viewing members of the media no differently than the worst of the street agitators led police to ignore repeated warnings from their superintendent to avoid such conflict. It was a line officers crossed continually and unnecessarily throughout convention week. Attacks on local and national media during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 by Chicago police created a public relations disaster that has stained their reputation in perpetuity.

Notes 1 Rights in Conflict: Chicago’s 7 Brutal Days: A Report Submitted by Daniel Walker, Director of the Chicago Study Team, to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, vii. 2 This chapter’s title comes from Barry Wightman’s, “The View From Behind the Billy Club,” Chicago Reader, August 21, 2008, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-view-from-behind-the-billyclub/Content?oid=1109041. 3 Chicago Tribune, April 5,1968, 1, 3–5, 11; the Chicago Sun-Times, April 5, 1968, 2–6, 18, 20, April 6, 1968, 1, 4–9, 11, 12, 14, April 7, 1968, 3, 6. 4 See Chicago Tribune, April 7, 1968, 1, 3, 4–6, 10, 1A6, 1A7, 76, April 8, 1968, 1, 2; and Chicago SunTimes, April 7, 1968, 4, April 8, 1968, 4. 5 Chicago Sun-Times, April 9, 3, 5, 21, 23, 25, April 10, 3–5, 21, 22, 32. 6 Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1968, 1, 2. 7 Ibid., April 9, 1968, 3. 8 Ibid., April 13, 1968, 6. 9 Ibid., April 16, 1968, 1, 2, 16. 10 Chicago Sun-Times, April 16, 1968, 4. 11 Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1968, 2. 12 Ibid., April 16, 1968, 2, and April 17, 1968, 1, 2. 13 Ibid., April 19, 1968, 10. 14 See Chicago Sun-Times, April 18, 1968, 3, 4, 35. 15 Author interviews with former Chicago police officers Sam McMaster, September 18, 2000; Norm Nelson, April 17, 2000, and Sam Ivanchenko, November 14, 1999. 16 Riordan is quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 28, 1968, 3. 17 Chicago Sun-Times, April 28, 1968, 12. 18 New York Times, April 28, 1968, 73. See also Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1968, 1, 8. 19 Author interviews with former Chicago police officers Ira Freyling, May 19, 2002, and Cal Noonan, March 17, 2002. 20 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 233.

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Behind the Billy Club 21 Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York, The Dial Press, 1968), 53, 102–108; Milton Viorst, Fire in the Streets (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 431. See also, “The Yippies Are Coming,” Ramparts, September 28, 1968, 21; and The Unraveling of America, 413. 22 See Chicago Sun-Times, August 22, 1968, 3; “The Yippies Are Coming,” 21; and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968). For the department’s planning committee, see the minutes of the Chicago Police Department Convention Planning Committee (CPD-CPC), January and February 1968, in the Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, December 10, 1968, Box 5 (hereafter, NCCPV). Also see United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Subversive Involvement in Disruption of 1968 Democratic Party National Convention HUAC Hearings of October and December 1968, Ninetieth Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968). 23 “Daley City Under Siege,” Time, August 30, 1968, 20. See also, Chicago Sun-Times, August 12, 1968, 1, 12, August 13, 1968, 19, August 25, 1968, 34, and August 27, 1968, 18. 24 The Sixties, 323; and Daley City Under Siege, 20–21. See also Chicago Sun-Times, August 12, 1968, 1, 12, August 21, 1968, 3, 14, and August 22, 1968, 3, 32; and Rights in Conflict, 27. 25 See Rights in Conflict, 89, 90; Tom Well, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1994, 277; and New York Times, August 26, 1968, 25. 26 “The Yippies Are Coming,” Ramparts, September 28, 1968, 23–24; New York Times, August 26, 1968, 25; Rights in Conflict, 91, 92; and Chicago Sun-Times, August 26, 1968, 26. See also, NCCPV, R502, Box 42, and the Chicago Police Department’s Convention Log, A053, Box 5. 27 New York Times, August 26, 1968, 25; Chicago Sun-Times, August 26, 1968, 5, 26; and Rights in Conflict, 92. 28 “The Yippies Are Coming,” 24; Rights in Conflict, 92–94. See also Chicago Sun-Times, August 26, 1968, 5, 26. 29 See Chicago Sun-Times, August 26, 1968, 5, 26; August 27, 1968, 5; “The Yippies Are Coming,” 24; New York Times, August 26, 1968, 25; and NCCPV, S064, Box 44, and R604, Box 43; and Rights in Conflict, 96. 30 Rights in Conflict, 96; “The Yippies Are Coming,” 24; Chicago Tribune August 26, 1968, 1, 7; and New York Times, August 26, 1968, 25. 31 Jim Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 299. See also, Chicago Tribune August 26, 1968, 1, 7; author interview with Darrell Novakovski, October 18, 1999; and Rights in Conflict, 97. 32 Author interview with Al Ogilvie, September 8, 1999. 33 New York Times, August 26, 1968, 25; Chicago Tribune August 26, 1968, 1, 7; and Rights in Conflict, 97, 98. Good general sources for Saturday and especially Sunday prior to convention week can be found in the Walker study team records. Files consulted included OR143, Box 34, R013, Box 40, S064, Box 44, S066, Box 44, R014, Box 40, S010, Box 44, R284, Box 41, A053, Box 5, R760, Box 43, R656, Box 43, R009, Box 40, R041, Box 40, R773, Box 43, R376, Box 41, and R789, Box 43, and the transcript from U.S. v. David T. Dellinger, et. al., No.69 CR-180, 1969. 34 Author interview with Archie Pasis, August 23, 2001. See also, Chicago Sun-Times, August 22, 1968, 32, and August 24, 1968, 14. 35 “The Yippies Are Coming,” 25; Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985), 186. See also New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29, 36 Author interview with Tom Freeborn, March 11, 2001. 37 Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 141. 38 Rights in Conflict, 106. 39 Author interview with Sheldon Bartowski, July 19, 2000; Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 6; Rights in Conflict, 106. See also New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29. 40 Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 6; and Rights in Conflict, 108. 41 “The Yippies Are Coming,” 25; New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29; Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 6; and Rights in Conflict, 108. 42 “The Yippies Are Coming,” 25. See also New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29. 43 New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29; and Rights in Conflict, 108. 44 Rights in Conflict, 205. 45 See Les Brownlee in NCCPV, R646, Box 43, 1; Rights in Conflict, 117; and Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971), 183. Twenty reporters needed hospital treatment after Monday night. Larger credentials after Sunday only made them more noticeable to cops, says Royko.

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Author interview with Steven Latz, June 4, 1999. Rights in Conflict, 208. “Dementia in the Second City, Time, September 6, 1968, 33. “The Yippies Are Coming,” 25–26; and Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the American Political Conventions of 1968 (Harmondsworth: England, Penguin Books, 1969), 143. See NCCPV, R402, Box 42, 11, and R401, Box 42, 1, 2; and Rights in Conflict, 109–111. See also New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29; Chicago Daily News, August 27, 1968, 1, 3,4, 8; Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 1; and Terry Southern, “Grooving in Chi,” Esquire, November 1968. Author interviews with Joe Pecoraro, October 13, 2003, and Tom Freeborn, March 11, 2001. Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 6; Who Spoke Up?, 186; and NCCPV, R402, Box 42, 11. Chicago Daily News, August 27, 1968, 1, 3,4, 8; Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 6; “The Yippies Are Coming,” 26; and “Grooving in Chi.” Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1968, 5; and Rights in Conflict, 114. For Monday night’s events, see, Rights in Conflict, 114, 115, 116; The Sixties, 327; Who Spoke Up?, 187; “The Yippies Are Coming,” 26; Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1968, 5; Chicago Daily News, August 27, 1968, 1, 3, 4, 8; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 144; New York Times, August 27, 1968, 29; and Fire in the Streets, 454–460. Chicago Sun-Times, August 27, 1968, 33. See also Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1968, 5; and Chicago Daily News, August 27, 1968, 14. See Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1968, 5, August 28, 1968, 9. See also Chicago Sun-Times, August 28, 1968, 28. Chicago Sun-Times, August 28, 1968, 28. See also Chicago Tribune, August 27, 1968, 5; and Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1968, 9. Rights in Conflict, 211, 213. See Commander Robert Lynsky in NCCPV, R502, Box 42, 16–18; and Rights in Conflict, 124. See Chicago Sun-Times, August 28, 1968, 9; Rights in Conflict, 126; Who Spoke Up?, 188; “The Cops and the Kids,” The New Republic, September 7, 1968, 13; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 146–148, and New York Times, August 28, 1968, 36. New York Times, August 28, 1968, 36; and Rights in Conflict, 126–28. See also “The Cops & the Kids,” 13. “The Cops & the Kids,” 13. Who Spoke Up?, 189; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 150; and author interview with Joe Pecoraro, October 13, 2003. Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1968, 1,9; and Rights in Conflict, 136. Author interview with former officer Ray Mihalicz, July 8, 1999. Author interview with Joe Pecoraro, October 13, 2003. For more on this, see, NCCPV, A152, Box 6, 7–8; R703, Box 43, 1–2; R789, Box 43, 9–14; SOR115, Box 47, 1; and SO84, Box 44, 4; Rights in Conflict, 137; and Chicago Tribune, August 28, 1968, 1, 9. Rights in Conflict, 141. Rights in Conflict, 145–146; and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 160–61. See also Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 30. Rights in Conflict, 146; and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 161. See also “Who Were the Protestors,” Time, September 6, 1968, 36; Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 18, 30; and The Sixties, 332. Rights in Conflict, 146–47, 150; and New York Times, August 29, 1968, 1, 23. For witness testimony, see NCCPV, SO19, Box 44, 70–73; R229, Box 41, 2; OR146, Box 34, 20–23; SO81, Box 44, 5; and SO84, Box 44, 1. Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 161; and The Sixties, 332. See also The War Within, 278, 279. Author interview with Paul Juravinski, January 26, 1999. See also U.S. vs. David Dellinger, et al, 8665; NCCPV, R402, Box 43; Rights in Conflict, 153; and New York Times, August 29, 1968, 23. The Sixties, 332; and Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 5, 12. Author interview with Walter Jorgenson, May 18, 1999. Rights in Conflict, 159; and “Who Were the Protestors,” Time, September 6, 1968, 36. New York Times, August 29, 1968, 1, 23; Chicago Daily News, August 29, 1968, 1–6; and Rights in Conflict, 162–63. Rights in Conflict, 167; and The Sixties, 333. Author interviews with Harold Pacnik, June 3, 1999, and Steve Nowakowski, November 1, 1999. Rights in Conflict, 170. Author interviews with Kurt O’Grady, March 22, 2000, Mel Latanzio, August 9, 1999, and Sam McMaster, September 18, 2000. See also Rights in Conflict, 173.

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Behind the Billy Club 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Author interviews with Terry Novicki, October 15, 2001, and Sam Ivanchenko, November 14, 1999. Rights in Conflict, 170; and Who Spoke Up?, 191–96. Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 164. “Grooving in Chi.” See Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1968, 1, 7; and Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 30. Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 5, 30. Chicago Sun-Times August 29, 1968, 30; Rights in Conflict, 175–77; Who Spoke Up, 191–96; “The Cops & the Kids,” 13–14; Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 163–68; and Lance Morrow, “The Whole World Was Watching” Time, August 26, 1996. The Sixties, 327–29. Time, September 6, 1968, 34. Rights in Conflict, 189–90; and New York Times, August 29, 1968, 1, 23. Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 3. Chicago Daily News, August 29, 1968, 1–3; New York Times, August 29, 1968, 1; and Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 3, 4, 30. See also Theodore Harold White, The Making of the President, 1968 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969), 301–303. Rights in Conflict, 218. Ibid., 219. Chicago Sun-Times, August 29, 1968, 46. Chicago Daily News, August 29, 1968, 14. Chicago’s American, August 29, 1968, 1, 3, 4. Chicago Sun-Times, August 30, 1968, 5, 7; New York Times, August 30, 1, 14; and Chicago Daily News, August 30, 1968, 5–7. Revolution for the Hell of It, 114, 115; and Boss, 189. New York Times, August 31, 1968, 1, and September 1, 1968, 1, 37. Author interviews with Harold Pacnik, June 3, 1999, and October 10, 2003; and Chicago Sun-Times, September 2, 1968, 4. Author interviews with Joe Pecoraro, October 13, 2003, and Ken O’Connor, October 10, 2003. Who Spoke Up?, 199. See Telltale Hearts, 162; and From Camelot to Kent State: The Sixties Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 289. Rubin quoted in From Camelot to Kent State, 288. Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 165. Author interviews with Marlin Rowden, June 21, 2000, and October 12, 2003, and Tim Markosky, July 8, 2001. The Politics of Protest: A Report Submitted by Jerome H. Skolnick, Director, Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 246.

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17 POLICE BRUTALITY AND THE STUDENT MOVEMENTS OF THE 1960S Kathryn Schumaker

In November 2011, a photo of a police officer pepper-spraying seated student protesters at the University of California, Davis made headlines around the globe.1 The students, who were aligned with the Occupy Wall Street Movement, expressed solidarity with students who had been brutalized just a week and a half earlier during Occupy protests at the University of California, Berkeley. Even before newspapers went to print, images and videos spread via social media. A YouTube video clip posted just hours after the attack has attracted more than 2.6 million views to date.2 Robert Haas, a Berkeley professor who sustained injuries during the demonstration, explained his shock at the intensity and violence of the police response to a peaceful protest. “It was stunning to see,” he told reporters. “[Officers] swung hard into their chests and bellies … . If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.”3 The global spotlight on police violence did not even motivate short-term shifts in how police responded to protests on the University of California campuses. Just two months after the incident of police brutality at Davis, police officers shot students with “non-lethal” pellets on the UC-Riverside campus as they protested a meeting of the regents.4 The pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis is just one example of the police violence that students have long faced on American college and university campuses, and it reveals how police violence itself has sparked revolts on campuses across the United States. The violence that spread across the California campuses in 2011 mirrors how, historically, police brutality has been both a cause and consequence of student protest. This chapter examines the interlinked history of police brutality and student activism through the examination of three strands of campus protest movements during the late 1960s: the antiwar, Chicano, and Black Student movements. Studied together, this history demonstrates how university administrators often wielded the power of the state against their own students during moments of heightened activism on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, students faced overlapping punitive regimes. College and university trustees were overwhelmingly wealthy white men over the age of 50 who tended to hold conservative views of free expression on campus.5 Administrators often suspended or expelled student protesters, while local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies worked to suppress and restrict dissent on campuses. Moreover, as students rebelled against war and racial discrimination, political and university leaders sometimes encouraged or allowed police officers to violently suppress protests. Police brutality was therefore threaded through the experiences of student protesters as they staged demonstrations on campuses across the United States. At times it unified movements, crosspollinating ideas about resistance to state violence across the Black, Chicano, and antiwar student 224

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-23

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movements. It drew students to critique American imperialism, especially as opposition to the Vietnam War created alliances that cut across differences of race and class. At the same time, such concerns were not evenly felt, even as they generated a sense of interracial solidarity. Black student protesters in the South faced the most brutal response from police officers during the height of the student movement. As young people came to see the state as an agent of violence in the late 1960s, they forged a politics of protest around these grievances.

Students and the Antiwar Movement Students had long been organizing on university campuses, and the student movements of the 1960s drew upon a legacy of those protests while also marking a distinctive phase as the influence of youth protests in national politics and culture grew. Campus demonstrations against the War in Vietnam punctuated the mid- and late-1960s, but an increasingly aggressive response from federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies contributed to students identifying police brutality as an issue that was linked to American state violence in Vietnam and Cambodia. In the antiwar movement, young people led the way. By adopting direct action protest techniques, antiwar activists put themselves in direct conflict with authorities, choosing the prospect of arrest in a show of defiance toward an unjust war. On college campuses, student activists faced resistance from institutional leaders as well as law enforcement officers. Administrators had long exercised their authority to discipline students under the legal theory that they acted in loco parentis, or “in the place of the parent.” But throughout the 1960s, students chafed against the actions of conservative college administrations. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which emerged in response to the University of California’s effort to contain and control political speech on campus, spread to other institutions. Local chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which took an early stand against American military operations in Vietnam, became generators of antiwar protest on campuses across the country. All of these developments brought administrators and students into conflict. Indeed, administrators sometimes actively sought to repress and undermine campus organizations that they deemed too radical. Despite the courts’ increasing recognition of the constitutional rights of students at public institutions, college and university administrators continued to suspend and expel student activists for their speech and actions. There were heightened stakes for universities that had military research contracts, as students targeted and publicized the connections between higher education and the war effort.6 Protesters also targeted instances where Dow Chemical—the company that manufactured napalm—attempted to recruit students on campus. This gave antiwar protesters a local target for their global critique of American intervention in Vietnam. By the time the antiwar movement coalesced following the Johnson Administration’s decision to send ground troops into Vietnam in 1965, the FBI had already launched surveillance campaigns into student activists. Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio was an early target, and the bureau’s efforts only increased as student movements gained power and visibility.7 By the late 1960s, the bureau took an especially aggressive interest toward individuals and organizations that it labeled as “radical”—including those that espoused Black or Chicano Power philosophies or challenged the morality and legitimacy of the Vietnam War.8 The FBI justified its secret domestic surveillance operations by accusing New Left activists of creating “disruption and violence” and undermining national security through their opposition to the war. Moreover, FBI officials claimed that they “continually and falsely allege police brutality and do not hesitate to utilize unlawful acts to further their so-called causes.”9 The issue of police brutality itself was used to justify efforts to disrupt the movements that the FBI opposed. As the visibility of student movements grew after 1965, protesters also faced increased scrutiny and harassment from local and campus police. Conflicts between antiwar student activists and police escalated in late 1967 as protesters engaged in a series of highly publicized mass demonstrations, 225

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including instances of direct action. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, became a hotbed of antiwar protest and civil disobedience. In October, Madison students launched demonstrations against recruitment efforts on campus by Dow Chemical. Despite threats that disruptive protests could lead to expulsion by the university administration, students held a sit-in to obstruct interviews with Dow representatives while outside the building, a huge mass of student protesters gathered, chanting, singing, and yelling about their opposition to the war, the use of napalm, and the growing police presence. Police officers declared the sit-in an unlawful assembly and began clearing the building, beating students with nightsticks and dragging them into paddy wagons.10 Students were shocked by the indiscriminate use of force they experienced during the Dow demonstrations, as officers seemed more intent on mercilessly beating students than they were in arresting them. As student activist James Rowen explained, the experience of police brutality profoundly shaped the politics of student demonstrators, and the issue came to consume the antiwar movement on campus. “I would trace my own radicalization to the Dow demonstration and to being personally beaten by police,” Rowen later said.11 Doctors and nurses treated nearly fifty students following the protests at the University of Wisconsin, and dozens of the students suffered head injuries.12 Despite the violence, student protests in Madison continued unabated in the following years. The experiences of student protesters in Madison were a harbinger of growing hostility between police and students on campuses across the country. Weeks later, students demonstrating against Dow were beaten and arrested at Indiana University.13 Indeed, the police riot that ensued outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention shocked the nation even as it exemplified the commonality of police violence that antiwar protesters faced on a smaller scale throughout the previous year. The harrowing experiences of the people brutalized by Chicago police at the direction of Mayor Daley were televised across the nation. By the time classes resumed for the fall semester, many young people were further radicalized by the unrestrained display of police brutality.14 The Nixon campaign capitalized on negative public perceptions of the student movements, promising to crack down on unruly protesters if elected. When Nixon took office in 1969, he followed through on those campaign promises and encouraged law enforcement investigations of student radicals as part of his “law and order” agenda.15 Municipal police departments responded by forming “red squads” that targeted New Left, Black Power, and other dissident groups for harassment and surveillance.16 State and federal agencies also tracked and policed student activists on and off campus. The FBI shared its files with state and local law enforcement agencies, making it easier for police officers on university and college campuses to identify dissidents and track them closely. State-wide agencies sometimes facilitated this process. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission conducted investigations into activists across the state, and it spied on Black student activists at Mississippi Valley State University in 1970.17 In Oklahoma, the short-lived secret Office of Interagency Coordination facilitated information-sharing on student protesters between 1968 and 1971.18 By 1969, public opinion had turned on the students, and SDS became the focus of special attention and public disdain, especially after the national organization’s leaders turned toward Marxism and critiqued American imperialism. State legislatures passed laws encouraging or requiring universities and colleges to punish students for protesting on campus or for being arrested as part of a demonstration.19 California, for example, threatened to take away state financial aid from “students convicted of unlawful conduct” and gave university administrators the power to declare a state of emergency on campus. The West Virginia state legislature gave broad authority to local officials to suppress riots, including the authority to deputize bystanders, search homes and dorm rooms in pursuit of rioters, and impose curfews. It protected local police officers who killed or injured people, absolving “officers from blame for the killing or wounding of a rioter and providing that all persons engaged in rioting shall be deemed equally guilty if an officer is killed or wounded during the riot.”20 226

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But it was the events that unfolded at Kent State University in May 1970 that would come to dominate national discussions of students, law enforcement, and the antiwar movement. Kent State was home to sustained protests by antiwar activists, including members of its SDS chapter, and Black United Students, who faced a hostile response from the university administration and local police. By 1970, the university had effectively banned SDS from campus. On the evening of May 1, police officers teargassed student demonstrators—some who smashed windows downtown—and the situation escalated as students threw rocks and police arrested fourteen people.21 The mayor called in the National Guard, and when students attempted to burn down the ROTC building, soldiers beat them back with teargas and rifles.22 The next day, when protesters who demanded to meet with the university president staged a sit-in in the middle of a road, National Guard members dispersed the crowd with their bayonets, slashing and stabbing several students. The escalating violence between protesters, police, and the National Guard set the stage for the massacre on May 4, when National Guard officers shot and killed four unarmed students and wounded nine others.23 The murders of students at Kent State marked a turning point in how many young people understood the war and its relationship to domestic state violence. Students on campuses across the nation vented their sadness, anger, and frustration after hearing the news that the American military had fired on its own people at Kent State. Students quickly organized demonstrations to grieve and protest state violence. Hundreds of college and university administrators across the country, fearing violence and unrest, shut down campuses. On campuses that remained open, students clashed with law enforcement officers. Students at the University of Oklahoma experienced the harshest crackdown on a peaceful protest in the wake of Kent State. The state’s governor, Dewey Bartlett, kept a close watch on student dissent, and he was especially dismayed by antiwar protesters. After news of the Kent State massacre broke, Bartlett insisted on meeting with student body president Bill Moffitt. He threatened to send the National Guard in to put down any protests that he personally considered “disruptive.”24 Moffitt, who had recently been elected as the first Black student body president, understood that Bartlett would encourage law enforcement officers to use force against students on campus in a veiled threat to the personal safety of students.25 The next day, they did. As students peacefully protested outside an ROTC training on campus on May 5, police officers charged into the crowd when a student waved a North Vietnamese flag. Students refused to allow the officers who arrested the student to leave until state highway patrol officers arrived, forcefully shoving back the protesters with billy clubs.26 Students at the University of Kentucky connected the deaths of students at Kent State with their concerns about policing on their own campus. In the demands they presented to the board of trustees, students demanded a reform of disciplinary policies, a statement of opposition to the bombing of Cambodia, and an end to the carrying of firearms by campus police.27 Days of protests followed, and the state responded with force. Governor Louie Nunn, who had described antiwar activists as “shaggy, bearded, gutless, cowardly individuals” in a speech the previous year, responded to the protests by sending in police officers in riot gear and the National Guard, who used nightsticks and pepper spray to suppress crowds of demonstrators.28 The extreme response increased anti-police sentiment among many students. As one student explained, “The police have done more to radicalize students here in the last two days than the SDS could have done in ten years.”29

The Black Student Movement As the antiwar movement crested in the late 1960s, Black students increasingly began to protest racism on their own campuses, including at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Participants in the Black student movement faced even greater hostility and brutality from local police departments than white New Left activists did—especially in the South.30 Although the murders of students at Kent State became emblematic of the era, police officers responded especially 227

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harshly to the Black Student Movement, wounding and killing Black student protesters on their own campuses in displays of state violence that received far less publicity than the Kent State Massacre did. Shifts in policing that took place during this era were especially significant in shaping how Black student protests were policed, as the rise of the War on Crime transformed policing at the local level. Federal policies that encouraged the militarization of law enforcement turned the national war power inward on its own people. Black rebellions against police brutality like the ones that unfolded in Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, and hundreds of cities in 1967 and 1968 provided new justifications for increasingly punitive stances toward Black people.31 The everyday experiences of Black children and teenagers were already shaped by encounters with police officers. The War on Crime measures escalated the policing of young people as municipal governments across the nation sought to pre-empt riots, encouraged by the 1968 Safe Streets Act. As historian Elizabeth Hinton argues, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Policing became more aggressive and intrusive in Black communities everywhere.”32 The result was a cycle of police harassment and Black acts of rebellion, which sometimes evolved into civil disorders after police officers became particularly violent. Black college students were not insulated from these broader currents. Although Black college and university students had long engaged in efforts to challenge white supremacy, the emergence of Black nationalist and Black Power ideologies sparked an even more antagonistic stance from college administrations, state leaders, and local law enforcement.33 The aggressive stance toward Black Power protests generated new grievances among Black students. Concerns about policing were interwoven with broader frustrations among students about the unwillingness of college administrators to implement the reforms that students demanded, including establishing Black Studies departments and hiring more Black faculty and staff. Across the country, Black student protesters connected the repressive tactics of police officers on campus to the exclusionary and racist structures of the university itself. Demands for Black Studies departments and the hiring of Black faculty members were part of a broader vision that challenged the ways that institutions of higher education replicated and reinforced white supremacy more broadly. Black students sometimes joined forces with white student protesters, as happened during the Columbia University protests in 1968. The university’s effort to use a nearby park in Harlem as the location for a new gymnasium became the focal point of critiques by SDS and the Students’ AfroAmerican Society. A thousand police officers swept campus buildings, brutalizing students and bystanders. One group of students decided to resist, throwing bottles and chairs at police officers, who beat them into submission in return. Police punched, clubbed, kicked, and dragged students by their hair. Altogether, they arrested 700 people.34 Following the end of the occupation, some university trustees expressed support for the police and blamed any violence on students.35 But it was at HBCUs in the South where Black student protesters faced the most unrestrained and brutal treatment by police. The police response to Black student protests in the late 1960s diverged significantly from the way law enforcement officers handled rioting white students amid efforts to desegregate public colleges and universities. As Southern governors stood against desegregation, they used the power of law enforcement not against rioting white students but instead against those who sought to enforce the rights of Black students and desegregate colleges and universities. At the University of Alabama in 1956, state highway patrolmen made no effort to control the mob that attacked and threatened to kill Autherine Lucy as she attempted to enroll, perhaps at the behest of Governor “Big Jim” Folsom. Even as rioters swept into downtown Tuscaloosa, where whites smashed the car windows of Black motorists, the police did nothing, and the University ordered Lucy’s expulsion.36 White student protesters at the University of Georgia, inspired by the punishment of Lucy at Alabama, rioted on campus in 1961 after two Black students enrolled. Police officers used teargas to disperse the brick-throwing crowd but did not arrest students or respond with force.37 228

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But the police response to the riots at the University of Mississippi was the most egregious example of how local law enforcement officers used their authority to protect white supremacy. Despite the presence of hundreds of law enforcement officials—including federal marshals, Oxford police, and National Guard soldiers—white protests soon evolved into all-out rioting with little intervention. The white crowd jeered at law enforcement officers and pelted them with cigarette butts and toilet paper rolls before escalating to brickbats, rocks, and bottles. But the marshals, instructed to keep the peace and avoid agitating the crowd, “ignored the remarks and missiles.”38 Indeed, state police remained passive or egged on the white mob as it smashed windows, assaulted journalists, and threw Molotov cocktails.39 Snipers fired at the marshals; hundreds were injured in the melee. Assailants shot and killed two men, including a French journalist. And yet no one was arrested.40 The refusal of police officers to enforce the law while white students rioted stands in stark contrast to the treatment of students at Mississippi’s segregated Black institutions later in the decade. Students were often arrested or brutalized by local police, and the leaders of their own universities often expelled students who participated in protests.41 The leaders of Black colleges and universities were often more concerned with what white legislators and governors thought than with protecting the rights and interests of their own students. For example, the administration at Jackson State University in Mississippi was traditionally hostile to student demonstrators, wielding its authority to punish and expel students who challenged the state’s white supremacist regime. Students engaged in protest anyway. White police officers predictably responded with violence. A continual source of anger and frustration was the unwillingness of law enforcement to discourage or ticket white drivers who endangered Black students by driving recklessly through the streets that crossed campus. In May 1967, police officers shot and killed a Black protester, Benjamin Brown, and wounded three others who were peacefully demonstrating on campus.42 The murders of young Black men by police on campus galvanized the Black student movement. Benjamin Brown’s murder sparked the creation of a coalition made up of students from Jackson State and Tougaloo College that presented a list of demands that connected Brown’s death to the city’s repressive racial regime, calling for sweeping changes.43 In Orangeburg, South Carolina, police officers shot and killed three Black men on the campus of South Carolina State University in 1968.44 These incidents sparked outrage and further protests at HBCUs and among Black students on campuses across the nation, generating loud and insistent demands for universities to establish Black Studies programs.45 But the outcry did not protect Black student activists from violence. In Houston, police officers responded to bottle-throwing and reports of gunshots from a dorm at Texas Southern University by firing thousands of rounds of bullets into the building before storming the building and arresting hundreds of students.46 At North Carolina A&T, the governor sent in the National Guard to suppress Black Power protests on campus, where soldiers fired into dormitories.47 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, police officers also killed Black student activists at South Carolina State College and at Southern University in Louisiana.48 Outside the South, the San Francisco Bay Area became a focal point of Black student protest as activists shared concerns and, at times, organizational efforts with the Black Panther Party. A fivemonth-long student strike at San Francisco State College, a predominately white institution, attracted the support of other student groups and community members. After more than a year of sustained protest and unrest, the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Third World Liberation Front staged a boycott of classes at San Francisco State College. Student protesters used aggressive tactics as they made demands to the university’s administration; by 1968, the administration adopted a more hostile stance toward the BSU. On November 13, the situation spiraled out of control, ending with police officers attacking students and bystanders. A cameraman reported to police officers that he had been beaten by a Black man as he was attempting to take photographs of the protesters. The police responded by sending in a tactical unit. In the wake of the violence, the university president, Robert 229

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Smith, resigned. He was replaced by an English professor, Samuel Hayakawa, who was openly hostile to student protesters, who he argued were unjustifiably interfering with other students’ educations.49 Amid the BSU strike at San Francisco State College, university administrators used local police and the National Guard to control and suppress student protests. With the administration openly hostile, the clashes between police and students became more frequent and violent in December. University president Hayakawa warned student protesters, “If some of you want to make trouble, stay right there. The police will see that you get it.”50 The standoff at San Francisco State lasted for months. But as Martha Biondi argues, public awareness of the widespread police brutality increased support for the student strike both on and off campus. Images and films of riot-gear-clad officers attacking young men and women appalled the public and turned students and community members against the administration.51 Just days after the Kent State massacre in 1970, police again fired into a crowd of peaceful protesters at Jackson State, killing two and injuring twelve. A grand jury declined to indict any of the officers, and they faced no punishment. A federal report on the terror directed at Black students in Mississippi noted that the deaths could be attributed to the “confidence of white officers that if they fire weapons during a black campus disturbance they will face neither stern departmental discipline nor criminal prosecution nor conviction.”52 Indeed, 1970 marked an especially brutal year for Black student protesters in the South. When the recently-founded Black Student Union at the University of Mississippi took over a performance at a campus chapel in 1970, armed state highway patrol officers surrounded the building and arrested the protesters, some of whom were sent to Parchman Prison.53 In their haste to identify and punish protesters, police officers jailed nearly half the Black student population of the university.54 A few months later, police officers arrested nearly 900 Black students at Mississippi Valley State University during a protest march. The arrested students were also expelled.55

The Chicano Student Movement As students began to demand that universities and colleges prioritize the needs and demands of Black, Chicano, and other racial and ethnic minority students, these movements were seldom isolated within campuses. Instead, student activists served as leaders within broader movements, and their concerns both reflected those of the communities surrounding their campuses as well as those of students themselves. The presence of students in local movements shaped their goals and efforts, and this was especially true for Chicano Movement activists. Complaints and challenges to police practices were therefore an integral part of these movements on many campuses, and Chicano activists in cities across the West placed police brutality at the heart of their demands for change. Like the Black student movement, Chicano students’ grievances primarily targeted education but were entwined with broader concerns about housing, employment, and policing. The Chicano Movement was especially influenced by the early leadership of student activists, who, as Armando Navarro explains, “became the movement’s driving force.”56 Beginning in 1967, Mexican American students across the Southwest organized local chapters of Chicano Movement groups on their campuses. In Texas, students joined the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO). Chicano students organized chapters of United Mexican American Students (UMAS) in California and, eventually, on other campuses across the Southwest.57 But Chicano activists rarely limited their protest activity to college and university campuses, instead often advocating for community concerns shared by many Mexican Americans. Elementary and secondary education was a core issue. Despite California law prohibiting the practice, students of Mexican descent in Southern California schools received a separate and unequal education compared to their white peers.58 In Los Angeles, where schools were overcrowded, half of all students of 230

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Mexican descent dropped out of school before graduating.59 And so in the late 1960s, Mexican Americans were significantly underrepresented on college and university campuses, especially within the University of California system. UMAS members viewed part of the organization’s mission as forming a bridge to local students, supporting their specific grievances and encouraging them to pursue a college education. And so UMAS members collaborated with teachers and students in East Los Angeles public schools to mount a massive protest against discrimination in education. Over the course of the first week of March in 1968, tens of thousands of Chicano student protesters in East Los Angeles poured into the streets to protest racism in the city’s public schools. The “East LA Blowouts” thrust the Chicano Movement onto the national stage. The “East LA Thirteen,” a group of adults and teenagers who were arrested on charges of “conspiracy” in relation to the Blowouts, faced decades in prison on trumped-up charges. Among them were UMAS leaders Carlos Muñoz and Moctezuma Esparza and college students Richard Vigil, Henry Gómez, Carlos Montes, and Fred López.60 In Los Angeles, the brutal law enforcement response that followed the East LA Blowouts underscored the problem of police violence. Across the nation, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had long faced police harassment and violence in their everyday lives. This was especially true in Los Angeles, where racialized notions of criminality among police officers meant that Mexican areas of the city were subjected to more surveillance, and Mexican Americans were more likely than whites to be arrested and charged with minor crimes.61 The FBI launched COINTELPRO investigations into Chicano organizations and sought to infiltrate, discredit, and destroy them.62 Police brutality had become so commonplace that Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles often expected to be beaten during their encounters with police.63 The public spectacle of police officers tackling and savagely beating teenagers made the problem visible to a broader audience.64 A year after the East LA Blowouts, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales called young Chicano activists together in Denver for the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. Embracing “revolutionary” ideals, the conference positioned young people as those best situated to lead the emerging movement around a distinctive sense of Chicano identity and a rejection of the assimilationist politics of previous generations of Mexican-American activists.65 The manifesto conference attendees produced, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” focused on Chicano nationalism, with specific attention to community control of schools, a declaration of “self defense,” and a reclamation of institutions. Following the Denver conference, Chicano student activists met at UC Santa Barbara, where they formed a unified organization, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), that issued its own manifesto that called for student activists to bring universities to account for their historical treatment of students of Mexican descent.66 In addition to calls for curricular changes and the hiring of Mexican American faculty and staff, El Plan de Santa Barbara declared that “it is time that [colleges and universities] be made responsible and responsive to the communities in which they are located or whose members they serve.”67 Part of this process of making universities accountable was that Chicano activists must engage in “policing social and governmental agencies to make them more responsive in a humane and dignified way to the people of the Barrio.”68 As Chicano students built organizations on campuses across the West, they also sought common ground with other student movements. A long history of police violence bound together the on and off-campus experiences of Black and Brown student protesters, and Chicano activists took inspiration from the emerging Black Power Movement. Chicano activists were among the multi-racial coalition supporting the student strike at San Francisco State College, and a Third World Liberation Front strike at UC Berkeley was similarly met with police violence.69 Many Chicano student activists joined the Brown Berets, a paramilitary organization that offered the movement’s most stringent critique of policing. Modeled on the work of the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets were dedicated to the principle of self-defense. When MEChA and Brown Beret members disrupted a

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mass in protest of the Catholic Church’s treatment of Mexican Americans and its non-support of the United Farmworkers grape boycott, police officers arrested and brutalized demonstrators.70 In Denver, Chicano activists denounced the over-policing of Mexican neighborhoods and instances of police brutality. Like the LAPD, the Denver police had a contentious relationship with the city’s Mexican American population. The city’s new chief of police in 1968, George Seaton, denied claims of police brutality and embraced federal programs to train police officers in riot control, forming five riot control “platoons” and inaugurating a Special Services Unit—the city’s first incarnation of a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team.71 Seaton even traveled to San Francisco to learn about how Bay Area police dealt with the student movement. Riot control platoons would showcase their aggressive treatment of student protesters in March 1969 when they tear-gassed and assaulted high school students during a student-led boycott of West High School in Denver.72 The war in Vietnam—and the disproportionate percentage of Mexican Americans who were drafted, wounded, and killed in action—drew Chicano activists to the antiwar movement in droves. Activists organized a series of mass demonstrations called the Chicano Moratorium in 1970 in order to publicize the disproportionate numbers of Mexican Americans who fought, were wounded, and died in Vietnam. Connecting the history of conquest and colonization to the police violence that people of Mexican descent faced in their own communities and the war in Southeast Asia, Chicano antiwar activists developed a stringent critique of American state violence at home and abroad. As historian Lorena Oropeza writes, “In Viet Nam, they questioned whether the Vietnamese forces were their enemy; at home, they were more convinced than ever that the police were.”73 At UCLA, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers used unrest at a campus antiwar rally as a pretext to harass and abuse Chicanos. The LAPD connected Chicano protests in Los Angeles to the student movement, and since the East LA Blowouts, the LAPD had adopted an increasingly aggressive stance toward Chicano activists in Los Angeles. LAPD officers used disorders associated with Moratorium protests as a pretext to storm a building that housed programs for minority students, where they assaulted faculty, staff, and students.74 The August 29, 1970, Chicano Moratorium demonstrations became a flashpoint in the Chicano Movement. The Chicano Moratorium brought tens of thousands of antiwar activists into the streets, and police officers responded by violently attempting to clear the protests, clubbing and tear-gassing men, women, and children.75 In Los Angeles, the death of well-known journalist Rubén Salazar—who had reported on police brutality—at the hands of police during the Chicano Moratorium protests escalated the longstanding conflict between the LAPD and Chicano activists. An LAPD officer launched a teargas canister into a café, where the projectile struck Salazar in the head and killed him instantly.76 The horrific events that unfolded during the Moratorium protests and continuing police harassment demoralized many supporters. At the same time, as Edward Escobar argues, police brutality and Salazar’s death radicalized Chicano activists and “helped politicize Mexican Americans by making clearer their subordination, giving them an increased sense of ethnic identity, and arousing a greater determination to act collectively to overcome that subordination.”77 As with the Black Student Movement, Chicano protesters faced violence and harassment from police officers. But the brutal response of police officers to the Chicano Movement helped forge a broader consciousness among some persons of Mexican descent about their vulnerability to police harassment and abuse.

Conclusion In 2016, the photograph of police officers pepper-spraying students at UC Davis received wide attention again when it came to light that the university paid consultants to “scrub” it from the internet; students have since called for the abolition of the University of California campus police departments. Shared concerns about policing have long been central to the diverse student movements on American campuses, particularly when students died at the hands of police. As Todd 232

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Gitlin wrote of the Black-led student strike at San Francisco State College, the violent response to peaceful protest “teaches that the enemy is not the police, not red tape, not fumbling administrators, but the State itself.”78 The examples of police violence at UC campuses in 2011 are only recent examples of a long history of police violence as a response to and generator of student activism on college and university campuses in the United States. Despite the efforts of administrators and other state officials to use law enforcement officers to stifle student dissent or discourage protests, such efforts did not extinguish the campus movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead, police brutality often generated new forms of protest and led young people to challenge the legitimacy of state violence at home and abroad.

Notes 1 “UC Davis police placed on leave after pepper spray video outrage,” The Guardian, Nov. 21, 2011; “Pepper spray: US campus police suspended,” BBC News, Nov. 20, 2011; and “Two Davis officers put on leave; UC president ‘appalled’ by tactics,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 21, 2011. 2 “UC Davis Protesters Pepper Sprayed,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4. 3 “UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident Goes Viral,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 20, 2011. 4 Dylan Rodríguez, “Beyond ‘Police Brutality’: Racist State Violence and the University of California,” American Quarterly 64 (June 2012): 301–313. 5 Jerome Skolnick, The Politics of Protest: Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation: A Staff Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), 86. 6 Kenneth Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 7 FBI: The Vault, https://vault.fbi.gov/mario-savio. 8 On FBI surveillance of student movements, see Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on American Freedom (New York: Pathfinder, 1975); and David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 9 Blackstock, COINTELPRO, 15. 10 David Maraniss, They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 369–376. 11 James E. Rowen, oral history interview with Laura Smail, 1978, UW-Madison Oral History Program, accessed online: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/61950. 12 Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight, 382. 13 Mary Ann Wynkoop, “Dissent in the Heartland: The Student Protest Movement at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 1965–1970” (PhD diss.: Indiana University, 1992), 109–111. 14 Thomas M. Grace, Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 122. 15 Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 541–544. 16 Frank Donner, Protection of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Oppression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 17 Joy Ann Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), 141. 18 Sarah Eppler Janda, Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 80–81. 19 Sale, SDS, 546–547. 20 “Campus Violence Spurs New Laws across the Nation,” New York Times, Sept. 1, 1969. 21 Grace, Kent State, 200–201. 22 Grace, Kent State, 204–206. 23 Grace, Kent State, 224–226. 24 Janda, 113. 25 Janda, 114. 26 Janda, 115–117. 27 Mitchell K. Hall, “‘A Crack in Time’: The Response of Students at the University of Kentucky to the Tragedy at Kent State, May 1970,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 83 (Winter 1985): 45. 28 Hall, “Crack in Time,” 39.

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Kathryn Schumaker 29 Hall, “Crack in Time,” 54–56. 30 Robert Cohen, “Prophetic Minority versus Recalcitrant Majority: Southern Student Dissent and the Struggle for Progressive Change in the 1960s,” in Cohen and David J. Snyder, eds., Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Christian Davenport, et al, “Protesting While Black? The Differential Policing of American Activism, 1960–1990,” American Sociological Review 76 (Feb. 2011): 152–178. 31 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 64–65. 32 Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s (New York: Liveright, 2021), 23–25. 33 Ibram X. Kendi, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 34 Stefan Bradley, Harlem v. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 95–97. 35 Bradley, Harlem, 98. 36 Robert A. Caro, “Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama: How the Mob Won,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 37 (Autumn 2002): 124–125. 37 Robert Cohen, “‘Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Don’t Want to Integrate’: White Student Attitudes toward the Desegregation of the University of Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 80 (Fall 1996): 616–618. 38 Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 351. 39 Eagles, Price of Defiance, 353–356. 40 Eagles, Price of Defiance, 360–365. 41 Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower, 141. 42 Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower, 137. 43 Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower, 139. 44 Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 32. 45 Biondi, Black Revolution, 33. 46 Biondi, Black Revolution, 31. 47 Jelani Favors, “North Carolina A&T Black Power Activists and the Student Organization for Unity” in Robert Cohen and David J. Snyder, eds., Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 264. 48 Cohen, “Prophetic Minority,” 25. 49 William Horsley Orrick, “Shut It Down!”: A College in Crisis: San Francisco State College, October 1968-April 1969 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 42. 50 Anthony Daniel Perez, Kimberly M. Berg, and Daniel J. Meyers, “Police and Riots, 1967–1969,” Journal of Black Studies 34 (Nov. 2003): 160. 51 Biondi, Black Revolution, 62–63. 52 Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower, 154–155. 53 W. Ralph Eubanks, “The Unhealed Wounds of a Mass Arrest of Black Students at Ole Miss, Fifty Years Later,” New Yorker, Feb. 23, 2020. 54 Williamson, Radicalizing the Ivory Tower, 142. 55 Williamson, Radicalizing the Ivory Tower, 141. 56 Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 53. 57 Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso, 1989), 73–74. 58 Mexican American parents successfully challenged de jure segregation in Mendez v. Westminster, but residential segregation generated segregated schooling in California as it did elsewhere. See Philippa Strum, Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010); and Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1878 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 59 Ian Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 16–17. 60 López, Racism on Trial, 25–26. 61 López, Racism on Trial, 140–141. 62 Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí!, Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 166–167. 63 Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

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Police Brutality and Student Movements 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Escobar, 1495–1496. Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power, 91–92. Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power, 94. “El Plan de Santa Barbara,” reprinted in Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power, 243. “El Plan de Santa Barbara,” 244. Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power, 86. Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power, 103–104. Ernesto Vigil, The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 89–90. Vigil, Crusade for Justice, 83–84. Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí!, 147. Edward J. Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968–1971,” Journal of American History 79 (March 1993): 1500. Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí!, 161–163. Escobar, “Dialectics of Repression,” 1484–1485. Escobar, “Dialectics of Repression,” 1486. Gitlin quoted in Sale, SDS, 519.

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SECTION 6

The Legal and Legislative History of Police Brutality

18 POLICE BRUTALITY AND THE NONHUMAN Thomas Aiello

Between 1998 and 2014, police shot 6,083 dogs. More than half of all intentional police shootings in the nation involve animals, dogs in particular. While officers who work with K9 dogs receive special training before entering the field, only a small handful of departments across the country provide animal behavior training for officers not specifically tasked with patrolling with a canine partner, and only Colorado requires such training.1 That lack of training, combined with a broad default position among police, chronicled by many in this collection, that unknown quantities who don’t display similar physical characteristics to the officers themselves are potentially expendable threats, has proven inordinately deadly for nonhuman animals in the United States. With an average of almost one dog shooting every day since 1998, the consequences for the animals themselves are obvious, but there is a human toll, as well, as the families of companion animals are devastated by the loss of a family member taken from them, usually without cause.2 There is also, as demonstrated by the collection’s companion essays, a decidedly human-racial element in police shootings of dogs, the majority taking place in black and brown neighborhoods. For all of these reasons, any holistic understanding of police brutality needs to include an analysis of officer-involved shootings of nonhumans. There are more than 77 million pet dogs in the United States and millions of others not part of a human household. Among the homes that include dogs, two-thirds describe pets as constituent parts of the family. Still, they are considered property, not persons, in the eyes of the law, which makes them even more vulnerable in encounters with police. That property status, then, leads challenges to police brutality against animals to build from the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.3 Then there is the same qualified immunity that shields many police officers from prosecution in shooting cases with human victims, a defense strategy occasionally effective when police shoot nonhuman victims. Law enforcement gains immunity in such cases if the shooting “[(1)] does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights [(2)] of which a reasonable person would have known,” a legal precedent that has protected countless officers in shootings of both humans and nonhumans. Even when qualified immunity doesn’t apply, however, police are often shielded from financial liability by a variety of other defenses and entirely shielded from criminal liability by animals’ lack of standing.4 Unsurprisingly, the decidedly racialized effect of qualified immunity in police shootings of Black and Brown humans has also translated into violence against their pets. In a geographical analysis of police and sheriff’s deputy killings of dogs in Los Angeles, Stefano Blocha and Daniel E. Martínez demonstrate that the bulk of shootings take place in the same Black and Brown neighborhoods in DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-25

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which the police commit the majority of their human shootings. The wanton disregard for Black and Brown human life by police, then, affects the lives of the animals who share those Black and Brown homes. “Violence committed against canines in these communities is an expression of larger trends in state violence that routinely takes place during the serving of search warrants,” argue Blocha and Martínez, “as part of stops and frisks of pedestrians, and as result of investigatory traffic stops that disproportionately target communities of color.”5 Speciesism and racism are their own independent entities, but in the United States from Reconstruction to the present they have acted on each other in ways that have been generative of new manifestations of both, within police departments and without. They feed off of one another, helping to shape the contours of both in the twenty-first century. They do not act in the same way, but they both act in concert, making engagement in one form of coded alterity a de facto engagement in the other. The history of the intersection of race and animality more broadly has also been the subject of more recent studies. Work by Joshua Bennett and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that African Americans deploy animal metaphors in direct response to historical white claims of Black animality and the long colonial project of treating the Black experience as a meaningless non-entity.6 Lindgren Johnson goes further, describing a “fugitive humanism” among African Americans that maintains significant animal relationships in pushing back against the animal associations created by white supremacy.7 Iman Jackson and Johnson, in particular, track such associations through literary production, while Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog combines with literary theory a more historical approach to understanding such associations, arguing that the white discourse of race and species served both to tie Blackness to animality and to bolster the white supremacist project.8 “The history of animals is not merely a ‘fad’ in the ever widening reach of historical scholarship,” argues Erica Fudge. It is instead the necessary outgrowth of debates in the discipline and broader public narratives outside of it. For Fudge, “the history of animals is a necessary part of our reconceptualization of ourselves as human.” Animals “are the site of social change,” which itself is the driver of historical progression. If meaning-making is a function of difference, and the human animal-nonhuman animal divide is the largest remaining assumed cavern of difference in the human mind, then it is vital that we seek to “learn more about humans by understanding what they claimed that they were not: animals.”9 At the same time, meaning-making is also a function of similarity, of comparisons that create the shifting dynamics of identity between, for example, humans and other animals, or between humans of differing levels of racial and class privilege. Cary Wolfe has argued in regard to critical theory that with the developments in biology, cognitive science, and other disciplines, “there is no longer any good reason to take it for granted that the theoretical, ethical, and political question of the subject is automatically coterminous with the species distinction between Homo sapiens and everything else.” The same can be said–must be said–for the discipline of history. When those in the field produce “a rather traditional version” of what Wolfe calls “the discourse of species,” that discourse, “in turn, reproduces the institution of speciesism.”10 Richard Ryder coined the term “speciesism” in an anti-vivisection pamphlet in 1970, and it was popularized by Peter Singer in the years that followed.11 Speciesism, Ryder argued, was “the widely held belief that the human species is inherently superior to other species and so has rights or privileges that are denied to other sentient animals.”12 It could certainly encompass oppression and physical cruelty, but oppression and cruelty were not necessary. Speciesism was any set of “beliefs and behaviours if they are based upon the species-difference alone, as if such a difference is, in itself, a justification” for those beliefs and behaviors.13 Singer concurred, seeing speciesism as “a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interest of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,” and argued that it could only be properly understood in relation to other dispossessions like sexism and racism.14 240

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Taking that speciesism seriously through the intersectional lens of race requires respecting the life of the nonhuman as much as that of the human, while still acknowledging their fundamental differences. It is the common position for any deontological conception of animal ethics, spanning from Kant’s categorical imperative to never treat anyone only as a means to an end to Ronald Dworkin’s non-relative interests that have total weight in moral calculations.15 The position was taken most influentially by Tom Regan. “Inherent value,” he argued, “belongs equally to those who are the experiencing subjects of a life.”16 Assuming nonhuman animals to be experiencing subjects of a life who have inherent value, and thus should not only be treated as a means to an end, shapes the signposting of animals in new ways and demonstrates how different bigotries intersect in the treatment of groups coded by race and species. “It could be argued,” writes Samantha Hurn, “that ‘Western’ ‘speciesism’ began with Aristotle and his continuum of living things, which saw humans at one end of a spectrum, the ‘perfection’ which for all other animals was unattainable.”17 Its presence in the historical discourse appears most regularly when historians ignore the interests of and consequences for nonhuman animals in the progression of human social history. After all, “the figure of the ‘animal’ in the West,” writes Wolfe, “is part of a cultural and literary history stretching back at least to Plato and the Old Testament, reminding us that the animal has always been especially, frightfully nearby.”18 That hiding in plain sight of other beings in temporal and physical space stands as another signpost of the influence of speciesism in “the formation of Western subjectivity and sociality as such, an institution that relies on the tacit agreement that the full transcendence of the ‘human’ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal’ and the animalistic.”19 That tacit agreement is built on semiotic referents designed to reinforce the notion of human supremacy, ultimately leading to what Jacques Derrida calls a “noncriminal putting to death” of those nonhuman animals that humans cannot see as beings with interests because of the influence of such signs.20 When Derrida describes his “noncriminal putting to death,” however, he does not just refer to nonhuman animals. The others put to death in such a manner are those humans animalized by similar semiotics that code them as being either unworthy of life or less worthy than those in power. And in the United States, that worth has been determined more than anything else by race. In encounters with the police, however, worth is also determined (and diminished) by indiscriminate violence, a violence that codes all markers of difference as potentially problematic to a group whose training teaches them to assume consistent threat. Nonhuman animals, and dogs in particular, are already devalued as beings without morally relevant lives, making their interactions with law enforcement even more tenuous. The case law attempting to reconcile animals’ status as property, the important role they play in the lives of human families, and the constant violence enacted on them by police, began substantially in the 1980s. In August 1984, for example, sheriff’s deputies in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin executed a search warrant on a family home, seeking a cash of marijuana and some stolen pressure cookers. They entered the house in camouflage and moved quickly to “secure” the premises. They found neither marijuana nor pressure cookers, but in the process of securing the house, one of the officers shot and killed the family’s German shepherd. When the family sued, the original jury in the case awarded them monetary compensation for the loss of the dog as well as punitive damages; it also required funding for officer training related to canine interactions. Appellate courts, however, found the punitive damages as problematic and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case back to Manitowoc County for a new trial in 1989. The court was clear that the shooting was a Fourth Amendment violation, a functional seizure of the family’s property, but worried about punitive damages for what was interpreted as a loss of property rather than the loss of a member of the family.21 It would prove a common appellate interpretation, courts validating Fourth Amendment claims based on police brutality to nonhuman animals, but refusing to describe that validation as a form of brutality. Seizure claims ensured victims a measure of monetary compensation, but that 241

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compensation was typically limited to the fair market value of the dog, not based on a serious interest in the life taken or the psychological damage to the family. It was a form of speciesism that ensured the financial culpability for offending officers and their departments would be minimal, leading to a shoot-first attitude that presumed dogs to be potentially violent threats rather than innocent bystanders. The standard was all the more galling when considering that common law culpability for pet owners after events like dog bites built from the assumption that dogs were not inherently violent at all, a standard commonly known as “first bite free.” Civilian victims of dog bites had to demonstrate in court that pet owners had a reasonable understanding of a dog’s potential for violent action to prove culpability and get financial restitution. Police, however, could assume the opposite and thus feel relatively unfettered in killing pets indiscriminately.22 There were, however, exceptions to that rule, wherein larger restitution could be made. Fuller v. Vines (1994) involved the shooting of Champ, a 12-year-old Great Dane/Labrador mix, while lying in the grass at his home. A father and son were with him when two police officers walked by. Startled at the presence of pedestrians, Champ stood up, prompting the officers to draw their guns. Both father and son begged them not to shoot the dog, but they did anyway. When the son protested, they turned the gun on him. As in most of the cases resulting from police brutality against dogs, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals treated the resulting suit as a Fourth Amendment property seizure, and after remanding the original suit back to the trial court, a jury awarded the Fuller family $143,000 for violation of the family’s constitutional rights, another $10,000 in punitive damages, and more than $100,000 in additional money for pointing the gun at the son.23 Fuller demonstrated that juries were more sympathetic to the bonds between human families and nonhuman companion animals than judges, but even with a heavy payout, the case was still the result of a civil action. The officers never faced charges and knew that Fourth Amendment seizure claims for killing dogs would never end in the kind of prosecution that would force them to face non-monetary consequences for their actions. The violent speciesism inherent in such paradigms inevitably played out within police departments, as well. The same year as the Ninth Circuit’s Fuller decision, the Eighth Circuit ruled on another Fourth Amendment dog-killing suit. Lesher v. Reed (1994), however, involved a dog slated to work for the Little Rock, Arkansas K9 unit. When officer James Lesher was transferred to the department, he donated a dog to the program and raised her himself. His written agreement with the LRPD acknowledged that Lesher could retain custody of the dog if she was deemed unsuitable for police work. After the dog bit a child, the force decided that she was not police material and informed Lesher that it was claiming and killing her as a result of the bite. Lesher protested vehemently and cited the clause in his agreement allowing him to retain custody. When threatened with termination if he didn’t relinquish the dog, he finally relented, but because of the incident, he was then transferred out of the K9 unit to another department. Lesher sued the force, claiming a Fourth Amendment violation for the taking and killing of his dog and a First Amendment violation of his free speech for the transfer. The Ninth Circuit discarded the First Amendment claim but validated that of the Fourth, despite police protestations that the agreement made the dog LRPD property and that there was no “search” so there was not a technical “seizure.” The Ninth Circuit laid bare the fallacy of such claims. “The seizure of property is subject to Fourth Amendment scrutiny even though no search has occurred,” the opinion stated. “Public employees, like private citizens, are entitled to the benefits of the Constitution, and the State may not coerce them into relinquishing a constitutional guarantee under threat of losing their employment.”24 While the decision provided the Lesher family with the potential for financial restitution, it couldn’t bring back their dog killed by the police department, which showed a wanton indifference to the lives of nonhuman animals. The case law is important and will continue to be discussed in the paragraphs that follow because it demonstrates the evolution of legal thinking on police brutality toward animals. But the one static entity in a legal system kinetically negotiating its relationship with 242

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police violence toward the nonhumans in their midst is that wanton indifference. The evolution of legal thinking, then, is about classification rather than prevention, restitution rather than punishment, drawing from the common law understanding of animals as chattel, as property. At least when the definition is in aid of describing police violence against them. Courts have historically wrestled with differences between domestic animals and wild animals, between livestock and pets. They have worried over whether goldfish, birds, or rats count in legislative definitions of “animal” and over the various exemptions applied to killing animals in a society that builds much of its food and entertainment sectors on their deaths.25 “Courts and legislatures seem to be searching for a balance to protect living creatures other than humans, without extending that protection to a point that may seem unreasonable and possibly unenforceable.”26 In all such searchings, however, the baseline understanding grounding legal decisions has been an assumption that nonhumans are not persons and have no legal standing. And so they enter the policing space in an inordinately vulnerable position, as expendable nonpersons, as property. One of the foundational cases governing such assumptions in the twentyfirst century is Rabideau v. City of Racine (2001). After Wisconsin police shot and killed Dakota, a dog living with Julie Rabideau, the judge in her case awarded the human plaintiff recovery for emotional damages based on the fact that she witnessed the killing. Rabideau argued that “anyone who has owned and loved a pet would agree that in terms of emotional trauma, watching the death of a pet is akin to losing a close relative.” The Supreme Court of Wisconsin, though acknowledging that bond, disagreed. “The law categorizes the dog as personal property despite the long relationship between dogs and humans,” the opinion read, and that being the case, petitioners “cannot maintain a claim for recovery for the emotional distress caused by negligent damage to her property.”27 That unwillingness by the court to countenance the human relationship with animals above and beyond their common law property definition served as a form of further permission for police officers to treat animals with relative impunity. That same year the Third Circuit Court of Appeals evaluated a Pennsylvania case wherein Immi, a Rottweiler, wandered into a parking lot adjacent to her house while her humans were in the process of moving. When approached by a police officer, Immi barked. Despite her bright pink collar and tags, and despite her owner screaming from the window of the home, the officer pulled his gun and shot Immi five times, even continuing to shoot as she attempted to crawl away. The court in Brown v. Muhlenberg Township (2001) was concerned in particular with the qualified immunity claimed by the officer and denied it based on his breach of Fourth Amendment seizure laws. But even in that legal victory against police violence, the victims were the human members of the Brown family rather than Immi, who was simply the property seized in an illegal Fourth Amendment action.28 Police have proven willing if not eager in many cases to take the lives of human victims, even when they are being filmed, because of a confidence that qualified immunity will protect them. In instances of police brutality against nonhumans, there is a reverse assumption at work. Claims of qualified immunity have been consistently struck down by courts precisely because animals are considered property. Fourth Amendment search and seizure violations rise in their place but never generate the possibility of jail time or other legal jeopardy for officers involved because the issue only arises in civil actions. Thus while qualified immunity has historically served as at least a partial motivating factor in the police shooting of humans, the lack of criminal prosecution in Fourth Amendment civil cases has become its own version of qualified immunity that creates a similar willingness to kill when officers encounter dogs in public spaces.29 And as in police brutality cases against humans, the assumption of at least an approximation of immunity lends a de facto credibility to officer narratives of events. In Altman v. City of High Point, NC (2003), for example, animal control officers rather than the police killed several dogs, but made a similar claim for qualified immunity. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals again rejected the claim 243

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but absolved the officers of responsibility because the dogs were Rottweilers, pit bulls, and large dogs of mixed breed that defendants were able to depict as aggressive and dangerous, a successful form of profiling so common in defenses of human shootings. The next year, a Connecticut court ruled that a police officer was justified in shooting a pit bull running toward him, despite the dog’s owner telling the officer that he was friendly. It was a deadly profiling made possible by the diminished standard of animals at the bar and officers’ correct assumption that in most cases, particularly in interactions with breeds with a reputation for aggression, they could kill without consequence.30 That reliance on profiling offered another intersection with the racialized history of policing. Just as racial profiling and stop-and-frisk policies provided permission for police officers to abuse civilians based on their own inherent fears of the other, breed assumptions gave them similar cover for similar violent interactions. It was a metaphorical intersection, to be sure, but one that could also find physical representation. In a 1998 police raid of the clubhouse of the San Jose chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, police shot three dogs that belonged to members of the group, guard dogs that were not only large and assumed to be aggressive, but were also by default associated with the Hells Angels, despite the fact that dogs do not carry the same cultural constructs to allow them to know or care about motorcycle gangs. Not only did the police kill three dogs on the property, but one of the members of the Hells Angels was “handcuffed just yards from where her dog Sam lay dead and bleeding.” It was the ultimate trauma for Sam and a substantial one for his arrested human companion. “The emotional attachment to a family’s dog is not comparable to a possessory interest in furniture,” the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2005. The officers predictably claimed qualified immunity, but the court disagreed, arguing that plans for the raid had been made a week in advance, giving police ample time “to develop strategies for immobilizing the dogs” without killing them. It was both an unreasonable search and an unreasonable seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment, based on a lived intersection of human and animal stereotypes.31 Demonstrating the legal schizophrenia presented by courts, another federal district court in the same year granted, for the first time, a qualified immunity claim for a police officer after shooting and killing a dog, despite the fact that that court accepted the plaintiff’s claim that the dog did not bite and that he could easily have just been put on a leash. The officer “could have reasonably assumed that the dog posed an imminent threat to his safety,” the court claimed, and thus he was “objectively reasonable in his belief that his conduct would not violate clearly established law.”32 It was a narrative familiar to African American plaintiffs since the recorded beating of Rodney King, the court giving the benefit of the doubt to a police officer’s reasonable assumption of danger based on no demonstrable data. And as the families of victims from Amadou Diallo to Freddie Gray knew all too well, that those baseless assumptions ended in death was of little legal concern in such decisions. And just as in those human decisions, the court’s acceptance of a qualified immunity claim carried with it consequences for future lawsuits, creating a stare decisis domino effect that made it more difficult for claims against police officers who killed pets in violation of the Fourth Amendment. In 2008, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld qualified immunity in the Milwaukee police killing of Bubba, a seven-year-old Labrador Retriever/Springer Spaniel mix. Despite the fact that Bubba was sitting in his yard, staring at his human companion, the officer who shot him claimed he felt threatened, and the court was inclined to take him at his word, arguing that the use “of deadly force against a household pet is reasonable only if the pet poses an immediate danger and the use of force is unavoidable.”33 Though shooting Bubba was clearly avoidable, the ambiguity of such terms gave the legal apparatus the ability to provide cover for law enforcement. That same year, the court for the Eastern District of California expanded such ambiguous definitions. “To determine whether the shooting of plaintiff’s dog was reasonable, the court must balance the nature and quality of the intrusion on plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment interests against the countervailing governmental interests at stake.”34 When “immediate danger” transmogrified to “countervailing governmental interests,” the potential for deadly police misconduct only increased. 244

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In 2007, for example, the municipality of Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, took control of three public housing complexes in the area. Though under their previous administrators the complexes allowed pets, the mayor of Barceloneta ordered the removal of residents’ pets. In two successive raids, officials seized at least twenty pets, explaining that if the animals weren’t surrendered, the families would be evicted. Many of the humans companions were killed on site, slammed into the sides of vans, or thrown off of a nearby bridge. It was the kind of cruelty that redounded as a consequence of the lack of legal accountability. When the residents sued, the mayor claimed qualified immunity, a claim denied by the courts in 2009 in part because of the blatant, extortive seizure and in part because of the particularly cruel deaths suffered by the animals. The municipality was ultimately required to pay $300,000 to the residents for violating their Fourth Amendment search and seizure rights and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights.35 In 2010, the Northern District of California also denied a qualified immunity claim, not because of grotesque cruelty or because qualified immunity couldn’t apply in the police shooting of a nonhuman animal, but instead because officers who killed an animal while executing a warrant knew that the plaintiff’s dog was in the house before they entered. That left Fourth Amendment claims, which the courts on two different occasions in 2010 and 2011 argued could apply to police shootings of nonhumans even when the victims were only wounded. Still, demonstrating the perfidious shadow of assumptions about qualified immunity and reasonable fear, both of those cases ended in summary judgments for the police defendants because the courts deemed the shootings reasonable.36 Perfidious shadows, however, hung in every corner of the connectivity between police brutality and definitions of the other. In a case that would find human echoes seven years later in the police killing of Breonna Taylor, Carroll v. County of Monroe (2013) upheld a lower court ruling that justified the law enforcement shooting of a family dog while executing a no-knock warrant in Monroe County, New York. Sheriff’s deputies used a battering ram to break down the plaintiff’s door, understandably distressing the dog who lived in the home and leading him to growl and bark at the entering officers. One of the deputies responded by shooting the dog in the head with a shotgun upon entry, but the court ruled that the aggression of the dog was justified enough for the shooting, despite the aggression being caused by the use of a no-knock warrant.37 The problematic nature of that kind of successful circular argument would become all too familiar in 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky, after the execution of a no-knock warrant and the understandable aggression of one of the home’s residents led to indiscriminate shooting and the killing of Breonna Taylor. The public outrage over the lack of police consequences for the attack was international in its scope, a macro version of what pet owners had experienced for years in cases like Carroll, the police unreasonably interpreting a threat, or experiencing a threat in response to their own actions, then using that interpretation and the case law that backed it to argue that what they did was reasonable, despite the unnecessary loss of life. The clear comparison between the different kinds of official othering and the lack of consequences for it would be obvious to police brutality’s human victims, particularly those among the African American population, leading to a glut of nonhuman animal symbolism in commentary on racialized policing. Racial uprisings, for example, have almost always included animalized commentary. One of the most prominent came in Harlem in 1964, following the police shooting of an African American boy.38 During the uprising that accompanied the killing, protesters described police culture as hunting culture, one policeman telling them, “I’m going to get me a nigger tonight.” The original officer, the protesters explained, didn’t have to wait for nightfall. “He got his nigger in the morning.” That hunting ethos, then, turned its subjects into animals. Harlem, according to psychologist Kenneth Clark, “is a product of violence and its existence is a symbol of inhumanity and injustice.” Even among the advocates of the victims of racial policing, humanity became the standard by which decency was judged. “How could the city expect the Negro to behave sensibly?” asked civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. “He behaved desperately because of the 245

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desperate situation.” That kind of framing, from both the hunters and hunted, even led the Washington Post’s news reporting on the violence to engage in such metaphors. Harlemites, one article explained, cared less about civil rights legislation and more about poverty and the need for food. “And if some Harlem youth are acting like animals today, it could be because some of them sell themselves to homosexuals” for sustenance.39 It was a demonstration of the declension inevitable in animal metaphors. Comparisons of police brutality to hunting were not unjustified, but they led to claims of inhumanity, which led to comparisons of inhumanity to desperation, which then ended in comparisons of Black behavior to that of animals and the absurd notion that their animalistic behavior was represented by the poor “selling themselves to homosexuals,” an act decidedly unrelated to nonhuman animal species. The reason that association existed was because of that particular problematic declension, but also because human society had been conditioned to see any behavior that skirted societal norms as nonhuman, as animalistic, despite the lack of any real resemblance to actual nonhuman animal action. It was not, then, a metaphor based on realistic comparisons. It was a metaphor based solely on bigotry, against the human or human group in the comparison, and against all nonhuman animals. And the only group in that particular paradigm without the ability to push back against such framing were the animals. As Mary Midgley has explained, “When human beings behave really badly, they are said to behave ‘like animals,’ however unlike their acts may be to those that any other species could perform. This is a way of disowning the motives concerned and distancing them from the rest of us,” the effort at moral superiority and political superiority trumping the need for one-to-one correlation.40 “Animal” is an epithet reserved for the most “horrible human beings” and “heinous criminals,” Jim Mason argues, particularly when “we want to describe their egoism, insatiable greed, insatiable sexuality, cruelty, senseless slaughter of other beings, and the mass slaughter of human beings,” behavior that is actually rarely the product of nonhuman beings. Animalizing such behavior, then, has nothing to do with the actual relationship to animals. Mason calls the general corpus of negative portrayals and ideas about nonhuman animals “misothery.” Misothery “reduces the power/status/ dignity of animals and nature and so aids and abets the supremacy of human beings in our dominionist culture.” It was that attitude that helped formalize the move to sedentary agriculture and create modern human societies. Debasing animals to elevate humans helped define culture and encourage domestication, which in turn created terminology that demeaned human beings with animal tropes even though the actions presented in the tropes had no specific relation to animals. “Before domestication,” Mason argues, “the powerful souls or supernaturals (or gods) were animal, and primal people looked up to them; after domestication, the gods were humanoid, and people looked down on animals.”41 This lack of direct correlation, in the words of Samantha Hurn, “goes some way towards explaining why human characteristics and actions such as rape and murder at one end of the spectrum, and sexual promiscuity or bad table manners at the other, are often labelled as animalistic.” By framing select humans as nonhuman animals, the framers “chastise and censure those others” considered outside of socially constructive norms.42 Animality, then, becomes a signpost of difference rather than the correlative comparison assumed by most metaphorical work. An excerpt from James Baldwin published in the New York Times in 1964 synthesizes much of the frustration felt in Harlem over signposts of difference and their disastrous consequences. “Here in this ghetto I was born,” he wrote. “And here it was intended by my countrymen that I should live and perish. And in that ghetto, I was tormented. I felt caged, like an animal. I wanted to escape. I felt if I did not get out I would slowly strangle.”43 While Baldwin’s lament could have applied directly to Harlem’s uprising, it worked in a different way in relation to animals. In this quote, urban poverty is a stand-in for a form of bondage, as with animals in zoos. Baldwin follows with an explanation of his hope that education would be his way out of such bondage, a solution significant because it is one wholly unavailable to the other caged beings he describes. There was in such comparisons no awareness that the pain and psychological strangulation felt by those like Baldwin were, it would stand to reason, faced 246

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by the animals they saw as convenient referents for caging. Though the author displayed plenty of transgressive behaviors that skirted societal norms, as in the Washington Post’s semantic declension about the Harlem uprising, his use of the animal metaphor didn’t result from those transgressions. Instead, his was an acknowledgment that being caged metaphorically was torture without an acknowledgment of those being caged actually. An article in the paper the following year made the comparison even more explicit, a critic of Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity accused “the antipoverty program of treating Negroes ‘like animals in a zoo.’”44 Martin Luther King made a similar comparison in describing black attempts to register to vote in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Potential registrants were “herded into an alley like animals” by the police to wait their turn for what became a frustrating and failed attempt to register.45 The metaphor was apt, as many animals were subject to herding and corralling that limited their range of motion, but its use elevated the frustrated black Alabamians at the expense of nonhuman animals, who were not part of King’s stated concern. It was a subtle belittling, but it was a belittling. Similar belittling can be seen in the protests of 2020 prompted by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “To watch my baby nephew suffer like an animal until they put him out of his misery,” said Floyd’s uncle, Selwyn Jones, “he didn’t deserve to die in the middle of the street like trash.” Jones here equates nonhuman animals with trash to make his point about police brutality.46 A protestor at one of the myriad marches in the aftermath of the killing told a reporter, “George Floyd was killed like an animal. And we’re tired. This is the norm. This is not something that’s new.”47 The refrains of 2020 echoed those of the protests of the 1960s, and the pain that came from police abuse echoed those of humans whose companion animals were killed under the guise of official duty. After the metaphors ran their course, however, there were still tens of thousands of dogs shot and killed by police. “In too much of policing today,” explains journalist Radley Balko, “officer safety has become the highest priority. It trumps the rights and safety of suspects. It trumps the rights and safety of bystanders. It’s so important, in fact, that an officer’s subjective fear of a minor wound from a dog bite is enough to justify using potentially lethal force.”48 In 2016, the problem was made most public by the documentary Of Dogs and Men, which examined in depth the disturbing trend of police shootings of companion animals.49 The ASPCA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and other advocacy groups have sought to create training programs for officers and funding pools for Fourth Amendment court challenges for victims of police abuse. Advocates created the Puppycide Database Project to track police shootings of dogs and other nonhuman animal companions.50 “Whether you’re talking about police shooting dogs or citizens,” explains attorney John Whitehead, “the mindset is the same: a rush to violence, abuse of power, fear for officer safety, poor training in how to de-escalate a situation, and general carelessness.”51 And whether you’re talking about dogs or citizens, the results have historically been catastrophic and deadly.

Notes 1 Genette Gaffney, “6,083 Dogs Shot and Killed: The Unknown Puppycide Epidemic in America,” Animal Law 24 (2018): 199, 200; and Kaylan E. Kaatz, “Those Doggone Police: Insufficient Training, Canine Companion Seizures, and Colorado’s Solution,” San Diego Law Review 51 (August-September 2014): 825. 2 Other statistics claim that dogs are killed by the police every ninety-eight minutes. Kaatz, “Those Doggone Police,” 826. 3 Cynthia Bathurst, Donald Cleary, Karen Delise, Ledy VanKavage, Patricia Rushing, The Problem of DogRelated Incidents and Encounters (Washington: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2015), 2. 4 Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). 5 Stefano Blocha and Daniel E. Martínez, “Canicide by Cop: A geographical analysis of canine killings by police in Los Angeles,” Geoforum 111 (May 2020): 153. 6 Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020); and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning In an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020). See also Aph Ko, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide for Getting Out (Brooklyn: Lantern Books, 2019).

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Thomas Aiello 7 Lindgren Johnson, Race Matters, Animal Matters: Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2019). 8 Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 9 Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 5, 9–10. 10 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1, 2. 11 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1975). 12 Ryder quoted in Lauren Corman L and Sarat Colling, “‘Nailing Descartes to the Wall’ by Propagandhi,” in Rebel Music: Resistance Through Hip Hop and Punk, eds. Scott Robertson, Martha Diaz, Anthony J. Nocella II, Priya Parmar (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2015), 36–37. 13 Ryder quoted in Lauren Corman, “Impossible Subjects: The Figure of the Animal in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 16 (No. 1 2011): 42. See also Richard Ryder, “Speciesism Again: The Original Leaflet,” Critical Society 1 (No. 2 2010): 1–2. 14 Singer, Animal Liberation, 7. 15 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (originally published 1785; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1977). 16 Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Advances in Animal Welfare Science, 1986/87, eds. Michael W. Fox and Linda D. Mickley (Washington: Humane Society of the United States, 1986), 187. 17 Samantha Hurn, Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 16. 18 Wolfe, Animal Rites, 6. 19 Wolfe, Animal Rites, 6. 20 Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject,” in, Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 278. 21 Erwin v. County of Manitowoc, 872 F.2d 1292 (1989). 22 Sonia S. Waisman, Pamela D. Frasch, and Bruce A. Wagman, Animal Law: Cases and Materials, fifth edition (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2014), 186–189. 23 Fuller v. Vines, 36 F.3d 65 (9th Cir. 1994). 24 Lesher v. Reed, 12 F.3d 148 (1994). 25 For cases exemplary of such hand-wringing, see Knox v. Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 425 N.E.2d 393 (1981); Lock v. Falkenstine, 380 P.2d 278 (1963); People v. Baniqued, 101 Cal. Rptr. 2d 835 (Ct. App. 2000); State ex rel. Miller v. Claiborne, 505 P.2d 732 (Kan. 1973); State v. Buford, 331 P.2d 1110 (N.M. 1958); Morning Fresh Farms, Inc. v. Weld County Board of Equalization, 794 P.2d 1073 (Colo. Ct. App. 1990); State v. Cleve, 980 P.2d 23 (1999); United States v. Park, 536 F.3d 1058 (2008); People v. Bugaiski, 568 N.W.2d 391 (Mich. Ct. App. 1997); State v. Nelson, 499 N.W.2d 512 (Minn. Ct. App. 1993); Holcomb v. Van Zylen, 140 N.W. 521 (1913); Commonwealth v. Massini, 188 A.2d 816 (1963); and McKinney v. Robbins, 892 S.W.2d 502 (Ark. 1995). 26 Waisman, Frasch, and Wagman, Animal Law, 15. 27 Rabideau v. City of Racine, 243 Wis. 2d 486, 627 N.W.2d 795 (2001). 28 Brown v. Muhlenberg Township, 269 F3d 205 (3rd Cir. 2001). 29 There have also been attempts by plaintiffs to frame police violence against dogs in other ways. In Copenhaver v. Borough of Bernville (2003), the plaintiff made a trespass to chattels claim, an intentional tort that put the focus on the officer’s “specific intent to commit a wrong,” rather than “on the alleged wrongdoer’s intent to exercise control over the chattel.” While the court allowed the tort, it limited the defendants to the shooter, rather than to the other officers and the force itself, because the intent claim only applied to the one who had actively demonstrated it. Copenhaver v. Borough of Bernville 2003 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1315 (E.D. Pa. Jan. 9, 2003). 30 Altman v. City of High Point, NC, 330 F.3d 194 (4th Cir. 2003); and Warboys v. Proulx, 300 F. Supp 2d 111 (D. Conn. 2004). For more on historical legal interpretations of dogs deemed aggressive or dangerous and the criminal liability related to those interpretations, see “Dogs,” Western Jurist 13 (April 1879): 150–152; Charles A. Ray, Negligence of Imposed Duties, Personal (Rochester: Lawyers’ Co-operative Pub. Co., 1891), 614–628; Montague R. Emanuel, Law Relating to Dogs (London: Stevens & Sons., 1908). 31 San Jose Charter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club v. City of San Jose, 402 F3d 962 (9th Cir. 2005). See also Gaffney, “6,083 Dogs Shot and Killed,” 207–208. 32 Dziekan v. Gaynor, 376 F. Supp. 2d 267 (D. Conn. 2005). In a Florida case four years prior, an officer was absolved of responsibility after shooting a human bystander while firing at what he described as vicious dogs. The suit was brought by the bystander, so the death of the dogs was ancillary to the case itself, but it

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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demonstrated both the lack of legal concern for animal victims of police brutality and the willingness of the court to countenance an officer’s fear as justification for violence. Ryan v. Roy, 801 So. 2d 203 (Fla. Dist. App. 4th 2001). Viilo v. Eyre, 547 F.3d 707 (2008). Perez v. City of Placerville, 2008 WL 4279386 (E.D. Cal. Sept. 9, 2008). Maldonado v. Fontanes, 568 F.3d 263 (1st Cir. 2009). Silva v. City of San Leandro, 744 F. Supp. 2d 1036 (N.D. Cal. 2010); Esterson v. Broward County Sheriff’s Department, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 117490 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 4, 2010); and Pettit v. State of New Jersey, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 35452 (D.N.J. Mar. 30, 2011). Carroll v. County of Monroe, 712 F.3d 649 (2d Cir. 2013). See also Gaffney, “6,083 Dogs Shot and Killed,” 208–210. Michael W. Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Eve Edstrom, “N.Y. Observer Finds Rioting Had Its Roots In Long Pent-Up Rage,” Washington Post, 26 July 1964, A1, A6. Mary Midgley, “Bridge-Building At Last,” in Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives, eds. Aubrey Manning and James Serpell (London: Routledge, 1994), 192. Jim Mason, “Animals: From Souls and the Sacred in Prehistoric Times to Symbols and Slaves in Antiquity,” in A Cultural History of Animals In Antiquity, ed. Linda Kalof (New York: Berg, 2007), 38–39. Hurn, Humans and Other Animals, 14. James Baldwin, “James Baldwin Recalls His Childhood,” New York Times, 31 May 1964, X11. Austin C. Wehrwein, “Shriver Defends Poverty Program,” New York Times, 7 December 1965, 27. “King Struck, Kicked During Racial Drive,” Chicago Tribune, 19 January 1965, 1. Morgan Matzen, “George Floyd’s uncle speaks out about nephew’s death, remembers his gentle nature and big smile,” Rapid City Journal, 28 May 2020, https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/state-and-regional/ george-floyds-uncle-speaks-out-about-nephews-death-remembers-his-gentle-nature-and-big-smile/article_7d3ef4e0-c157-583b-873a-a2f209a1a89a.html (accessed 11 June 2020). Esha Sarai, “For Many, George Floyd Death Not a Solitary Incident,” Voice of America, 31 May 2020, https://www.voanews.com/usa/many-george-floyd-death-not-solitary-incident (accessed 13 June 2020). Balko quoted in John Whitehead, “Don’t shoot the dogs: The growing epidemic of cops shooting family dogs,” Overton County News, 7 January 2020, https://www.overtoncountynews.com/lifestyles/don-tshoot-the-dogs-the-growing-epidemic-of-cops-shooting-family-dogs/article_98757e76-318f-11ea-8d4fe35f8b517936.html, accessed 23 September 2020. Of Dogs and Men, dir. Michael Ozias, prod. Patrick Reasonover (2016). See also Rebecca Jenkins, “Documentary Review: Of Dogs and Men,” Animal Law 22 (No. 1 2015): 193–202. See ASPCA, “Position Statements on Law Enforcement Response to Potentially Dangerous Dogs,” https:// www.aspca.org/about-us/aspca-policy-and-position-statements/position-statements-law-enforcementresponse, accessed 22 September 2020; Animal Legal Defense Fund, “Dogs Shot by Cops: Companion Animals and Law Enforcement,” https://aldf.org/project/dogs-shot-by-cops/, accessed 22 September 2020; and The Puppycide Database Project, https://puppycidedb.com/, accessed 23 September 2020. Whitehead, “Don’t shoot the dogs.” See also Sophie B. Mashburn, “For the Love of Dogs: Why Every State Should Include Pets in Civil Protective Orders,” Journal of Law and Social Deviance 9 (2015): 1–29.

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19 BRUTALITY AT THE BAR The Supreme Court and Police Misconduct Thomas Aiello

St. Francis County was a rural area in east central Arkansas, and in late December 1927, the bodies of two boys were found in the local Cutoff Bayou. Julius McCollum had been 11 years old, the white son of a local store owner. Elbert Thomas, 19 years old, was Black, and the twin tragedies broke everyone in the small community near the county line. Both had been at the McCollum family store on December 29, as had Robert Bell and Grady Swain, two Black youths, eighteen and fourteen respectively. In the rush to discover what happened to the victims, a witness claimed that Bell had admitted to him on the night of the twenty-ninth that Bell had drowned Thomas and that Swain had drowned McCollum. Their race was already a source of suspicion for white law enforcement, so they were both arrested, and in the process of an “interrogation,” whipped mercilessly and repeatedly, both were forced to make confessions to the crimes. Both were quickly convicted of first-degree murder by all-white juries and sentenced to death before appealing the verdicts to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which overturned the ruling. “The officers admitted whipping the defendants, but denied that they did so to obtain the confessions,” the Court’s decision explained. “They claimed that they whipped them because they were impudent to them, and said that the confessions were free and voluntary.” Still, the Court overturned the ruling based on insufficient evidence, and thus “it will not be necessary to decide whether or not the confessions were extorted from the defendants by whipping them.” The ruling, however, took pains to note that even though it wouldn’t rule on the confession issue, “this court is committed to the rule that confessions used in evidence against the defendant must be free and voluntary, and they must not be extorted from them by whipping them or by any inquisitorial method.”1 On retrial, the cases were moved to Woodruff County to avoid local furor, and the defendants were split. Robert Bell was convicted again by an all-white jury and this time sentenced to life in prison. This time the appellate court had to deal with the forced confession. Bell “told how he was made to lie upon the floor, clad only in a thin shirt and trousers, and was whipped with a leather strap attached to a handle—the strap was three-and-a-half feet long and three inches wide.”2 That testimony was freely admitted to by law enforcement, who argued that it happened not to get a confession but instead because “he was a mean, hard-headed nigger.” “Did you whip him at any time because he wouldn’t confess and give details?” one officer was asked. “I whipped him to try to make him tell where the money was.” Q. Not about the killing of Julius McCullom? A. Well, I don’t know—probably I might have done that. I don’t know; maybe it was in connection with the case. 250

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Q. Did he make a free and voluntary confession or not? A. Well, I don’t know that I could say Bell ever made a free and voluntary confession. I got a confession out of him by piecemeal—it was never very free. There never was any voluntary confession coming from this big nigger.”3 It was difficult to argue that the confession was not coerced, and the Court agreed that it was. “It was the duty of the State to affirmatively show that the confessions made to the sheriff and McCullom were given free from the undue influence under which the prior confessions were made, and this it has wholly failed to do. The only reasonable inference, from all the facts, is that such influence did remain and produce the confession.”4 The case was an early example of police brutality being adjudicated in a state appellate court, but it went no further because it was a matter decidedly under the purview of the state. The Arkansas Supreme Court’s ruling in Bell v. State (1929) demonstrated the importance of appellate courts, as all-white juries were likely to convict brutalized Black defendants despite incidents of police brutality. Appellate judges were more likely to weigh such issues with more consideration. But that consideration would not provide any consistency in appellate judicial thinking about the role of police brutality in due process. When such cases began to appear at the federal level and in the Supreme Court, justices were unable to formulate consistent policy, and in the process abetted the continuation of police brutality under a lenient rubric that led many officers to assume, rightly, that their crimes would not be considered crimes when push came to shove. If there was any demonstrable trajectory of Supreme Court thinking about police brutality, it was an early protection for victims of police brutality that began to shift in the 1940s to a more vigorous protection of abusive police. The most important turning point in that transition came in the 1945 Screws v. United States decision wherein a divided court admittedly ruling against its own beliefs validated police brutality and damaged the Justice Department’s ability to bring civil rights cases against abusive officers. The turn to validation hinged in part on states’ rights claims that determination of what constituted excessive treatment should be determined by the states that employed law enforcement. But the most important factor in governing the Court’s turn to protecting police abusers was the seeming inscrutability of police “willful intent” and a broad benefit of the doubt given to claims of law enforcement that officers felt threatened at the time of their violent acts. Such arguments would ensure that though the Supreme Court had an intentionally limited role in adjudicating cases of police brutality, the frayed trajectory of its rulings would cast a long shadow and create a permissive atmosphere for officers to act with relative impunity in the decades following World War II. Seven years after Bell, a similar case from Mississippi finally appeared at the Supreme Court. In March 1934, three Black tenant farmers were arrested following the murder of white planter Raymond Stewart in Kemper County, in rural east central Mississippi. They were indicted on April 4 and sentenced to death on April 6, a week after the planter’s death. The only evidence against the tenant farmers was confessions forced under abject torture. On appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court decided that the torture was not a denial of due process, and that complicity ultimately led the case to the federal Supreme Court two years later.5 When one of the defendants protested his innocence, sheriff’s deputies hanged him from a tree branch, then let him down just before he was no longer able to breathe. Then they did it again. They tied him to the tree and whipped him. He still refused to confess, but two days later they took him to jail anyway, along with his two supposed accomplices. They “were made to strip, and they were laid over chairs and their backs were cut to pieces with a leather strap with buckles on it, and they were likewise made by the said deputy definitely to understand that the whipping would be continued unless and until they confessed, and not only confessed, but confessed in every matter of detail as demanded by those present, and in this manner, the defendants confessed the crime, and as the whippings progressed and were repeated, they changed or adjusted their confession in all 251

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particulars of detail so as to conform to the demands of their torturers.”6 It was impossible for a neutral observer to not see the actions of the deputies as a denial of due process, so the Supreme Court reversed, not only scolding the trial court, which “knew that there was no other evidence upon which conviction and sentence could be based,” but also the Mississippi Supreme Court, which “denied a federal right fully established and specially set up and claimed.”7 It was a rare rebuke of police brutality, but one that was exceedingly clear as to the role of police violence in the maintenance of Fourteenth Amendment due process rights for criminal suspects. And the rarity of the case itself in the nation’s highest court seemed to be ready for revision, as in February 1939, three years after the Brown decision, Franklin Roosevelt’s Justice Department, led by Attorney General Frank Murphy, created the Civil Liberties Unit of the department’s Criminal Division, an office that would the following year change its name to the Civil Rights Section. “In a democracy, an important function of the law enforcement branch of the government is the aggressive protection of the fundamental rights inherent in a free people,” said Murphy upon the Section’s creation. “In America these guarantees are contained in express provisions of the Constitution and in acts of Congress”8 It was a body that could work to prosecute rights violations in areas where police violence was accepted as routine, particularly in racialized situations, wherein suspects were members of minority groups. And the Section was more than window dressing. In 1940, as the Civil Liberties Unit was changing its name to the Civil Rights Section, the government filed charges in the Northern District of Georgia against white Atlanta police officers who tortured young Quintar South, accused of theft, in attempting to provoke a confession. A federal district judge ruled in what became known as United States v. Sutherland that such abuse violated the “color of law” statute, Section 52 of Title 18 of the criminal code. “Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States,” said the statute, “or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens,” would be fined or imprisoned for up to a year. If injury resulted, the penalty jumped to ten years. If the actions killed someone, or if sexual abuse was part of the injury, then life imprisonment or the death penalty was appropriate. The officer on trial for the torture of Quintar South, the judge ruled, was clearly guilty under the “color of law” statute, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment.9 The abuse was so obvious that the Sutherland case never made it further in the appellate process, but others did. Chambers v. Florida (1940) was not initiated by the Justice Department. On the hot night of May 13, 1933, an elderly white man named Robert Darsey was robbed and murdered in Broward County, Florida. Less than an hour after the crime, a Black man named Charlie Davis was arrested for it, and over the following day, as many as forty additional Black men were arrested and held without warrants, authorities claiming that they wanted to protect them from potential mob violence. The men were questioned in marathon sessions over five days without counsel for hours at a time until they provided confessions, and then they were further interrogated until the confessions matched the version of the story that the authorities wanted. Three of the men pleaded guilty to murder and another was found guilty by an all-white jury, based almost solely on the forced confession. All four were sentenced to death, a sentence affirmed by the Florida Supreme Court. Florida argued to the federal Supreme Court that the body didn’t have jurisdiction to overturn a jury trial, but Hugo Black, writing for the majority, disagreed. The Court had jurisdiction because law enforcement violated the rights of the defendants. “The very circumstances surrounding their confinement and their questioning, without any formal charges having been brought, were such as to fill petitioners with terror and frightful misgivings,” he wrote. “To permit human lives to be forfeited upon confessions thus obtained would make of the constitutional requirement of due 252

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process of law a meaningless symbol.” The Supreme Court reversed the convictions, keeping with the precedent established in Brown.10 The Court did it again four years later in Ashcraft v. Tennessee (1944), this time with police abuse of a white suspect. E.E. Aschraft was accused of hiring a Black man, John Ware, to kill his wife. There was little to no evidence of such a plot, but Memphis police placed Ashcraft in a small interrogation room under a hot light and questioned him constantly, in shifts, from a Saturday to a Monday, nonstop. Even then, Ashcraft, though he complained of horrific abuse, never confessed to the crime, though the officers claimed that he did. The murder convictions of both Ashcraft and Ware were built almost entirely on Ashcraft’s supposed confession under the most extreme duress. Hugo Black again wrote the opinion of the court, reversing the conviction and arguing that Ashcraft’s confession was coerced.11 There were, however, cracks in the armor. Justice Robert H. Jackson dissented, joined by Felix Frankfurter and Owen Roberts, arguing that if “a sovereign State” had decided that the confession was satisfactory, then the federal courts had no business interceding on the defendant’s behalf. “Even where there was excess and abuse of power on the part of officers, the State still was entitled to use the confession,” wrote Jackson. The state was allowed to determine what constituted torture or abuse, and if the state ruled that the confession was acceptable, then federal courts needed more than just a lack of belief in their judgment to overturn a conviction.12 The split decision demonstrated that the nascent federal consensus against police brutality was beginning to fray, an unraveling that would only be exacerbated the following year in Screws v. United States (1945). The case began two years prior on January 29, 1943, when Robert Hall was arrested on suspicion that he had stolen a tire in Baker County, Georgia. He was driven by car to the courthouse in the county seat of Newton, but before he even entered the building, the sheriff, Claud Screws, a deputy, and a policeman began beating him with fists and blackjacks. They later claimed that he had insulted them and tried to steal one of their guns, despite the fact that he was handcuffed at the time. After thirty minutes of abuse, Hall was finally knocked unconscious. Screws and the deputies then dragged him into the courthouse by his feet and threw him into a jail cell. Hall was clearly dying, so an ambulance was called. It took him to a hospital where died within the hour without ever regaining consciousness.13 The Justice Department first attempted to convince Georgia authorities to prosecute the case against Screws, but both local and state authorities declined, arguing that investigating the case at the local level would require the same law enforcement that stood accused, thus making it virtually impossible to make a case in a rural part of the state where the powerful white population had no problem with the behavior of its sheriff or his deputies. And so, without any local effort, the stillnew Civil Rights Section indicted on three counts, relying on Sections 51 and 52 of Title 18 of the criminal code. Section 52 was the “color of law” statute, while Section 51 made it illegal for "two" or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” A federal district judge threw out the charge based on Section 51, arguing that the statute was intended to deal with private rather than public citizens, but the Section 52 charges stood, and all three officers were found guilty in a federal jury trial, receiving three years in prison and a thousand dollar fine.14 The decisions were upheld at the federal appellate level before arriving at the Supreme Court, a body that demonstrated the fraying trajectory of past thinking about police brutality in four separate opinions written in a case that came to be known Screws v. United States (1945). The majority opinion came from William O. Douglas, joined by Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, and Chief Justice Harlan Stone. The first issue that the majority dealt with was a challenge based on the vagueness of the statute itself. Douglas was sensitive to the challenge but ruled that a long history of case law had given the Court good reason to deflect such a charge. He explained that the law was enacted to 253

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enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, stemming from the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the purpose of which was "to protect all persons in the United States in their civil rights, and furnish the means of their vindication."15 Such protection required a wide net. But the vagueness contention was not the only potential pitfall of the law’s application to the Screws case. A violator of the section “under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects” someone to a deprivation of their rights, and Douglas focused his attention on the willfulness of that action. He noted that “willfully” was not added to the statute until 1909, taking from the addition a decided intent by legislators to limit the law’s reach. “We think the inference is permissible that its severity was to be lessened by making it applicable only where the requisite bad purpose was present, thus requiring specific intent not only where discrimination is claimed, but in other situations as well.”16 And so any conviction must come with a finding “that petitioners had the purpose to deprive the prisoner of a constitutional right, e.g., the right to be tried by a court, rather than by ordeal. And in determining whether that requisite bad purpose was present, the jury would be entitled to consider all the attendant circumstances – the malice of petitioners, the weapons used in the assault, its character and duration, the provocation, if any, and the like.”17 The trial court judge did not instruct the jury on willful intent. Instead, he told the body that “if these defendants, without its being necessary to make the arrest effectual or necessary to their own personal protection, beat this man, assaulted him or killed him while he was under arrest, then they would be acting illegally under color of law.” But without willfulness, no matter how “shocking and revolting” an “episode in law enforcement,” there was not guilt under the statue.18 And so the Court, which had seemingly taken a relatively hard line against police brutality in previous cases, turned away from its own precedent and reversed the Screws conviction, in the process making convictions for police brutality charges that much more difficult for prosecutors, as the standard now required conclusive proof of willful intent. Douglas argued that since the officers claimed that they were responding to protect themselves, it was essentially the job of the prosecution to disprove such notions, despite the fact that the only witness to the case was the dead victim of police misconduct. Owen Roberts, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson dissented, all agreeing that “this brutal misconduct rendered these lawless law officers guilty of manslaughter, if not of murder, under Georgia law.” But “instead of leaving this misdeed to vindication by Georgia law, the United States deflected Georgia’s responsibility by instituting a federal prosecution. But this was a criminal homicide only under Georgia law. The United States could not prosecute the petitioners for taking life. Instead, a prosecution was brought, and the conviction now under review was obtained under” Section 52, “put on the statute books on May 31, 1870, but, for all practical purposes, it has remained a dead letter all these years.” Their argument was that the crime of Screws and his accomplices was unconscionable murder, but compensatory action under federal law to do something wherein a state refused to do anything was not the intention of the law itself. Section 52 “was never designed for the use to which it has now been fashioned.”19 Frank Murphy, in a separate dissenting opinion, relieved himself of such wrangling over the finer points: “Robert Hall, a Negro citizen, has been deprived not only of the right to be tried by a court, rather than by ordeal. He has been deprived of the right to life itself. That right belonged to him not because he was a Negro or a member of any particular race or creed. That right was his because he was an American citizen, because he was a human being. As such, he was entitled to all the respect and fair treatment that befits the dignity of man, a dignity that is recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution. Yet not even the semblance of due process has been accorded him. He has been cruelly and unjustifiably beaten to death by local police officers acting under color of authority derived from the state. It is 254

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difficult to believe that such an obvious and necessary right is indefinitely guaranteed by the Constitution or is foreign to the knowledge of local police officers so as to cast any reasonable doubt on the conviction under § 20 of the Criminal Code of the perpetrators of this ‘shocking and revolting episode in law enforcement.’”20 Reversing the Screws conviction, he argued, would be tantamount to abetting the crime after the fact, and would set a disturbing precedent that would only facilitate more police brutality. It was a conclusive and moral decision (and one that proved particularly prescient) that only served to highlight the inherent problem with the case, as the fourth opinion, written by Wiley Rutledge, went in the exact opposite direction. Rutledge acknowledged everything that Murphy acknowledged. “The right not to be deprived of life or liberty by a state officer who takes it by abuse of his office and its power is such a right,” he argued. “To secure these rights is not beyond federal power.” This sections 51 and 52 “have done, in a manner history long since has validated. Accordingly, I would affirm the judgment.” But voting with his beliefs was something he was unwilling to do. The Court “is divided in opinion. If each member accords his vote to his belief, the case cannot have a disposition. Stalemate should not prevail for any reason, however compelling, in a criminal cause or, if avoidable, in any other.” And so his opinion concurred with that of Douglas, “in order that disposition may be made of this case.”21 It was high-order equivocation and one that would have a devastating impact on the Civil Rights Section’s ability to prosecute cases of police brutality at the federal level. Screws himself was reelected as sheriff by his white constituents and acquitted by an all-white jury in a retrial. More importantly, the requirement to prove willful intent against the word of officers themselves, combined with the dissenting view that the federal government should not even be in the business of taking such cases as civil rights violations when states should be charging them as murders or manslaughters, functionally closed the door on federal civil rights prosecutions of incidents of brutality by state and local law enforcement for the next two decades. And it did so as World War II came to a close and the era of civil rights began in earnest, only heightening the incidents of police brutality. Those strands came together most notoriously in the case of Isaac Woodard. Nine months after the Supreme Court’s Screws decision, on February 12, 1946, Woodard, a decorated Black veteran of the Pacific theater of World War II, returned home to South Carolina after an honorable discharge from the Army. He boarded a Greyhound bus in Augusta and argued with the driver about his ability to use the restroom at a local bus stop outside of town, prompting the driver to contact local authorities in Batesburg. They pulled Woodard from the bus and violently assaulted him in a nearby alley before taking him to jail on a charge of disorderly conduct. There they further abused him, jabbing his eyes with billy clubs and blinding him. Authorities sent him, blind, before a judge the next morning, who declared him guilty of disorderly conduct and fined him fifty dollars. It was more than two days before he was allowed to see a doctor.22 The violence was reminiscent of that of Screws three hundred miles southwest, but it received far more national attention because of Woodard’s military service. The NAACP, under the leadership of Walter White, investigated the case and worked to publicize it. Orson Welles described the case on his national radio program, and Woody Guthrie recorded a song about the violence. In September, White met with Harry Truman at the White House, and the story he told the President led Truman to direct the Justice Department to open an investigation. Screws had all but foreclosed the possibility of civil rights charges in the case, but the bus stop where Woodard was taken happened to be on federal property and he was in his service uniform during the assault. That gave the federal government jurisdiction without requiring the use of Section 52.23 But jurisdiction wasn’t necessarily a panacea for police violence. The Justice Department brought charges against the officers in federal district court in Columbia, South Carolina, but on November 5, they were acquitted by an all-white jury after less than thirty minutes of deliberation, even though 255

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the local sheriff, Lynwood Shull, never denied abusing Woodard. Though prosecutors interviewed no one but the bus driver and by most accounts presented a lackluster, incomplete case, there was no appeal. Shull and his deputies were never punished.24 If federal jurisdiction to prosecute violence was unsuccessful, and the use of federal civil rights statutes to compensate for local inaction was precluded by the Supreme Court, law enforcement officers could act with relative impunity without fearing any federal consequence. And they did, for decades, without any real imposition by the Supreme Court. If anything, the Court actually further facilitated incidents of police brutality when in 1968, it ruled that police officers could stop and frisk suspects without probable cause, as long as the officer had a “reasonable suspicion” that a crime was being committed or would be committed. The case, Terry v. Ohio, did not involve an incident of police brutality, per se, as the officer frisked suspects in the process of casing a store and carrying a gun, but the lack of violence involved in the case did not abrogate the permissive ruling that gave officers the ability to claim reasonable suspicion without probable cause when stopping and frisking suspects.25 Based on the ruling, what became known as “Terry stops” became common practice, most notoriously in New York City, where thousands of incidents of stop-and-frisk were made each year, roughly three-quarters of those incidents practiced on minorities and seventy percent of them found to be unjustified.26 Another consequence of the Supreme Court’s inaction involved danger to police officers themselves. In June 1978, for example Terrence Johnson, a fifteen-year-old Black youth, was arrested in Prince George’s County, Maryland, twelve miles from the Supreme Court building, on suspicion of stealing from coin-operated laundry machines. Though he was a minor, his parents were not notified of his arrest. Instead, officers beat him mercilessly in various rooms of the station until, attempting to protect himself, Johnson pulled the gun of one of the officers and shot him, ultimately killing two of the policemen who had abused him. At Johnson’s trial, despite testimony about police brutality being suppressed, the jury did not convict him of first or second-degree murder, opting instead for a charge of voluntary manslaughter. It is possible that had testimony about the county’s long history of police brutality been admitted, he would have been acquitted entirely.27 Johnson’s case was finally adjudicated in 1981, and four years later, the Supreme Court again continued its inconsistent thinking about police brutality, obviously influenced by cases like that of Terrence Johnson. Tennessee v. Garner (1985) had its roots in an act of violence perpetrated more than a decade prior. On October 3, 1974, Memphis police officers witnessed a fleeing suspect from a burglary call. The suspect, Edward Garner, was 15 years old and obviously unarmed, but when he began to climb a fence to escape rather than obey an officer’s demand to halt, the officer shot him in the head and killed him. Garner had stolen ten dollars from the house. The officers did not break a law, as Tennessee statute provided that “if, after notice of the intention to arrest the defendant, he either flee or forcibly resist, the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the arrest.” Instead, Garner’s father initiated a civil suit in federal court, which finally arrived at the Supreme Court in 1985. Byron White, writing for the majority, argued that the use of deadly force was a Fourth Amendment seizure, then ruled that the seizure had to be justified. Though common law usually justified such deadly force, common law came into being at a time when most offenses were punishable by death, White reasoned. Times had changed. Deadly force, he argued, could not be used simply to prevent escape, as allowed by Memphis law. It was only justified if “the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”28 It was a ruling that sided with Garner, but at the same time there were plenty of cases wherein deadly force was used by police in less overtly egregious manners. “Probable cause to believe” and “significant threat” were vague concepts that police could use in their favor after killing unarmed suspects. As in the Screws decision decades prior, which worried over “willful intent,” the Court relied on officer impressions to determine justification, and when the police were the perpetrators of violence, using 256

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their own claims about what they believed at the time of the violence to decide whether or not it was justified would obviously provide other officers with excuses for their actions.29 And the Court was not done. It would go even further four years later in Graham v. Connor (1989). Dethorne Graham had left a convenience store without buying anything, leading a policeman to follow him, stop him, and ultimately assault him. Graham filed suit against the officer in federal court, and though the district court and court of appeals both agreed that the officer, M.S. Connor, was liable for the attack, the Supreme Court, now complete with Ronald Reagan’s conservative justices, reversed the decisions. Writing for the majority, William Reinquist argued that the only amendment that held in such cases was the Fourth Amendment, and that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could not apply to such official stops. With only seizure claims being valid, then, seizure “requires a careful balancing of the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against the countervailing governmental interests at stake.” The right to make arrests necessarily entailed “the right to use some degree of physical coercion or threat thereof to effect it,” Reqinquist claimed. But “because the test of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application,” its “proper application requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case.” Only adding insult to injury, he reasoned that “the question is whether the officers’ actions are ‘objectively reasonable’ in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them, without regard to their underlying intent or motivation,” and “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”30 The ruling only exacerbated the permission slip that the Court had been providing in various forms since Screws to allow officers at least relatively free reign to use violence against suspects. With that permission slip in place, ensconcing itself ever since the Screws decision in the immediate wake of World War II, the Court seemed reluctant for the rest of the century and into the twenty-first to wrestle with the issue of police brutality. In June 2020, for example, as uprisings around the country brought the issue of police brutality to a fever pitch, the Supreme Court refused to hear eight cases dealing with qualified immunity, a practice making it difficult for police officers to be held accountable and built on the reasonableness standard developed by the Court in its Fourth Amendment cases. Several months later, it heard the case of Roxanne Torres. Torres had been sitting in her car in an Albuquerque housing complex parking lot in 2014 when police officers in tactical gear arrived at the complex to serve a warrant. Torres was not the subject of the warrant, but because she saw unidentified men with weapons approaching her, she tried to drive away. The police officers responded by shooting at her thirteen times, hitting her twice. Unlike so many before her, Torres lived to sue her attackers in a case that made it to the Supreme Court.31 The Court, however, had been moving steadily away from the concern it showed for victims of police brutality in the 1930s, and was fully uninterested by the twenty-first century’s third decade. In October 2021, the Supreme Court sided with the officers against Torres in a brief unsigned decision without any dissent. It was interpreted by pundits as an endorsement of the qualified immunity standard, requiring that plaintiffs “must not only show that the official accused of misconduct violated a constitutional right, but also that the right had been ‘clearly established’ in a previous ruling.” Still, in two other decisions in 2021, demonstrating that the frayed edges of the Court’s thinking on police brutality had not yet been stitched wholly in favor of violent law enforcement officials, the Supreme Court sided with prisoners against abusive corrections officers in unprovoked attacks. “Some cases are so egregious, the court suggested, that no precedent directly on point was necessary to allow a plaintiff to sue.” But being shot two times by officers while sitting in your car was not so egregious.32 The Supreme Court has, perhaps intentionally, not been the principal arbiter of police brutality claims and incidents in the United States, but the evolution of its few rulings over time has had an inordinate impact on the willingness of law enforcement to engage in violent behavior. From Screws 257

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forward, the Court has, through both inconsistency of application and a decided trend toward taking the word of officers over and against their victims, created a permissiveness of which law enforcement has regularly taken advantage. It is, in fact, telling that the history of a practice so prevalent in American society is so limited in its Supreme Court precedent, leading many to hope that the justices will begin to assert themselves on the issue as they have in other high-profile controversial issues, with an emphasis that harkens back to its thinking of the 1930s, rather than of the 1940s.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Bell and Swain v. State, 177 Ark. 1034, 1036 (Ark. 1928). Bell v. State, 180 Ark. 79, 83 (Ark. 1929). Bell v. State, 180 Ark. 79, 84 (Ark. 1929). The ruling rested on Love v. State, 22 Ark. 226 (1860), wherein a confession was coerced by a mob not through violence but through threats. Bell v. State, 180 Ark. 79, 90 (Ark. 1929). There were earlier cases that at least approached a consideration of police brutality without actually adjudicating the issue. Logan v. United States (1892) dealt with a suspect’s right to be protected while in the custody of federal marshalls, not because the marshals themselves actually abused the suspect, but because a lynch mob in Indian Country sought to kill a group of suspects accused of larceny while they were in federal custody. See Logan v. United States, 144 US 263 (1892). Brown v. Mississippi, 297 US 278, 282 (1936). Brown v. Mississippi, 297 US 278, 287 (1936). For a detailed examination of the Brown case, see Richard C. Cortner, A “Scottsboro” Case in Mississippi: The Supreme Court and Brown v. Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986). For more on Brown and its place in the Supreme Court’s engagement with both police brutality and civil rights more broadly, see Marilynn Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 146–148; and Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 117–135. Baltimore Sun, 4 February 1938, 1. United States v. Sutherland, 37 F. Supp. 344 (N.D. Ga. 1940); and 18 U.S. Code § 242, Deprivation of rights under color of law. Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227, 240 (1940). For more on Chambers, see Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 227–229. Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U.S. 143 (1944). Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U.S. 143, 156 (1944). For more on police brutality in Ashcraft, see US Senate, Confessions and Police Detention, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, 85 Cong., 2nd sess, 7 and 11 March 1958 (Washington: USGPO, 1958), 49; “Confessions–Admission of confession obtained after 36 hours of continuous questioning by state officers held deprivation of due process (Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 64 Sup. Ct. 921),” Harvard Law Review 57 (July 1944): 919–921; “Note on Ashcraft v. Tennessee,” Marquette Law Review 28 (Summer 1944): 125–127; and “Note on Ashcraft v. Tennessee,” Minnesota Law Review 28 (June 1944): 497–498. For more on police brutality in relation to forced confessions in particular, see US Senate, Confessions and Police Detention; and Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 69–74. Robert K. Carr, “Screws v. United States: The Georgia Police Brutality Case,” Cornell Law Review 31 (November 1945): 51–52. Ibid., 50, 52–53. Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 98 (1945) Ibid., at 103. Ibid., at 107. Ibid., at 92, 94; and Carr, “Screws v. United States,” 53–58. Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 138 (1945); and Carr, “Screws v. United States,” 61–63. Ibid., at 134–135; and Carr, “Screws v. United States,” 58–60. Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 134 (1945). See also “Federal Prosecution of State Law Enforcement Officers under the Civil Rights Act,” Yale Law Journal 55 (April 1946): 576–583; and Charles W. Corcoran, “Federal Court Remedies against State and Local Police Abuses: Third Degree Practices Enjoined,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 39 (No. 4 1949): 490–497; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 408–409; and David Mark Chalmers, Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 74.

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Brutality at the Bar 22 The fullest account of the Woodard case is Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). But it is not the only one. See, for example, Tinsley E. Yarbrough, A Passion for Justice: J. Waties Waring and Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 48–53; Michael R. Gardner, Harry Truman and Civil Rights (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 17–23, 211–212; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 362–363; and Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011), 398–399. 23 See Gergel, Unexampled Courage. 24 Ibid. 25 Terry v. Ohio, 392 US 1 (1968). 26 “Stop-and-Frisk Data,” ACLU of New York, 2019 Report, https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-friskdata, accessed 2 April 2022; and James P. O’Neill, “Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City,” 2017, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year-end2017-enforcement-report.pdf, accessed 2 April 2022. 27 Rick Seltzer and Charles F. Turner, “Racism, Police Brutality, and the Trial of Terrence Johnson,” Insurgent Sociologist 11 (July 1981): 67–74. 28 Tennessee v. Garner, 417 US 1 (1985). 29 For more, see Chad Flanders nad Joseph Welling, “Police Use of Deadly Force: State Statutes 30 Years After Garner,” Saint Louis University Public Law Review 35 (No. 1 2015): 109–156. 30 Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989). See also Jill I. Brown, “Defining ‘Reasonable’ Police Conduct: Graham v. Connor and Excessive Force during Arrest,” UCLA Law Review 38 (No. 5 1991): 1257–1286; and Geoffrey P. Alpert and William C. Smith, “How Reasonable Is the Reasonable Man?: Police and Excessive Force,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 85 (Autumn 1994): 481–501. 31 Adam Liptak, “Heightened Gravity for a Police Violence Case,” New York Times, 21 July 2020, 14A. 32 Adam Liptak, “Legal Shield for Officers Is Bolstered in 2 Decisions,” New York Times, 19 October 2021, 16A.

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20 CHASING THE ILLUSION OF POLICE REFORM UNDER CAPITALISM Jillian Aldebron and Rodney Green

Introduction Modern society is the site of conflict between the capitalist class, which controls the means of production and owns most of the wealth, and the working class—the vast majority of the population—whose labor it exploits for the extraction of profit.1 The purpose of policing, in this context, is to protect capitalist interests by “keeping the peace”: that is, prevent disruption of the status quo.2 To fulfill this role, the police are accorded extraordinary powers: the right to restrict a person’s freedom of movement, to subject a person to interrogation, to demand unquestioning obedience, and to exert as much physical force as they alone deem necessary to coerce compliance up to and including the license to kill. Given that the function of the police is to enforce an exploitative regime, through violence and intimidation if need be, “police reform” as invoked by the working class has sought to reduce harm to individuals and communities caused by police action or inaction. This has largely entailed redefining acceptable behavior, restricting officer discretion, better training, and holding officers to account for misconduct that violates the law or departmental rules. Over the past 50 years, these measures have been accompanied by calls for civilian (external to the police department) involvement in processing misconduct complaints and public reporting on accountability. But while the desire of the working class for reform has been a relief from untrammeled oppression, capitalist class reform has sought greater efficacy and reliability of subjugation. This has meant “professionalization” to root out corrupt selfinterest, militarization (in structure, tactics and equipment), insidious and omnipresent surveillance, and the entrenchment of racism in policy, practice, and culture—this last essential to undermining working class cohesion by fomenting discord that obscures common interest.3 Invariably, working class reform achievements have been subverted by capitalist reform imperatives, honored only to the extent that repression too harshly felt itself becomes a flashpoint for discontent, thereby imperiling the social order it is meant to preserve. In essence, reform over the years has not resulted in lessening the grip of the iron hand, but rather sheathing it in a velvet glove. Only since the brazen police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 have activists come to understand that a police force that meets the needs of the working class is an oxymoron and called to abolish or de-fund the police. In this chapter, we trace the evolution of police reform in the US. We then use the example of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to show that the enforcement arm of a capitalist state can hardly be reformed to tame violent behaviors that are central to its purpose. We selected the

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LAPD because it has had one of the longest-serving civilian oversight bodies and spent 12 years under judicial supervision of federally mandated reforms.

The Origins of Policing Broadly speaking, policing in the US began as watch systems in the northern colonies (first recorded in 1631 Boston) to safeguard property and control “disorderly conduct”; southern slave patrols (a strategy brought by Barbados plantation owners to the Carolina colony in 1706) to return runaways, administer punishment, and stifle rebellion; and western frontier vigilantes, assembled in the 1800s to defend mining interests, which included keeping workers in check.4 These early forms of social control were conceptually aligned in the service of cementing capitalist power: securing assets (even when this meant people), suppressing labor resistance, and legitimizing racism.5 By the early 1800s, rural populations and immigrants began flooding into increasingly densely packed northern cities to feed the wage labor demands of the industrial revolution. The watch system was inadequate in this new demographic landscape, whose volatility was fueled by execrable working and living conditions. Municipal governments turned instead to armed security patrols, paid for by the capitalist elite, to compel working class discipline.6 In the South, conscription into the Confederate army depleted the ranks of slave patrols, and at the end of the war they were formally disbanded. But their ideology, tactics, and often members were absorbed into the urban police forces established in the South to manage the same pressures experienced in the North.7 By the late 1800s, police departments were incorporated into the government bureaucracy of every major US city, starting with Boston in 1838. The fact that they answered to party bosses and the economic elite made them petri dishes for corruption.8 Excessive and lethal force—now under color of law and unopposable—was employed as a matter of course, whether to discourage petty infractions (public drunkenness, vagrancy), elicit respect, extract information, break up strikes, or put immigrants in their place.9 Crime and resistance to wage labor misery were interchangeable concepts. The term “police brutality” was coined in the 1860s to describe the expedient justice administered by club-wielding officers to which workers and immigrants were most often subjected. With the capitalist class lauding their ability to “preserve order,” the police exploited racial and cultural differences and competition for jobs to fracture working class opposition, fomenting the conditions for combustible social strife that would justify and, ultimately, normalize a permanent police presence on neighborhood streets.10

The Evolution of Reform The early 1900’s saw internal efforts to reform police departments, led by trail-blazing Berkeley police chief August Vollmer. These emphasized professionalism, insulation from political influence, and the adoption of scientific technologies—all in the name of more effective crime-fighting. Departments established strict command hierarchies (inspired by Vollmer’s military service in the Philippines), set up specialized units, propounded rules of conduct, and instituted operating procedures. They established recruitment, training, and promotion criteria. Ultimately, these reforms further entrenched corruption by strengthening bonds among the rank and file, who resented the authoritarianism and discipline of a paramilitary command structure. Importantly, they provided cover for racial policing, now performed under the guise of vigorous crime control.11

Federal Interest in Reform The 1920s brought a wave of state and local commissions to study crime and how it was being addressed. When police corruption allowed organized crime to flourish during Prohibition, reform 261

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got the attention of President Herbert Hoover, who appointed a panel to investigate the criminal justice system. The so-called Wickersham Commission published a raft of reports in 1931, including the damningly titled “Lawlessness in Law Enforcement,” which documented the widespread use of cruelty, torture, and prolonged detention to extract confessions, as well as the fabrication of evidence, entrapment, and bribery. Unsurprisingly, it proposed no solutions, leaving it to “the will of the people” to fix the problem.12 But the will of the people was being systematically crushed. Periodically, the accumulation of unredressed labor grievances and antagonisms arising from inequality erupted in mass revolts—often strategically policed to allow savage attacks on Blacks and immigrants by white mobs. As with Prohibition, it took a major threat to the capitalist system for the federal government to react—in this case, when violence roiled five cities in the summer of 1943 and disrupted war production in Detroit. President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights documented ubiquitous “unfettered police lawlessness”—physical attacks, failure to protect, tortured confessions, unwarranted arrest, illegal search and seizure, among others—with the burden of these civil rights violations falling disproportionately on minorities and the poor. It further pointed to “areas of the country where the freedom to move about and choose one’s job is endangered by attempts to hold workers in peonage or other forms of involuntary servitude.”13 Among other recommendations was the passage of federal legislation enumerating “the right to be free from discriminatory law enforcement resulting from either active or passive conduct by a public officer.” Congress declined to take up the suggestion. Social conflicts over desegregation and labor struggles built throughout the 1950s, leading to a major steel strike in 1959 and anti-racist urban rebellions in the 1960s and beyond—exacerbated by the use of police power to enforce Jim Crow and crush Vietnam war protests. Police excesses now headlined the national agenda and national news. For the first time, in 1967, a presidential commission recommended limiting police discretion in routine operations.14 In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known colloquially as the Kerner Commission, placed the blame for sporadic inner-city flare-ups across the US squarely on white racism and de facto segregation, but pointed to “the abrasive relationship between the police and the minority communities [as] a major—and explosive—source of grievance, tension, and disorder.”15 Kerner echoed previous commissions in both diagnosis and recognition that “the lack of effective mechanisms for handling complaints against the police” aggravated public hostility toward police misconduct and aggressive control tactics. Recommendations to curb police violence began to coalesce around improving community relations and establishing fair, impartial processes for handling complaints.

Civilian Review Boards, Community Policing, and Police Unions The need for outside scrutiny of police practices also figured in the recommendations of numerous reports, echoing working-class demands for civilian review boards (CRBs), which began to emerge in the mid-twentieth century.16 In 1948, the first CRB was established in Washington DC to respond to racism and police brutality. In 1953, a coalition of advocacy groups pushed for a board in New York. This was followed by oversight boards in Philadelphia (1958), York, Pennsylvania (1960), Rochester, New York (1963), Minneapolis (1965), and Baltimore (1965).17 While the structure and role of these entities varied widely, they shared common fatal flaws: no funding, no staff, no legal authority to compel cooperation, and lack of political support from city leaders. Utterly ineffective, some were lambasted by the public as a farce; all were short-lived.18 But the sheer savagery of the police response to the social upheavals of the late 1960s, flashed across television screens for every household to see, cost departments their credibility. Once the police were revealed to be the source of strife rather than guardians of order, lawmakers yielded to public pressure for CRBs, which took off in earnest in the 1970s and by 2020 exceeded 140 nationwide. Nonetheless, all CRBs suffer, to some degree, from structural weaknesses, insufficient resources, and legal impotence.19 262

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Just as working class reforms looked to be making nominal headway in the 1960s and 1970s, police officers were finally granted a powerful weapon of resistance they had sought since the late 1800s: legal authority to form unions, with collective bargaining rights. These newly transformed “fraternal orders of police” became significant political forces, obtaining extraordinary exceptions from civil service rules, and lobbying successfully for federal and state laws that shielded officers from scrutiny and discipline.20

Federal Intervention in Policing The tension between capitalist and working-class reform goals continued to play out in the ensuing decades. Capitalist emphasis on community policing sounded benign, but in practice meant augmenting police presence and using communication tools and personal relationships to intensify surveillance. The same 1994 federal law that authorized the Department of Justice (DOJ) to force reform of local police departments found to violate civil rights—arguably benefiting the working class—also added 100,000 officers to the streets, increasing police encounters and opportunities for abusive conduct, and created a grant program to channel federal dollars to municipal and state police agencies.21 As of mid-2021, the DOJ had used its investigative authority 73 times and entered into 40 consent decrees and settlement agreements that typically require scores of reforms and install a courtappointed monitor to oversee compliance.22 The DOJ stopped intervening in local policing during the Trump administration, but in 2021 changed course and launched probes into the Minneapolis, Louisville, and Phoenix police departments.23 The impact of DOJ intervention on ameliorating police behavior has been uneven at best. In some cases, reductions in misconduct over the duration of the agreement are reversed soon after federal oversight ends.24 As the 2020s unfold, the working class continues to strain against the excesses of capitalism’s enforcement, caught in a cycle that has repeated itself for nearly 200 years: a highly publicized act of extreme police repression leads to mass uproar, followed by investigations and commissions, resulting in reforms that pacify protests but nevertheless leave the fundamental nature of policing intact. This time, however, there is a challenge to the existing order. The seeds of police de-funding and a reconceptualizing of “public safety” sown in 2020 have yet to bear fruit, but they remain firmly planted in the public imagination.

Reforming the Los Angeles Police Department Nowhere has the struggle between working class aspirations for just, fair, and respectful policing and a capitalist system existentially dependent on brute force played out more starkly than in the City of Los Angeles. Among its peers, the LAPD sits atop the law enforcement pantheon and is remarkable for its string of “firsts” in policing. It was the LAPD that introduced military tools and equipment to control the domestic population, adopted communications technology to isolate its “troops” from the corrosive influence of fraternization with the public, and marshalled S.W.A.T. platoons to suppress urban unrest. The LAPD has jealously guarded its preeminence—in one infamous example, sabotaging a decade-long gang truce that, by drastically reducing violent crime, challenged the primacy of tough policing as the bulwark against lawlessness.25 For Black and Latinx residents in particular, the LAPD has been notoriously tyrannical, riding roughshod with impunity over individual rights, penalizing resistance, spying on opponents, and traumatizing entire neighborhoods.26

The Board of Police Commissioners: Civilian Oversight The Los Angeles City Council established the LAPD in 1876, and in 1889 sought to stabilize what proved a chaotic operation by putting it under the civilian supervision of a three-member Board of 263

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Police Commissioners (BPC)—two volunteers and the mayor serving ex-officio as president.27 The BPC set regulations for officer conduct and penalties for disobeying them, approved deputy appointments and officer hires, and reviewed suspensions and terminations. The mayor retained the authority to hire and fire the chief. But in this era of political patronage, the reporting hierarchy did little to eliminate rampant corruption.28 Vollmer was brought in as chief in 1922 to clean up the department, but he found little political appetite for reform and left after a year.29 His failure foreshadowed nearly a century of such outcomes, to the detriment of the city’s working-class population. In 1923 the situation became untenable when it jeopardized the legitimacy of city officials to govern on behalf of the financial elite. Vollmer’s replacement as chief was revealed to be a boozer and philanderer, not to mention a Ku Klux Klan member (as were many officers, the county sheriff, and the US attorney). To quell moral outrage and better insulate themselves from the department, city officials sought a charter amendment making the police chief a civil service position.30 This step would prove disastrous when, decades later, the mayor was removed from the equation and the BPC and LAPD’s personnel department were made jointly responsible for hiring the chief. Combined with civil service protections, the position became virtually untouchable; a succession of chiefs ruled supreme and made a mockery of oversight by routinely backing officers who committed even the most egregious acts.

Oversight and Racism From its inception, the BPC, along with the police leadership, reflected the prevailing hostility of white elites toward native populations, Mexicans, Asians, and Blacks. In 1926, the city annexed Watts to forestall the establishment of a Black-run town on its doorstep. Racial animus increased along with Black migration, which surged in the 1940s spurred by defense-industry demand for wartime labor. Los Angeles was the last major western city where commercial establishments refused to serve Blacks, and clung to restrictive housing covenants well into the 1960s, some 20 years after they were invalidated by the Supreme Court.31 The BPC historically served as the handmaiden of the LAPD rather than as an advocate for accountability on behalf of beleaguered residents. It was indifferent to the recurrent accusations of police brutality resounding from the poorer, darker working-class neighborhoods. It defended the unabashed bigotry of William Parker (chief from 1950 to 1966), whose tenure was bookended by the sadistic beating of seven young Mexican-Americans by drunken LAPD officers in 1951, and the 1965 Watts uprising against police abuse—with a string of ugly incidents in between.32 It condoned the LAPD’s bloody pre-emptive attack on peaceful anti-war protesters in 1967, which netted the some 500 misconduct complaints to the ACLU. Without interviewing a single victim, the BPC pronounced the onslaught lawful and proper.33 In the 1970s, the BPC failed to rein in the far-reaching tentacles of the LAPD’s secretive counter-intelligence apparatus.34 Not until 1981, facing relentless public pressure and a class action lawsuit that made public 6,000 pages of intelligence files going back decades, did the BPC finally stop LAPD’s illegal wiretapping and infiltration of civil rights advocates, environmental groups, college campuses, political opponents, elected officials—and, ironically, the BPC itself.35 In the interim, it shrugged off 584 officer-involved shootings and use of lethal force incidents from mid1974 to 1979 alone. Some 55% of victims were Black, 22% Latinx, 22% white, and 1% other; out of the 128 killed, 50% were Black, 16% Latinx, and 33% white.36

Watts and the McCone Commission The 1965 Watts uprising made it impossible to ignore the failure of the BPC and internal accountability systems. Advocates clamored loudly for a board independent of city government to 264

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handle public complaints of police misconduct. The ACLU, NAACP, liberal council members, and grassroots groups envisioned a community-based model that would investigate complaints and allow victims to claim up to $500 compensation in return for waiving the right to sue.37 The McCone Commission, set up to identify the causes of Watts and offer solutions, declined to blame LAPD behavior lest criticism impede the department’s ability to control lawlessness; it pointedly ignored the more than 70 allegations of police brutality it received. It did, however, acknowledge BPC deficiencies and suggested installing an inspector general who would report to the chief.38 Undeterred by the timid findings and determined to press for civilian review, the ACLU set up neighborhood complaint centers that by 1969 amassed 639 complaints of demonstrable and racially biased misconduct filed by 314 Blacks, 174 Mexican-Americans, 118 whites, and 34 others. But the BPC—ever in lock step with the ruling elite—stood its ground, arguing that independent civilian review would usurp LAPD authority over its personnel.39

Reform Efforts Intensify In 1979, the BPC tentatively flexed its muscles and censured the LAPD for committing “a crime against humanity” when officers pumped eight bullets into Eula Love, a widow distraught over attempts to shut off her gas because of an overdue $22 bill. The Shooting Review Board, made up of deputy chiefs, had ruled the homicide justified.40 Still, the BPD, ever in thrall to the police chief, then Darryl Gates (1979–1992), endorsed shooting guideline revisions that were tepid at best, their only nod to the Love killing a requirement that officers assess the impact of initial shots before firing again. In 1980, the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) resumed collection of misconduct complaints and by 1982 was taking in an average of 1,200 a year. CAPA’s years of organizing—and widespread condemnation of the 1977 police killing of a mentally-ill white man—pushed the BPC to more rigorously investigate use of force incidents, culminating in the first overhaul of use of force policy in more than a decade. This did not, however, reduce the number of incidents or fatal shootings, nor did it lead to the creation of an independent board.41 Then the chokehold, favored by officers to incapacitate or humiliate but sometimes proving fatal, became a focus of public outrage. The BPC again bowed to Gates and settled for a six-month moratorium while the policy was reviewed rather than imposing an outright ban. In the end, regular use of the chokehold was replaced by the metal baton—a crippling throwback to the clubs used in the early days of policing to mete out street justice. The BPC did nothing to curtail baton use, despite innumerable serious injuries and use of force complaints ballooning in the ensuing years, with 3,781 baton incidents recorded by the LAPD from 1987 to 1990.42 Again, reforms nominally intended to help the average resident simply traded off one mechanism of abuse for another.

Burgeoning Surveillance Death and injury at the hands of officers are the most visible but not the only consequences of misconduct that civilian oversight could, in principle, remedy. LAPD’s record of intrusive surveillance to crack down on real or perceived threats to political stability and the social order dated back to the 1920s. Early targets were labor leaders, communists, immigrants, and enemies of organized crime.43 In the 1960s, focus moved to civil rights activists, peace protesters, and groups such as the Black Panthers and Brown Berets.44 In the 1970s and 80s, attention shifted to gangs and drugs, which was used to excuse the enduring neglect and wholesale criminalization of Black and Latinx populations.45 By then, the LAPD Community Resources Against Hoodlums (CRASH) intelligence unit was keeping a card file on “suspected” gang members and affiliates, almost entirely made up of poor Black and Latinx youth, whose names were entered on field information cards whenever they had 265

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even superficial contact with the officers saturating their neighborhoods. The BPC judged the database an effective crime prevention tool, ignoring its disparate racial impact.46 Card files eventually gave way to computerized Gang-Related Active Trafficker Suppression (GRATS) and Gang Reporting and Tracking (GREAT) systems whose extensive rosters of “drug dealers” and “gang suspects” included every person ever arrested for a minor violation or quality-of-life infraction. Federal grants to help local police agencies wage Nixon’s War on Drugs expanded the size and scope of LAPD’s monitoring system. It was the Los Angeles city attorney’s office that authored the California state law authorizing blanket surveillance and neighborhood raids, branding anyone even peripherally associated with gang activity, including parents, as potential criminals.47 With new money, legal authority, and city council backing, Gates launched Operation Hammer, indiscriminately sweeping up tens of thousands of Blacks and Latinx who were stopped, searched, arrested and—although many were never charged—entered into the perpetual surveillance machine.48 It did not matter that, by the LAPD’s own account, gang-related crime remained stable over 1980–1988, while the number of “gang members” in its database doubled from 15,000 to 30,000.49 Operation Hammer was true to its name: in 1988, an 88-officer contingent, complete with helicopter support, descended on two apartment buildings in southwest Los Angeles to show the gangs who was boss. They dragged the occupants outside—men, women, children—and made them lie on the front lawn while officers busted doors, windows, and walls, ravaged personal belongings, chopped furniture into kindling, and signed their handiwork with graffiti proclaiming “LAPD Rules.”50 The operation hauled in just 6 ounces of marijuana and less than an ounce of cocaine. The city paid $3.8 million to compensate victims for the damage.51 By 1990, misconduct complaints and lawsuits had become routine. The period 1972–1990 counted 15,054 complaints of abuse and 5,598 lawsuits, the latter of which racked up $43 million in payouts by the city.52 The BPC consistently gave Gates glowing performance reviews, despite the trail of atrocities left in his wake and a cost to the city of $31.6 million in excessive force lawsuit settlements from 1989 to 1991 alone.53 The BPC was aware that the LAPD was so out of control that it was (literally) getting away with murder, yet declined to intervene in the routine exoneration of officers accused of using excessive force.54 From 1986 to 1990, internal affairs sustained just 19% of public complaints overall and just 7.9% of the 1,988 excessive force or improper tactics complaints it received. In fact, internal affairs only investigated 66 excessive force complaints over the time period, sending the remaining 1,922 to area commanders where they disappeared into the administrative abyss. Even when complaints were sustained, Gates often overturned or minimized punishments—especially for excessive force.55 The handful of commissioners who occasionally asserted themselves over the years were either drowned out, overruled, or pushed out. Then in 1990, Mayor Bradley took advantage of two vacancies on the BPC to appoint replacements committed to taking their oversight responsibility seriously, including a civil rights attorney. This new BPC suspended Gates in 1991 pending an investigation into the Rodney King incident; the city council stepped in and reinstated him.56

Rodney King and the Christopher Commission In 1991, a stunned nation watched the graphic video of LAPD officers bludgeoning a motorist to a bloody pulp for failing to obey a traffic stop. Rodney King became the poster child for everything that was wrong with policing. The Christopher Commission, impaneled to investigate, found that not only did a significant number of LAPD officers resort to excessive force and ignore departmental regulations, but they were rewarded and promoted rather than disciplined; a mere 42 of 2,152 excessive force complaints filed in the previous four years had been sustained. It found a siege mentality and culture of racism and bigotry in the ranks so pervasive that officers freely exchanged racist remarks over their patrol car radios without a second thought.57 In 1992, the acquittal of the 266

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four officers who left King broken and brain-damaged sparked six days of virulent protests in Los Angeles and other US cities. The Commission recommended replacing confrontational policing with community policing. It called for Gates and current BPC members to step down—a damning indictment of the Board. It proposed bolstering the BPC with more staff and an inspector general (IG) to audit and oversee the LAPD disciplinary system, removing the chief from the civil service, and limiting chief appointments to a five-year term, renewable once at BPC discretion.58 The political elite considered the LAPD problem “solved,” despite the years-long delay in enacting these recommendations; the BPC resumed business as usual and fealty to a chief who invariably balked at interference with his command. Gates’s replacement, Bernard Parks (chief from 1997 to 2002) initially seemed promising because, as deputy chief for internal affairs, he had presided over increased complaint investigations and more officers being disciplined or fired. But he consistently dismissed BPC requests for policy changes and stonewalled the IG, prosecuting a relentless, and ultimately successful, campaign to oust her.59 Yet again, reform failed to meet its promise for those yearning for relief from the grinding reality of abuse.

The Rampart Scandal and DOJ Oversight The Rampart scandal exploded in 1998–1999, implicating 70 officers in an array of wrongdoing; 150 people convicted by planted evidence were freed and the city paid out $125 million in 140 lawsuits. A team of independent experts excoriated the LAPD’s Board of Inquiry report on the affair for minimizing the magnitude of corruption, ignoring a corrosive internal culture, and failing to consider structural solutions.60 A separate BPC-commissioned external review, which brought together the collective efforts of 190 community members, highlighted a systematic failure of supervision in the LAPD that perpetuated an “us versus them,” “siege,” and “the end justifies the means” mentality predisposed to the use of force.61 The DOJ had initiated a probe into allegations of excessive force and unreasonable searches and seizures by the LAPD in 1996, but Rampart brought new urgency to reform negotiations. The city council approved a deal with the DOJ in late 2000 and a consent decree soon followed. Yet with the ink on the agreement barely dry, William Bratton was appointed chief in 2002 on the promise of pursuing a repressive “broken windows” campaign that would end what he called LAPD’s “smileand-wave” approach to crime and elevate the fight against graffiti to a top priority.62 The consent decree was premised on a DOJ finding that LAPD officers were “engaging in a pattern or practice of excessive force, false arrests, and unreasonable searches and seizures.” It set out 191 reforms that the LAPD agreed to implement within five years. Most involved institutional solutions to stop misconduct and criminality, eradicate the policies and training that condoned them, and prevent recidivism. One notable requirement was the creation of a computerized Training, Evaluation and Management System (TEAMS II) to monitor officer performance, nip at-risk behaviors in the bud, promote best practices, and identify training needs.63 Such a system had been repeatedly recommended for years, but never established. It still took eight more years for the LAPD to get TEAMS II up and running. The consent decree also strengthened BPC oversight of the department and direct involvement in the disciplinary system. It reaffirmed BPC authority to review and approve all LAPD policies prior to adoption. It gave the BPC and its IG special responsibility to review all categorical (employing a deadly weapon) use of force incidents, and examine audits of interactions with persons exhibiting mental illness, warrant requests, arrests, confidential informants, and use of force to determine whether existing policy needed to be modified. It created an annual reporting requirement for the LAPD to furnish the BPC with statistics on complaint allegations, dispositions, and investigations. It assigned the IG responsibility for investigating retaliation complaints made by officers.64 These sweeping mandates were a testament to the failure of successive commissions to reform the LAPD. 267

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In 2006, with 30% of the structural reforms outstanding, the court extended federal oversight for three more years—essentially telling the LAPD it could not be trusted to make the changes on its own. The BPC chair called the court’s decision “regrettable.”65 When full compliance was still not achieved by the 2009 extended deadline, the court grudgingly terminated regular federal monitoring, but replaced it with a transition agreement that made the BPC responsible for overseeing the implementation of the remaining reforms. The DOJ retained the option of going back to court at any time to revive the more stringent reporting arrangement. The transition was expected to last 18 months but dragged on for four more years: only in 2013 was the LAPD fully released from federal supervision.66

Measuring Change—the Consent Decree and Beyond Anecdotes about police misconduct, disciplinary failures, toxic police culture, and wrangling over policy and practice speak to the extraordinary difficulty of achieving any reform that might weaken social control asserted through police power. Quantitative data from the period during and post consent decree reinforce this observation.

Data Data from 2001 to 2019, a period encompassing broad and rigorous federal monitoring, suggest that high levels of unconstitutional policing persisted despite consent decree mandates. Evidence includes misconduct complaints and associated allegations, the extent to which allegations were sustained, officer-involved shootings (OIS), and the differential treatment of Blacks, in particular. These data were collected through California Public Records Act requests to the LAPD in 2017 and 2020. Additional data were obtained from the US Bureau of the Census and other public records available on the websites of the BPC, IG, and LAPD.67 We use complaints as a surrogate for misconduct because no measure of actual misconduct exists. That said, complaints are only the tip of the iceberg: the overwhelming majority of people who believe they have been the victims of excessive force, let alone other forms of police misconduct, never file a complaint.68 Each complaint contains one or more allegations of police misconduct, and each allegation category is associated with a departmental policy. These range from the comparatively trivial “discourtesy,” to the grave “unlawful force” or “racial profiling/biased policing.”69 To simplify the analysis, “serious allegations” are defined to include all allegations of unauthorized force, unauthorized tactics, racial profiling/biased policing, false imprisonment, detention violation, and unlawful search. The LAPD classifies about 10.62% of these serious allegations as “non-disciplinary,” meaning that the alleged violation, if proven true, would not warrant discipline and could be handled through mediation, supervisor counseling, or additional training—or that the accused is not an LAPD officer. From the standpoint of the complainant, however, such allegations are perceived as sufficiently significant to prompt a complaint, so they are included here in relevant tabulations alongside “disciplinary” allegations. It is recognized that allegations such as “discourtesy” may also be traumatizing, but they are abstracted from here to simplify the analysis. The LAPD collects data on the race/ethnicity of complainants, although this field is self-reported and voluntary, accounting for a large number of “unknowns.” The data are usable only for years after 2006. OIS data is available from 2005 forward, although information before 2009 is incomplete.

Complaints The number of public complaints against LAPD officers peaked in 2006 at 6,416 and then fell steadily to 3,079 complaints in 2019. Complaints per 10,000 residents fell from a high of 17.0 per 10,000 residents in 2006 to 7.7 per 10,000 residents in 2019 (Table 20.1). 268

4774 4504 4809 5970 6100 6416 6146 5535 4768 4139 3932 3619 3414 3676 3269 3170 3186 3026 3079

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

269

1570 1217 1091 1427 1689 1579 1528 1559 1676 1597 1556 1409 1278 1405 1291 1270 1227 1330 1246

All Serious Allegations ∗ 1466 1121 989 1264 1546 1415 1353 1369 1623 1597 1556 1409 1277 1398 996 909 1041 974 977

Serious Disciplinary Allegations

Source: HUCUP 2021. ∗ Includes both “disciplinary” and “non-disciplinary” allegations.

12.8 12.0 12.7 15.7 16.4 17.0 16.3 14.8 12.5 10.9 10.4 9.5 8.9 9.5 8.4 8.1 8.1 7.6 7.7

Complaints Per Capita Complaints

Year

635 430 429 556 664 661 611 616 582 554 531 506 437 458 414 337 383 345 302

Unauthorized Force 335 271 208 241 237 213 181 137 153 161 162 148 150 170 163 158 137 147 110

Unauthorized Tactics

Table 20.1 Complaints, Serious Disciplinary Allegations, and All Serious Allegations ∗, 2001–2019

350 311 231 305 425 376 388 396 461 421 419 342 304 359 68 0 0 0 0

False Imprisonment

1 7 295 361 297 304 301

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Detention Violation – – – – – – – 21 203 252 240 202 220 208 197 227 267 355 378

Biased Policing 104 96 102 163 143 164 175 190 53 – – – – – – – – – –

Racial Profiling

146 109 121 162 220 165 173 199 224 209 204 211 166 203 154 187 143 179 155

Unlawful Search

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Complainants 70 by Race/Ethnicity A look at trends in complaint filing by race/ethnicity shows that Black complainants are greatly over-represented in terms of their share of the general population. The number of known71 Black complainants per 1,000 Black residents over the period 2006–2017 ranges between 2.0 and 4.7, some 4.4 to 5.9 times that of known non-Hispanic whites (Figure 20.1). For known Native American complainants, the number per 1,000 Native American residents often reaches 2.6 times that of known non-Hispanic whites.72 These strikingly disparate ratios are indicative of systemic racism in LAPD policing. Complainants by Race/Ethnicity per 1,000 Population of Corresponding Race/Ethnicity, 2006-2017 5.0 4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0

Figure 20.1

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 White non-Hispanic Black Hispanic Asian American Indian

Complainants by Race/Ethnicity per 1,000 population of Corresponding Race/Ethnicity, 2006–2017

Source: Created by the author based on information in Source: HUCUP (2021). 73

Serious Disciplinary Allegations Serious disciplinary allegations follow a similar pattern over time to complaints, peaking at 1,623 in 2009, and then declining to about 1,000 annually in 2015–2019 (Table 20.2). Few serious disciplinary allegations were sustained, ranging from 10 (less than 1%) to 47 (3.2%) per year. The sustain rate was a little over 1% in 2019, the end of the period under review—including sustained-no penalty allegations for which discipline was ruled out. It is worth remembering that, as noted previously, for those sustained allegations where the offending officer could be punished, the decision is the sole purview of the chief, who may reduce or eliminate disciplinary consequences entirely74.

Officer-Involved Shootings (OIS) OIS may well be the most extreme acts associated with police misconduct, and often attract more public attention than mundane abuses of police power, such as over-policing, and failure to answer calls for help. Over 2005–2019, the period for which data are available, we find a fairly consistent number of annual shooting incidents, ranging from a low of 26 in 2019 to a high of 63 in 2011, with an average annual OIS of 43.75 These numbers do not include accidental discharges or canine shootings. In a large number of OIS, the victim had no gun or was not brandishing a gun. Many of the victims, as documented by the LAPD, were demonstrably in behavioral crisis or mentally ill, and the share of Black victims far exceeded the share of Blacks in the population at a ratio of 3.5:1 (Table 20.3).

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Illusion of Police Reform under Capitalism Table 20.2 Serious Disciplinary ∗ Allegations LAPD Year

Sustained Serious Allegations–penalty

Sustained Serious Allegations–no penalty

Total Sustained Serious Allegations

Serious Allegations

Percent Sustained

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

41 22 25 24 30 30 21 10 15 12 13 11 21 23 28 19 31 16 10

6 3 4 2 0 1 3 0 0 2 0 1 0 11 2 3 10 7 3

47 25 29 26 30 31 24 10 15 14 13 12 21 33 26 22 41 23 13

1466 1121 989 1264 1546 1415 1353 1369 1623 1597 1556 1409 1277 1398 996 909 1041 974 977

3.21 2.23 2.93 2.06 1.94 2.19 1.77 0.73 0.92 0.88 0.84 0.85 1.64 2.36 2.61 2.42 3.94 2.36 1.33

Source: HUCUP 2021. ∗ Allegations are categorized as either “disciplinary” or “non-disciplinary.” Only disciplinary allegations are subject to procedures that can result in a “sustained” finding.

Confounding Factors Although the slight downward trends over time in complaints and serious allegations suggest that police conduct may have improved marginally, the low rate of sustained disciplinary allegations signals that officers are still not facing consequences for misconduct. Moreover, improvements suggested by the above trends may not be attributable to oversight or behavior modifications at all, but to environmental factors.

Demographic Changes The racial and ethnic composition of Los Angeles changed considerably over the 19-year period of analysis. Most notable has been the 9.94% decline in the Black population, from 393,285 to 354,182; its percentage of the total population also dropped, from 10.52% in 2001 to 8.90% in 2019.76 Blacks have been the disproportionate victims of alleged police misconduct, as reflected in their strikingly large share of complainants. The decline in the Black population could, therefore, account for some of the reduction in complaints and serious allegations observed in the time trends without there having been substantive changes in policing behavior. The Pearson correlation coefficient over the 19-year period between the percentage of Blacks in the population and the number of complaints, at 0.683, is high and significant (p = 0.004), reinforcing this inference.

271

272

42 37 57 43 42 40 63 37 46 30 48 40 44 33 26

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

– – – – 14 42 – 19 19 12 12 13 10 10 8.0

Black

Source: HUCUP (2021).

Number

Year

– – – – 4.0 13 – 22 6.0 4.0 7.0 1.0 10 2.0 2.0

White

– – – – 23 45 – 51 21 12 23 23 26 19 15

Latino

Race/Ethnicity of Suspect

– – – – 1 0 – 5 0 1 6 4 0 4 1

Other/ Unknown

Table 20.3 LAPD Officer Involved Shootings, 2005–2019

– – – – – – – 3 – – – – – – –

Asian

– – – – 21 16 26 17 15 18 21 19 17 14 12

Killed

– – – – 9.0 13 21 13 20 8.0 18 11 20 16 10

Injured

Outcome for Suspect

– – – – 33.3 42 – 19 41.3 41.4 25 31.7 21.7 28.6 30.8

Black Suspect Percent of OIS Shootings

Black Disproportion

– – – – 9.6 9.2 – 9.2 9.0 8.9 8.8 8.7 8.8 8.8 8.9

Black Percent of Population

– – – – 3.5 4.6 – 2.1 4.6 4.7 2.9 3.6 2.5 3.2 3.5

Ratio of Black Suspect Percent of OIS Shootings to Black Percent in Population

Jillian Aldebron & Rodney Green

Illusion of Police Reform under Capitalism

Changes in Arrest Levels Coincident with the decline in complaints has been a decline in arrests recorded by the LAPD, consistent with a national trend starting in 2012, which was accelerated in Los Angeles by the downgrading of some felonies and institution of pre-arrest juvenile diversions. This may also have affected complaint and allegation volume over time since complaints typically arise from encounters with police officers, and serious allegations are often associated with arrests. The Pearson correlation coefficient between annual arrests and annual complaints for the period 2001–2019 is high and significant (0.840, p =.000) (see Figure 20.2).

Figure 20.2 Arrests per Year in City of Los Angeles Sources: LAPD, Statistical Digest, 2001-2009; Los Angeles Open Data, Crime Data from 2010-2019, https://data.lacity. org/Public-Safety/Crime-Data-from-2010-to-2019/63jg-8b9z

Attitudes Toward the Complaint Process The declining trend in complaints especially after 2006, the year that all consent decree reforms were slated for completion, may also be attributed to changing attitudes toward the complaint process. The literature on what underlies trends in attitudes toward the complaint process over time is sparse, addressing only satisfaction with the experience among those who have filed complaints. It is nevertheless reasonable to surmise that the persistence of a low sustain rate and failures to impose discipline, despite consent decree reforms, may well have encouraged a growing cynicism about the ability of the system to hold wrongdoers to account, reducing the public’s willingness to file complaints over time.

Vulnerability of Arrestees to Intimidation Bratton’s broken windows strategy—vigorously prosecuting petty offenses that, if left unpunished, would eventually graduate to serious criminal behavior (a theory not supported by the scholarly literature)—exacerbated the number of people living in poverty who had arrest records, as well as those on parole or probation at any given time. By definition, a disproportionately large number of people arrested live in the “hot-spot” neighborhoods slated for intensified police presence—those with the highest concentrations of Blacks, Latinx, homeless persons, the mentally ill, and the drug addicted. One salient example: the 2006 Skid Row raids on the homeless population, which saw a large share of the 1,000 monthly citations for offenses like jaywalking and loitering turn into jail time 273

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because offenders could not pay the fines. Because those with recorded contacts and arrests are especially vulnerable to harassment or to an adverse impact on parole or probation status, one would expect that having a greater concentration of such individuals in the populations most impacted by police misconduct would depress the number of complaint filings.

Implication of Findings for the Period During and After the Consent Decree The complaint data vividly show the disproportionately large share of Black complainants over the period 2006–2017. This comparison suggests a much higher experience of questionable policing by Blacks and Native Americans compared to other groups in Los Angeles. In the OIS data, there is a similarly disproportionate share of Blacks subjected to police gunfire, often with grievous outcomes. Blacks as a percentage of OIS victims (30.8%) compared to their percentage in the population (8.9%) is approximately 3.5:1. These figures strongly suggest the persistence of race-based policing with little if any improvement over the period of study—notable because this was one of the problems the consent decree was meant to remedy. The declining trend in total complaints from 2001 to 2019 and parallel decline in the most serious allegations have less significance due to confounding factors over this time period. The level of police abuse and the lack of accountability in Los Angeles remain high despite DOJ involvement and BPC oversight.

Policy and Practice Changes Ultimately, the impressive slate of reforms required by the consent decree may have amounted to no more than shadow play, an assessment that could be better made by looking at related short- and longer-term performance indicators. A Harvard study that deemed the reforms a success nevertheless acknowledged “persistent differences” in how Blacks and Latinx experienced the police as late as 2008, seven years after the consent decree went into effect—in particular, that use of force against Blacks and Latinx remained disproportionate to their share of police contacts, which themselves were disproportionate to the share of Blacks and Latinx in the total population. None of the 320 allegations of racial profiling investigated in 2007 was sustained, and an IG sample of complaints alleging racial profiling between May and October of that year discovered investigative flaws in five of the six reviewed.77 Inter alia, a 2008 ACLU data analysis showed racially disparate outcomes in stop-and-frisks for the period 2003–2004, a conclusion rejected by both the LAPD and BPC.78 The Harvard study found that the most frequent complaints—more than 17,000 over 1998–2008—were for discourtesy, with Blacks filing 31%. Of the 2,368 discourtesy complaints closed in 2008, the LAPD sustained just 39, or 1.6%. The overall sustain rate for misconduct complaints closed in 2008 was 3%, while the sustain rate for serious allegations adjudicated that year was a mere 0.73%.79 In the 11 years following the Harvard study (2009–2019) there were 11,375 discourtesy complaints, of which just 277, or 2.44%, were sustained.80 Charlie Beck, who served as LAPD chief from 2009 to 2018, claimed that by the end of his tenure, the department had fully assimilated a modern policing culture that embraced the role of guardian over that of soldier.81 But under Beck, recourse to guns was neither abandoned nor punished. From 2007 to 2015, there were 343 shooting incidents by LAPD officers, with 75 officers found to have violated policy. Of these, just 2 officers were fired, 24 were suspended without pay (but the union paid their salaries), one was allowed to retire, and the remaining 48 received reprimands or no consequences at all.82 In fact, over the period 2011–2015, by which time the BPC had assumed authority to review and issue definitive findings on police shootings, the LAPD found 29 officers involved in shootings erred only in using “inappropriate tactics,” compared to 18 who violated the use of lethal force policy.83 274

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The LAPD reported that the number of OIS jumped 50% in 2015, catapulting the department to the top ranks of the nation’s deadliest police forces—a distinction that Beck explained publicly by Los Angeles having “a geographic or demographic that is more violent than others.” OIS numbers from 2009 to 2019 show a disproportionate number of victims were Black (22.5%) or Latinx (42.3%).84 An earlier study showed that 37% of victims had demonstrable signs of mental illness.85 Despite the yearto-year fluctuations in OIS, the trend over time in the number of such shootings and their disproportionate impact on Blacks, in particular, remained high. Compounding the accountability problem, the BPC approved a rule accompanying the 2015 roll-out of body-worn cameras that sealed the footage from public view, but allowed officers to see it before making use of force statements.86 In 2016, despite the BPC’s announced intention to incorporate an emphasis on de-escalation and minimal force into LAPD policy, Los Angeles topped the nation for the rate of fatal police shootings per 100,000 residents, surpassing Chicago and nearly triple the rate in New York City.87 From 2013 to 2018, LAPD officers killed 113 people; Black killings were more than four times the rate of whites, and Latinx twice the rate of whites.88 Lawsuit settlements for civil rights abuses alone reached budget-busting proportions: $124 million for 2012–2016. Over that same period, total costs for settlements and judgments on all claims, including labor violations, hit $215 million.89 Such statistics belie Beck’s assertion of a “new dawn” of LAPD policing.

High-Tech Surveillance After the Christopher Commission, community policing combined with new forms of surveillance further insinuated police presence into the social life of residents. Throughout the consent decree years and beyond, disregard for privacy rights and the persistence of discriminatory policing continued to fester at the heart of LAPD operations. Policing became increasingly automated, driven by algorithms, with years of accumulated bias baked into the data on which they were constructed.90 When CompStat—a statistical package used to manage police resources, gauge productivity, and identify problem areas—was introduced in 2002, it inevitably reproduced inequitable results. In 2011, Beck, a former CRASH unit officer, mounted Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration), which incorporated a person-based component that provided ready-made justifications for pretext stops, among other things.91 LASER “suspect profiles” were based on a “Chronic Offender Score” point system to articulate reasonable suspicion for making a stop and justifying harassment, eliminating entirely the need for officer discretion—or even a second thought. Then in 2012, Beck upped the ante by adopting PredPol, a controversial software program reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.” PredPol monitored the activities of supposed miscreants, defined the spatial parameters of high-risk neighborhoods, and ran this information through an algorithm to predict property crimes before they happened. A two-and-a-half-year case study of LAPD’s predictive policing in action found that PredPol reinforced stereotypes, evaded transparency, and reproduced race, class, and neighborhood inequalities.92 In August 2018, the BPC suspended (but did not terminate) LASER and PredPol due to unremitting complaints from a growing number of local activists. A 2019 IG evaluation confirmed that the LAPD needed to do a better job of standardizing criteria for calculating risk and tracking people. Still more important, there was no evidence to conclude that predictive policing tools reduced crime.93 Yet despite the program’s manifest shortcomings, non-existent payoff, and expense, the BPC refused to scrap it, instead accepting the chief’s assertion that location-based strategies were necessary to “keep people safe.”94

The Los Angeles Case Study Summed Up Los Angeles has had an external police watchdog built into the city administration for nearly 150 years, and its powers have expanded over time. DOJ intervention and federal judicial oversight have 275

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reinforced BPC authority and exacted a laundry list of institutional reforms intended to achieve constitutional compliance by LAPD officers. But even with civilians at the helm, regulatory curbs on officer discretion, sufficient organizational capacity, a transparent process, an engaged citizenry, friendly courts—the necessary features of robust civilian oversight—significant qualitative change for working-class Angelenos has failed to materialize.95 Reform aimed at professionalizing the police force changed the form but not the nature or incidence of abuse, especially for minority populations. Commissions and studies and surveys concurred in where the problems lay, but recommendations that attenuated discrimination or did not contribute to enhanced police power were shelved. A federal consent decree reinforced management structures, supervision, and training, but had little impact on the body count or abusive policing. It was silent on use of force tactics, apart from requiring canine bites to be counted as a use of force, which the LAPD had not been doing. The most recent data shows a modest reduction in the number of complaints of serious abuses in LA, but that reduction tracks closely the exodus of Blacks. At the same time, surveillance has become omnipresent and ever more intrusive. In Loyola-Marymount’s 2017 public opinion poll of Los Angeles residents, 58% of respondents said they expected another uprising similar to Watts to occur in the next five years—higher than any year except 1997, the first year the survey was conducted, and a 10-point jump over 2012.96 This sentiment is a grim testament to the inability of capitalism to either satisfy or definitively suppress the demands of those it exploits and, therefore, its continuous need for both forceful and surreptitious methods of control to inhibit opposition and quash rebellion. Given this politico-economic context, the notion of effective police reform seems likely to remain a contradiction in terms for the working class.

Conclusion If capitalism implies inequality, exploitation, and racial division and relies on violent coercion to enforce it, no amount of reform can lead to a kinder, gentler practice of policing. Calls in 2020-2022 to defund, abolish, or reimagine the police reflect popular disenchantment, especially among Blacks and Latinx, with reforms that seem only to strengthen capitalist control over the working class. There is a growing recognition that violence in all its forms is essential to police power, reducing prospects for meaningful reform to a fantasy. Opponents of abolition raise the specter of lawlessness and chaos without the police to protect the public. But there is ample evidence that the police do little to prevent or solve crime. In 2019, the average “clearance rate”—a measure of arrests or case closures for reasons such as victim non-cooperation or suspect death—was 45.5% for violent crimes and 17.2% for property crimes across law enforcement agencies nationally.97 It is surely possible to imagine a “public safety” system that limits police authority to major crimes, and shifts resources to social and health services. Such proposals exist, some going back 100 years.98 But none has seen the light of day except on a very small scale. Tellingly, even in the aftermath of a gruesome murder beneath the knee of a police officer and a massive public outcry for justice, widespread demands—and promises by politicians caught on the back foot—to disband the police or reduce police budgets have gone largely ignored. Camden, New Jersey, which famously “scrapped” its police force in 2012, actually just handed off the police function to the county, which intensified surveillance, put more officers on the street, and brought in a “broken-windows” strategy.99 One exception was in Los Angeles, where the city council overrode a mayoral veto to carve $150 million (8%) out of the LAPD’s 2020–2021 budget, cutting officer numbers and diverting the money to a panoply of needs in the most underserved communities. But the embrace of change proved ephemeral: in 2021, the council bowed to police union pressure, hiking LAPD funding by 3% and scrapping plans for officer layoffs. The dismal legacy of palliative gestures and frustrated hopes continues. In a capitalist regime so ruthlessly unjust that its survival is contingent on terror, pervasive scrutiny, criminalization of race and ethnicity, and the wanton infliction of violence, reform will remain illusory. 276

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Notes 1 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (originally published 1867; New York: Modern Library, 1906). 2 Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1985–1915, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017). 3 Michael Reich, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Towards a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (originally published 1935; Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013); Loïc Wacquant, “Class, Race, and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America,” Socialism and Democracy 28 (Issue 3 2014): 35–56; and Jonathan W. Hutto and Rodney D. Green, “Social Movements Against Racist Police Brutality and Department of Justice Intervention in Prince George’s County, Maryland,” Journal of Urban Health 93 (February 2016): 89–121. 4 Philip L. Reichel, “Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type,” American Journal of Police 7 (Issue 2 1988): 51–77; and Gary Potter, “The History of Policing in the United States,” Parts 1–6, 25 June 2013, Eastern Kentucky University Police Studies Series, https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policingunited-states-part-1, accessed 13 August 2021. 5 Theodore William Allen, “’They Would Have Destroyed Me’: Slavery and the Origins of Racism,” Radical America 1975 9 (No. 3 1975): 40–63; Robert Weiss, “The Emergence and Transformation of Private Detective Industrial Policing in the United States, 1850–1940,” Crime and Social Justice 9 (Spring-Summer 1978): 35–48; and Robin Walker Sterling, “Fundamental Unfairness: In re Gault and the Road Not Taken,” Maryland Law Review 72 (No. 3 2013): 607–681. 6 Weiss, “The Emergence and Transformation of Private Detective Industrial Policing in the United States.” 7 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 8 Potter, “The History of Policing in the United States.” 9 Ibid. 10 Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 11 Potter, “The History of Policing in the United States.” 12 Samuel Walker, “Introduction,” in A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Records of the Wickersham Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, compiled by Robert E. Lester (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1997). 13 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Washington, DC: US GPO, 1947). 14 Samuel Walker and Charles Katz, The Police in America, An Introduction, 10th Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2018). 15 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, DC: US GPO, 1968). 16 Samuel Walker, “The History of Citizen Oversight,” in Citizen Oversight of Law Enforcement, ed. J.C. Perino (Chicago: ABA Publishing, 2006). 17 Walker and Katz, The Police in America. 18 Walker, “The History of Citizen Oversight.” 19 Rodney D. Green and Jillian Aldebron, “In Search of Police Accountability: Civilian Review Boards and Department of Justice Intervention,” Phylon 56 (Summer 2019): 111–133. 20 Noam Scheiber, Farah Stockman, and J. David Goodman, “Fierce Protectors of Police Impede Efforts at Reform,” New York Times, 7 June 2020, A1. 21 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 42 U.S.C. 13701 et seq. 22 Green and Aldebron, “In Search of Police Accountability.” 23 Maggie Gile, “DOJ Opens Probe into Phoenix Police Similar to Those Underway in Minneapolis, Louisville,” Newsweek, 5 August 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/doj-opens-probe-phoenix-policesimilar-those-underway-louisville-minneapolis-1616698, accessed 12 August 2021. 24 Hutto and Green, “Social Movements Against Racist Police Brutality and Department of Justice Intervention in Prince George’s County, Maryland.” 25 Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); and Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, 3rd ed. (Oakland: AK Press, 2015). 26 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles.

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Cannon, Official Negligence. Domanick, To Protect and to Serve. Walker and Katz, The Police in America, An Introduction. Cannon, Official Negligence. Cannon, Official Negligence. Ibid. Domanick, To Protect and to Serve. Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); and Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Domanick, To Protect and to Serve. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Ibid. Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? (Los Angeles: Governor’s Commision on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965). Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners. (1980). The Report of the Board of Police Commissioners Concerning the Shooting of Eulia Love and the Use of Deadly Force, Box 8, folder 6, University of Southern California, http:// digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll69/id/5941, accessed 13 August 2021. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Cannon, Official Negligence. Ibid. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Mike Davis and Robert Morrow, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2018). Cannon, Official Negligence. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Domanick, To Protect and to Serve. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Davis and Morrow, City of Quartz. Domanick, Blue. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Domanick, To Protect and to Serve. Ibid. Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles. Domanick, To Protect and to Serve; Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles; and Jane Fritsch and Paul Feldman, “Council Orders Reinstatement of Gates Despite Bradley Plea,” Los Angeles Times, 6 April 1991, https:// www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-06-mn-1479-story.html, accessed 13 August 2021. Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department. (Los Angeles: Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, 1991). Ibid. Cannon, Official Negligence; and Domanick, Blue. Domanick, Blue; and Erwin Chemerinsky, “An Independent Analysis of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Board of Inquiry Report on the Rampart Scandal,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 34 (Issue 2 2001): 547–656. Report of the Rampart Independent Review Panel (Los Angeles: Rampart Independent Review Panel, 2000). Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles; and Charlie LeDuff, “Los Angeles Police Chief Faces a Huge Challenge,” New York Times, 24 October 2002, A22. United States v. City of Los Angeles, et al., 288 F.3d 391, 401 (9th Cir. 2002), Consent Decree, available online at http://assets.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/final_consent_decree.pdf, accessed 14 August 2021. Ibid. Patrick McGreevy, “Extension Sought for Police Decree,” Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2006, https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-11-me-consent11-story.html, accessed 12 August 2021. Joel Rubin, “Judge Frees LAPD from Consent Decree,” Los Angeles Times, 17 July 2009, https:// latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/07/judge-frees-lapd-from-consent-decree.html, accessed 13 August 2021; and Joel Rubin, “Federal Judge Lifts LAPD Consent Decree,” Los Angeles Times, 16 May 2013, https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2013-may-16-la-me-lapd-consent-decree-20130517-story.html, accessed 13 August 2021.

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Illusion of Police Reform under Capitalism 67 Howard University Center for Urban Progress, The Howard University Civilian Review Board Database (HUCRBD), stored at Howard University Center for Urban Progress. 68 Matthew J. Hickman, Citizen Complaints about Police Use of Force, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, June 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice). 69 Racial profiling was replaced as an allegation category in 2008 by “biased policing,” which enlarged the definition to include all protected classes under California civil rights law. 70 “Complaints” per se are not recorded by race/ethnicity, but data is collected on the race/ethnicity of complainants. A complaint may have several complainants, who may belong to different races or ethnic groups, and a given complainant may have filed more than one complaint. 71 “Unknowns” generally account for 15–25% of complainants (2006 saw an atypical spike of 50% unknowns). 72 Post-2017 data is not comparable with earlier years due to changed reporting methodology, so the time series ends at 2017. 73 Howard University, Civilian Review Board Database. 74 Mike Reicher, “Why LAPD Officers Escaped Serious Discipline Over 8 Years of Bad Shootings,” Los Angeles Daily News, 3 January 2016, https://projects.dailynews.com/lapd-officer-shootings-discipline/, accessed 13 August 2021. 75 Each OIS is an “incident” that may involve more than one officer. For example, 48 officers were involved in the 33 OIS in 2018, 110 in the 44 OIS in 2017, and 102 in 37 OIS in 2012; an officer may be involved without discharging a weapon. 76 Howard University, Civilian Review Board Database; and United States Bureau of the Census, Population and Housing Estimates, 2019 (Washington, DC: USGPO, 2019). 77 Christopher Stone, Todd Foglesong, and Christine M. Cole, Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree (Cambridge: Harvard Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, 2009). 78 Ian Ayres and Jonathan Borowsky, “A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department,” American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (October 2008), available online at https://www.aclusocal.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/11837125-LAPD-RacialProfiling-Report-ACLU.pdf, accessed 13 August 2021. 79 Stone, Foglesong, and Cole, Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree. 80 Howard University, Civilian Review Board Database. 81 Joe Domanick, “Maybe We’ll Become an Example for America,” The Crime Report, 3 March 2016, https:// thecrimereport.org/2016/03/03/maybe-well-become-an-example-for-america-2/, accessed 13 August 2021. 82 Reicher, “Why LAPD Officers Escaped Serious Discipline Over 8 Years of Bad Shootings.” 83 Howard University, Civilian Review Board Database. 84 Ibid. 85 Domanick, “Maybe We’ll Become an Example for America”; and Los Angeles Police Department, 2015 Use of Force Year-End Review (Los Angeles: LAPD, 2015), available at http://assets.lapdonline.org/assets/ pdf/Use of Force Review-Final.pdf, accessed 14 August 2021. 86 Keith Mather, “Divided Police Commission Approves Rules for LAPD Body Cameras,” Los Angeles Times, 28 April 2015, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lapd-body-cameras-rules-20150427-story. html, accessed 14 August 2021. 87 Jason McGahan, “2016: The Year LAPD Led the Nation in Fatal Shootings (Again),” LA Weekly, 20 December 2016, https://www.laweekly.com/2016-the-year-lapd-led-the-nation-in-fatal-shootingsagain/, accessed 14 August 2021. 88 “Police Accountability Tool,” Mapping Police Violence, 2019, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/cities, accessed 14 August 2021. 89 Richard Winton, “LAPD Settlements Soar as Officials Close the Books on High-Profile Lawsuits Against Police Officers,” Los Angeles Times, 9 May 2017, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lapdlitgation-costs-20170509-story.html, accessed 14 August 2021. 90 Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles; Ayres and Borowsky, “A Study of Racially Disparate Outcomes in the Los Angeles Police Department”; and Rashida Richardson, Jason M. Schultz, and Kate Crawford, “Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice,” New York University Law Review 94 (May 2019): 192–233. 91 Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” May 2018, available online at https://stoplapdspying.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Beforethe-Bullet-Hits-the-Body-May-8-2018.pdf, accessed 14 August 2021. 92 Sarah Brayne, “Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing,” American Sociological Review 82 (October 2017): 977–1008.

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Jillian Aldebron & Rodney Green 93 Mark P. Smith, Review of Selected Los Angeles Police Department Data-Driven Policing Strategies, Los Angeles Police Commission Office of the Inspector General, 12 March 2019, available at https://a27e0481-a3d044b8-8142-1376cfbb6e32.filesusr.com/ugd/b2dd23_21f6fe20f1b84c179abf440d4c049219.pdf, accessed 13 August 2021. 94 Mark Puente and Cindy Chang, “LAPD Changing Controversial Program That Uses Data to Predict Where Crimes Will Occur,” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 2018, https://www.latimes.com/california/ story/2019-10-15/lapd-predictive-policing-changes, accessed 13 August 2021. 95 Erik Eckholm, “As Justice Department Scrutinizes Local Police, Cleveland Is the Latest Focus,” New York Times, 18 June 2014, A12; and Samuel Walker, “Institutionalizing Police Accountability Reforms: The Problem of Making Police Reforms Endure,” St. Louis University Public Law Review 32 (No. 1 2012): 57–92. 96 Fernando J. Guerra, Brianne Gilbert, and Berto Solis, “L.A. Riots 25 Years Later: 2017 Los Angeles Public Opinion Survey Report,” Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, Loyola Marymount University, 2017, available at https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/studyla-reports/4, accessed 14 August 2021. 97 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reporting Program: Percent of offenses cleared by arrest or exceptional means, by population group, 2019, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-inthe-US-2019/tables/table-25, accessed 13 August 2021. 98 Williams, Our Enemies in Blue; and Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (New York: Verso Books, 2017). 99 Hank Kalet, “Camden Didn’t Defund Its Police Department—It Just Handed It Off,” The Progressive Magazine, 30 June 2020, https://progressive.org/latest/camden-didnt-defund-police-department-kalet200630/, accessed 14 August 2021.

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21 PRESIDENT’S TASK FORCE ON TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY POLICING Frederick W. Turner II and Brent Hoosac

Introduction In a democratic society, police officers are utilized to prevent social upheaval, decrease crime, and protect citizens while also acknowledging their freedoms. Officers must find this balance so that they do not appear to be an occupying force. Over time, criminals have begun using much more lethal weapons. To combat these higher-capacity weapons used by criminals, law enforcement had to adapt by obtaining more advanced equipment and training.1 However, civilian police officers obtaining and using military-type equipment has become a polarizing subject in today’s society. As a result, many are afraid that this will cause the police to become more militarized, which may result in a more unclear distinction between the military and the police.2 Kara Dansky asserts that there are four fundamental elements of police militarization: •

• • •

the institution of the 1033 program, which was implemented in the 1990s, in order to provide military equipment to local law enforcement organizations. In addition, it also provided federal funding to local governments for the purchase of military-type weapons from the private industry; the utilization of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) by federal law enforcement, the utilization of SWAT by local law enforcement, and the culture in law enforcement that centers on fear and control instead of equality and safety within the community.3

In the wake of the response by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, to Michael Brown’s shooting, an unarmed African American, Attorney General Eric Holder, expressed his concern over the deployment of military equipment, which, according to him, sent a conflicting message. At the time, President Obama also issued an order for a comprehensive review of the practice of issuing local law enforcement agencies surplus military equipment.4 It is important to understand that a more militarized police force does not actually mean they will literally engage with the civilian population, similar to how the military fights battles. Instead, “the essential effect of the presumption of threat—manifested in militarization—is symbolic or expressive.”5 There is a stark contrast between the ideologies of the military and the police. As pointed out by Bieler (2016), the first sentences of the U.S. Army Infantry manual maintains that their objective “is to close with the enemy by means of fire and maneuver to destroy, capture, or

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-28

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repel an assault by fire, close combat, and counterattack.”6 In contrast, as stated in the patrol guide for the New York City Police Department, The primary duty of all members of the service is to protect human life, including the lives of individuals being placed in police custody. Force may be used when it is reasonable to ensure the safety of a member of the service or a third person, or otherwise protect life.7 Given the distinct divisions in ideologies that exist between the military and police, it is understandable that citizens may become concerned with the perception that the police are becoming more militarized. In this chapter, we will examine these issues, as well as a legitimate need for this type of equipment in comparison to the adverse effects it may cause.

Description of the Problem or Issue In 2014, in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting, the 1033 program came under scrutiny after protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, which led to the Ferguson police department’s use of military-grade equipment, such as weapons and armored trucks that were believed to have been obtained through the 1033 program. This perceived disproportionality in the law enforcement response to these types of incidents has ignited a divisive debate over the ramifications of providing military capabilities to local police agencies. The issues are the legitimate need for this type of equipment versus the effects that increased police militarization has on police legitimacy and the citizens they serve.

Literature Review The 1700s to Mid-1800s in America In the mind of some, policing in America can be traced back as far as the late 1700s, when policingtype groups were formed from military bodies that were developed to sustain the institution of slavery. For example, in U.S. cities in the South, paramilitary type, municipal police forces were created from the city’s colonial militia; these forces acted independently of the military. However, most would argue that the origin of policing in America was derived from Robert Peel’s 1830s London Metropolitan Police organization.8 The Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 asserted that law enforcement would not function in the capacity of an occupying force to maintain law and order. Peel envisioned that the police would enforce laws with the least amount of force necessary.9 The Texas Rangers were formed during this time period in America as a military-style force to combat Native Americans. They incorporated a military-type structure and appointed military leaders as their commanders.10 In 1807 the Insurrection Act was passed, which gave the president the authority to direct any branch of the military to suppress insurrections, uprisings, and civil disturbances that might have posed a threat to the functioning of state or federal laws.11 This Act required that the president could send troops in to “suppress a rebellion only if requested by the state or upon a determination that the situation was so dire that federal law could no longer be enforced, or if the basic rights of the state’s citizens were being violated.” This legislation mandated that this power only be provided to the president as a last resort.12 In 1845, the first modern police agency was developed in New York City. These first law enforcement agencies concentrated their efforts on community issues.13 During its developmental stages, law enforcement did not want to be viewed as an army; therefore, they did not carry guns or wear uniforms. However, because of insufficient training and the required political connections just 282

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to become a police officer, law enforcement was known more for their ineptness, brutality, and corrupt methods instead of their abilities to deal with crime.14 During the mid to late part of the 1890s, New York City Police Department Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt asserted that many of the concepts obtained in the army equally applied to the administration of a law enforcement organization.15 The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878, making it unlawful for the military to be utilized in a domestic law enforcement role unless specified under the exemptions in the Act. These exceptions eliminated prohibiting the use of the military for active or direct use in forcing the law. Today, any attempts by the legislature to approve the use of the military in domestic concerns must consider this prohibition in its regulatory construct.16 The prolonged conflicts of the Indian wars, in the view of some, were more like a lengthy series of law enforcement operations than they were actual wars. Once these had concluded, under Congress’ civil direction, the same forces that fought in the Indian wars were then sent to fight in the Spanish-American War in 1898. These battles also took directly from the U.S. police forces to support military strength, maintain control during the occupation, and then track down the fugitives.17 Professionalism and police reform did not begin to take shape in the United States until the early part of the twentieth century, which eventually evolved into the modern policing institution as we know it today.18

The 1900s During its early stages, law enforcement was useful in many ways, but it had difficulty handling violent and organized crime. For example, after the Volstead Act’s passage in 1919, more commonly known as Prohibition, law enforcement dealt with the rising violence associated with the mafia.19 These criminals used powerful weapons and military-style assault tactics, which caused law enforcement to transform their firearms and tactics.20 Between the 1930s to the 1960s, law enforcement developed paramilitary “red squads” and intelligence units to engage with labor disorder.21 However, law enforcement departments began to struggle with overcoming their inept, brutal, and unfair reputation; thus, reformers began to pursue a structural methodology similar to Hoover’s transformation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One of these changes included the removal of politics as an influencing body in law enforcement. Additionally, many cities developed civil service processes, which transformed police officers from political agents to civil servants.22

The 1960s to the Present In 1962, John F. Kennedy created the Office of Public Safety (OPS). This agency “rode roughshod over the military-civilian divide in its work training police corps of allied nations.”23 This organization sent more than $200,000 and approximately 1,500 advisors overseas to train more than 1 million police officers during its time in existence. However, Congress terminated the program by 1974 because of reports being made that torture and political policing were occurring. Prior to its termination, however, the OPS had an impact on the changes that occurred to police forces, more specifically in their militarization. This came as a result of the OPS relationship to counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency was a method devised to counter guerrilla-style tactics, which places “military forces in police-like roles and brings the police to adopt military characteristics, confounding distinctions of mission and places citizens at home/enemies abroad.”24 The 1960s brought on more military-style tactics by police engaging in widespread protesting. This continued into the 1970s when law enforcement dealt with heavily armed KKK members and the Black Panther Party. In the 1980s and 1990s, law enforcement confronted the crack cocaine epidemic, street gangs, and the associated violence that came with it. Legislation such as the Firearms 283

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Owners’ Protection Act, Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and other similar type acts had little effect on keeping weapons from street gangs, and violent crimes increased throughout the country during this period of time. And, because of events such as the 1997 North Hollywood police shootout, Columbine, and the events of 9/11, law enforcement increased its militarization even more throughout the United States. However, police militarization came to the forefront in 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, due to law enforcement’s response to its aftermath. Jay Fortenbery argues that while citizens aspire for safety and protection, they also want to retain their freedoms. Therefore, the dilemma for law enforcement organizations is how far they can go in their push toward a more militarized police force before impacting citizens’ fundamental civil liberties.25

Discussion Progression Toward Police Militarization According to Anta Plowden, militarization in law enforcement took its initial steps in 1965 with a routine traffic stop for driving under the influence, which eventually led to one of the worst riots in U.S. history.26 A physical altercation ensued between the subject, his family members, and the officer. This arrest then led to what came to be known as the Watts riots. During these riots, officers on the ground felt overwhelmed by tactics, such as rioters taking up sniper positions, using Molotov cocktails, and employing guerilla-style tactics, which were all used by Vietnam War enemy combatants. Police agencies were encountering new problems that forced them to evolve even further in their tactics. The “hippie movement,” the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement all brought on large-scale demonstrations throughout the country. These protests often began peacefully, but eventually broke out into violent situations. When law enforcement would arrive at these protests, their response was vital to whether the incidents would escalate or not.27 In 1967, the Kerner Commission was created to identify contributing problems, which led to law enforcement ineffectiveness during the 1960s. Some of the essential findings included: (a) structural issues with dispatch orientation for command and control in policing these disorders; (b) the lack of information or intelligence accessible to law enforcement regarding the planning of protests and other events that involved civil disorder, as well as events that were in progress; and, (c) in most police departments, officers were not equipped with proper protective gear that would protect them from objects such as rocks, bottles, and other projectiles.28 The commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department during the Watts riot was Inspector Daryl Gates. The riots’ aftermath left him with the perception that civilian law enforcement training, equipment, and tactics were insufficient to engage with guerrilla-style tactics that they had encountered during the riots. The U.S. military was engaged in this type of warfare in Vietnam during that time, and as a result, Gates requested guidance from the military. Subsequently, the military provided him with the tactics and training for more effective methods of suppressing riots.29 In 1967, the Los Angeles Chief of Police, Thomas Reddin, developed a new unit called Tactical Operations Planning in response to confrontations between antiwar protestors and the Los Angeles Police Department speech given by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Culver City, California. The unit’s responsibility was to develop a strategy for and response to riots, protests, and dignitary visits. Daryl Gates was put in charge, and he sectioned the unit into 16 military-type squads. Gates initially suggested that the unit be renamed as “Special Weapons Attack Team” (SWAT); however, after pushback against the word “attack,” the unit was renamed “Special Weapons and Tactics”; more commonly known as SWAT.30 The “war on drugs” was declared by President Nixon in 1967. Using this symbolic terminology, the idea was to unify the public into engaging and addressing this societal problem. President Nixon 284

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and his team conducted public relations initiatives by using scare tactics regarding heroin to garner public support. Because of the campaign’s success, President Nixon was able to push through a succession of crime-related bills that enable things such as wiretapping, preventative confinement, and “no-knock” warrants.31 One of the first SWAT raids occurred in December of 1969, at the Black Panther Party headquarters in Los Angeles. A 3-hour-long shootout ensued between the LAPD SWAT team and a well-armed and fortified Black Panther group. In the end, this high-profile raid was a large demonstration of law enforcement’s abilities to engage organizations that many politicians, police officials, and middle-class Americans feared. Even though civil rights groups were infuriated, the SWAT raid was a success for public relations, and over the next 5 years, SWAT teams were developed in major cities throughout the United States.32 In 1981, the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act was passed, which allowed the military to assist law enforcement organizations with drug-related cases, counterterrorism, and associated types of operations.33 It also allowed for police and soldiers to train together and conduct joint paramilitary operations, which included the use of a U2 spy plane to help find drug fields, as well as using military helicopters to carry out search warrants on civilians who were believed to be growing marijuana.34 The progression of militarization continued through the 1980s when the utilization of SWAT teams and other police paramilitary units (PPUs) dramatically increased with the war on drugs. By 1995, approximately 90% of all law enforcement agencies in the United States had these paramilitary units.35 During the 1990s, these paramilitary methods extended further than just drug raids. Common investigations developed into prolonged standoffs; however, in some cases, these standoffs ended with the wrongful deaths of individuals who were not connected to drug-related crimes. Incidents like Ruby Ridge, Waco, and raids like the one involving Elian Gonzalez caused the public to begin expressing concern over the tactics utilized by civilian police.36 Criminalist Peter B. Kraska published a report in 1997 regarding “the systematic insurgence of militarism throughout American civilian law enforcement.” Kraska determined that the total number of SWAT deployments had gone from 3,000 in 1980 to almost 30,000 by 1995; however, of most concern was the use of a SWAT team, paramilitary-style tactics, that were being utilized more often by regular patrol officers.37

National Defense Authorization Act and 1033 Program In 1997, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was passed, establishing the 1033 program. This program allowed for the transfer of military supplies to local law enforcement agencies. However, the program was a by-product of the military’s ever-expanding involvement in the war on drugs. Under the 1033 program, law enforcement agencies were required to follow a three-step process to obtain military equipment: • • •

The agency must have approval from their state program coordinator and the participation of the Law Enforcement Support Office, which oversees the 1033 program. The agency must provide a request and rationalization for items they are requesting to obtain. The police agency will receive either an approval or denial and, if approved, the agency is required to pay for all shipping costs for it to be sent.38

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, law enforcement agencies throughout the country were justified in their requests for larger arsenals and additional equipment because of the looming threat of terrorism. American forces began to prepare to engage terrorists overseas, and the continuous threat of additional terrorist attacks in America began to skew the divide between the military and the everexpanding militarization of domestic law enforcement. In the name of counterterrorism, police agencies increased their usage of armored trucks to conduct military-type search warrants on civilian homes.39 285

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Ferguson, Missouri The progression of this militarization continued until the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, when it came under heavy scrutiny.40 In 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was shot and killed by a Caucasian police officer from the Ferguson Police Department, which resulted in widespread protests throughout the city. During these protests, police officers dressed in military gear, equipped with military-style weapons and armored vehicles, confronted both peaceful and violent protesters. Local police response gained both national and international attention, which garnered criticism from many different sources throughout the world. Although much of the attention focused on the actual shooting and events surrounding the shooting, the law enforcement response opened the eyes of many about the perceived militarization of civilian law enforcement.41 As a result of the circumstances surrounding what occurred in Ferguson, many policymakers and stakeholders were critical of law enforcement agencies’ use of surplus military equipment. As part of their findings, the President’s Task Force on twenty-first Century Policing asserted that these types of methods could harm the relationship between the community and law enforcement.42 Patrick Gillham and Gary Marx have analyzed law enforcement’s response to the Ferguson incident by drawing on the Kerner Commission’s findings. The results of their study indicated: (1) that since the time of the Kerner Report, the abilities of commanders to obtain assistance from other agencies and effectively communicate through the chain of command had increased significantly. After the incident in Ferguson took place that day, officers utilized the code, which indicates that a civil disorder was occurring, and as many as twenty-five police cars were dispatched to the scene. (2) Police that were involved in the handling of the civil disorder in Ferguson were better equipment in comparison to the 1960s, and (3) the equipment utilized for control in Ferguson, such as mid-level weapons like tasers and various projectiles, were marketable different from officers’ batons and revolvers from the 1960s.43 In January 2015, President Obama signed an executive order called the Federal Support for Local Law Enforcement Equipment Acquisition. This Executive Order was created to discern actions that could enhance federal assistance for the proper use and acquisition of controlled equipment by state, local, and Tribal police organizations. It also created a federal interagency working group whose responsibility was to put forth a set of recommendations. Some of the recommendations made by this working group included: (1) mandating local jurisdictions to provide requests for controlled equipment that are considered dangerous, but could serve a legitimate purpose; (2) the development of training and protocols in order to acquire controlled equipment. Police agencies must “commit to have in place general policing training standards, including training on community policing, constitutional policing, and community impact.” And, (3) mandating data collection and the retention of specified information on this equipment when it is used in a “significant incident.”44

Analysis In a large portion of the literature reviewed for this paper, the articles began by referring to the incident that occurred in Ferguson and the response by law enforcement in the aftermath, which in some ways, gave the perception that police militarization began because of that incident. However, the blurred lines between policing, the military, and police militarization appear to have begun as far back as the mid-1960s. Thus, the question is not whether there is police militarization or whether it has progressed to a certain point. We argue that it boils down to two distinct aspects: (a) legitimate needs for this type of equipment versus (b) what effects it has on police legitimacy and the citizens themselves.

The Legitimate Need for This Type of Equipment Although there may be many legitimate purposes for the use of military-type equipment and weapons by law enforcement, one glaring and obvious purpose is law enforcement’s response to 286

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active shooter incidents. Over a period of time, there have been numerous active shooter incidents throughout the United States. According to Pete Blair and Hunter Martaindale, between 2000 and 2010, there were 84 active shooter incidents, and in 41% of the attacks, the suspect(s) carried multiple weapons.45 However, two of the first shootings that occurred—which garnered tremendous media attention and raised the level of support for an increase in police militarization were the Columbine, Colorado school shooting and the North Hollywood, California, bank robbery shootout.46 The North Hollywood bank robbery shootout occurred in February 1997. The police officers in this incident faced two bank robbery suspects and found themselves completely outgunned and ineffective. The two suspects were armed with high-powered assault rifles and were covered with body armor protecting them from the inadequate handguns and shotguns that were issued to law enforcement at the time. Officers were forced to improvise during the incident and borrow firearms that could penetrate the suspects’ body armor from a gun dealer in the area. As a result of this incident, police departments across the country began transitioning to assault rifles.47 At the time, police officers customarily trained at 25 yards using 9mm handguns; but during the incident, the officers on the scene found themselves shooting at the suspects from 70 yards away as the suspects were shooting back at them with AK-47 assault rifles. During the gun battle, the two suspects fired 650 rounds, and one LAPD patrol vehicle itself sustained 56 gunshots.48 During the Columbine incident, which occurred in April 1999, the two suspects in the case planned the incident for over a year. To carry out their plan, “they had built nearly 100 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) including two 20-pound propane tank bombs and amassed an arsenal that included two shotguns, a 9 mm carbine rifle, and a TEC-9 semi-automatic handgun.”49 In total, 12 students and one teacher were killed, and the suspects committed suicide by shooting themselves. Before this incident, officers arriving on the scene of incidents like this would secure the perimeter and wait for the SWAT team to arrive, who would then approach and engage the suspect(s). The thought process was that street-level police officers did not have the equipment or training to handle a barricaded subject or an incident involving a hostage. Following the events in Columbine, law enforcement throughout the United States began to establish new protocols. The initial patrol officers on scene would create a small tactical unit, enter the area or facility where the incident was taking place, and engage the shooter.50 In a review of shooting incidents that occurred between 1966 and 2019, Adam Lankford and James Silver assert that over time mass shooting incidents within the United States have become more fatal. They also explained that changes within society have led to an increase in more mass shooters. These shooters are inspired to kill large numbers of people for fame or attention or because they are influenced by previous mass shooters.51 These individuals spent long periods of time planning their crimes and were increasingly more likely to obtain powerful weapons and devise specific strategies that could increase their chances of a higher mortality rate when they carried out their plan. In 2016, a 40-year high was reached for the total number of people who were shot during mass shootings within the United States. Then in 2017, another grim milestone was reached when more people were killed by active shooters than in any other year since the FBI first began recording this information. Although the United States has experienced mass shootings for over 50 years, the highest number of casualties have occurred since 2007. This has come as a result of mass shooting incidents like Virginia Tech, the Orlando nightclub, and Las Vegas, in which a total of 139 people were killed.52 From their research, Lankford and Silver found a correlation between the use of multiple firearms by the suspects and higher fatality rates. In 31% of the mass shootings that occurred between 1966 and 2009, the suspects possessed semi-automatic rifles or assault weapons; however, between 2010 and 2019, that ratio increased to 56%.53 The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and National Tactical Officers Association examined significant trends and issues related to SWAT in the United States from 2009 to 2013. The IACP utilized the National Opinion Research Center at the 287

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University of Chicago for data analysis. Data were collected from 254 law enforcement organizations through a survey. Based on their analysis, some of the key findings included the following: • • •

Most deployments were related to high-risk warrant service, police agencies that utilized their SWAT team were eight times more likely to use less-lethal methods than lethal, and the “incidents that occurred during deployment of SWAT teams or resources by year, the incident type that occurred most often was one in which a suspect was armed or firearms were found.”54

Military-type equipment, such as ballistic shields and armored trucks are made to provide protection and greater safety. For instance, “armored vehicles create ballistic protection to anyone inside and allow for officers to respond to deadly scenes in safety as well as a means to rescue fellow officers and civilians in harm’s way.”55 Christopher Koper explains that firearms identified as assault weapons usually come with large-capacity ammunition magazines that can hold 30 or more rounds, whereas more commonly sold semiautomatic pistols and rifles can hold between 11 and 20 rounds of ammunition.56 In recent studies, assault weapons and other low-capacity magazine firearms account for 2 to 12% of the firearms used in crimes; however, when combined, assault weapons and other highcapacity semi-automatic firearms account for 22 to 36% of crimes involving guns. Equipment such as ballistic shields can provide the needed protection to individual police officers if issued as their standard equipment, which can help save lives. Law enforcement’s mission is to serve and protect and maintain the safety of the public. Having access to military-type equipment may strengthen their ability to carry out this vital function. The use of Humvees and military helicopters for example have been used in the aftermaths of hurricanes and tornados to extract survivors in areas where normal vehicles cannot access.57 Vincenzo Bove and Evelina Gavrilova examine the effectiveness of providing these military-style weapons and equipment to police agencies and their effects on combating crime. They utilized data from the U.S. Department of Defense, reviewing 176,000 equipment transfers to 8,000 local law enforcement organizations that occurred between 2006 and 2012. The results of this study indicated (a) that acquiring this equipment helped to decrease street-level crime, (b) the program is financially sound, and (c) there is an inherent deterrence factor.58 According to Olugbenga Ajilore, law enforcement has obtained almost $1 billion worth of excess military surplus equipment because of the 1033 program. Since 2007, the acquisition of this equipment has increased. Ajilore conducted a study to determine whether the acceleration of obtaining this type of equipment has led to an increase in police use-of-force situations, combining data obtained from the database of the Pentagon’s 1033 program and survey data obtained through the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The results of the study indicated “there is little evidence of a causal link between general military surplus acquisition and documented use-of-force incidents.” Moreover, the use of military vehicles that were obtained led to less use-of-force incidents.59

Effects of Police Militarization on Police Legitimacy and the Citizens Themselves Police legitimacy is founded on the belief that law enforcement has adequate authority to enforce the law, uphold public lawfulness, and make appropriate decisions that are good for the public they protect. This sentiment induces the community into having a sense of obligation to abide by law enforcement. It is presumed by society that their law enforcement will sustain the community’s principles as a whole and make their decisions based on what is in the public’s best interest. Voluntary compliance with law enforcement is vital because it encourages a self-regulatory role. In other words, “legitimacy acts as a social control mechanism that breeds voluntary compliance with the law and police.”60 288

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Richard Moule and his coauthors examine the correlation between police legitimacy and the public empowerment of law enforcement and police militarization. Their study was focused on the actual effect of legitimacy regarding citizens’ inclination to allow law enforcement organizations to become more militarized; they did so through cognitive psychology and rational choice theory. Moule et al. examined legitimacy versus empowerment and two possible outcomes that could arise from this: the possibility of violating civil liberties and a rise in law enforcement effectiveness. Moule et al. conducted a national sampling of 702 adults and a “structural equation modeling (SEM) strategy” to examine whether police legitimacy directly affects society’s empowerment of law enforcement, more specifically, as related to police militarization and whether legitimacy has an indirect effect on empowerment because of possible ramifications of militarization. Moule et al. found that as the perception of police legitimacy rises, citizens’ willingness to empower law enforcement increases; that is, empowerment of police involves allowing law enforcement the ability to become more militarized by acquiring excess military equipment. Another finding was that in line with “cognitive anchoring” and rational choice, police legitimacy also impacts societies’ evaluation of the possible ramifications of empowering law enforcement. As the perception of police legitimacy rises, there is a corresponding effect with the idea that becoming more militarized will enhance law enforcement’s effectiveness. However, a higher level of perceived police legitimacy may decrease concerns over civil rights violations that come as a result of police militarization. Stated differently, when citizens view law enforcement as legitimate, they may overlook the negative consequences this may bring. These results indicate that legitimacy is a significant “predictor of public support for police acquiring and using surplus military equipment, net of their perceptions about the possible consequences of police militarization.”61 Jonathan Mummolo asserted that the ever-expanding presence of heavily armed law enforcement officers throughout the United States has garnered extensive concern about police militarization. Supporters argue that militarized law enforcement helps protect officers and deter criminal behavior, while critics contend that these methods target minority neighborhoods, leading to the erosion of police legitimacy. Mummolo also argues that the high number of militarized units in minority communities can increase tensions between these groups, which is already at a heightened level. As part of his research, Mommolo conducts studies on several related topics. First, he analyzed the deployment of militarized police units in Maryland to determine whether they were deployed more often in communities primarily comprised of African Americans. Second, he utilized a nationwide panel of data concerning local law enforcement militarization, examining whether militarizing police increases officer safety or decreases crime. And lastly, by using the survey, Mommolo analyzes whether witnessing militarized law enforcement officers in media reports erodes law enforcement’s reputation within society. The results of his study indicated that militarized law enforcement units are more often utilized in areas with higher populations of African Americans. In addition, there was no sustainable evidence that the use of a SWAT team lowered violent crime rates or affected the rates at which police were assaulted or even killed. Finally, when citizens see militarized law enforcement units in media reports, they react negatively, are less willing to provide funding for police organizations, and they are not as supportive of the police who patrol in their communities.62 In June of 2014, a report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recommended that local governments develop or grant power to an agency to provide oversight to safeguard their local police agencies from becoming excessively militarized. According to Kara Dansky, as part of these agencies’ responsibilities, they would approve or disapprove: • • •

all weapons and vehicles obtained through the 1033 program, grant-funding requests from the federal government that would be spent on military-type weapons and or vehicles, and submissions to vendors to buy military-style weapons.63 289

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Eliav Lieblich and Adam Shinar define militarization as a process in which law enforcement agencies adopt the operational aspect of a military or assimilate to its beliefs and culture. One of the main issues with police militarization is that it increases violence and decreases police legitimacy. The sheer omnipresence of police militarization has made it become more normalized, and as a result, has mitigated its actual effects. A by-product of police militarization is that it creates a presumption in law enforcement’s eyes that the citizen(s) are a threat. As such, citizens from marginalized areas present a clear and ever-present danger of such magnitude that it requires a response from law enforcement of significant force. The symbolic nature of this militarized police equipment “marks the policed community as an enemy, and thereby excludes it from the body politic.”64 Police militarization indicates a presumed threat because of these crucial factors. First, it is mainly preventative instead of specifically reactive. The mobilization of militarized law enforcement suggests the anticipation of significant violence that will require considerable force. Second, it is an aggregate response since it is not always focused on a particular person; it tends to depend on the assumptions that violence may occur. When the use of militarized police becomes a norm, the assumption of the threat becomes normal as well.65

Task Force on Twenty-first Century Policing Report In 2014, the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, became the center point for police reform in the twenty-first century. Not only did this incident amplify the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which began as a result of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but it also brought increased scrutiny to other controversial law enforcement shootings, which included Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. As a result, President Obama established the Task Force on twenty-first-century Policing. During the early part of 2015, while the task force was still engaged in creating suggested measures, there were several other high-profile incidents including the shooting death of Walter Scott in South Carolina.66 With the creation of this task force, President Obama described the prevailing distrust, which existed between many communities and their local law enforcement agencies. Moreover, he asserted that in a country where the fundamental principle is equality under the law, many still felt as though they were being unfairly treated, especially young people of color. The task force asserted that one of the keys to our democracy is the trust that should exist between police organizations and the citizens they serve. This mutually beneficial relationship is vital to the stability of our communities, the integrity of the justice system, and the delivery of law enforcement services in a safe and effective manner.67 These ideas argued by the President underpinned the basic philosophical construct of the Task Force on twenty-first Century Policing. Many years of research and practice have shown that the public feels just as strong about the way in which law enforcement interacts with them as they do about the results of legal actions that are taken. Citizens are more likely to conform with the law when they feel as though the individuals enforcing the laws have the legitimate authority to do so.68 The task force was composed of a variety of stakeholders brought together to examine the issues from all perspectives. The panel members heard from over 120 in-person witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of written testimony that were provided by experts on all topics covered. The task force itself included chiefs of police, academia, law enforcement union leaders, a state-wide training director, and community activists.69 The goal of the task force was to determine best practices and to issue recommendations to the President on how police practices could reduce crime while still developing and building trust with its communities.70 It focused on the continuing issues that affect law enforcement-citizen interactions by engaging with the long-held presumptions concerning the nature of law enforcement methods. In addition, the task force was tasked with 290

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discerning areas where further study may be required to enhance evidence-based law enforcement practices that are consistent with present realities.71 In its final submission, the eleven-member panel put forth more than sixty recommendations, including, but not limited to developing community trust, law enforcement policies, implementation of technology, police officer training, and the wellness and safety of police officers. The task force identified six main topics, referred to as “pillars.”72 The following is an analysis of these pillars and some of the recommendations put forth. Pillar One: Building Trust and Legitimacy on both sides according to the task force was the fundamental principle for the task force’s examination. The task force argued that although policing has become more effective since the 1990s, Gallup polls have indicated that the public’s confidence level in law enforcement had leveled off, and within some populations of color, confidence had decreased. Moreover, many years of research and practice have shown that citizens are more likely to conform to the law when they feel as though the persons who are enforcing the laws have legitimate authority to do so. However, the public grants legitimacy only to those who they perceive are acting in a procedurally just manner. Procedurally just conduct is established based on four main determinants, which include: “treating people with dignity and respect; giving individuals voice during encounters; being neutral and transparent in decision making, conveying trustworthy motives.”73 Thus, police officers cannot develop community trust if they are viewed as outsiders coming in as an occupying force to assert their control on the citizens of the community. This first Pillar sought to provide focused recommendations for building relationships between the police and the community.74 The following are some of the recommendations made by the task force under this pillar: •

• •

• •

The culture of policing should take on a guardian mindset in developing public trust and legitimacy. Law enforcement should incorporate procedural justice as its directing principle for both internal and external policies to help guide them when they are interacting with the public. Police organizations should develop a culture of transparency and accountability to enhance public trust and legitimacy. By doing so, decision-making will be better understood and in line with policy. In order to further public trust, law enforcement organizations should initiate non-enforcement activities to engage more with communities that typically have higher rates of investigative and enforcement actions with government agencies. Police organizations should also track and examine the amount of trust communities may have in their law enforcement. Finally, organizations should aspire to create an organization that consists of a wide range of diversity of its employees, including their race, gender, language, life experience, and cultural background. This will assist police officers with their understanding and effectiveness when dealing with all citizens of their community.75

Pillar Two: Police and Oversight asserted that if law enforcement officers are to perform their duties according to established policies, then those policies should conform with community values. It is important that these policies are clearly stated and articulated to the public. They should be implemented in a transparent manner so that law enforcement will have credibility within the communities they serve, and the citizens will have faith that the police are acting in their best interest.76 Under this pillar, some of the suggestions made by the task force include: •

Police organizations should work in partnership with community members (particularly in neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by crime) in order to create policies and strategies aimed at distributing resources. This type of strategy can assist in the reduction of crime by enhancing relationships, increasing police engagement with the community, and encouraging cooperation. 291

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•

• •

Police departments should have well-defined and comprehensive policies regarding “the use of force that include training, investigations, prosecutions, data collection, and information sharing.”77 These policies must be clear and concisely written and made available to the public for their inspection. Police departments are also encouraged to conduct nonpunitive assessments of critical incidents independent of criminal and administrative investigations. And, in the absence of a warrant or probable cause, a police officer should be mandated to obtain consent prior to a search, and explain to the individual that they have the right to refuse consent. Ideally, under these circumstances, officers should obtain written acknowledgment that they sought consent to search.78

Pillar Three: Technology & Social Media - This pillar provides guidance for the implementation, use, and evaluation of technology and social media by police agencies, in order to enhance law enforcement practices, and to help develop trust and legitimacy within a community. However, there must be a well-defined policy for its implementation, which clearly explains its purposes and goals.79 Some of the recommendations made by the task force under pillar three included: • •

• •

Police departments should incorporate smart technology that is intended to prevent tampering or manipulating evidence contrary to policy. Agencies should include an evaluation process to measure the effectiveness of newly acquired technology, which includes soliciting input from employees at every level of the organization, as well as from the community. The United States Department of Justice, in conjunction with law enforcement practitioners, should establish nationwide standards for the research and development of new technology. And, the United States Department of Justice should confer with civil rights and civil liberties organizations, and academic groups within the law enforcement field, as well as other experts, regarding the constitutional issues that may arise from the implementation of newer technologies.80

Pillar Four: Community Policing & Crime Reduction—The task force explained in this pillar that community policing is an essential philosophy for all stakeholders involved. The fundamental concept of community policing stresses law enforcement working together with community residents to collaborate on public safety issues. The task force argued that it is crucial that community members view law enforcement as allies, and to work together with a common goal of creating stable community technologies.81 Some of the suggestions made by the task force under this heading included: • • • •

Police departments should establish and adopt policies and strategies that buttress the importance of engaging with the community to manage public safety. Community policing should be incorporated into the culture and departmental construct of police agencies. A multidisciplinary, community-team approach should be taken by law enforcement for planning, implementation, and response to critical incidents involving complex contributing factors. And, communities should support law enforcement when the culture of and policing practices reflect the values of their actions by promoting dignity for all; especially when that involves the most vulnerable.82

Pillar Five: Training & Education addressed the training and educational needs of police officers. As we become a more diverse nation, the extent of the responsibilities for law enforcement has 292

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expanded, and as a result, it is imperative that law enforcement managers be trained and capable of engaging in an immense number of today’s challenging issues. The task force asserted that all states should create a standard for hiring, training, and educating law enforcement officers. The knowledge and skills that are needed to effectively handle the issues officers deal with today require a greater level of education, in addition to extensive training for specialized areas of police work.83 In their recommendations, the task force made some of the following suggestions under this pillar: •

• •

In order to assist with training and education for law enforcement, the Federal Government should support the creation of partnerships with training facilities throughout the nation to advance consistent standards for better quality training and develop innovative training hubs. During the training process, police departments should engage community members. The United States Department of Justice should assist with the development of strategies for a comprehensive Field Training Program, which focuses on changing law enforcement culture and organizational procedural justice problems that agencies can incorporate and tailor to local jurisdictional needs.84

Pillar Six: Officer Wellness & Safety describes the importance of this issue, not only for law enforcement, but for their co-workers, organizations, and public safety as well. The pillar emphasized a collaborative approach for the support and proper integration of officer wellness and safety. The task force noted that many officer-related injuries and deaths occur, not because of confrontations with offenders, but as a result of poor nutrition, not enough exercise or sleep, and substance abuse. Despite this fact, these causes are often overlooked and only given limited attention.85 Some of the recommendations made by task force under this pillar included: • • • • •

The United States Department of Justice increases and further promotes its multi-dimensional officer safety and wellness initiatives. As conclusive evidence of valid duty or non-duty-related disabilities, pension plans should recognize fitness for duty examinations. There should be support from the Federal Government for ongoing research into the efficacy of officers having annual mental health checks, as well as fitness, reliance, and nutrition. Safety and wellness should be promoted at every level of the police organization. The United States Department of Justice should support and provide assistance to organizations with the implementation of scientifically based shift lengths by law enforcement.

Assessment of the Report The report specified that the culture of law enforcement was the fundamental determinate for the contentious relationship, which exists between the police and many communities. It found that law enforcement’s investigative methods have progressively become more effective; however, the public’s confidence level in their police has flattened or in many minority communities, has decreased. The extensive reforms outlined in the report provided a foundational construct for this discussion to begin.86 The task force argued that the way to build trust and legitimacy is to change the culture within law enforcement. The principle to their dialog was the significant role militarystyle policing culture plays in advancing the warrior mentality. By suggesting this shift within police culture from warriors to guardians, the task force concentrated on the negative effects of more aggressive police tactics for fighting crime to a more contemporary law enforcement ideology.87 However, the main issue is the feasibility of implementing this transformation within police culture. The question becomes whether law enforcement officers can actually be trained to accept a new 293

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style of policing.88 Many changes have been made by law enforcement agencies throughout the country since the release of the task force’s recommendations, including, but not limited to: •

•

•

•

•

•

As a result of the events that took place in Ferguson, legislatures and stakeholders argued the merits of militarized law enforcement, articulating concern over the ramifications this may have on citizen rights and the effectiveness of the police.89 In January of 2015, President Obama put forth an Executive order called the Federal Support for Local Law Enforcement Equipment Acquisition. This Executive Order was created to determine actions that could enhance Federal assistance for the proper use and acquisition of equipment by state, local, and Tribal police organizations.90 However, in August of 2017, President Trump repealed the Obama executive order because of concerns regarding both officer and public safety.91 Larger police organizations have taken actions to revamp their use of force policies. In one survey conducted by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, they found that between 2015 and 2017, 39% of the organizations had changed their policies governing the use of force and revised their training by implementing de-escalation and scenario-based training.92 Many states began implementing changes, which could be seen in the number of legislative actions that were passed between 2015 and 2016. For example, in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia there were at least seventy-nine changes to existing laws that govern police practices in comparison to at least twenty total bills in the previous three years.93 States have implemented enhanced use-of-force training, placed restrictions on certain methods of control and restraint tactics like chokeholds, and have assembled working groups to examine the use of lethal force by police officers.94 Some states, such as Oregon and Tennessee have passed or enhanced restrictions on racial profiling, with some implementing requirements for additional training of police officers regarding implicit bias and the impacts that it may cause.95 Post-Ferguson, many states adopted different procedures in reference to law enforcement interaction with citizens who may have mental illness. From 2014 to 2017, twenty-seven states, including Washington D.C. passed legislation that requires all police officers in their respective states to receive forty hours of Crisis Intervention Team training.96

Conclusion In this chapter, we have reviewed the history of policing, the slow progression of police militarization, and the report issued by the Task Force on twenty-first Century Policing. After the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, police militarization came to the forefront of American culture. The topic of police militarization has become a polarizing subject in America today; however, in this chapter, we have presented both legitimate purposes for police militarization and the negative effects that it may produce. It is important that a balance be struck between the need for this type of equipment by law enforcement while protecting the rights and dignity of the citizens they serve. Moving forward, it is important that all stakeholders involved come together in order to find this balance.

Policy and Practice Recommendations For future study, we would first suggest a secondary meeting of the twenty-first Century President’s Task Force be convened. The Task Force would make an assessment of the progress that has been made since their initial report, and whether there has been progression or regression made in the Pillars. The Task Force would then expand upon their first report and develop newer guidelines for all law enforcement organizations to establish better community relations and the services they 294

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provide. Second, a more standardized approach should be made to provide public awareness of the specific reasons military-type equipment is important to law enforcement. And, third developing an in-service training program for any officers who will utilize this type of equipment. The program would educate officers on the perceptions and secondary effects this equipment might cause.

Notes 1 Jay Fortenbery, “Police Militarization In a Democratic Society,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 13 June 2018, https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/police-militarization-in-a-democratic-society, accessed 31 July 2021. 2 Robert D. Johnson, “Military Equipment and Police Agencies,” The Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (February 2017), https://shsu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11875/ 2258/1707.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, accessed 31 July 2021. 3 Kara Dansky, “Local Democratic Oversight of Police,” Harvard Law & Policy Review 10 (Winter 2016): 59–75. 4 Kevin H. Govern, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities: An Examination of Trends Impacting Upon Police Militarization,” Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 23 (No. 1 2016): 89–134. 5 Eliav Lieblich and Adam Shinar, “The Case Against Police Militarization,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 23 (Nos. 1 and 2 2018): 108. 6 Sam Bieler, “Police Militarization in the USA: The State of the Field,” Policing 39 (November 2016): 586–600; and Infantry Platoon and Squad, ATP 3-21.8, Department of the Army (April 2016), https:// armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ATP%203-21x8%20FINAL%20WEB%20INCL %20C1.pdf, accessed 31 July 2021. 7 New York City Police Department, Patrol Guide: Mission, Vision, and Values of the New York City Police Department, Procedure No. 200-02 (3 April 2019), http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/ public_information/public-pguide1.pdf, accessed 31 July 2021. 8 Micol Seigel, “Always Already Military: Police, Public Safety, and State Violence,” American Quarterly 71 (June 2019): 519–539. 9 Fortenbery, “Police Militarization In a Democratic Society.” 10 Seigel, “Always Already Military.” 11 Isaac Tekie, “Bringing the Troops Home to a Disaster: Law, Order, and Humanitarian Relief,” Ohio State Law Journal 67 (No. 5 2006): 1227–1264. 12 Joseph B. Doherty, “Us vs. Them: The Militarization of American Law Enforcement and the Psychological Effect on Police Officers and Civilians,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 25 (Spring 2016): 415–450, quote from 418. 13 Fortenbery, “Police Militarization In a Democratic Society.” 14 Anta Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force: The Militarization of America ’s Police Force and its Consequences,” University of Miami Law Review 71 (Fall 2016): 281–311. 15 Seigel, “Always Already Military.” 16 Tekie, “Bringing the Troops Home to a Disaster.” 17 Seigel, “Always Already Military.” 18 Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” 19 Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” 20 Fortenbery, “Police Militarization In a Democratic Society.” 21 Seigel, “Always Already Military.” 22 James Hawdon, “Crises of Security and Crises of Legitimacy: Organizational Evolution in American Policing, 1860–2017,” in On These Mean Streets … People are Dying: Police and Citizen Brutality in America, eds. Lisa Eargle and Ashraf Esmail (Lake Charles, LA: Green Legacy Publishing, 2019), 40–70. 23 Seigel, “Always Already Military,” 524. 24 Ibid., 525. 25 Fortenbery, “Police Militarization In a Democratic Society.” 26 Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” 27 Patrick F. Gillham and Gary T. Marx, “Changes in the Policing of Civil Disorders Since the Kerner Report: The Police Response to Ferguson, August 2014, and Some Implications for the Twenty-First Century,” Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4 (No. 6 2018): 122–143. 28 Ibid. 29 Doherty, “Us vs. Them.”

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

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Ibid., quote from 424. Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” Doherty, “Us vs. Them.” Bryanna Hahn Fox, Richard K. Moule, and Megan M. Parry, “Categorically Complex: A Latent Class Analysis of Public Perceptions of Police Militarization,” Journal of Criminal Justice 58 (No. 2 2018): 33–46. Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” Frederick W. Turner and Bryanna Hahn Fox, “Public Servants or Police Soldiers? An Analysis of Opinions on the Militarization of Policing from Police Executives, Law Enforcement, and Members of the 114th Congress U.S. House of Representatives,” Police Practice and Research 20 (Issue 2 2019): 122–138. Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” Doherty, “Us vs. Them,” quote from 438. Vincenzo Bove and Evelina Gavrilova, “Police Officer on the Frontline or a Soldier? The Effect of Police Militarization on Crime,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 9 (August 2017), 1–18. Plowden, “Bringing Balance to the Force.” Turner and Fox, “Public Servants or Police Soldiers?” Steven M. Radil, Raymond J. Dezzani, and Lanny D. McAden, “Geographies of U.S. Police Militarization and the Role of the 1033 Program,” Professional Geographer 69 (Issue 2 2017): 203–213. Fox, Moule, and Parry, “Categorically Complex.” Gillham and Marx, “Changes in the Policing of Civil Disorders Since the Kerner Report.” Dansky, “Local Democratic Oversight of Police,” quotes from 70. J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, “United States active shooter events from 2000 to 2010: training and equipment implications,” Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Texas State University (2013), https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.394.2235&rep= rep1&type=pdf, accessed 31 July 2021. Fortenbery, “Police Militarization In a Democratic Society.” Ibid. “Gunfights That Changed Law Enforcement Tactics,” American Shooting Journal, 2020, https:// americanshootingjournal.com/gunfights-that-changed-le-tactics/, accessed 31 July 2021. Jaclyn Schildkraut and Tiffany Cox Hernandez (2013). “Laws That Bite the Bullet: A Review of Legislative Responses to School Shootings,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 39 (2014): 363. Scott W. Phillips, “Police Response to Active Shooter Events: How Officers See Their Role,” Police Quarterly 23 (Issue 2 2019): 262–279. Adam Lankford and James Silver, “Why have public mass shootings become more deadly? Assessing how perpetrators’ motives and methods have changed over time,” Criminology & Public Policy 19 (February 2020): 37–60. Ibid. Ibid. International Association of Chiefs of Police and National Tactical Officers Association, National Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Study: A National Assessment of Critical Trends and Issues from 2009 to 2013 (2020), https://ntoa.org/pdf/swatstudy.pdf, accessed 31 July 2021, quote from vi. Johnson, “Military Equipment and Police Agencies,” 3–4. Christopher S. Koper, “Assessing the Potential to Reduce Deaths and Injuries from Mass Shootings through Restrictions on Assault Weapons and Other High-Capacity Semi-Automatic Firearms,” Criminology & Public Policy 19 (February 2020), 147–170. Johnson, “Military Equipment and Police Agencies.” Bove and Gavrilova, “Police Officer on the Frontline or a Soldier?” Olugbenga Ajilore, “Is There a 1033 Effect? Police Militarization and Aggressive Policing,” Munich Personal RePEc Archive, no. 82543, 30 October 2017, https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/82543/1/MPRA_paper_ 82543.pdf, accessed 31 July 2021, quote from 1. Scott E. Wolfe, Justin Nix, Robert Kaminski, and Jeff Rojek, “Is the effect of procedural justice on police legitimacy invariant? Testing the generality of procedural justice and competing antecedents of legitimacy,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 32 (No. 2 2016): 253–282, quote from 259. Richard K. Moule, Jr., Megan M. Parry, George W. Burruss, and Bryanna Fox, “Assessing the Direct and Indirect Effects of Legitimacy on Public Empowerment of Police: A Study of Public Support for Police Militarization in America,” Law & Society Review 53 (March 2019): 77–107, first quote from 79, second and third from 97. Jonathan Mummolo, “Militarization Fails to Enhance Police Safety or Reduce Crime but May Harm Police Reputation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (No. 37 2018): 9181–9186.

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67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Dansky, “Local Democratic Oversight of Police.” Lieblich and Shinar, “The Case Against Police Militarization,” 105. Ibid. William S. Parkin, Vladimir Bejan, and Matthew J. Hickman, “Police, Public, and Community Violence: Exploring the Relationship Between Use of Deadly Force, Law Enforcement Killed, and Homicide Rates in the United States,” Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society 21 (Issue 2 2020): 1–20, https://ccjls. scholasticahq.com/article/14144-police-public-and-community-violence-exploring-the-relationships-between-use-of-deadly-force-law-enforcement-killed-and-homicide-rates-in-the-unit, accessed 31 July 2021. President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2015), available online at https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/taskforce_finalreport.pdf, accessed 31 July 2021. Ibid. Tosha Childs, “Building Police Community Trust in Illinois: Will We Ever Get There? An Examination of the Illinois Police and Community Relations Act,” Southern Illinois University Law Journal 43 (2019): 675–701. Parkin, Bejan, and Hickman, “Police, Public, and Community Violence.” President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Julian A. Cook, III, “Police Culture in the Twenty-First Century: A Critique of the President’s Task Force’s Final Report,” Notre Dame Law Review 91 (No. 2 2016): 106–114. President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 10. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Cook, “Police Culture in the Twenty-First Century.” Parkin, Bejan, and Hickman, “Police, Public, and Community Violence.” George Wood, Tom R. Tyler, and Andrew V. Papachristos, “Procedural Justice Training Reduces Police Use of Force and Complaints Against Officers,” Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117 (No. 18 2020): 9815–9821. Moule, Parry, Burruss, and Fox, “Assessing the Direct and Indirect Effects of Legitimacy on Public Empowerment of Police.” Dansky, “Local Democratic Oversight of Police.” Adam Goldman, “Restrictions Lifted on Surplus Military Gear for Police,” New York Times, 29 August 2017, A19. Laurel O. Robinson, “Five Years After Ferguson: Reflecting on Police Reform and What’s Ahead,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 687 (January 2020): 228–239. Ram Subramanian and Leah Skrzypiec, To Protect and Serve: New Trends in the State-Level Police Reform, 2015–2016 (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2017). Ibid. Ibid. Robinson, “Five Years After Ferguson.”

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Cultural Representations in Literature, Music, and Film

22 NOT ONLY COMPTON Gangster Rap, Policing, and Protest Felicia Angeja Viator

Through 1988, as NWA recorded and prepared to promote its debut album Straight Outta Compton, national headlines announced that “gang-related” crimes had become as much the hallmark of life in South Los Angeles County as the palm trees that hovered above.1 There were lurid features about “yuppie havens” under threat, where, in the worst of scenarios, upstanding citizens died in gang crossfire. Leaders in Sacramento warned of LA’s rampant “street terrorism” spreading like cancer throughout the Inland Empire and as far north as Portland, Oregon. Film directors, including William Friedkin and Dennis Hopper, composed backdrops of urban blight and Black crime, while White fear contaminated California’s vaunted promised land.2 With the swirling drama of the late 1980s as leverage, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates was able to amass the political and moral capital he needed to amplify his department’s already aggressive anti-gang operations. A popular mandate and the support of the LA County Sheriff’s Department allowed the chief to redeploy the controversial six-ton battering ram tank—colloquially known as the “batterram”—for drug busts. He reauthorized his narcotics task force to coordinate cover-of-night raids in residential communities deemed home to drug traffickers. And, with the cooperation of the county sheriff, Gates conducted his signature “gang sweeps” —mass arrests dependent upon profiling – in predominantly Black neighborhoods throughout South Los Angeles. South Central native Maxine Waters, an LA councilwoman at the time, lamented that as her community grappled with real challenges including drug abuse and gun violence, Chief Gates had made it dangerous for Black residents to call for help. His bellicosity, she argued, produced a “Catch-22” for her people, who were frustrated with the abuse of their trust, their safety, and their children. An African-American legal aid serving LA citizens caught up in gang sweeps and drug raids was blunt: “Who will protect us from the police?”3 National attention to LA’s street gang crisis rose throughout 1988 and peaked in 1989. As it did, police action in these local “ganglands” broadened and intensified to such a degree that one Los Angeles civil rights activist characterized it as “police gangbanging.” Yet, with all the media coverage of juvenile crime, turf wars, and drive-by shootings, there was little room for and little interest in a discussion about the parallel—and historically rooted— dilemma of police violence, which, in LA, directly affected the day-to-day lives of people already challenged by crime in their communities.

NWA Made Room “Fuck Tha Police” was the most recognized song in LA rap group NWA’s repertoire by the spring of 1989. The song was an album cut, not a single and never paired with a music video, yet its lyrics were DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-30

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quotable, the chorus a three-word earworm, the conceit an infectious anti-state tongue-lashing. “Fuck Tha Police” was also unusually explicit, with the track’s very title censored on all packaging and promotional materials for the 1989 Straight Outta Compton album, and many considered it dangerous and inflammatory. According to the Parents Music Resource Center, the national Fraternal Order of Police, and at least one FBI public affairs officer, the song advocated violence.4 Even in the 1980s—an era of “punk riots,” “porn-rock” Senate hearings, and “parental advisory” stickers – “Fuck Tha Police” was a grenade of controversy.5 Ice Cube called the record his “revenge fantasy.” It was a fictional courtroom drama in which each member of NWA took turns prosecuting the Los Angeles Police Department, on trial for abuse.6 With Judge Dr. Dre presiding, Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E portrayed ferocious attorneys and star witnesses, detailing in rhyme a litany of crimes including harassment (“Fuckin’ with me ‘cause I’m a teenager/With a little bit of gold and a pager”), excessive force (“They’re scared of a n----/So they mace me to blind me”), privacy violations (“Search a n---- down and grabbin’ his nuts”), and racial profiling (“Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/Thinking every n---- is sellin’ narcotics”). Each rapper punctuated his evidence with retaliatory, epithet-filled threats. Ice Cube promised to “swarm/On any mothafucka in a blue uniform,” and mused about a “bloodbath of cops dying in L.A.” Ren challenged his uniformed nemesis to “take off the gun” and stand toe-to-toe with him––“And we’ll go at it, punk, and I’m-a fuck you up!” Then, with the officer disarmed, he imagined picking up the gun and morphing into a modern-day vigilante hero, “takin’ out a cop or two.” Eazy-E, the “gangsta” with “flava,” echoed Ren with his own provocation: “Without a gun and a badge, what do you got?/A sucker in a uniform waiting to get shot.” At the end of the drama, Judge Dre issued his final verdict to the fictional defendant: “The jury has found you guilty of being a redneck, white-bread, chicken-shit motherfucker.”7 “‘Fuck Tha Police’ isn’t a metaphor for anything,” wrote LA Weekly’s culture writer Jonathan Gold in May 1989, attentive to the national furor swirling around NWA’s song. The rappers may have been spinning vengeance tales, but they were as transparent as they came, clearly tormented by the system the “chicken-shit motherfucker” represented Gold conducted. The song that riled the censors and outraged law enforcement was, at its core, “the sort of snarling anti-cop rant left unsaid until the black-and-white is around the corner and safely out of earshot.” It was the equivalent of kicking a trashcan––a fantasy about scoring a victory when defeat was already a burning reality.8 In the midst of escalating tensions in LA around excessive policing, NWA member Dr. Dre addressed his band’s growing reputation as LA rap “outlaws,” conceding that, sure, they were “nasty and hard-core,” but that was beside the point. His group’s music, and specifically a track like “Fuck Tha Police,” mattered because it laid bare a basic truth about kids in Black communities like his: “That’s how they feel about the cops.”9 And as music artists with access to the tools of production and promotion, Ice Cube said, NWA aired “all that pain and frustration” with the expectation that America would listen.10 Straight Outta Compton was a product of and a response to a climate of oppression in South Los Angeles County, an environment in which young people were subject to a brutal and indiscriminate “by all means necessary” police plan to eradicate gang crime, and where, as MC Ren said, kids were targeted for what they wore and where they lived.11 “Fuck Tha Police” served as an outlet for youths who wanted to vent frustration over their inability––and their community’s failure––to check the violent institutions governing their lives. “I know what it’s like,” one LA gang member said of the song’s core message. “I’ve been harassed by the police, I’ve been thrown down on the ground, and I had to hop fences.” He claimed the song’s spirit of insurrection for himself: “That was my freedom of speech.”12 South Central native John Singleton had a similar response. As a film student at the University of Southern California, puzzling over the lack of Black boys in coming-ofage cinema, he drew inspiration from NWA’s music and the way it gave “voice to everything I had seen growing up.”13 302

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By the end of 1989, “Fuck Tha Police” had become the linchpin of NWA’s national success. “That’s my shit,” Brooklyn rapper Glen “Daddy-O” Bolton proclaimed that year, telling Spin that even in New York, a city notoriously picky about its rappers and protective of its exclusive claim to hip-hop culture, and where attitudes were generally averse to West Coast rap, the record was consumed ravenously. “They’re visual, they’re talented,” Bolton said, adding, “they’re saying what people want to hear.”14 Another Brooklyn native, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, reveled in NWA’s music, especially “Straight Outta Compton” and “Fuck Tha Police,” because he heard a rejection of Black victimization, and, importantly, echoes of his own life.15 Meanwhile, in a Philadelphia high school orchestra class, Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter passed his headphones to Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and invited him to listen to Straight Outta Compton. Already a hip-hop enthusiast, 16-yearold Questlove was thunderstruck. “There were certain things that artists didn’t do,” he remembered. “You just didn’t say, ‘Fuck the police.’” With a sense that he was witnessing something both musically and culturally revolutionary, he borrowed the cassette. “I ditched chamber orchestra and sat in the furnace room with a cheap-ass GE walkman and listened to that album from start to finish.”16 “Fuck Tha Police” was like no rap hit before it, particularly because it hooked listeners who had never set foot in Los Angeles. The song was, of course, grounded in local grievances, which included the LAPD’s use of aggressive profiling, Chief Gates’ signature Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) units, and its tank-like battering ram vehicle. But the central complaint in the lyrics about police abuse was one widely shared. When talk show host Arsenio Hall interviewed the members of NWA on his nationally broadcast show about how “Fuck Tha Police” addressed the problem of police violence in LA, Dr. Dre corrected him: “Not only Compton. Not only Compton.”17 The Los Angeles rappers, who were riding a wave of album sales and publicity that spring, had just announced their first national headline tour when the attempts to silence them began. Dewey Stokes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP; essentially a labor union for the nation’s law enforcement officers) announced that his organization was drafting a resolution to advise its members to “refuse to work at or provide security for concerts by any group advocating violence against police officers”—in effect, making a coordinated effort to keep NWA from being able to stage concerts. “We as a country, and we as a police organization,” Stokes trumpeted, “can’t stand by and let people feed this to the youth.” The FOP extended its call to private security firms, imploring them to ally with police and withhold their services from NWA tour organizers. The national organization, with its 203,000 members, also passed an official resolution to boycott any event or product associated with the rappers that the FOP said were “trying to get brother police officers killed.” Meanwhile, local police departments in cities on NWA’s tour route received messages from cops in other regions via an informal “fax campaign,” which helped galvanize law enforcement communities from Philadelphia to Shreveport in opposition to gangster rap.18 In Richmond, Virginia, outraged patrolmen called for city managers to rescind an event permit for an NWA show booked at the Richmond Coliseum, and called on Virginians to boycott the music. The acting mayor of Kansas City declared that the rappers were not welcome in his town. On- and off-duty officers in Toledo refused to provide security for the group’s Ohio stop. In Baltimore’s Prince George County, police successfully barred NWA from appearing at a rap festival held at the Capital Centre. In Shreveport, Louisiana, police refused to provide security inside a concert site and instead positioned barricades all around the venue grounds so it could monitor everyone coming and going.19 Local police officials in Detroit tried a different approach, sending members to stake out the NWA concert at the Joe Louis Arena from inside so they could surveil the performers and their fans, who reportedly chanted the lyrics to “Fuck Tha Police” at every show. At earlier stops along the tour, NWA had chosen not to perform the song, sometimes in agreement with venue management, who had to answer to local law enforcement. But, perhaps as a statement on Detroit’s more aggressive policing, or perhaps as a spontaneous celebration of this final performance in Detroit, the 303

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group used an encore as an opportunity to launch into it. Before the end of the first verse, management at the Joe Louis Arena cut sound and turned up the house lights, ending the show abruptly. After tussling with NWA’s staff, and later detaining members of the group briefly at their hotel, one Detroit officer told the press that his department was sending a message: “You can’t say ‘fuck the police’ in Detroit.”20 Police abuse was a hot-button local issue in many of these concert tour stops in which residents—particularly young people of color—had dealt with patterns of relentless harassment similar to the kinds described in “Fuck Tha Police.” The anger in Detroit, one of America’s most racially segregated and violent cities, had long been simmering. There, Black residents complained about racist police functioning as if they were private security forces serving the white suburbs, whose residents were vocal, as journalist Ze’ev Chefets reported, with their concerns about Detroit’s “racial composition, and the physical threat they associate with blacks.”21 In the months before NWA first arrived in Toledo, Ohio, its police chief, Martin Felker, had responded to an uptick in crime in the city’s Old West End district by ordering his officers to “pay attention to groups of black juveniles,” implying that race was probable cause enough to stop and question suspects. When an association of African-American lawyers filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Toledo law enforcement, Felker rescinded his order, but the relationship between the city’s small Black population and its mostly white police force remained strained; in the weeks leading up to NWA’s Toledo appearance, a prominent Black clergyman quoted the rappers in a letter to Police Chief Felker noting that the city’s Black community was of the mind that “police think they have the authority to kill a minority.”22 In August, NWA was slated to headline a rap showcase at the Capital Centre in Washington, DC, but the timing put the event right in the midst of the turmoil surrounding a recent police killing. A couple of months earlier, just east of DC, four white officers in Prince George’s County, Maryland, had beaten two Ghanaian brothers, Martin and Gregory Habib, during a traffic stop. The four county cops left Martin with a broken jaw and internal bleeding; Gregory Habib was killed, as a result of crushing blows to his chest and abdomen that damaged his heart and lungs.23 “It’s unfortunate and I feel very, very bad about the death of the young man,” the county’s police chief, Michael Flaherty, told a local reporter, “but as unfortunate as it is, I don’t know if there was any misconduct on the part of the officers.”24 A county grand jury considering charges against the four patrolmen issued no indictments. State’s Attorney Alex Williams, the first Black prosecutor to hold the job, cried foul, warning that tensions between the mostly white police force and the mostly Black community had been mounting for years, and Gregory Habib’s death might be a tipping point. The local press noted that NWA’s planned concert appearance had come at a bad time for police, particularly because the rappers refused to sign a contract promising that they would not perform any portion of their song “Fuck Tha Police.” Under pressure from county officials, Capital Centre promoters dropped NWA from the showcase.25 In New York, where NWA had no planned concerts but its fan base was swelling, a cascade of alarming reports highlighted the tragic consequences of, as one criminal justice advocate put it, the “racist attitudes permeating the New York Police Department.”26 In Brooklyn, for instance, police dragged a father from his car for protesting a parking violation, knowingly endangering the man’s three-week-old baby, who was left alone in the cold by the arresting officers who referred to the child as “the little n-----.” In a 1987 case, a white resident who attempted to document the bloody police beating of a cuffed Black teen at a Manhattan subway station was, himself, handcuffed, injured, detained on specious charges, and kept in custody for two days.27 In January 1989, outrage grew over an incident in Queens, in which New York police surrounded 71-year-old Ann Hamilton while she sat in her car eating peanuts. Officers smashed the woman’s windshield, dragged her from the vehicle, and arrested her for “reckless endangerment,” a charge the department justified by saying that Hamilton had been digging in her glove compartment while parked in a drug zone. 304

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Calls from the woman’s family, from African-American religious leaders, and from the local Black press to prosecute police for their involvement in a “reign of terror” resulted in an apology from Mayor Ed Koch, but little else.28 In the wake of that incident, news broke that eight Black and Latino boys had been arrested for the rape of a white Central Park jogger named Trisha Meili. After Manhattan’s District Attorney announced charges against five of the teens, described in the national press as “wilding” (a term derived from a rumor that LA rapper Tone Loc’s hit “Wild Thing” was the inspiration behind the boys’ alleged crimes), civil rights advocates and police watch dogs in New York poked holes in the evidence and accused investigators of subjecting the boys to torturous interrogation.29 Meanwhile, prominent New York real-estate mogul Donald Trump paid for a large ad in the New York press––Trump’s “High-Priced Graffiti,” as one critic referred to it––calling for New York’s political leaders to “unshackle [cops] from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s.” Trump’s fullpage indictment of “wild criminals … of every age,” and his call in the case of the so-called Central Park Five to “bring back the death penalty,” was black-and-white proof of the cultural chasm between those who lived with law enforcement injustices and those who denied any injustices existed at all.30 As NWA traveled from city to city on the group’s first national tour, these tensions plus a ream of high-profile cases of police misconduct across the country put the growing conflict between individual rights and urban systems of law and order on full display. The result was an amplification of the problems portrayed in Los Angeles rap right at the same moment that NWA’s promotional push for its controversial debut album was at its apex. It meant that the real challenge for law enforcement was not that NWA was leveling insults; the threat was in the group’s swelling popularity. Rumors of fans gleefully yelling anti-cop expletives at each concert on that 1989 tour suggested that NWA had become a conduit for protest. “Advocating violence and assault is wrong,” FBI public affairs officer Milt Ahlerich wrote in a letter to NWA’s label that August, “and we in the law enforcement community take exception to such action.” The “fax campaign” undertaken by informal networks of police officers to alert other departments to the lyrical content of NWA’s music had reached Ahlerich’s office. Claiming to represent “the FBI’s position,” he responded by scolding the group’s label Priority Records for distributing music that was “discouraging and degrading” to police officers at a time when, as he noted, the number of cops killed annually was on the rise.31 It was the first time an FBI official had so formally objected to a form of creative expression, and the threatening missive thrust NWA into the center of a national dialogue about free speech. As the cover of the Village Voice declared that October, with text stamped over the faces of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella, “The FBI Hates This Band.”32 FBI admonishment and law-enforcement boycotts were designed to derail NWA’s tour and, more broadly, to prevent the group and its handlers from profiting off what critics defined as “cop killer” music. NWA and Priority Records, however, treated the conflict as a springboard for widespread exposure and a backdrop for reinforcing the rebel spirit in the music. “That song,” as Ice Cube remembered, was “the essence of what the group had become.”33 When Dr. Dre heard that NWA was now on the FBI’s radar, he knew “we had something.” Ice Cube agreed: “When the FBI has your name, you know you’re doing work. You know you’re making a difference.” The Los Angeles rappers were no longer metaphorically kicking trashcans but could claim, with an air of pride, that they did have the power, as MC Ren put it, to “threaten society.”34 NWA’s public spat with the FBI helped re-center the national dialogue around the over-policing of Black communities. But it also re-centered conversations about hip-hop and the artists that mattered most. NWA managed to yank the focus away from the East to spotlight the West. The LA rappers’ relentless assertion of their right to free speech, against all odds, made them champions of resistance and earned them a place as the first rap group to appeal simultaneously to four distinct 305

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kinds of listeners: the grassroots, longtime LA rap loyalists; the traditional, mostly nonwhite hip-hop fans in the proverbial “urban North”; the southern Black rap fans who had been primed to gravitate toward West Coast rap since the early days of Egyptian Lover, Eazy-E, Ice T, and Oakland’s Too $hort; and the predominantly white, blue-collar suburban listeners who, until Straight Outta Compton, had found punk and heavy metal, rather than rap music, supremely cathartic and a better reflection of their own disillusionment.35 Randy Davis, a record buyer for StreetSide stores who was well versed in the history of counterculture movements, noted that Los Angeles had made rap “the rebellious music of the ‘90s.”36 But not everyone in the music industry was on board with NWA’s new militancy. “What frightens me about them is that they’re really good,” said Vernon Reid, Black front man for the rock band Living Colour. Others argued that LA rappers had abused their public platform by promoting an apolitical version of Black militancy that bordered on nihilism. According to management at A & A Records & Tapes, which pulled copies of Straight Outta Compton from all of its chain stores, NWA’s music could only be called “blatantly destructive.”37 A more ominous critique, however, came from inside NWA’s own stomping ground. South Central youth counselor and Black activist Leon Watkins fretted over the swelling popularity of NWA, predicting that “nothing good” would come of it. While the Village Voice made a pitch for recognizing LA rappers as delivering “an organic expression of south-central LA’s half-hidden gang world,” Watkins worried that the members of NWA were aggravating the “frustration” already crippling his city and his people.38 He argued that these young men penning lyrics about the real crises metastasizing around him, including socioeconomic isolation and distrust of systems of justice, were “taking advantage” of “a volatile situation.” Watkins didn’t think that NWA’s records alone would spark an uprising, but he feared that a crisis of some kind would “[set] things off, and then the music becomes a battle cry.”39 The crisis came on the night of March 3, 1991, during a police traffic stop along the San Fernando Valley freeway. There, an African-American motorist, 25-year-old Rodney King, was brutally beaten. In the presence of twenty-one LAPD officers on the scene, at least four patrolmen Tasered, clubbed, and kicked King to such a degree and at such length that the young man thought he had died. (According to King, the officers thought the same; he remembered that in the moments after the hitting stopped, someone threw a sheet over his head.)40 The beating was not fatal but it did leave King debilitated, with a broken ankle, a broken jaw, a cracked eye socket, a shattered cheekbone, skull fractures, brain damage, partial paralysis, a dozen electrical burns, and internal bleeding. As noted later by Black Angelenos, leaders of the local Coalition Against Police Abuse, the NAACP, the ACLU, and police watch activists nationwide, the brutality exhibited that night was not new; there were countless documented cases, not only in Los Angeles but in cities across the country. King was only the latest victim of such reprehensible police violence.41 But the March 3 traffic stop was an extraordinary event because, unlike other cases, this one was captured on home video. Watching from his apartment balcony above the strip of the busy street where King’s arrest turned violent, Lake View Terrace resident George Holliday had grabbed a camcorder and captured nearly ten minutes of the beating. The video that became widely known as the “Holliday tape” was aired nationally and on loop, the gripping images tailor-made for television news. As NBC’s nightly news producer Steve Friedman explained, the tape was undoubtedly the only reason King’s beating became a network news story at all.42 And it spurred immediate outrage, particularly among those who had never before witnessed or experienced such an egregious display of state barbarism. Responses from citizens and leaders came swiftly. Days after the Holliday tape emerged, hundreds of people marched in front of LAPD headquarters in protest, chanting, giving speeches, and sharing stories of their own experiences with police harassment and racial bigotry.43 California lawmakers Maxine Waters and Don Edwards made public statements demanding that the Los 306

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Angeles District Attorney issue swift indictments of all police officers involved. Following Police Chief Daryl Gates’ curt characterization of Rodney King’s beating as nothing more than an “aberration,” a chorus of public figures, including stalwart conservative George Will, Democratic US Senator Joe Biden, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, called for the LAPD chief’s resignation. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley issued a stern rebuke of Gates, and then, after taking one of his own agencies to task for misconduct, the mayor announced, “We must face the fact that there appears to be a dangerous trend of racially motivated incidents running through at least some segments of our Police Department.” The city’s Police Commissioner Melanie Lomax also broke ranks with the chief by choosing to publicly decry the department’s treatment of King. It looked, she said, like something “straight out of South Africa and the Deep South.”44 Meanwhile, the Southern California chapter of the ACLU referred to Gates’ police force as a “gang” in “blue uniforms,” echoing the words of LA’s most marginalized youths of color who, after years of navigating street gang wars and police violence, drew the same parallel. ACLU leaders also called on the chief to resign––a futile campaign that was an eerie echo of the failed efforts of activists in Prince George’s County to force police officials to take responsibility for the 1989 death of Gregory Habib.45 At the federal level, the Congressional Black Caucus demanded recognition from Congress that the catastrophe in Los Angeles was emblematic of a national emergency. Armed with a deep file of cases collected by the ACLU and the NAACP, the CBC took pains to demonstrate on Capitol Hill that the Rodney King beating was only an anomaly in that it was caught on film, and that, in fact, such abuse was endemic in American policing. Members called for the US Justice Department to broaden the scope of its investigations of police abuse to include all urban law enforcement agencies throughout the country; only such an expansive review could uncover “the systematic nature” of state-sanctioned brutality in the United States. Congressman John Conyers of Michigan beseeched his colleagues, “If we can’t protect citizens against the kind of videotaped violence that occurred in L.A. that night, we’re a nation in jeopardy.”46 At the same time, the Holliday tape gave leaders like Conyers, and the general public, reason to be hopeful. It was widely believed that videotaped evidence of such flagrant, even criminal, abuse of authority would ensure justice. With irrefutable proof of felony misconduct, there would likely be a jury trial, convictions, and perhaps lengthy sentences; under California law, an individual convicted for inflicting severe bodily injury could serve up to seven years in state prison. More crucially, people thought, there would be a long-overdue reckoning inside law enforcement agencies around racial bias and its ramifications. “Without the tape, the LAPD might have argued anything and been believed by a jury,” said a member of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s investigatory team in March 1991. But with the tape, city leaders, legal experts, and the broader public trusted that the guilty verdicts against the officers would come and, perhaps, so would new legislation curtailing law enforcement agencies’ use of violent force. More crucially, there would be no new Watts Rebellion; justice would defuse protests in the streets. As one survivor of police abuse said, in hopeful anticipation of real accountability at last, “We are blessed that this incident happened.”47 That spring, Compton rapper Eazy-E told a reporter that the Holliday tape vindicated his group and their controversial music. It reaffirmed NWA’s claim that news could be reported from the ground, and that the very people who bore witness to injustice and made a record of it were as close to the “truth” as were news journalists. As Eazy-E argued, the American public could no longer dismiss as hyperbole his group’s complaints about police violence or the ways in which Los Angeles rap music reflected real Black lives in danger. Once the raw, black-and-white footage of King’s beating became a media spectacle, shocking television viewers across the country, Eazy-E said, “They understand now.”48 Ice Cube put it more plainly: “We finally got y’all … on tape.”49 Estranged from NWA for over a year by 1991, and growing into his new roles as a chart-topping solo artist and Hollywood actor, Cube found fresh cause to revisit his old defense of “Fuck Tha Police.” It was, after all, a song he had 307

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co-written and then wielded like the burning symbol of the First Amendment it was, shaming censors for muzzling his group’s honest response to a real American crisis. Now, having seen the news about Rodney King’s beating and the grizzly images of King’s disfigured face in print and on television, Cube was again in a position to warn his critics against dismissing gangster rap’s tales as mere burlesque. With a certified platinum solo album and a critically acclaimed EP under his belt, plus Hollywood credibility – and an NAACP Image Award nomination, thanks to the success of John Singleton’s film Boyz N the Hood in which he starred as Darrin “Doughboy” Baker – Ice Cube prepared to release his much-anticipated second album, Death Certificate. Buoyed by the silverscreen exposure and his durable reputation as a rap provocateur, he spoke of his second album in the context of an escalating climate of anti-Black violence in Los Angeles, along with “drugs … the penitentiary and this capitalist system.” Death Certificate, he told The Source, was as much a response to the beating of Rodney King as it was to the killing of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Compton girl shot to death by a Korean storekeeper over a bottle of orange juice.50 Death Certificate, in this political environment, was a move to double down on themes he had explored as a member of NWA, and to force a public reaction. It worked. After Death Certificate’s November 1991 release, music distributors, pop critics, civil rights groups, and religious leaders denounced it as violently racist, citing especially a set of bars in “No Vaseline” interpreted as anti-Semitic and the racial slurs used in the song “Black Korea,” in which Cube as protagonist tells a Korean merchant to “pay respect to the Black fist/Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.” Still vilified for rapping on “Fuck Tha Police” about “a bloodbath of cops, dying in LA,” Ice Cube found himself newly castigated for indulging in vengeance fantasies and for conflating Black militancy with vigilantism.51 The fact that Cube leaned into the charges further infuriated those who viewed the LA rapper as a danger to society. He told the Los Angeles Times, for instance, that he did indeed mean his lyrics in “Black Korea” to be taken literally, because “if things don’t get better, we’re going to burn their stores down.”52 In protest, thousands of Korean merchants across the nation boycotted St. Ides, a beer brand Ice Cube had promoted. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, lobbied record chain stores to remove Death Certificate from shelves. A writer in the Village Voice, the progressive weekly that had put NWA on its cover in 1989 to champion them as heroes in the fight against a “cultural crackdown,” referred to Cube as “a straight-up racist, simple and plain”––a flagrant reference to Cube’s musical allies in the rap group Public Enemy, who famously condemned America’s white supremacist traditions in the hit single “Fight the Power.”53 In a wildly unprecedented move, Billboard published an editorial charging Ice Cube with “the rankest sort of racism and hatemongering,” and argued that his lyrics, which the trade journal characterized as the “unabashed espousal of violence against Koreans, Jews and other whites,” blurred the line between art and “advocacy of crime.”54 Death Certificate and was evocative of Straight Outta Compton, not only because it smashed sales records and exceeded expectations.55 During a period of heightened racial tension in Los Angeles, and following the decision by a white LA judge, after a jury’s guilty verdict, to only fine Korean storekeeper Soon Ja Du $500 for the murder of Latasha Harlins, Ice Cube’s song “Black Korea” created an uproar reminiscent of “Fuck Tha Police.” While not a single, “Black Korea” became Death Certificate’s most notorious cut, and the public outcry it generated provided him a platform to highlight the relationship between the exploitation of power and the degradation of Black people. Ice Cube harnessed his ballooning public role as one of hip-hop’s “most streetwise and politically complex” voices, and used it to argue, yet again, that Black lives were systematically discarded in Los Angeles, just as they were nationwide. In interview after interview, he warned that it was a mistake to assume that gangster rap, which reflected the fantasies, pleasures, travails, and fears of Black youth, was devoid of social or political meaning. To vilify him or his lyrics, as violent as they were, was to miss the point and to willfully ignore the inhumanity in the Du sentencing and the Holliday tape. The demoralization was 308

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nothing new, Ice Cube noted, but the repercussions for it might be. As he told The Source in late 1991, “Pretty soon, shit’s gonna blow up.”56

Months Later, It Did On April 29, 1992, veteran news correspondent Dan Blackburn drove with his television crew into South Central Los Angeles, through neighborhoods only recently memorialized in Ice Cube’s lyrics and John Singleton’s film. They were on a mission that night to cover the ugly first hours of a major riot in Los Angeles, borne of decades of political and economic neglect and unchecked police abuse. As Blackburn reported, “I was in the Chicago riots. I covered D.C. when the riots happened after the Martin Luther King assassination. I’ve never seen anything that comes close to this.”57 The violent uprising escalated quickly. By the end of the first day, Los Angeles was in a state of emergency. Governor Pete Wilson made preparations to deploy National Guard troops; the California Highway Patrol blocked exits from the Harbor Freeway and the Santa Monica Freeway to prevent motorists from entering zones of protest in Inglewood, South Central, and downtown Los Angeles; the city halted bus service in the area; the Los Angeles Unified School District announced its plan to close schools; the Federal Aviation Administration redirected flights approaching LAX; and LA’s mayor, Tom Bradley, issued a desperate plea for peace, then signed a curfew order.58 Two days after Dan Blackburn and CNN began covering the unrest, the riots had taken hold of the whole county, and leaders declared a full-blown national disaster. FBI SWAT team officers, Border Patrol agents, California National Guardsmen, and Los Angeles police officers joined some 4,500 members of the US Army and the Marine Corps, many of them back from fighting in the Persian Gulf, who descended upon Los Angeles “as if they were responding to an international crisis in Panama or the Middle East.” Troops were outfitted in fatigues, flak jackets, and helmets, and armed with M-16 rifles and 9mm pistols. They rolled through smoke-filled avenues in Humvees, ten-ton trucks, and armored vehicles. As he took his position in South Central, the heart of the riot zone, one National Guardsman summed up the scene: “Welcome to Beirut West.”59 Through five days and nights, every major television news organization and cable news outlet, most of them deploying news choppers, streamed live footage of the so-called “Rodney King Riots.”60 It was a national media event like no other in American history, a spectacle of unrest precipitated by two other unprecedented media spectacles. First, there had been the airing of the videotaped police beating of Rodney King. Then came the widely reported trial (including live, gavel-to-gavel coverage on Court TV) of the four Los Angeles Police officers charged in King’s assault.61 Yet, on April 29, 1992, following weeks of nationally broadcast trial proceedings, the nearly allwhite jury declared the officers not guilty. Across the nation, protesters gathered in front of courthouses and police headquarters, activists planned marches, university students held candlelight vigils, high school students staged walkouts, local communities scheduled gatherings to discuss racial injustice, and officials and citizens alike registered their shock at how, as Syracuse Mayor Tom Young said, “the legal system failed.”62 In San Fernando Valley, at the original site where King had been beaten, a mostly Black crowd gathered along the busy thoroughfare, holding signs declaring “Honk Your Horns for Guilty” and chanting, “We want justice!” In South Central, along Normandie Avenue, Black Angelenos gathered on sidewalks to vent their anger, placing handmade signs in the street decrying racist cops. Some along the avenue threw rocks and bottles at passing cars. Others shouted their dissent as if to an entire nation culpable for the injustices they had just witnessed. Tonia Smith stood on the strip yelling, “We’re tired of being slaves!” Meanwhile, angry citizens flooded phone lines at local newspapers, radio, and television stations.63 By the evening, twenty-five square blocks of central Los Angeles were aflame. Opportunists of every race, class, and age had gutted chain stores, strip-mall businesses, and mom-and-pop shops in 309

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the area. At the intersection of Florence and Normandie, groups of Black men dragged white motorists from their cars and beat them. A news helicopter captured one particularly brutal attack of white gravel truck driver Reginald Denny, and the bloody scene was broadcast live. In Compton, where a year before the fatal shooting of ninth-grader Latasha Harlins and the virtual exoneration of her killer, Soon Ja Du, had heightened an already-combative relationship between AfricanAmerican and Korean Angelenos, Black protestors trashed Asian-owned businesses while some Korean residents armed themselves in defense. Downtown, the city’s symbols of law and order were under siege, too, with the guardhouse outside LAPD headquarters torched, a fire ablaze inside City Hall, and the glass facade of the Criminal Courts building smashed to bits.64 And across the riot zone, graffiti declaring “BLK PWR,” “Latasha Harlins,” “This Is For Rodney King,” “Look What You Created,” and “Fuck Tha Police” testified to the layers of frustration and pain fueling insurrection. “I’m not saying I told you so,” Ice T relayed to the Los Angeles Sentinel early that May, before the smoke of the uprising had begun to clear, “but rappers have been reporting from the front for years.”65 Tupac Shakur, then an emerging Bay Area rapper and aspiring actor following in the footsteps of Ice Cube, echoed Ice T. “We’ve been reporting this,” Shakur said of West Coast rappers, with a nod to Los Angeles. “We’ve warned, ‘If you don’t clean up, there’s going to be … mass destruction.” Luther Campbell, front man for Miami’s oft-censored group 2 Live Crew, noted that for years rappers had been “screaming out what the problem is,” while authorities were effectively muzzling them, “screaming back, ‘Don’t say what you’re saying.’”66 But more than any other rap celebrity, Ice Cube made it plain: “Anything you wanted to know about the riots was in the records before the riots.” Indeed, he could claim the longest and most varied track record as an artist offering tracings of the problems brewing in Los Angeles, which by April 1992 included his work with NWA and three solo recording projects. Beyond the music, there was his breakout performance as a young Crip in the film Boyz N the Hood, which had illustrated the fateful impact of daily indignities, big and small, on the lives of Black boys in South Central. For half a decade, Ice Cube noted, he had “given so many warnings on what’s gonna happen if we don’t get these things straight.”67 In the immediate aftermath of the 1992 LA uprising, he had cautioned the nation against dismissing the rioters as it had carelessly dismissed gangster rap artists. And he warned moral crusaders and law-and-order politicians against summing up youth rebellion in the streets as delinquency or nihilism. “America needs to know that these kids are willing to shut the country down for liberation.”68 When the Washington Post asked Ice-T, fresh off the release of his 1992 album Home Invasion, to speak to any connections between rap music and the Los Angeles riots, he obliged. “Black rage,” he said, finally had a mainstream audience.69 What Ice T asserted—and what the unprecedented, industry-transforming success of both Ice Cube’s 1992 album The Predator and, more notably, Dr. Dre’s 1992 debut The Chronic shows—is that the 1992 Los Angeles riots proved to be a catalyst for the commercialization of the very genre of rap that had been pigeonholed as too dangerous and too divisive to thrive. The riots made palpable the complicated, and sometimes destructive, human responses to oppression that LA rap had narrated for years already. Put another way, the twentyfour-hour streaming news coverage of rebellion in Los Angeles functioned, for LA gangster rap, better than any music video in the way it drew widespread attention to the music and made a case for its cultural relevance. Gangster rappers, with NWA as the vanguard, did more than rile critics by muddying truth and fiction, reflecting viscerally on hardship, exposing violent state abuse, mixing militancy with millionaire dreams, and thumbing their noses at every faction that viewed them as a threat to Black advancement. More crucially, they popularized their own defiance, and in doing so, made young Black perspectives on American society and its abuses a driving force in American culture.

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Notes 1 The following article is adapted from Felicia Angeja Viator, To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). 2 Robert Reinhold, “In the Middle of L.A.’s Gang Wars,” New York Times, 22 May 1988; Elaine Lafferty and Margaret B. Carlson, “The Price of Life in Los Angeles,” Time, 22 February 1988; Ivor Davis, “Gangs Invade Yuppie Haven: Violence in Los Angeles,” Times (London), 8 February 1988; Ann Wiener, “Woman Fatally Hit By Gang Gunfire in Westwood,” Los Angeles Times, 1 February 1988; and “Los Angeles Drug Gangs Spread Out Over the West,” Chris Reed, Guardian, 20 February 1988. See also Colors, directed by Dennis Hopper (1988; Orion Pictures, 2001), DVD; To Live and Die in L.A., directed by William Friedkin (1985; MGM, 2003), DVD. 3 Pamela Klein, “By All Means Necessary,” LA Weekly, 30 December 1988, to 5 January 1989, 43–44. 4 N.W.A., “Fuck Tha Police,” Straight Outta Compton, Album (Ruthless/Priority, 1988), Vinyl LP, Cassette, and CD; Steve Hochman, “Compton Rappers Versus the Letter of the Law: FBI Claims Song by NWA Advocates Violence on Police,” Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1989; Tipper Gore, “Hate, Rape, and Rap,” Washington Post, 8 January 1990; and David Mills, “Guns and Poses; Rap Music Violence: Glorifying Gangsterism or Reflecting Reality?” Washington Times, 17 August 1989, E1. 5 Peter H. King, “Punk Rockers Put on Notice by Santa Ana: Punk Rock: Santa Ana is Wary,” Los Angeles Times, 9 January 1982; Dan Nakaso, “Skin Slashed, Furniture and Windows Smashed: Punk Rock May Cost Theater Owner His License,” Los Angeles Times, 20 January 1983; Cary Darling, “Talent & Venues: 41 Arrested at L.A. ‘Punk Riot,’” Billboard, 95, no. 8. (26 February 1983): 30, 35; Patrick Goldstein, “Is Heavy Metal a Loaded Gun Aimed at Its Fans?” Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1986; and “Record Labeling” Senate Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, United States Senate, First Session on Content of Music and the Lyrics of Records, Sept. 19, 1985 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1985). 6 Mills, “Guns and Poses.” 7 N.W.A., “Fuck Tha Police.” 8 Jonathan Gold, “N.W.A.: A Hard Act to Follow,” LA Weekly, 5 May 1989; and Mike Sager, “Cube,” Rolling Stone, Issue 588 (4 October 1990): 78. 9 Jon Pareles, “Outlaw Rock: More Skirmishes on the Censorship Front,” New York Times, 10 December 1989; and Dennis Hunt, “Dr. Dre Joins an Illustrious Pack in the Last Year,” Los Angeles Times, 22 October 1989, 76. 10 NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group, directed by Mark Ford (2008; VH1 Rock Docs, 2008), TV Broadcast. 11 Klein, “By All Means Necessary”; and The Arsenio Hall Show, Season 3, Episode 15, created by Arsenio Hall and Marla Kell Brown (Paramount Domestic Television, Sept 28, 1990), TV episode. 12 Tha Westside, directed by Todd Williams (2002; Niche Entertainment, 2002), DVD. 13 Sam Kashner, “Hollywood in the Hood,” Vanity Fair (September 2016), 222. 14 John Leland, “Droppin Science,” Spin, 1 August 1989, 48–52. 15 Jay Z, Decoded (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 10, 16. 16 Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, “N.W.A.,” Rolling Stone, issue 972 (21 April 2005): 90. 17 The Arsenio Hall Show, Season 3, Episode 15. 18 Hochman, “Compton Rappers Versus the Letter of the Law”; Mills, “Guns and Poses”; Harrington, “The FBI As Music Critic”; Pareles, “Outlaw Rock”; and David Mills, “N.W.A. Flees Stage After Song Lyrics Incite Concert Police,” Washington Times, 17 August 1989. 19 Carol Motsinger and Cameron Knight, “Ice Cube recalls tense ’89 stop in Cincy,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 June 2016. 20 Dave Marsh and Phyllis Pollack, “Wanted for Attitude,” Village Voice 34(41), 10 October 1989, 33–34. 21 Stephen Franklin, “Murders Torment Detroit,” Chicago Tribune, 13 January 1987; and Ze’ev Chafets, “The Tragedy of Detroit,” New York Times, 29 July 1990, 326. 22 Chester Higgins, “Harassment suit filed in Toledo,” New York Amsterdam News, 27 August 1988, 5; “Toledo Police Chief Rescinds His Order to Question Blacks,” New York Times, 16 August 1988, A25; and Marsh and Pollack, “Wanted for Attitude.” 23 Norris P. West, “Man Beaten by PG Police Gets $1.9 Million Award,” Baltimore Sun, 18 March 1993. 24 Debbie M. Price, “Blows Cited in Death of P.G. Suspect,” Washington Post, 25 May 1989. 25 Debbie M. Price, “P.G. Police Chief Caught in the Eye of the Storm,” Washington Post, 25 September 1989; and Matt Neufeld, “Lyrics get rap group cut from Cap Centre,” Washington Times, 22 August 1989. 26 Charles Baillou, “Why White Cops kill Black People,” New York Amsterdam News, 3 December 1988, 3.

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Felicia Angeja Viator 27 Peter Noel, “Prof files $15M police brutality suit,” New York Amsterdam News, 3 June 1987, 1. 28 Harold Jamison, “Assault on Woman Draws Pastors Anger,” New York Amsterdam News, 14 January 1989, 3. 29 Robin Marantz Henig, “Behavior: The ‘Wilding’ of Central Park - Complex Motivations Underlie Violent Group Actions,” Washington Post, 2 May 1989, 6; and J. Zamgba Browne, “Attorney deplores cops handling of rape arrests,” New York Amsterdam News, 29 April 1989, 1. 30 Thomas Collins, “Donald Trump’s High-Priced Graffiti,” Newsday, 3 May 1989, 67. For an example of Donald Trump’s celebrity, see the May 1, 1984 issue of GQ magazine, which features Trump as its poster boy for millionaire risk-takers and a feature story entitled, “Donald Trump Gets What He Wants.” 31 Milt Ahlerich, letter to Priority Records, August 1, 1989, published as figure in Steve Hochman, “Compton Rappers versus the Letter of the Law,” Los Angeles Times, 5 August 1989; Marsh and Pollack, “Wanted for Attitude.” 32 Cover, Village Voice, 10 October 1989. 33 K Murphy, “Full Clip: Ice Cube Breaks Down His Entire Catalog,” Vice, 8 October 2010. 34 NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group. 35 Jon Pareles, “Should Ice Cube’s Voice Be Chilled,” New York Times, 8 December 1991. 36 Deborah Russell, “N.W.A. Displays A Winning Attitude; Stickered Album is Nation’s Top Seller,” Billboard, 22 June 1991, 7. 37 Steve Hochman, “Police Don’t Give Rappers Bad Rap,” Los Angeles Times, 2 April 1989. 38 Marsh and Pollack, “Wanted for Attitude.” 39 Hochman, “Police Don’t Give Rappers Bad Rap.” 40 Linda Deutsch, “21 LAPD Officers Involved in Beating of Black Motorist,” Press Telegram (Long Beach), 20 March 1991, A1, in U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information/ Privacy Act Records: Rodney King, Part 1 of 24, item 57, https://vault.fbi.gov/rodney-king; and Kurt Streeter, “Months before He Died, Rodney King Told How the Beating by LAPD Officers Changed His Life,” Los Angeles Times, 3 March 2016. 41 Danny Pollock, “2 Local Victims React Differently to Police Brutality,” Star-News, 21 March 1991, 1, in FBI Records, the Vault, Rodney King, part 1 of 24, item 222. 42 “Civilians’ Video Cameras Undoing Rogue Officers,” Star-News, 8 March 1991, A8, in FBI Records, the Vault, Rodney King, part 1 of 24, item 46. 43 Janice Luder, “300 Protest Beating of Rodney King,” Star-News, 10 March 1991, A1, in FBI Records, the Vault, Rodney King, part 1 of 24, item 55; and “Hundreds of Protesters Demand That Gates Resign,” Los Angeles Times, 10 March 1991. 44 Howard Gantman, “Bradley, Lawmakers Urge Probe of Brutality,” The Outlook, 7 March 1991, in FBI Records, the Vault, Rodney King, part 1 of 24, item 23–24; Elaine Woo, “Rev. Jackson Joins Call for Gates’ Ouster, Scolds Bradley,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1991; and Tracy Wood and Sheryl Stolberg, “Patrol Car Log In Beating Released,” Los Angeles Times, 19 March 1991. 45 Ramona Ripston, “Chief Gates Must Step Aside,” Los Angeles Times, 7 March 1991; Tim Kenworthy and Jill Walker, “Lawmakers Ask FBI to Probe Los Angeles Police for Brutality; Chief Gates Urged to Resign Over Beating of Black,” Washington Post, 13 March 1991; and Yusuf Jah and Sister Shah-Keyah, Uprising: Crips and Bloods Tell the Story of America’s Youth in the Crossfire (New York: Scribner, 1995), 122, 132. 46 Jerry Seper, “Black Caucus wants action on alleged brutality in LA,” Washington Times, 13 March 1991; “Black Caucus Urges Broadened U.S. Inquiry Into LAPD Beating Case,” Los Angeles Times, 13 March 1991; John Yang and Jill Walker, “4 L.A. Officers Reported Indicted in Taped Beating; U.S. to Widen Probe of Alleged Police Brutality,” Washington Post, 15 March 1991; and “U.S. widens probe of police violence,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), 15 March 1991. 47 Charles Leerhsen and Lynda Wright, “L.A.’s Violent New Video,” Newsweek, 18 March 1991. 48 NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group. 49 Gerrick Kennedy, “Ice Cube Reflects on the 25 Years Since the Release of ‘Death Certificate’,” Los Angeles Times, 30 June 2017. 50 Ras Baraka, “Endangered Species,” The Source, September 1991, 34. 51 Ice Cube, Death Certificate, album (Priority Records, 1991), CD; N.W.A., “Fuck Tha Police”; and John Leland, “Should Ice Cube’s Voice Be Chilled.” 52 Richard Harrington, “War of Songs Escalates,” Washington Post, 13 November 1991. 53 Robert Christgau, “Review: Hard Again,” Village Voice, 15 November 1991; and Public Enemy, “Fight The Power,” single (Motown, 1989), vinyl, 12.” 54 Editorial, Billboard, 23 November 1991, 8. 55 Paul Grein, “’Certificate Accomplishes; Hammer Hits; Star Producers Shine Brightly on Hot 100,” Billboard, 16 November 1991.

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Not Only Compton 56 Marsh and Pollack, “Wanted for Attitude”; and Baraka, “Endangered Species.” 57 Dan Blackburn, Of Presidents and Predators (Conneaut Lake: Page Publishing, 2018), pn; and Michelle Shocked and Bart Bull, “Commentary: L.A. Riots: Cartoons Vs. Reality,” Billboard, 104(25), 20 June 1992): 6. 58 “Charting the Hours of Chaos,” Los Angeles Times, 29 April 2002. 59 Rowan Scarborough, “Bush mobilizes 4,500 troops as backup for police,” Washington Times, 2 May 1992; and Robert Reinhold, “Riot in Los Angeles: The Overview,” New York Times, 3 May 1992. 60 Max Robins, “Television: Chopper Heaven in L.A. Hell,” Variety, 4 May 1992, 111. 61 Dennis McDougal, “Few L.A. Outlets for Live Coverage of King Trial,” Los Angeles Times, 26 February 1992. 62 Johnathan Croyle, “Central New York Reacts to the Rodney King Verdict in 1992,” Syracuse.com, 1 May 2017. 63 Amy Wallace and David Ferrell, “Verdicts Greeted with Outrage and Disbelief: Reaction,” Los Angeles Times, 30 April 1992. 64 David Whitman, “The Untold Story of the LA Riot,” U.S. News and World Report, 23 May 1993; and Mathews, “Special Report: The Siege of L.A.” 65 Carolyn Bingham, “City of the Stars Under Siege and Occupation,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 7 May 1992, B3. 66 John Leland, “The Word on the Street Is Heard in the Beat,” Newsweek, 11 May 1992, 52, in Carton 37, Folder 1, Ronald T. Takaki Papers Administration Papers, 1823–2009, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. 67 Ice Cube, “F--- ‘Em (Insert),” The Predator, album (Priority Records, 1992), CD. 68 NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group. 69 Richard Harrington, “Ice-T and the Invasion of White Suburbia,” Washington Post, 24 March 1993.

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23 POLICE VIOLENCE IN FILM FROM BLAXPLOITATION TO NEW BLACK REALISM 1 Katharine Bausch

• • • •

A badge is scarier than a gun Would you mind explaining that for me? Any n[...] on the streets can get a gun, sir. A badge is like a whole damn army behind you. I better hold on to this then.2

In the searingly powerful film Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), a young black man (LaKeith Stanfield) who is being interrogated by an FBI agent (Jesse Plemmons) explains to the agent why he would rather carry a badge to steal cars than a gun. For those in the movie audience who have never experienced the omnipresent power of police officers in the United States as a black American has, this scene and this movie explain with potent simplicity the ways in which the FBI, as an arm of the State, terrorized and brutalized young black activists in the 1960s and the 1970s. Released in the United States only eight months after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, a black man in his custody, Judas and the Black Messiah serves as a lesson to American moviegoers previously unaware of the deep and long histories of anti-black police brutality in the United States.3 The ways in which various law enforcement officers, at the direct behest of the State, terrorized and brutalized young black activists in urban centers of black activism in the 1960s and the 1970s were documented in almost real-time by black male filmmakers of the period. And many of those primary films were exhibited to white Americans living in those same urban centers because of the unexpected and too short mainstream popularity of Blaxploitation films. Blaxploitation films, action-adventure stories of urban black men in the throes of a personal and communal quest for black liberation, were a staple of urban movie theatres in the 1970s. In them, white audiences witnessed the reality of anti-black police brutality in their own time, making it much more difficult to relegate that kind of white supremacist brutality to a supposedly dead system of enslavement or, at the very least, to “Southern fanatics.” Another so-called “public reckoning” with anti-black police brutality in the United States took place in 1992 after four white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of brutality attacking Rodney King, a black man in their custody. This was despite the recordings of the event seen all over the media in the wake of the event, a haunting connection with George Floyd. In response to the acquittal, Los Angeles residents took to the streets to protest anti-black police brutality, which led to “the onset of a riot,” which lasted for six days.4 314

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-31

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As with the era of Blaxploitation, black filmmakers documented the anti-black police brutality in the urban centers of the 1990s in real time. In particular, a group of young black male directors created and released blunt narratives of life as a young black man living in US cities that at once caught the attention of mainstream film critics and large white audiences. New Black Realist films, also action-adventure stories of black men in urban settings, eventually taught white Americans about their present reality of anti-black police brutality, even if that was not the intention of the artists who created them. Both Blaxploitation films in the 1970s and New Black Realist films in the 1990s then were not only powerful in their own times but provide contemporary audiences with primary evidence of the continuities and changes of the power the State exerts to oppress black Americans through law enforcement. But they are also acute reminders of the ways in which in every period of US cinema, black American filmmakers have used the power of film to tell their stories, to educate, and to liberate.

“I Was Born Black and I Was Born Poor” 5 In the 1960s and 1970s, at the same time as in big urban centers, black Americans were often the most visible marginalized group in the 1960s and 1970s. In the aftermath of the Great Migration, and as the black freedom struggle intensified in this period, mainstream media exposure to images of empowered black men increased, especially as television became ubiquitous. Black men were often well-positioned to attract the US popular imagination. First, the black Civil Rights Movement greatly influenced political, social, and cultural life in this period. Black men fighting for their rights, whether through liberal civil rights organizations, Black Power movements, or less formallyorganized words and actions, became iconic symbols of liberty, freedom, and democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. Before this period, black men commonly evoked images of enslavement, criminality, degradation, or weakness in the white popular imagination, and they were often used in mainstream white culture as foils for ideal and idealized manhood. As these movements gained momentum, however, the black man came to symbolize a powerful and liberating rejection of US failures and limitations.

“Can You Dig It?” 6 Changing racial politics in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s had an impact on representations of black men in Hollywood films. Before the 1940s, they tended to present black men in ways that perpetuated the same one-dimensional stereotypes that appeared in literature: the Tom (the loyal slaves in Gone with the Wind in 1939), the Coon (the laughable Steppin’ Fetchit), and the Buck (the feral Gus in Birth of a Nation in 1915).7 Beginning in the 1940s and extending into the 1970s, some film depictions of black men began to change due to Hollywood’s desire to at least attempt to acknowledge black men’s contribution to the World War II effort, the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the art of black liberation.8 For example, in 1963, the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP held a press conference demanding the end of Hollywood’s anti-black hiring policies and film portrayals.9 The reasons for the specific rise of Blaxploitation films, produced mostly between 1970 and 1974, require an understanding of the intersection of two phenomena in the 1950s and 1960s, both inside and outside of Hollywood. First, with the rising popularity of television, the failure of several huge Hollywood blockbusters, the 1948 Paramount Consent Decrees, which broke up vertical integration in the film industry, and the retirement of an older generation of filmmakers, major motion picture studios (the Majors) were suffering severe monetary losses by the late 1960s.10 Desperate to survive, the major Hollywood studios devised new strategies for making money, some of which involved exploiting audiences near pre-existing urban theatres, which by the 1970s consisted mostly 315

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of a small white working-class population and a large black working-class population. The Majors, therefore, produced low-budget films that appealed to urban black audiences and hoped to turn over enormous profits.11 This plan had the added benefit of addressing the pressure on studios to include more black Americans in the film industry. Second, by 1970 US black audiences wanted film heroes who were, according to film historian W.R. Grant, “able to touch on the new national mood of Black militancy and cultural nationalism.”12 As part of this movement, Blaxploitation writers and directors created black male characters who represented the politics and styles of the Black Power (BP) branch of the black liberation movement. The relationship between Blaxploitation and BP should not be exaggerated. The majority of the films often resisted the formal politics and strategies of these movements. But the films were also aligned with a lot of BP culture. Together, the problems of large Hollywood studios and the power of urban black activists and audiences demanding change led to the creation and release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), the first of the widely distributed Blaxploitation films. According to film historian Jesse Rhines, director and writer Melvin van Peebles financed Sweetback himself, choosing to reject a film contract offered by Columbia Pictures because he wanted to have full control of his film. This is important to note since only one-fifth of all Blaxploitation films were financed by black Americans. Released in April, Sweetback was wildly popular with urban black audiences, ultimately grossing ten million dollars in its first run.13 It was also popular among black revolutionaries. In fact, Huey P. Newton wrote an article in the Black Panther Party newspaper entitled “He Won’t Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analysis of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” Newton praised Sweetback as the “first black revolutionary film” and argued that it reflected the values of the BP movement directly. He stated, “Bobby [Seale] and I started the Black Panther Party” in order “to build the Black community” and “Sweetback helps to put forth the ideas of what we must do to build that community.”14 Sweetback tells the story of a young urban black man who at the beginning of the film is working in a brothel. While he is in the custody of two white police officers, Sweetback witnesses the police officers beating Mu-Mu, a young black member of a radical political organization. Enraged, Sweetback steps in to help Mu-Mu, injuring the police officers in the process, and then spends the rest of the film fleeing to the U.S./Mexican border. After the financial success of Sweetback, the Majors tested the new genre with Shaft (1971), which was directed by black American filmmaker Gordon Parks. Shaft was originally written for a white cast but was changed in order to test the new urban black audience. Produced and distributed by primarily white Hollywood insiders and crewed by mostly white technicians, Shaft was still considered a “black film” by many because its director and most of its cast were black men and its narrative focused on the urban black community.15 Furthermore, the Majors were direct about wanting to market to a black audience, and this guided many of their decisions, including the subject matter and director. For instance, the decision to hire Parks, a high-profile black photographer and director, was not only designed to shift anti-black hiring practices in Hollywood. It was also a recognition of a black radical man whose influence in contemporary US culture was wide, which drew attention to his auteurship of a black urban experience. Shaft is the story of John Shaft, a super-suave private detective hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a local gangster. Shaft, originally reluctant to help a local gangster, pursues the kidnappers while white police detectives pursue and harass him. Shaft appealed to black and white audiences alike. In fact, the movie was so popular that when a 1971 showing of Shaft was sold out at a movie theater in Brooklyn, a small riot had to be broken up by the police. The 1200 seats that were available for the showing were not enough to satisfy the appetite for the movie.16 The popularity of the film and its crossover appeal prompted the quick production of a sequel. On the heels of the success of the first Shaft came Super Fly (1972), directed by Parks’s son, Gordon Parks Jr. Unlike his father’s films, Super Fly was written and financed by black Americans. 316

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A friend of Parks Jr., black writer Philip Fenty, wrote the script for Super Fly. In a 2004 interview, Fenty said that he wanted to write the script because in the 1960s and 1970s, Harlem was “an exciting place to be,” making it and its residents an intriguing subject for a film. He spent time with street hustlers and black residents in order to understand how “Broadway had totally given over to street people.” White producer Sig Shore, who had had success in bringing European films to the US market, helped Parks Jr. release the film, but it was financed by two black dentists and Parks Sr. Eventually, it was distributed by Warner Brothers.17

“Sire these Lines are Not Homage to Brutality that the Artist has Invented, but a Hymn from the Mouth of Reality” 18 The early black-directed Blaxploitation films presented proud and unapologetic black men who resisted white supremacy and integration in ways that echoed the politics of black radical movements in this era. For instance, Sweetback opens with two quotations that place the narrative of the main character within a BP framework. While Sweetback is running on screen, presumably from the police, with sirens blaring in the background, the first quote states: “Sire these lines are not homage to the brutality that the artist has invented, but a hymn from the mouth of reality.” The second states: “This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man.” The first quotation reminds the viewer that the film is meant to depict the real brutality of being a black man in the United States. The second uses language—brothers and sisters for black people and "the Man" as an embodiment of white power—that was popular in BP movements. At its core, the film presents Sweetback’s life as evidence of an oppressive white state that wants to control black men and uses police officers to do so. Sweetback is first taken into custody by two white police officers who want to use him as a patsy for a murder. The scene in which the white police officers demand that Sweetback’s black boss let them take Sweetback away sets the narrative in motion. In it, the police officers state with false tones of persuasion, “we just need him for a couple of hours to take downtown to make us look good.” Sweetback’s boss asks sarcastically in response “when did you people get so interested in black people?” In the background, Sweetback stands stoically, dissembling any relevant emotions. But once the three reach the downtown police station, Sweetback is in handcuffs, and he witnesses the brutal beating of the black activist Mu-Mu, he feels compelled to throw off his false disinterest and step in. The beating of Mu-Mu is visually graphic and immediate for the audience, as van Peebles uses the camera, editing, music, and the visual of Mu-Mu’s brutalized body to make sure that it is unavoidable. This is mirrored by the violent interaction between Sweetback and the white police officers. The camera repeatedly flashes to the blood on Sweetback’s handcuffed arms and hands. And, in an important intervention, the camera focuses solely on Sweetback, as he raises a fist and brings it down on the unseen officers. This allows van Peebles to draw the focus away from the white men and towards the black man who is fighting back, demanding to be seen. As this scene unfolds, the soundtrack sings “They bled your mama,” in recitation, to which Sweetback responds defiantly, “they won’t bleed me.” Sweetback’s power against the white supremacist State is even more amplified by the rumors spread by the all-white police force that there may have been several black men involved in the “ambush” of their fellow officers. This part in the soundtrack is not the only acknowledgment throughout the film that white police officers do not only brutalize the black men in the community. The many black women who work at the brothel with Sweetback allude to the pervasive and terrifying threat of violence that white police officers use to try to control them and the very real consequences of violating the rules of a white supremacist society. But like with the Mu-Mu sequence, van Peebles does continue a pattern in US films whereby the pain and brutalization of black women caused by the police is used mostly as a plot device to further the male protagonist’s incentive for revenge. 317

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In the end, after many scenes of Sweetback’s flight, aided by many members of the black community along the way, of the police officers trying to mobilize and trap him, and of several successful standoffs against the police, one in which Sweetback is shot, we see Sweetback crosses the Tijuana River, fighting police dogs in the water, and vowing to return to the U.S. one day to “collect some dues.” Van Peebles ultimately made a film in which a young black man, who has not only attacked two white men, but two white police officers, among the most dangerous transgressions of white supremacy, finds freedom. In so doing, undoubtedly many white audience members left with a better sense of the reality of police officers’ brutality towards black men, but black audience members also left with a sense of what it might be like to be liberated from this brutality. John Shaft is also portrayed as proud, aggressive, and non-compliant in the face of constant harassment by the Mafia men who are trying to take over Harlem, but also the white police officers he confronts. When Shaft is first approached by the white detectives who want his help in Harlem, for instance, he mocks the white lieutenant’s lack of understanding of black culture, saying that it’s because “us black folks speak mushmouth, detective.” Furthermore, he refuses to say why two black gangsters are looking for him and plays on the racist expectations of the detectives. He says that the two gangsters are “soul brothers” who want Shaft “to teach them the secret handshake,” blatantly mocking anti-black racism. He leaves the scene with a final act of defiance. The detective asks, “Where the hell you goin’ Shaft?” and Shaft famously replies, “I’m goin’ to get laid. Where you goin?” after which he laughs and strides away. He will not be controlled by the police. In his defiance of white supremacy policing, Shaft also celebrates his blackness. Shaft becomes enraged when he is accused by another black man of being “a Tom,” a white lackey, to which he shouts, “Don’t Tom me!” His loyalty to his race is also made clear when he refuses to be a spy for the police. The detective tells him that he is not asking Shaft to “sell out” and implores him to lay off “all this black shit.” Shaft replies coolly that all of the gifts in the world “won’t make” him “sing for the cops.” As he says, all of the power bestowed on him by the Man will not change the fact that he “was born black” and he was “born poor.” Priest, the protagonist in Super Fly, is also defiant and proud when rebuffs the power of white police officers. As the head of a local illegal drug business, Priest tells the audience that while for a long time he has “played the only game the Man will let him play,” he is ready for the one last big score that will allow him to leave that life, and New York City, forever. He, in the film’s original trailer, tells the audience that he “has a plan to stick it to the Man.”19 When he is approached by white police officers who want him to work as a confidential informant in return for their supposed protection, Priest listens, but ultimately does not do any work for the police and announces that he is quitting his illegal drug business. He is warned that the lead detective on the case, a white officer named Reardon, is going to kill him then. In the climax of the film, when Reardon drives Priest to the waterfront and threatens to kill him, Priest, still refusing to be an informant, is beaten brutally by several police officers. However, Priest overcomes the officers in a carefully edited fight scene that highlights Priest’s power, and casually walks away to his girlfriend, who is waiting with the money that will take them out of NYC. According to filmmaker Warrington Hudlin, this particular scene was very important to black audience members. He recalls in a 2004 interview that when he saw Super Fly for the first time in St. Louis, Missouri, in its opening year, the whole black audience got to its feet and applauded at the conclusion of the scene. He saw this moment as a “catharsis” for oppressed people. Cultural critic Todd Boyd argues that “at the end Ron O’Neal [Priest] basically tells the white man to kiss his ass and walks off and jumps in his tricked out hog. That’s John Wayne riding off in the sunset for black people.”20 Scenes from these three popular and lasting Blaxploitation films – so lasting, in fact, that both Shaft and Super Fly have had more contemporary remakes released— demonstrate clearly the ways in which black male directors used their films to speak the truth about the vicious violence police 318

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officers perpetrate against black people, to educate those who were previously unfamiliar with that reality, and to offer hope, pride, and power to those who could never forget that reality.

“They Want Us to Kill Ourselves” 21 New Black Realist films, not coincidently, fermented under similar conditions to Blaxploitation. Within the black community in the 1980s and 1990s, the specific Black Nationalism of the 1970s had diminished. Instead, a conservative agenda for black America developed, praising self-help and accountability in a move reminiscent of the “politics of respectability” of the early twentieth century. Like the politics of respectability, politicians in the late 1980s and early 1990s felt that the black middle class would be the best role model for inner-city black people.22 Many black community leaders demanded that black Americans stop acting like victims of a white supremacist State and take responsibility for their lives. This self-help platform in black American politics was in line with the general trend in US politics under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Political scientist Preston H. Smith commented at the time that “under the guise of empowering the poor and promoting new social contract policies such as welfare reform, the Clinton administration expects the impoverished blacks to ask less of the state and to do more for themselves with still less.”23 In a direct response to the politics of self-help, black American critics spoke out. These critics called black conservatives traitors, and likened them, as black cultural historian William van Deburg points out, “to the Jews who led their brothers and sisters into the ovens of the Holocaust.”24 These critiques came often in the form of popular culture more than institutional politics, including in film. Having been denied access to political power for centuries, and perhaps feeling as though the 1950s, 60s, and 70s push for access to political power had failed them, black Americans often funneled their frustrations through their access to popular culture. As mentioned, young critics only gained more credence when the savage beating of Rodney King was broadcast to the world. Filmmakers such as John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers criticized those that minimized the role that anti-black racism plays in US society. And they often used narratives of police brutality against black men as an example of the ineffectuality of “respectability.” van Deburg describes these films as “the cinema of recuperation.”25 I call them New Black Realism.

“Can’t Afford to be Afraid of Our Own People Anymore” 26 Similar to the Hollywood period before Blaxploitation, the Majors were faced with the twin realities of a changing geographical landscape that was affecting their ticket sales and a complete failure to deal with anti-black racism in the industry. In the 1990s, the Majors produced a series of what were termed “blockbusters” (expensive productions meant to appeal to a wide audience and financially support the studios). In order to finance these more expensive productions, the Majors looked for smaller films that might appeal to enough people to make a profit and ultimately massive entertainment companies like Disney Studios bought many of the independent studios, and in the process acquired many black artists.27 This also meant that the Majors could claim that they were trying to break down white supremacist barriers in their industry. In these acquisitions was the labor of several young black male filmmakers who were noticed by the white mainstream media. Often positioned as a “new field of young black talent in filmmaking” by established film critics, these filmmakers were of course part of the traditions of the black liberation movement’s strong relationship to movies. But positioning them this way was an important part of getting as many white audience members as possible to think that the work of these filmmakers was worth paying to see. The gatekeepers were waving them through.

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John Singleton, who wrote and directed Boyz N the Hood (1991), took full advantage of this space to develop a narrative around his and others’ experiences as young black men growing up in Los Angeles in this period. The film unravels the many nuances and complications in the experience of a group of black male friends. The audience watches Tre, Doughboy, and Ricky navigate gendered expectations of love, violence, and power amidst white supremacy. And many of the most visceral parts of the narrative involve the role of police officers, white and black, in maintaining patriarchal white supremacy. The Hughes Brothers’s Menace II Society (1993) addresses many of those same nuanced and complicated situations. While the narrative closely gazes at the lives of Caine and his friends, all of whom live in Watts and Crenshaw in the 1990s, the audience is overwhelmed by the ways in which police officers meet out the punishments for violating patriarchal white supremacy. Culminating in a final scene in which the two young black protagonists are murdered by black gang members who have been seduced and controlled by police officers.28 Finally, like Blaxploitation films, while the ways in which the State uses police officers as overseers of black women is not completely absent from these three examples of New Black Realism, the absence of black women’s stories is definitely felt. There are many scenes in these films, like in most films ultimately distributed by Hollywood, in which black men’s stories about black women are central – ranging from misogynistic stereotypes to beautifully nuanced and loving presentations – but there is little to no evidence of black women’s experiences of police brutality.

“Being a Black Man in America Isn’t Easy. The Hunt Is on and You’re the Prey.” 29 Boyz N the Hood opens with footage from the archives of Los Angeles network television news outlets. The voices of various news anchors are heard describing their experiences during the L.A. Riots. The rest of the film uses rap, fashion, and a distinct black aesthetic to describe the experiences of young black men in L.A. at the same time. It also very effectively uses stories about police officers working in South Central L.A. to describe those experiences. In an early scene in the movie, for instance, Tre watches his elementary school friends being arrested by two white police officers. Singleton directs the camera to zoom in on the kids and the police and the editors use slow-motion and music, which makes it impossible to not understand that Tre is witnessing the full power of the police in a formative moment in his childhood. In a scene in which a teenaged Tre’s father, Furious, confronts a black police officer who threatened Tre with a gun, Singleton directs other film techniques that highlight the power struggle between the two. When the police officer asks Furious “Something wrong?,” and Furious retorts, “Yeah, something wrong,” for example, really bright red and blue police lights show the all-black crowd’s reactions; some of them look scared, some look skeptical, and some look defiant. This particular moment shows the complicated emotions that black community members in South Central feel about the police, who they clearly know is there to control and punish them. Choosing to make the police officer black only makes Tre’s story feel even more painful. The official 1991 trailer for the film even uses quick cuts to pastiche a scene of Tre running from an assailant the audience can’t see. The scene is edited in slow motion so that the viewer can clearly see the look of terror on his face. The images could be an homage to scenes of Sweetback running, but for the fact that Sweetback looked tired but free. Tre looks trapped and desperate. Putting other quick cuts of the scenes involving police officers in the trailer shows the audience that they are one of the predators in that hunt. Policework, then, is narrated as being about the pursuit, capture, and killing of young black men.30 In Menace II Society, there is no doubt that the primary antagonists in black men’s lives are police officers. The Hughes Brothers’s origin story for Caine begins with a flashback of Caine’s father. The technical lighting, the music editing, and the costuming show the audience that Caine’s father was a black illegal drug dealer in the 1970s, much like Priest in Super Fly. At first you think that this is to 320

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tell the audience that Caine was influenced by his father to join a gang in L.A. But then throughout the movie, the Brothers show the audience that the eventual arrest and imprisonment of his father traumatizes Caine. In a later scene, Caine talks to his father across the glass wall in a prison’s visiting room. The dialogue and the imagery are very affective at narrating Caine’s pain. For instance, the camera closeups of their tears and the actors’ defeated body postures clearly demonstrate that Caine is being denied his humanity by the prison system along with his father. The actors even mirror each other’s movements, at times with their hands divided by the glass, a film technique most often used to inextricably link the two characters’ experiences. Finally, in a scene set up to surprise the audience, two rival L.A. gangs support each other against brutal police officers. When Caine and his friend Sharif are driving, they are pulled over by two police officers who kidnap them, brutalize them, and then release them in an L.A. neighborhood with a Latinx gang warring with black gangs. Again, the Brothers make sure that the audience understands what Caine and Sharif are feeling in these moments with close-ups of their terrified and torn faces and vocalizations of their bodies’ pain. A plot-twist, though, has members of the Latinx gang saving them. The release scene begins in the dark with an ominous setting of approaching Latinx gang members and ends with the gang members driving Caine and Sharif to the local hospital. Part of the audience is evidently meant to be as surprised as the friends, although many who have experienced life in these parts of L.A. would be aware of the many ways in which the police officers there have tried to incite violence between gangs in order to stop them from joining together against the officers and the ways in which the young men in these gangs were resisting that. Like making the police officer who threatens Tre be black in Boyz N the Hood, this clarifies that the police officers try to use non-white people, regardless of their role in the system, in the service of white supremacy.

Conclusion Both New Black Realist and Blaxploitation films, then, include particular attention to the role that police officers play in the lives of primarily black men living in urban centers. In so doing, they are invaluable primary artifacts in the history of policing in the United States. They are also part of the longer story of the ways in which US police officers’ use of brutality haunts black American men’s experiences. Neither of them attend to the haunting of black women, although many even in their own time did. Pam Grier’s performance in several Blaxploitation films, explored in film historian Yvonne D. Sim’s work Women of Blaxploitation (2006), writer and director Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust, and the feature film Set It Off (1996) all attend to black women’s experiences of police brutality.31 They are also both complex examples of the way in which black filmmaking has and does contribute to the pursuit of black liberation from white supremacy. As bell hooks notes, “changing the way we see images is clearly one way to change the world.”32 Undoubtedly and as usual, hooks writes the truth.

Notes 1 This chapter comes from work I conducted over the course of several years in preparation for my book; He Thinks He’s Down: White Appropriations of Black Masculinities in the Civil Rights Era (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020). While this chapter focuses on black male artists exclusively, this is not a reflection of a lack of black women in black liberation movements, or in popular black films, or in filmmaking in these two eras, or as victims of anti-black police brutality. Instead, it is a reflection of the misogyny and anti-black racism that kept and keeps black women out of the center of these narratives and continues to keep the stories of black women out of the archives. I do not take up these absences in detail here, but nor do I try to avoid them or ignore the power of their silence. I can only hope that I have not failed completely in that task.

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Katharine Bausch 2 Shaka King, dir., Judas and the Black Messiah, performances by Jesse Plemons and LaKeith Stanfield (Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 2021). 3 “George Floyd: What Happened in the Final Moment of His Life,” BBC News, 16 July 2020, https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52861726. 4 Seth Mydans, “Failure of City Blamed for Riot in Los Angeles,” The New York Times, 22 October 1992, https://web.archive.org/web/20181123043203/https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/22/us/failures-ofcity-blamed-for-riot-in-los-angeles.html. 5 Gordon Parks, dir. Shaft, performance by Richard Roundtree (Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1971). 6 Melvin van Peebles, dir., Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasssss Song, performance by Melvin van Peebles (Detroit: Cinemation Industries, 1971). 7 These terms for stereotypical constructions of black masculinity in Hollywood film are taken from Donald Bogle’s foundational study of black Americans in film, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 2001). Bogle argues that the 12minute film Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) was only the first of dozens of early US films that propagated stereotypes of black people. During times of racial conflict, the Buck was predominant; in the 1920s and 1930s the general levity of films made the Coon popular; and in the late 1930s, economic insecurity made the loyal and steadfast Tom popular. The marginalization of black Americans in the film industry contributed to the perpetuation of stereotypes. While there were a few black actors, there were almost none on the technical side of filmmaking. Some black Americans, mostly men, found success in writing film scores, especially during the Jazz Age, and a few black American actors were able to move into screenwriting, directing, and producing. But generally, anti-black racism in Hollywood and the exclusion of black Americans from craft unions kept them out of many positions in the industry. 8 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, 101, 118, 137. 9 By this point, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had ordered the desegregation of movie theaters in the South, pointing to the role that movies and Hollywood played in maintaining white supremacy in the United States. Many of the off-screen workers in the industry fought to keep their unions segregated. Partially because of this, the increase in employment of black Americans in Hollywood industries in this period was marginal. 10 Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: the African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 82. 11 Ibid., 69. 12 W.R. Grant, Post-Soul Cinema: Discontinuities, Innovations, and Breakpoints 1970–2005 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 35. 13 Jesse Rhines, Black Film/White Money (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 43–46. 14 Huey P. Newton, “He Won’t Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analysis of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 19 June 1971. In contrast, many white and black critics attacked the genre. Some white film critics saw it as a direct threat to white people. New York Post critic Archer Winsten argued that “whites would have to be masochistic to accept the unrelenting portrait of their fellows.” Critiques also came from within the black community. Lerone Bennet of Ebony magazine explicitly stated: “It is necessary to say that nobody ever fucked his way to freedom. And it is mischievous and reactionary finally for anyone to suggest to black people in 1971 that they are going to be able to screw their way across the Red Sea. Fucking will not set you free. If fucking freed, black people would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago.” See Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks; and Guerrero, Framing Blackness. 15 Rhines, Black Film/White Money, 41–46. 16 “Unruly Movie Crowd Injures Two Policemen,” New York Times, 25 October 1971. 17 Philip Fenty and Sig Shore, “Special Features: One Last Deal,” Super Fly, dir. Gordon Parks Jr. (1972; Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 2004), DVD. 18 Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasssss Song, written by Melvin van Peebles. 19 Super Fly, trailer (1972). 20 Todd Boyd and Warrington Hudlin, “Special Features: One Last Deal.” 21 John Singleton, dir. Boyz N the Hood, performance by Laurence Fishburne (Los Angeles, Columbia, 1991). 22 Preston H. Smith, “Self-Help, Black Conservatives, and the Reemergence of Black Privatism,” in Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality (Boulder: Westview, 1999). 23 Ibid., 288. 24 William L. van Deburg, Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9. 25 Ibid., 172.

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Police Violence in Film 26 Singleton, Boyz N the Hood, performance by Fishburne. 27 Rhines, Black Film/White Money, 81. 28 Menace II Society is one of my personal favorites of film that I analyze here (along with Super Fly). Since objectivity is an impossible and unworthy goal, I have no doubt that this could come through in the work. 29 The Hughes Brothers, Menace II Society, performance by Charles S. Houhgton (Los Angeles; New Line, 1993). 30 Menace II Society, trailer (1993). 31 F. Gary Gray, Set it Off (Los Angeles; New Line, 1996); and Yvonne D. Sims, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture (New York: McFarland & Co., 2006). 32 bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008).

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24 POLICE BRUTALITY AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT James E. Smethurst

The issue of “police brutality,” a longstanding term denoting unjust and unjustified police violence, gained particular prominence in the Black Arts era. The representation of police violence against Black people, who often saw (and see) the police more as an occupying army in their communities or as gatekeepers often brutally denying them access to what Malcolm X called “human rights” than as providers of impartial law, was a central one for the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This violence could be strangely personal and visceral on an individual level and yet weirdly removed in a more systemic way. In addition to the treatment of policing by visual artists, theater workers, poets, musicians, fiction writers, and other artists who were undoubtedly part of the movement, Black Arts influenced the emergence of Black popular culture, especially Blaxploitation movies and popular fiction by such writers as Chester Himes, Nathan Heard, and James Baldwin, in which the police and their misdeeds were a central feature, often linking the police to organized crime. In part, Black Arts activists shared a widespread sentiment of urban African American communities about the prevalence of police violence, a sentiment that Black people were increasingly willing to act on in mass ways with little precedent in the United States in the 1960s. With the exceptions of the Harlem “riots” of 1935 and 1943, the sorts of eruptions of Black anger that characterized the “long hot summers” of the 1960s were new to most urban centers. Again with the exception of Harlem in 1935 and 1943, most “race riots” prior to the 1960s were the result of white mobs attacking Black people and invading Black communities—though, as in Chicago in 1919 and Detroit in 1943, African Americans often organized and fought back. Virtually all of the urban uprisings of the 1960s before the wave following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 were set off by an incident of police violence and/or unjust arrest—and in the case of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 by police and Klan attacks on Civil Rights workers. Of course, there were other causes of the uprisings: poor housing, lack of job opportunities, inferior education, unequal access to health care, and so on for Black people, but the conflict with the police was the match that lit the fuse. Participants in the Black Arts Movement were certainly not the first African American artists to take up the theme of police violence, and both as an issue in of itself and as a metonym of white subjugation of Black people by any means necessary. In the 1949 Langston Hughes story “Bop,” Hughes’s famed Harlem everyman “Simple” claims that the sounds of bebop are drawn from a police officer beating a Black man with a club: “You must not know where Bop comes from,” said Simple, astonished at my ignorance. “I do not know,” I said. “Where?” “From the police,” said Simple. “What do you mean, 324

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from the police?” “From the police beating Negroes’ heads,” said Simple. “Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says, ‘bop! bop! … be-bop … mop! … bop!’ “That Negro hollers, ‘Ooool-ya-koo! Ou-o-o!’ “Old Cop just keeps on, ‘mop! mop! … be-bop! … mop!’ That’s where Be-Bop came from, beaten right out of some Negro’s head into them horns and saxophones and piano keys that plays it. Do you call that nonsense?”1 This connection of urban Black experience, and the collective oppression of Black people, to expressive culture, linking the grassroots to the avant-garde was a hallmark of Hughes’s work, especially from the 1940s on, and a key forebear of the Black Arts Movement. Nevertheless, the Black Arts Movement powerfully inscribed police violence as an instrument of racial domination, and Black resistance to that violence, in the public imagination. Black Arts was, paradoxically, an avant-garde arts movement that sought to reach a popular audience rather than a small coterie. Black Arts activities and institutions appeared in almost every community and every college campus in the United States where there was an appreciable number of Black people. While there was communication and often cooperation between these various regional and local manifestations of Black Arts (workshops, theaters, bookstores, galleries, schools, poetry readings, murals, concerts, dance companies, visual arts galleries, museums, journals, newspapers, and so on), each community had its particular character. The political beliefs of Black Arts participants varied from different strains of revolutionary Marxism to neo-Africanist cultural nationalism—and sometimes combined those stances in seemingly unlikely ways (at least if one considers Black nationalism and Black Marxism to be inherently opposed). However, despite this range of often conflicting beliefs, there was a generally shared concept of African American liberation and of the right of African Americans to determine their own destiny. There was also usually some common notion of the development or recovery of an authentic national Black culture that was linked to an existing African American folk or popular culture. In short, this culture was to be mass, revolutionary, and paradoxically traditional. The Black Arts Movement represented the uprisings sparked by police violence (and the system for which this violence stood) as popular struggles for Black liberation and self-determination. These struggles were seen not only as political and physical but also as cultural and symbolic. Of course, for Black Power and Black Arts activists, many of whom were familiar with both Malcolm X and Antonio Gramsci (whose work first became available in English in the late 1950s), the political was cultural and the cultural was political. When Malcolm X asked “Who taught you how to hate yourself?” in speeches, he was making an essentially cultural argument. That is to say that white ideological control was significantly exercised through expressive culture: film, theater, the mass media (especially television), visual art, and literature. Frequently, Black artists used the conflict between the police and the Black community to stand stereotypes of Black people contained in US popular culture on their heads. For example, Jeff Donaldson’s 1963 proto-Black Arts painting Aunt Jemima and the Pillsbury Doughboy depicts a Black female domestic worker, recalling the revolt of such workers in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956, resisting the attack of a policeman. The Black woman may well be a Civil Rights protestor. Basically, Donaldson, a founder of the crucial Black Arts visual arts collective AFRICOBRA, humanizes the image of a mythical Black cook adorning the boxes of baking products on supermarket shelves, revivifying it as a symbol of Black pride and self-assertion and paying tribute to the inspirational lead of the Black domestic worker—much like Langston Hughes in his Alberta K. Johnson poems, Gwendolyn Brooks in her Hattie Scott poems, and Alice Childress in her Mildred stories did before. Visual artist Betty Saar’s assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) and painter Joe Overstreet’s The New Jemima (1965), both feature the image of Jemima with guns, albeit without direct reference to the police. 325

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Black Arts activists, particularly visual artists, often took Black Arts and Black Power militants themselves as the iconic subject of representations of police brutality and repression. This was not surprising since the political and cultural activities of Black Arts and Black Power brought their leaders and rank and file into direct conflict with the police. However, the representation of such violence also served as a means to connect the grassroots African American experience to that of the younger Black artists, reminding community members that the artists and activists did not exist in a space outside of theirs. Boston visual artist Dana Chandler became a sort of painter laureate of such work, as exemplified in “Fred Hampton’s Door #2,” featuring a bullet-ridden replica of the door of the Chicago Black Panther leader killed in a police assault on his apartment while he slept, an attack that killed another Panther Mark Clark and wounded several others. Amiri Baraka’s beating and jailing at the hands of the Newark police during the uprising of 1967, too, became an iconic subject for Black artists, as seen in Chandler’s “LeRoi Jones: Arrested.” Graphic artist Emory Douglas’s work, which frequently appeared in the Black Panther newspaper that he also designed and laid out, regularly addressed police violence against Black activists, as in his poster for Panther activist Bobby Hutton, who was killed by the Oakland police in 1968. One can see the many literary and music tributes to George Jackson, the Black Marxist “Soledad Brother” who was killed in 1971 during an attempted prison break in this light, too. Jackson’s collected letters from prison, Soledad Brother (1970) became a key Black Power text. Again, his imprisonment and death at the hands of correctional officers did not so much set him apart as connect him to a larger Black male experience of state violence and incarceration. The general Black understanding that police violence was not fundamentally an encounter between individual African Americans and individual “bad cops” but a key instrument of systematic oppression gave Black Arts inversions of the power relations between Black subjects and white police a particular power, at once humorous, thrilling, cathartic, and ultimately liberatory. One might see part of the appeal of such inversions as a carnivalesque rupture of normal social relations, a sort of lord-of-misrule moment in which the top is on the bottom, serving as a sort of pressure release from a social safety valve. However, more typically these inversions invite a Black audience to imagine a different world where such an inversion was more or less permanent—or where once occurring, the world never really returns to its previous position. For example, poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez’s 1968 play The Bronx Is Next enacts a play within a play in which a white cop roleplays a Black Harlemite and Black revolutionaries white police, again turning social types upside down within the context of the 1960s urban rebellions. Black resistance to the police and police violence against the community, then, is shown as not simply a protest against racist policing, as important as that is, but as a rebellion against a larger system of oppression and dehumanization and as a move toward collective self-determination. Of course, part of the appeal of this portion of the play is that a Black audience (the audience at nearly all the early performances of the play) would find it funny in an exhilarating way: CHARLES:

jumps up-looks elated. Then we’ll jest be standing on the corner talking and you c’mon by. Oh yeah, maybe you should be running. OK? CHARLES: ROLAND and JIMMY move to one side of the stage-the WHITE COP moves to the other side and begins to run toward them. CHARLES: Hey slow down boy. What’s your hurry? WHITE COP: stops running. Yes. What’s wrong officer? JIMMY: Where you running to so fast? WHITE COP: I just felt like running officer. I was feeling good so I decided to run. ROLAND: Oh you were feeling good. So you decided to run. Now ain’t that a load of shit if I ever heard one.2 The elation here is from an enactment of the dream of actually having and exercising power. It is worth pausing here to remember that the play, like other Black Arts expressions, was not a lecture, but a work 326

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of art designed to engage, entertain and give pleasure to a Black audience as it inspired and informed. One might consider it a reversal of the usual tropes and meanings of racial impersonation that ultimately derived from minstrelsy. That is to say that this turned upside the long-standing humor for white audiences of white performers acting “Black” in various ways. Those ways often drew on the trope of the tramp or bumpkin “Jim Crow” who was utterly unwhite, displaying a complete and natural inability and ambition to adhere to what might be thought of as the emotional, intellectual, physical, and moral codes of whiteness and on the trope of the dandy, “Zip Coon,” who aspired to such whiteness but failed spectacularly. In either instance, this acting “Black,” included the play within a play routine of white artists imitating Black people imitating white people. The key to the humor in both cases is the Black failure to be or become white, whether through a fundamentally alien (to whiteness) constitution, lack of effort, or misplaced aspiration. In the context of the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow eras, this humor, pointed up, among other things, Black unsuitability for citizenship fundamentally associated with whiteness. That is to say, as Malcolm X pointed out (and such Afro-Pessimists as Frank Wilderson remind us) to be a “Negro” (or as Malcolm X said “a so-called Negro”) is to be marked as a slave, a noncitizen, and (in the US context) a non-human. To be “white” (or “a so-called white man”) is to be a master, a citizen, and a human. In other words, “Negro” (and even “Black”) and “white” denote a power relation and structure of human and non-human, citizen and non-citizen rather than an essential character. The complication is that this structure is represented as cultural, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. This is all to say that the Black revolutionary Larry’s elation at the start of the roleplaying of racial inversion in Sanchez’s play is significantly due to its embodiment of taking and having power. The revolutionary very successfully acts “white” in the sense of exercising power over the “white cop” in the play within the play—so successfully that the “White Cop” desperately wants the act to end, to go back to normal. However, instead, the act becomes real as, the play implies, the “White Cop” is killed: WHITE COP:

But what have I done? I was just running. This is not legal you know. You have no right to do this … ROLAND: You are perfectly correct. We have no right to do this. Why I even have no right to hit you but I am. Hits WHITE COP with gun. WHITE COP: falls down. Gets up. Now wait a minute. That is going just a little too far and … CHARLES: I said why were you running down that street boy? WHITE COP: Look. Enough is enough. I’m ready to stop-I’m tired. JIMMY: What’s wrong n–r boy-can’t you answer simple questions when you’re asked them. Oh I know what’s wrong. You need me to help you to remember. Hits WHITE COP with gun. WHITE COP: Have you gone crazy? Stop this. You stop it now or there will be consequences. ROLAND: What did you steal black boy -we can’t find it on you but we know you got it hidden someplace. Hits him again. WHITE COP: Oh my god. Stop it … This can’t be happening to me. Look-I’m still me. It was only make believe. CHARLES: Let’s take him in. He won’t cooperate. He won’t answer the question. Maybe he needs more help than the three of us are giving him. JIMMY: I don’t know. Looks like he’s trying to escape to me. Take out your guns. That n–r is trying to run. Look at him. Boy, don’t run. Stop. I say if you don’t stop I’ll have to shoot. WHITE COP: Are you all mad? I’m not running. I’m on my knees. Stop it. This can’t continue. Why … ROLAND: You ain’t shit boy. You black. You a n–r we caught running down the street-running and stealing like all the n–rs around him. CHARLES: Now you trying to escape–and we warned you three times already. You only get three warnings then …3

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If whiteness essentially means power and blackness a lack of power, then this role-playing here also symbolically inverts the types and tropes of racial impersonation in the ways that the revolutionary successfully acts “white.” This echoes Clay closing in his final soliloquy in Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman in which Clay warns of the dangers of preaching a version of “whiteness” to the nonwhite peoples of the world: But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who’s probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these n–rs. Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don’t make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they’ll begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you’ll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can accept them into your fold, as half‐white trusties late of the subject peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those ex‐coons will be stand‐up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they’ll murder you. They’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They’ll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from your bones, in sanitary isolation.4 Of course, as it does in other ways, particularly with respect to gender roles and the relations of Black men and Black women, one can see in Sanchez’s play at least some thought about the dangers and complexities of assuming “whiteness” in all its racism, masculinism, and misogyny. What does it mean to basically accept the cultural terms that come with “whiteness” (and masculinity) as an expression of holding and exercising power? Amiri Baraka’s one-act play Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself (1967) poses armed resistance to police violence as a marker of Black political, psychological, and spiritual evolution. In Arm Yourself, the police are not simply an occupying army subjugating Black people, but an instrument of genocide, which is seen as the longer-term goal of the white power structure. Recognizing that purpose is a condition of survival. The main Black characters in the play consist of “First Brother,” “Second Brother,” and “Sister,” the wife of the Second Brother. (Two minor characters, “Paul” and “Woman,” also have brief cameos.) The play largely consists of a dialogue/debate/fight between the First Brother, who is disgusted by police violence but opposes an armed response to that violence, and the Second Brother who has a gun and sees such a response as the only viable answer to the police. Much inspired by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (with which Baraka would later fall out), the gun becomes a metonym for Black power. The argument is heightened when Paul, who has been shot by the police, staggers in and dies. Paul’s offense besides being Black was that he attempted to interfere with the police when they assaulted the Sister. The First Brother rejects the Second Brother’s claim that only when they pick up the gun will they be able to have real power and truly defend themselves and their women: FIRST BROTHER:

(Helping Sister up): How we gonna protect the women … we don’t have no

power. SECOND BROTHER:

And you never will … this is power … until you, we, get enough heart to walk with this power … to be men, brother, then we deserve just what we get. Can you dig that? You don’t have no heart … can you dig that?5

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The gun in Baraka’s play becomes not simply a tool by which African Americans can resist police violence, but a marker of Black consciousness, of the political and psychological transformation (or of the failure to make such an evolution from “negro” to “Black”): SECOND BROTHER:

Oh, you gonna try to knuckle with me, but you can’t get hot with them devils … you really are the true negro of negroes … the king of negroes … old raghead … sugarlips, heself …6

As the First Brother grapples with the Second Brother, the police reappear. Ignoring the Sister’s pleas to stop fighting, both men are unable to resist the police, who first kill the man with the gun and then the other man (and the woman). The police exit kicking the dead bodies, laughing, and talking about gas chambers. In this, the play resembles Baraka’s transitional Black Arts play Dutchman in which a failure to fully follow through on the implications of recognizing the genocidal nature of white power leads to the death of the Black protagonist. Similarly, what the failure also represents is the failure of Black men, or some section of Black men, to fully assume the responsibilities of true Black manhood, including the paramount imperative to protect Black women. This masculinist vision of Black gender resonated with Baraka’s 1967 adoption of Maulana Karenga’s Kawaida philosophy in which men were seen as natural leaders of the Black community (and the family) and women as not equal, but “complementary.” (Both Baraka and Karenga would renounce this position to varying degrees in the 1970s.) However, it is also worth noting that this vision, though influential, coexisted and conflicted with representations of Black women as active fighters as seen in Jeff Donaldson’s painting or the many visual arts renderings of Angela Davis as an iconic Black Power figure, a figure whose national status significantly turned on her conflict with the police and the criminal justice system. The police are not just present in Black Arts era art as prison guards or an occupying army in the ghetto, but also as part of the apparatus that supervises and literally polices Black people when they venture outside the ghetto. In James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, perhaps Baldwin’s fiction most clearly in a Black Arts modality, one of the protagonists, Fonny, is sent to prison on a false rape charge engineered by a racist white officer Bell. As Gabrielle Bellot pointed out, one thing that the 2019 film version underemphasized was how Bell represented a system and larger machinery of repression, how the racist violence of the police was both personal and impersonal. Yes, Bell had a particular hatred of Fonny, but that was because Fonny resisted him and his authority. The book notes that Bell was said to have already killed a Black man. So Bell’s hatred and racism was personal, but for impersonal reasons of the transgression of racial boundaries, a transgression that Fonny and his partner Tish, the other main protagonist of the novel, had already enacted through their presence in the largely white Greenwich Village to which they had moved from Harlem.7 And while it may have been a seemingly personal animus that led Bell to frame Fonny, Bell was aided and abetted by a system of courts, police, prosecutors, judges, prisons, and so on, who had no direct knowledge of Fonny. While Nathan Heard’s 1968 Howard Street centers on the ghetto of Newark’s Central Ward, it resembles Baldwin’s novel in that the police are individually corrupt, venal, and brutal and yet part of a larger systemic violence against the poor Black residents of Howard Street, driving them toward self-destruction though heroin, alcohol, crime, and aggression against each other. One thing that distinguishes Heard’s novel is that the police are not all white. The police officer who features most prominently in Howard Street, Slim McNair, is Black. He is described as an “honest enough cop.” “Honest enough cop” here is an indictment of the system in that it really means averagely corrupt and violent. McNair has a stake in prostitution on Howard Street, takes bribes, and brutalizes a young Black suspect in the local precinct house. Again, he is not unusually corrupt and violent, just

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averagely so. McNair calls the suspect, Jimmy Johnson, a “n—r” in front of two white policemen. Johnson reflects that he had “often heard of black cops putting on this n—r show for their white colleagues; calling black suspects n—r’s as if the name didn’t apply to themselves as well. It often shocked more confessions out of suspects than the beatings did. Worse than this, he knew that the black cops tended to take their frustrations out on black suspects only.”8 In short, the system constrains McNair so that while seeming personally motivated, his corruption and his verbal and physical violence toward Black people is effectively “white.” In that sense, as Black Power and Black Arts activists frequently averred, Heard argues that police brutality is not simply an expression of personal racial animus, but that racism, and indeed whiteness, is part of a system and racist police brutality is an expression of that system not simply dependent on the race or the ostensible social attitudes of the individual police officer. This depiction of police brutality as part of a system found its way into the broader Black popular culture, especially the Blaxploitation film genre. In many respects, Blaxploitation is hard to categorize because, like R&B in music, it can be seen as more of a marketing strategy (films created for an urban, Black, significantly younger, and male audience) rather than a coherent genre. It drew on existing genres popular among younger, Black, male audiences (hard-boiled detective/noir, gangster, horror, martial arts, low comedy, soft porn, Western, and so on). They were not movement films and, in fact, often depicted Black Power groups as essentially insincere and opportunistic thugs (Super Fly [1972]) or as well-meaning, but ineffectual (Shaft [1971]). One thing that almost all Blaxploitation films did have in common, whatever older genres they sampled, is that their protagonists were not movement people, but essentially super-individualists who triumphed over the white power structure, often embodied in the police and organized crime (which, as in Super Fly, were sometimes more or less the same thing) through their wits and their fists (and guns) and their sexual prowess. Nevertheless, scenes of police violence against Black people, most graphically in the beating of Freddie in Super Fly, were iconic Blaxploitation moments where the character of the violence was not that of the over-zealous repression of crime, but that of a criminal gang eliminating its competition. Much as in The Bronx Is Next, the excitement generated by these films, whose climaxes often brought cheering Black audiences to their feet, was based on a role reversal so that the police and/or white gangsters were at the receiving end of violence—generally being outfought physically after being outwitted by the protagonist. The most immediate impact of the Black Arts representation of police brutality and repressive police, both directly and through Blaxploitation, was in hip hop, maintaining a sonic (and significantly visual) bridge between the expressive culture of the 1960s and 1970s and the era of Black Lives Matter, particularly with the rise of the “Conscious” and “Gangster” genres in the 1980s. While what might be thought of as the earliest overtly political rap song, Bother D’s 1980 “How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise?” only obliquely refers to police brutality, the first widely popular “conscious” hip hop work, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982) featured a short coda in which the group is arrested by the police for being Black, male, and on the street corner. This code is preceded by two parts: an impressionistic, first-person catalog of ghetto problems and indignities which takes up the majority of the performance, and a tightly compressed second-person story of a young man who grows up in the ghetto admiring and emulating various sorts of criminals ultimately to be raped and commit suicide in prison. One might see the coda and the story of the young man as presenting a sort of dialectic in which the cautionary tale of the young man is complicated by the coda’s enactment of the proposition that Black people, especially young Black men, are criminalized for simply being and acting as if they were free. In short, while the very intentional conditions of the ghetto might impel Black youth toward acts of criminality, the criminalization of Black people, again particularly young Black men, is about control and domination, not serving and protecting.

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From this point on, police brutality and the resistance to brutal policing becomes a recurring theme and trope in hip hop, including artists not normally considered as “conscious” artists as such, in such iconic pieces as NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” (1998) and KRS-One’s “Sound of da Police” (1993). This strain of hip hop follows Black Arts in using police brutality and rebellion against it to affirm both the existence of the Black individual as subject (and a Black collective, people, or nation as a subject) attempting self-determination. A vivid example of this strain in the twenty-first century is Lil Wayne’s “God Bless Amerika” (2013), particularly as seen and heard in the music video of the piece, and its representation of the attempted new urban order of post-Katrina New Orleans and Lil Wayne’s native Hollygrove neighborhood. While Lil Wayne is not generally considered a “political” hip hop artist, his spelling of “Amerika” is a direct invocation of Black Power/Black Arts and New Left rendering of the name in a way that connects it to Nazism. In the video one sees white riot police—that is a mass of white police in the mode of controlling, repressing, punishing a collective, a community—charging out of the fog into the everyday post-Katrina Hollygrove community life of barbecue, basketball, smiling children, double dutch, bicycles and expressions of Black working class familial love as well as abandoned and ruined buildings. While the police are the visible agents of the state of the moment, we understand that they stand in, also for judges, jail, prison guards, politicians, and, ultimately, the ruling class. “My country ’tis of thee, “Sweet land of kill ’em all and let ’em die, ” Lil Wayne declares, reminding the viewer and listener that Katrina and its aftermath was in many respects not only more a human-caused disaster than a natural one, but also a tool of motivated class and racial domination instead of just not so benign neglect (the difference between the formulations of “kill ‘em all” and “let ‘em die”—though the two are not mutually exclusive in Lil Wayne’s view). The community, again a working-class Black community, is shown defiantly and resolutely waiting, prepared to resist both culturally and directly. They already know that Black lives matter, their lives matter. The US flag goes back up covering it all up. We are not living in 1968. Still, “I can’t breathe,” among the last words of George Floyd as he was choked by the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin (mirroring the words of Eric Garner, a Black man choked to death by New York policemen in 2014) has become a rallying cry. That cry certainly raises persistent police violence against Black people as an important social problem in the United States, but it also uses police brutality and brutal policing as a metonym for a racialized system of political, social, economic, cultural, emotional, and spiritual domination that cannot be adequately addressed through normal political channels, a figuration that was significantly shaped by the Black Arts Movement. As Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor recently wrote, “It didn’t matter then [the 1960s], as it doesn’t matter now, whether white society approves or disapproves; what mattered was that formal mechanisms for social change failed to function, compelling AfricanAmericans to act on their own behalf.”9 Even if the times are different, the Black Arts Movement and its iconic images of the violent encounters between Black people and the police as emblems of systemic oppression, African American resistance to that oppression, and the imperative of selfdetermination inform the social understanding of both the killings of Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery and the Black Lives Matter movement of the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 Langston Hughes, The Early Simple Stories (The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 7) (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 228. 2 John Bracey, Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst, editors, SOS: Calling All Black People, A Black Arts Movement Reader (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 523. 3 Bracey, Sanchez, and Smethurst, 523–24.

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James E. Smethurst 4 Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 98. 5 Amiri Baraka, Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself (Newark, New Jersey: Jihad Publications, 1967), 7. 6 Baraka, Arm Yourself, 8. 7 Gabrielle Bellot, “What Barry Jenkins Missed in His Adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk,” Lit Hub (February 8, 2019), https://lithub.com/what-barry-jenkins-missed-in-his-adaptation-of-if-beale-streetcould-talk/. 8 Nathan Heard, Howard Street (New York: Dial Press, 1968). 9 “Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People.” New York Times May 29, 2020.

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25 FROM DRAGNET TO BROOKLYN 99 How Cop Shows Excuse, Exalt, and Erase Police Brutality Susan A. Bandes1

As the narrator intoned at the beginning of each episode of Dragnet: “The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” This famous tagline captures both the allure of the cop show and some of its problematic premises: that each crime investigation is a freestanding story capable of resolution in a single episode of television, that the cop’s point of view is, quite simply, the “truth,” and that the guilty are easily distinguishable from the innocent. The long-running template established by shows like Dragnet has proved to be an exceptionally poor vehicle for telling stories of police brutality, largely by design. And the failure of cop shows to reflect the reality of police brutality matters for more than just reasons of artistic verisimilitude. It matters because these shows serve as the major source of information about policing for much of the citizenry. In purporting to reflect the reality of policing, they also shape public attitudes, public expectations, and even law and policy. This chapter will begin with an account of the impact of cop shows (or police procedurals, in more formal parlance) on public perceptions of crime and law enforcement. As the chapter will then recount, this shift in perception was no accident: the police procedural began as a project endorsed—and in many respects, conceived—by law enforcement agencies to transform the image of bumbling Keystone Cops into the paragon of straight-arrow Sergeant Joe Friday. The transformation has taken many shapes, including warm-hearted Andy Griffith, morally grounded Frank Furillo, and even ‘racist but lovable’ Andy Sipowitz and ethically-compromised Vic Mackey, but its central premises have remained unchallenged. When brutal or corrupt cops are depicted on the small screen, they are generally depicted as aberrations—bad apples in an otherwise clean barrel. But in fact, brutal cops are rarely depicted at all. When questionable police conduct is portrayed, the conduct is carefully positioned on a continuum between allowable and excessive force, and usually, it falls comfortably on the “allowable” end of the spectrum. This positioning frames police use of force, even when mistaken, as an act taken in the righteous pursuit of justice, and the wrongfulness of the conduct as simply a matter of degree. The chapter concludes that cop shows fall short in depicting police brutality both in its narrower definition—action taken to degrade and dehumanize—and in its broader definition—the use of excessive force. Part I explains how the medium of television in general and the cop show genre in particular work to construct and transmit social, political, and legal norms. Part II illustrates these dynamics, exploring the success of the police procedural in valorizing law enforcement—both the job and those who do it. Part III addresses the definitional issue, noting that police brutality is sometimes used as a synonym for excessive force, and sometimes defined more narrowly to encompass actions DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-33

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taken to degrade and dehumanize. It argues that, under either definition, the depiction of police brutality in cop shows falls grievously short. Part IV explores the mechanisms by which police violence is erased or rendered unproblematic. The first mechanism, discussed in Section A, is the tendency to turn a blind eye to the systemic racial bias in policing, and even to race in general. The second mechanism, discussed in Section B, is the depiction of police violence as rare, and as either justified or understandable. Finally, Part V asks whether cop shows can do better to depict the endemic problems with policing and to begin an informed debate about possible solutions. It considers whether the longstanding flaws of the genre flow from the limitations of the television medium itself. In this regard, The Wire is instructive. The show managed to brilliantly illustrate systemic dysfunction, and yet it failed to depict the prevalent, often casual infliction of police brutality in over-policed neighborhoods like West Baltimore. It also fell short in its treatment of reform movements. Its lack of attention to these issues squarely raises the question: why do even the best media portrayals of policing so rarely depict the reality of police brutality, much less confront its root causes? The chapter concludes that the failures of the police procedural to grapple with accountability and reform are not baked into the medium. The field is rife with possibilities for expanding the universe of empathic engagement, and for illustrating both the harms of police violence and the difficult tradeoffs inherent in the effort to reimagine public safety.2

Cop Shows and the Construction and Transmission of Law Enforcement Norms Television has become our culture’s principal storyteller, educator, and shaper of the popular imagination. It has played an enormously influential role in educating the US public about the criminal justice system. After all, the majority of Americans have had little or no experience with the actual criminal justice system, but have long been bombarded with images of crime, policing, and punishment on TV.3 Although the legal question in a court of law might be whether police conduct was objectively reasonable,4 dictated by custom or policy,5 or part of a pattern or practice,6 there are certain deeply embedded cultural assumptions that inevitably influence these legal inquiries. Legal decision-makers, like the rest of us, make sense of and ultimately evaluate police conduct by attempting to situate it within a narrative.7 If a cop violated the law, can we understand and even sympathize with the mistaken action? If we take the cop’s perspective, we are likely to do so. Was the act an aberration or part of a pattern? If we don’t live in a police-saturated neighborhood, we are likely to assume that acts of unprovoked force are aberrant. What were the counter-forces the officer was acting against? If the law enforcement agency is presented as part of the thin blue line that separates civilization from the forces of mortal danger and chaos, chances are we will forgive a substantial amount of lawbreaking—especially when the legal limitations are framed as silly and hyper-technical. The assumptions that underlie legal constructions of police conduct are heavily influenced by the narrative tropes and depictions that imbue our culture.8 It has been well documented that tv news tends to report crime from the vantage point of law enforcement,9 and to present it as a decontextualized series of violent incidents perpetrated mainly against strangers,10 in which Black men are far more likely to be perpetrators than police officers or victims.11 It has also been documented that this skewed depiction has played a powerful role in creating a public perception that crime is committed mainly by Black men, and, as a corollary, that Black men tend to be violent and dangerous.12 It might be tempting to believe that cop shows don’t contribute to that harm because they are fictional works. It’s worth noting that “documentary” shows like COPS blur the boundary between news and fictional shows,13 and that these shows have taught audiences to valorize cops, dehumanize alleged perpetrators, and normalize problematic police conduct.14 But more to the point, it turns out that boundaries between fact and fiction do not matter much when it comes to shaping the consciousness of tv viewers. When (often racialized)15 tropes about violent perpetrators, and airbrushed depictions of law enforcement,16 are relentlessly 334

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broadcast,17 viewers do not tend to keep them in separate categories. All these representations contribute to a composite message that becomes very hard to counter.18 The tropes we’ve absorbed from television are now an inextricable part of our cultural knowledge. The law enforcement agent’s point of view is presented as the sole relevant focus. Since cops are the recurring characters, only they are granted interiority, ambivalence, the ability to grow and change, families whose needs must be weighed against career decisions, and all the other markers of a fully realized character. Against that backdrop, acts of brutality can be framed as aberrant at worst, and even as understandable or necessary. Crime victims tend to be humanized just enough to offer a ready target for viewer sympathy (thereby providing another way to highlight the salutary role of the police), but not enough to acknowledge that victims, too, are complex characters—who may sometimes also be suspects or even perpetrators.19 And those subjected to brutality are depicted not as complex actors, not as victims, but as two-dimensional, single-episode suspects and perpetrators without history, interiority, or families to feed. In this schema, the human costs of brutality are erased. The focus on a police-centered point of view does more than just humanize individual cops and their families. It also renders a portrait of policing as a close-knit brotherhood, bound together by a sense of loyalty and shared purpose that are given urgency (and even a kind of nobility) by the everpresent danger of the job.20 The sense of looming danger shared by police and policing families is vividly depicted. It can be called upon to explain a wide swathe of conduct and misconduct. But no parallel depiction exists of the communities that bear the brunt of over-policing. There is no exploration of the shared sense of fear and trepidation that haunt police-saturated communities in which innocent actions can lead, without warning, to terrifying and even fatal consequences.21 When disciplinary investigations, constitutional limitations like Miranda warnings or warrant requirements, or other strictures on policing are introduced, they are predictably framed as counterproductive interventions by clueless bureaucrats or cynical careerists.22 Civil rights and other safeguards are offered up as a barrier to effective policing, while the true sources of police dysfunction are obscured. Police brutality—to the extent it is portrayed at all–is depicted as an individual failing, and not as the result of system-wide choices and priorities. One of the themes of this chapter will be precisely the difficulty of portraying the deeply embedded causal links between official priorities and individual police actions. As long as police misconduct is portrayed as simply a series of unpredictable individual decisions by front-line police officers, the long-term persistence and even flourishing of police brutality will continue to appear incomprehensible and intractable. Most harmful of all, it will continue to be rendered invisible. And visibility matters greatly. Cop shows and other media portrayals of crime and law enforcement don’t merely shape the consciousness of viewers; they also shape public policy and legal doctrine. Cop shows generate public concern for certain types of crime, generally, crime that is violent, racialized, high profile, and perpetrated by a single offender against a sympathetic victim. These crimes seem to call for certain types of responses–principally, apprehension of violent, dangerous suspects by any means necessary, and extraordinary deference to the police officer’s instincts for preserving safety (his or her own as well as that of the community). Law enforcement agencies can garner accolades and claim success by responding to these concerns, whether or not they are based in fact.23

Valorizing Law Enforcement: A Highly Successful Propaganda Effort Dragnet and the other early police procedures began as the product of partnerships with the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies for the purpose of creating pro-police propaganda.24 There was nothing ambiguous about the symbiotic nature of the relationship. In 1910, the International Association of Chiefs of Police was dismayed by filmic portrayals of crime as “fun and glamorous” and of Keystone Cops as bumbling, ridiculous, and even corrupt.25 In the next few decades, police reform and a self-censoring movie industry helped the image of the police to some extent, but “what cemented 335

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the idea of the hero cop in the American imagination was the modern cop show, starting with 1951’s Dragnet.”26 As journalist Alyssa Rosenberg recounts, creator Jack Webb “forged an extraordinary partnership”27 with the LAPD. “In exchange for story ideas,”28 help with security, permits, and other logistical challenges, and other “in kind” financial assistance (for example, using cops as extras, and the free use of police vehicles and equipment), he gave the LAPD carte blanche to revise and censor his scripts. This partnership would become “a model for police storytelling for decades to come.”29 Highway Patrol (1955) was developed in response to the California Highway Patrol’s desire to have a show like Dragnet. The FBI (1965) was the product of an explicit partnership as well—J. Edgar Hoover maintained complete script approval,30 frequently censoring or rewriting individual scenes.31 Though the explicit partnerships have faded away, the template they established has flourished, in part by adapting to changing times without challenging certain basic cop show verities. As tv critic Alan Sepinwall noted, Sgt Joe Friday and the other early cop show protagonists were essentially re-costumed Wild West sheriffs–infallible, unflappable, incorruptible loners, bent on “cleaning up their communities by any means necessary.”32 It is true that law enforcement protagonists became more complex over time, but this complexity, rather than introducing ambiguity about the judgment of police, instead tended to render their fallibility more understandable and sympathetic. The essential components of the template remained constant. Most important, the police are the only recurring characters in the drama and the story is told from their point of view. Those who try to police the police (e.g., Internal Affairs, defense lawyers, or anyone wielding a copy of the Constitution) are acting from ignorance or bad motives. Moral lines remain clearly drawn–there is no grey area between victims and perpetrators, or between the guilty and the innocent. And finally, each episode is a self-contained story—a problem that can be solved in thirty or sixty minutes, with an easily identifiable villain. This template was not designed to permit an exploration of the causes of excessive force or police brutality, and it has proved hardily resistant to questioning the status quo. As Rashad Robinson summarized in her foreword to the Color of Change report: “there is no stronger public relations force working against reform than scripted television. Whether intended or not, some of the most popular television series of the last three decades have also served as the most effective PR arm for defending the system, especially the police.”33

Police Violence and Police Brutality Police are permitted to employ force and violence—and indeed, law enforcement has a statesanctioned monopoly on the lawful use of violence. The legal line between authorized and excessive force has proved extraordinarily hard to draw. As Paul Chevigny observes in his classic examination of police violence, the question of what constitutes “doing [the] job,” as opposed to administering extra-legal punishment, is always contested.34 In liberal democracies, we are always negotiating the balance between violence and order. The threat (and the occasional application) of violence is a strong impulse in the criminal law … But the level of violence the police will use varies all the way from merely arresting a defiant person to shooting him or torturing reluctant witnesses to give up information. Controlling the level of violence is an essential problem of human rights in ordinary police work.35 Jerome Skolnik and James Fyfe note that in common parlance, police brutality is defined as “the lawless exercise of force employed in excess.”36 They offer a somewhat narrower definition, arguing that the widespread failure to distinguish unnecessary force from police brutality is an impediment to progress. They define brutality as: conduct that is not merely mistaken but taken in bad faith with the intent to dehumanize and degrade its target. It is … conscious and venal … directed against persons of marginal status and credibility … and committed by officers who usually take great pains to conceal their misconduct.37 336

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As they note, the fact of concealment and the deliberate choice of targets who are unlikely to be believed make brutality extremely difficult to document or prove, even in the era of videotaping.38 Under this narrower definition, the use of excessive force during the execution of a search warrant, a pat-down search, or an interrogation would not necessarily constitute police brutality. In contrast, to take two examples from The Wire, the decision of supervisory personnel to lock the door of the interrogation room and subject Bird to a retaliatory beating,39 or Prez’s unprovoked assault on a young man in the Project Towers (resulting in his loss of an eye)40 would fit the bill.41 This type of police brutality seems simply too dark for television. It is nearly invisible on the small screen. Police violence is nearly always positioned on the continuum between acceptable and unacceptable force in the service of the job—and usually portrayed as falling comfortably on the lawful (or at least understandable or forgivable) end of that continuum. For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to consider police brutality in its broader, more commonly used sense (excessive force) as well as its narrower sense (intentional dehumanization). So much of the harm normalized by cop shows occurs on the slippery slope between “doing the job” and using unacceptable force. A traffic stop that escalates, an undercover drug buy gone wrong, an interrogation session undergirded by the unspoken threat of physical force, or even the repetitive, degrading use of stop and frisk in overpoliced neighborhoods—these forms of police violence, ostensibly undertaken to keep the streets safe and investigate crime, become part of the woodwork in cop shows.

Normalizing and Erasing Police Brutality: From Dragnet to the Golden Age “You don’t get it, do you? After all this time. The difference between dirty and necessary. That, like it or not, you and all your self-righteous friends in the Ivory Tower, you need people like me out on the streets, doing the things regular cops are unwilling to do, going the extra mile to make sure the truly evil, the truly dangerous, go away. I thin the herd for the greater good.”42 As Rashad Robinson succinctly summarizes: “In this speech, Sergeant Voight expressed a recurrent theme in police procedural dramas: all is fair, and ultimately good and forgivable, in pursuit of the bad guy; moreover, accountability only holds back the pursuit of justice and the ability to keep good people safe.”43 This recurring trope normalizes and indeed valorizes police brutality by portraying it as (in the proper circumstances) the courageous, morally correct course of action. In this formulation, the occasional resort to brutality is the road taken by the strongest of cops—those who are willing to cast aside the foolishly sentimental adherence to constitutional rights that the rest of us have the luxury to hollowly espouse.44 The strong cop knows that when push comes to shove, law enforcement’s highest calling is to keep “us” safe from “them,” that “we” secretly endorse this tradeoff, and that the nobility of the police officer lies in his willingness to be unfairly vilified for doing what clearly needs to be done.45

Component One: Erasing Race Notice that this trope (often called the “Dirty Harry syndrome”46) relies on the usually unstated but ever-present distinction between a “we” and a “they” (reinforcing its connection to Skolnik and Fyfe’s definition of brutality, which emphasizes the marginalized status and othering of those subject to police violence). It depends on the assumed ability of cops to neatly distinguish the innocent from the guilty; those who deserve safety from those who threaten safety. Drawing the distinction between “us” and “them” may be accomplished in several ways. The most straightforward is simply by communicating to the viewer that the suspect did in fact commit the crime in question, usually a shocking murder or sexual assault. This can be achieved by the use of an 337

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omniscient narrator, or through the eyes of the (ever-reliable and believable) law enforcement officer herself. Or it can be telegraphed in less explicit ways, through characterizations of sympathetic victims or by signaling that the suspect is untrustworthy, repellent, or dangerous, with the subtext that if the suspect didn’t commit the precise crime being investigated, he undoubtedly did other things deserving of punishment. If it can’t be established that he committed the crime, it can be strongly suggested that he is “that kind of person.” Indeed, commentators note the frequent use of a supplementary trope: the use of “endorsers,” often friends or relatives of the victim who confirm that, in light of the suspect’s character and prospects, the officer made the correct decision.47 The role of race in these depictions is unacknowledged, submerged, but ever-present. The erasure of the racialized dimension of police violence is an essential component of the erasure of police brutality. Police dramas tend to simply ignore the problem of race-based injustice. In the early shows like Dragnet, race went unmentioned. The Andy Griffith Show, which took place in a small North Carolina town during the Jim Crow era, and turned on its depiction of the protagonist as “gentle, wise, friendly [and] superhumanly relaxed,” “chose to sidestep the problem altogether.”48 During the golden age of complex police procedurals, NYPD Blue gingerly approached the question of racism with its portrait of the racist cop Andy Sipowicz. As Sepinwall observes, “Andy, for all his abundant flaws, was allowed an inner life that viewers never got from the perps he tuned up, and even his retrograde attitudes about race were presented with very delicate context.”49 The Color of Change study focused on a number of cop shows from the current (post-Ferguson) era, and found that they uniformly shied away from depictions of racial profiling or other racially biased practices, failed to depict the use of force as a particular problem for minorities, and generally treated race as not particularly relevant to an understanding of policing as practiced in the United States.50 The largely racialized nature of the us versus them mentality is one of the essential components of police brutality that cop shows render invisible. As noted earlier, television is the primary source of information about criminal justice for most viewers. The perpetuation of police brutality depends on the tendency of its practitioners to inflict it only on those in poor, marginalized, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, and to keep it out of affluent, politically influential precincts. As long as it is out of sight of the powerful, police brutality will be viewed by those with influence as aberrant or simply incredible, if it is acknowledged at all.

Component Two: Erasing Brutality The early cop shows, in keeping with their propaganda function, portrayed their heroes as straight arrows who remained firmly in control of their emotions and did things by the book.51 As Alyssa Rosenberg describes, cop shootings were portrayed as “acts of last resort by noble policemen.” The officer would agonize over his decision and often had to be convinced he’d done the right thing.52 As she astutely observes, the dramatic tension in these scenes generally centers on alleviating the cop’s pain and remorse, and rarely includes the perspective of the victim.53 As to the myriad other varieties of excessive force: (unwarranted) tasing, use of dogs, use of pepper spray, hitting or punching, chokeholds, and the like,54 these are rarely depicted. On occasion, certain brutal acts are referred to coyly and obliquely. For example, even as Detective Kelly in NYPD Blue asserted his fealty to the law, he noted that when a murderer is in danger of walking free unless he confesses, “I leave my gun and jewelry outside with the Constitution.”55 Yet these thinly veiled references always portray physical force as part of the investigative continuum; the unpleasant but necessary cost of doing good police work. One can scour the cop shows nearly in vain for any scenes depicting the infliction of pain for the sake of punishment or humiliation.

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The Wire’s exceedingly rare depictions of police brutality are instructive. The Wire assures viewers repeatedly that “a man must have a code.”56 And when Prez commits an unprovoked and brutal assault on a young man in the Project Towers, causing the victim to lose an eye, the act is framed as a violation of the code. Despite the fact that the commander and others initially cover for Prez, it is made clear that his act advanced no legitimate objective, and that he was not “good police.” Ultimately, Prez leaves the job entirely. His actions are those of an untrained, unsuited rookie, and the department soon sets matters right, reaffirming the bad apple trope. But it turns out that in certain situations, brutality does fit within this code. In particular, those who kill, harm, or even seriously disrespect cops deserve to be beaten as punishment.57 What is missing from the cop shows, from Dragnet to Brooklyn 99,58 is the depiction of the police violence that terrorizes many communities: shoving a gun down a pedestrian’s throat,59 or a plunger up a man’s anus,60 or holding a cattle prod to an interrogation subject’s testicles,61 or placing a typewriter cover over his head until he struggles to breathe,62 or sitting on the neck of a handcuffed, unresisting man while he pleads for his life—and even after the life drains out of him.63 But also: arresting pedestrians for their manner of walking down the street,64 pulling cars over for minor infractions like a burned-out tail light,65 or stopping Black and Latino residents repeatedly for loitering, violation of open container codes, furtive appearance, and other behavior that would not raise an eyebrow in whiter, more affluent precincts.66

Can Cop Shows Do Better? Cop shows have the power to educate the citizenry about the realities of law enforcement practice. As we have seen, their failure to do so—their predictable tendency to act as a public relations arm for the police instead–is not merely an aesthetic shortcoming, but a problem with significant real-world ramifications. Cops shows communicate certain insistent and damaging messages: that rules, laws, and disciplinary regimes are nothing more than impediments to good policing; that systemic racism and bias, to the extent they exist at all, do not affect policing, and that we ought to trust the police to keep us safe and solve the crime. Those who seek to reform policing are portrayed as outsiders who don’t really understand “the job,” and whose views are bound to be ill-informed and foolishly sentimental. The disconnect between the public face of policing and the airbrushed version on the small screen is increasingly hard to deny. It has been clear since the days of Dragnet that the police procedural is a powerful tool—it both conveys information and captures hearts and minds. The questions are: Why can’t this tool be deployed to create empathy not only for those doing the tough job of keeping the peace but for those whose lives are adversely affected by wrongful law enforcement practices?67 And why can’t this tool be deployed to help engender an informed debate about how to bring about a more effective, more equitable policing regime? There is an argument to be made (albeit ultimately rejected, I will suggest) that the shortcomings of television in general, and of the police procedural in particular, are endemic to the medium. For example, two decades ago, journalist Jeffrey Sheuer described certain regressive characteristics of the medium. He wrote that television fragments information into isolated, dramatic particles and resists longer and more complex messages. It is drawn to immediacy and action rather than to character development or exploration of root causes. It prefers to focus on individuals rather than larger communities. These features of television militate against a vision that emphasizes change. For all these reasons, Sheuer argued, the medium is conservative rather than progressive.68 His arguments are powerful, and yet they do not answer the fundamental question: are these characteristics inherent in the medium itself, or are they imposed by cultural, commercial, and political forces, and therefore amenable to change under the right circumstances?

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HBO’s brilliant show The Wire placed this question in sharp relief because it unsettled many of the expectations Scheuer described, challenged many of the cherished traditions of the cop show, and held out hope that the genre could accommodate a different kind of narrative. As I wrote in 2011: [U]nlike the standard police procedural, which presents and resolves a discrete problem every week, The Wire keeps widening its lens to reveal the context in which crime and policing take place … The Wire is deeply concerned with institutions, how they constrain the shape of individual lives, and how they perpetuate themselves, often at the expense of achieving their legitimate goals … Against all odds, it creates a compelling narrative about institutional dynamics and bureaucratic dysfunction.69 In short, The Wire defied convention and pushed the boundaries of the genre. Although the police perspective was central to the series, it was not the sole perspective offered, and cops were not the only characters given rich inner lives and families. And miraculously, The Wire not only depicted a range of people in all their complex humanity, it was also deeply concerned with depicting institutional dynamics. If The Wire could tell a gripping, complex story about dysfunctional systems, perhaps it could tell just such a story about the systemic problems with policing and the nature of the systemic harms policing causes to communities. Yet as I concluded on revisiting the issue several years later, this did not happen. Seven years after The Wire concluded, the Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report70 depicted the effects of over-policing in chilling detail.71 The Ferguson Report vividly detailed the experience of living in an occupied territory in which police exercised vise-like social control that would not be tolerated in whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. It depicted the innocuous behaviors that led to crushing fines and even arrests. It described the policy-level decision-making that incentivized the police to behave this way. The Wire does not depict such a world. It does not depict the everyday experience of living in an aggressively policed community like West Baltimore or the South Bronx. The show portrays many of those in the drug trade as complex and often sympathetic characters. But they are, in fact, drug dealers. And in “the game,” as The Wire calls it, the police go after drug dealers. They go where the crime is. The police in The Wire does not observe the legal niceties of stopand-frisk very often, but the salient point is that they are hassling the corner boys, who are, in fact, dealing drugs … The game the police are playing is investigating crime, not broken-windows policing or aggressive social control. They are not hassling the “civilians” who are out for an evening stroll. Although the show, quite refreshingly, does tackle issues of policing priorities and incentives, these critiques do not address the basic programmatic72 question: why are so many police officers deployed in the low-income, largely Black and Latino area of West Baltimore? Since the show is laser-focused on West Baltimore, we are simply left to assume that the whiter, more affluent precincts have a much smaller police presence. But since we don’t see the West Baltimore police blanketing the neighborhood and stopping scores of civilians for innocuous or nonexistent reasons, the implication is that the police are concentrated in West Baltimore because that is where the crimes are occurring. In short, The Wire, unlike many shows, had deeply realized recurring characters who were not police officers. But it had no recurring “civilian” characters who were just people doing their best to live good lives in an aggressively policed community. It did not show how someone like Philando Castile could get pulled over forty-nine times for minor traffic violations and ultimately shot to death, or how someone like Freddie Gray could end up mortally injured in a police van because he made eye contact with three police officers in a high crime neighborhood and then ran in the other direction.73 Neither The Wire nor any other cop show has captured the harms, emotional, psychological, and physical, of living with the constant fear of an unpredictable and possibly fatal police encounter. These sorts of psychological harms, both individual and community-wide,74 have been 340

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well captured in film documentaries like Fruitvale Station (2013), fictional films like Blindspotting (2018), and limited television series like When They See Us (2019). It can be done. In addition to their failure to depict the systemic harms of policing, cop shows, by casting reformers as clueless or opportunistic subjects of mockery and derision, have played a counterproductive role in the national conversation about police reform.75 Here too, the show that prided itself on portraying complex organizations dropped the ball on depicting reform movements. As Dave Zirin observed, The Wire failed to depict the student organizers, urban debaters, teacher activists, Black trade unionists, legalization activists, and others who had been organizing for years. He called the show “incredibly dismissive of people’s ability to organize for real change.”76 Yet the show introduced another approach that offers a promising template: it recognized that law enforcement does not operate in a vacuum, and that it is essential to open up the lens to encompass other institutions (such as schools, labor unions, state and local government, and media organizations) that both impede reform and offer new ways of thinking about public safety and the public good. There are many reasons to celebrate The Wire, and one is that it has demonstrated the capabilities of the medium. Future shows can build on its accomplishments. The current debate about police reform is rife with dramatic possibilities. There are opportunities to do what television does best: to engender empathy. Cops shows, in their future incarnations, might expand the lens to create empathy for those on the wrong end of the police officer’s stick, and those who live in the neighborhoods that struggle with both over-policing and under-policing.77 They might also depict the rich and generative conversations and challenges that characterize the modern police reform movement.78 It is long past time to shed habits that were forged in an age of straight-up propaganda, and to bring the police procedural into the current age.

Notes 1 Centennial Professor of Law Emeritus, DePaul University College of Law. The author thanks Bennett Capers and Jocelyn Simonson for incisive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Melissa Haniff for excellent research assistance. 2 Emefa Addo Agawu, How should we reimagine public safety?, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ 2021/03/24/wapo-editorial-board-reimagine-safety-chat/ (last visited April 18, 2021). 3 Studies show that “media influence increases as the public’s direct experience with a problem decreases.’ Color of Change Hollywood & Univ. of Southern Calif. Annenberg School of Communications, Normalizing Injustice at 18, Color of Change https://hollywood.colorofchange.org/crime-tv-report/ (2020) (PDF last accessed March 31, 2021). 4 Graham v. Connor, 490 US 386, 387 (1989). 5 Monell v. Dept. of Social Svcs., 436 US 658, 690–91 (1978). 6 42 USC. Sec. 14141. 7 For example, the Supreme Court in Scott v Harris, 550 US 372 (2007) evaluated a dashcam video of a highspeed chase with reference to “a Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort,” and Justice Scalia at oral argument made explicit reference to the movie “The French Connection.” 8 See generally Susan Bandes, “Patterns of Injustice: Police Brutality in the Courts,” Buffalo Law Review 47 (No. 3 1999): 1275–1341. 9 All too often, the police narrative is credulously reported as if it is objectively correct. See e.g., Alex Shephard, “Rethinking the Press’s Relationship with Police,” The New Republic, June 5, 2020. 10 See e.g., “Television has distorted Americans’ view of policing,” The Economist, June 25, 2020 (discussing emphasis on violent crime in prime time tv dramas, and connection to mistaken belief that crime rates are rising); W.J. Potter & M. Vaughan, “Anti-social behavior in television entertainment: trends and profiles,” 14 Communication Research Reports 14 (1997): 116–124.. 11 Color of Change, supra note 3 at 58. 12 Color of Change. Id. 13 Jack Healy, “How Truthful is ‘COPS? A Fixture of Reality TV Faces Scrutiny,” New York Times, June 21, 2019. See also Stephen Kearse, “The End of the Fictional Cop,” The Atlantic, July 31, 2020 (noting that shows like COPS are being cancelled in the wake of growing outrage over real-life police misconduct), Tim

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14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Stelloh, “Bad Boys: How “Cops” became the most polarizing reality TV show in America,” The Marshall Project, 1, 22, 2018 (fans of Cops think black people commit more crime than they actually do). See e.g., Kenya Evelyn, “How TV crime shows erase racism and normalize police conduct,” The Guardian, January 25, 2020. Color of Change, supra note 3. See Jeffrey Sheuer, The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind (New York: Routledge, 1999), 39. See Potter & Vaughan, supra note 10. See e.g., Kathleen Donovan & Charles Klahm IV, “The Role of Entertainment Media in Perceptions of Police Use of Force,” Journal of Criminal Justice and Behavior 42 (No. 12 2015): 1261–1281 (linking exposure to crime dramas to increased belief that police are successful in lowering crime and use force only when necessary). See also Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 7–10 (describing tv content, including news, fiction, and other genres, as a seamless torrent, a “wraparound presence in which we live much of our lives.”) As Law and Order would have it, the police and prosecutors represent “the people” against “the offenders,” as if these are two easily distinguishable and entirely distinct groups. See e.g Meredith Blake, “Dick Wolf Packed TV with hero cops. Critics say that’s part of what’s ‘killing us.’” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2020. Just as cop shows overstate the amount of violent crime police deal with, they also arguably overstate the day-to-day dangers faced by the police. These misapprehensions influence the jurisprudence of policing. See e.g., Seth Stoughton, “Policing Facts,” Tulane Law Review 88 (May 2014): 847–898; Jason Blair Woods, “Policing, Danger Narratives, and Routine Traffic Stops,” Michigan Law Review 117 (No. 4 2019): 635–712. See generally Susan Bandes, Marie Pryor, Erin Kerrison and Phillip Goff, “The Mismeasure of Terry Stops: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Harms of Stop and Frisk to Individuals and Communities,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 37 (2019): 1–19. But see Susan Bandes, “And All the Pieces Matter: Thoughts on The Wire and the Criminal Justice System,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 8 (No. 2 2011): 435–445 (noting that The Wire, unlike the vast majority of cop shows. did portray consequences for failure to observe the warrant requirement and other legal limitations). Clinton R. Sanders and Eleanor Lyon, “Repetitive Retribution: Media Images and the Cultural Construction of Criminal Justice,” in Cultural Criminology, ed. Jeff Ferrell and Clinton R. Sanders (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 25–44. See Alan Sepinwall, “A History of Violence: Why I loved cop shows, and why they must change,” Rolling Stone, August 9, 2020. Constance Grady, “How 70 years of cop shows taught us to valorize the police,” Vox, June 3, 2020. Grady notes that these negative images didn’t come out of nowhere: the Lexow Commission of the 1890s substantiated charges that police engaged in widespread harassment and extortion. Ibid. Alyssa Rosenberg, “How Police Censorship Shaped Hollywood,” Washington Post, Oct 24, 2016. Ibid. Ibid Ibid. Roger Sabin, Ronald Wilson, Linda Speidel, Brian Faucette and Ben Bethell, Cop Shows: A Critical History of Police Dramas on Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015), 49–50. Sepinwall, supra note 23. Color of Change, supra note 2 at 8. Paul Chevigny, Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), 9. Id at 12. Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force (New York: Free Press, 1993), xvi. Ibid, 19. See also Susan Bandes, “Patterns of Injustice,” supra note 8 at 1276. Ibid. The Wire: One Arrest (HBO Television broadcast July 21, 2002) (Season One, Episode Seven), discussed in Susan A. Bandes, “Video, Popular Culture, and Police Excessive Force: The Elusive Narrative of OverPolicing,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 2018 (2019) 1–23.. The Wire: The Detail (HBO television broadcast June 9, 2002), discussed in Bandes ibid at 19. As will be discussed shortly, The Wire’s treatment of these two incidents is both disheartening and instructive. See infra text accompanying notes

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From Dragnet to Brooklyn 99 42 Speech by team leader and star of Chicago P.D. series (2014) Sergeant Hank Voight, who is white, to his former partner, Denny Woods, the department’s independent auditor, who is Black (Homecoming episode), discussed in Color of Change, supra note 3, at 79. 43 Color of Change, Ibid. at 79. 44 More measured, intellectual cops, such as Dutch on The Shield, are dismissed as naïve and ineffectual. (I’m indebted to Bennett Capers for that insight). See also Erica Scharrer, “Tough Guys: The Portrayal of Hypermasculinity and Aggression in Televised Police Dramas,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 45 (No. 4 2001): 615–634. 45 The filmic prototype was of course Dirty Harry, but the most extreme version of this trope might be Dexter (2006), a blood splatter expert on the Miami police force who becomes a murderer on the side. For a season or two, he hews to a strict moral code—killing only serial killers who have exploited loopholes in the system to escape scot-free. Improbably, the viewer roots for Dexter. In later seasons, the line between Dexter as “righteous” vigilante and Dexter as serial killer becomes harder and harder to draw. 46 The term has become a common reference in the policing literature. See e.g., Skolnick & Fyfe supra note 36 at 7. 47 See e.g., Color of Change, supra note 3, at 31. See also Rosenberg, “Dragnets, Dirty Harrys and Dying Hard: A syllabus for 100 years of the police in pop culture,” Washington Post, October 24, 2016. For example, Rosenberg describes an episode of Naked City in which relatives of the deceased victim told the officer not to feel bad because the victim wasn’t worth it, an episode of Starsky and Hutch in which the mother of a slain Black teenager absolved the officer, and an episode of Hill Street Blues in which cop Perez, having mistakenly shot a child playing with a toy gun, “receives absolution from the child’s mother.” 48 Sepinwall, supra note 24. 49 Ibid. 50 Color of Change, supra, note 3 at 108. 51 Rosenberg, “How Police Censorship Shaped Hollywood,” supra note 27. 52 Rosenberg, supra note 47. 53 Ibid. 54 For examples of commonly used types of force, see the use of force continuum: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/ articles/use-force-continuum (last visited April 21, 2021). 55 Susan Bandes and Jack Beermann, “Lawyering Up,” Green Bag 2d 2 (Autumn 1998): 5–14. 56 See Bandes, “Video: Popular Culture,” supra note 39 at 19–20. 57 When the character Bird violates the parallel code of the street by killing a “civilian” (a person not involved in the drug trade) and then spews hateful words at Detective Kima Greggs during an interrogation, the message is clear that he asked for and deserves the beating he is about the receive. The Black anti-hero Omar acts as the endorser, stating: “Bird sure do bring it out of people, don’t he?“ See also the coy conversation about taking the suspect in Officer Dozerman’s killing on a detour through the Western District, where he must have been mistaken “for a pinata.” Bandes, “Video,” ibid. 58 The Shield, via the character of Vic Mackey and his strike team, struggles with the issue of the bad, openly corrupt cop, giving rein to the tension between Mackey’s repellent qualities and his seductive appeal. After all, Mackey “knows the street and his unconventional tactics reap results.” Linda Speidel, “The Shield” in Cop Shows, supra note 31, 151. The Shield may unflinchingly portray brutality and corruption, but it never takes a firm stand against them—the show’s moral center is hard to locate. 59 The Glenn Evans case (in which former Commander Evans was acquitted of shoving a gun in a pedestrian’s mouth), discussed in Bandes, “Video, Popular Culture, and Police Excessive Force,” supra note 39 at 8 60 The attack on Abner Louima, discussed in Bandes, “Patterns of Injustice,” supra note 8. 61 An action taken on multiple occasions by Commander John Burge and his men in Chicago. See Bandes, “Patterns of Injustice,” ibid. 62 This was one of numerous acts of torture committed by Commander John Burge in Chicago. See Bandes, “Patterns of Injustice,” ibid. 63 See “Medical Examiner Testifies Eric Garner Died of Asthma Caused by Officer’s Chokehold,” New York Times, May 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/nyregion/eric-garner-death-danielpantaleo-chokehold.html (last visited April 21, 2021) (Daniel Pantaleo case);” Video: Medical Examiner Says Police Restraint ’Just More Than Mr. Floyd Could Take,” NPR, April 9, 2021 https://www.npr.org/ sections/trial-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2021/04/09/985722945/live-video-medical-examiner-to-testifyabout-george-floyds-death (last visited April 21, 2021) (Derek Chauvin case). 64 See Topher Sanders et al, “Walking While Black,” ProPublica, Nov. 16, 2017. 65 See “Catherine E. Shoichet and Mayra Cuevas, Walter Scott shooting case: Court documents reveal new details,” CNN, September 10, 2015.

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Susan A. Bandes 66 Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540, 658–67 (SDNY 2013). 67 For an example of such programming (and an inkling of the challenges it faces), consider the powerful Blackish episode “Please Baby Please,’ whose topic was police brutality, and which ABC refused to air in 2017 “reportedly over concerns it was too politically charged.” The episode finally aired in 2020, long after creator Kenya Barris left the network, his relationship with the network having “soured” as a result of the conflict. See Bethonie Butler, “ABC finally released the political “Blackish” episode it refused to air two years ago. It feels fresher than ever.” Washington Post, August 11, 2020. See also Color of Change, supra note 3 at 10, noting that writers’ rooms for police shows (and in general) suffer an extreme lack of diversity. 68 Sheuer, supra note 16 at 10. 69 Bandes, “And All the Pieces Matter,” supra note 22 at 435–36. Lest my appreciation for the show be questioned, I also called The Wire “a dazzling literary achievement, a riveting show: the greatest television series ever made.” Ibid at 445. 70 Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, March 4, 2015. 71 Note that these three paragraphs rely heavily on “Video, Popular Culture,” supra note 36 at pp 17–18. 72 See Tracey Meares, “Programming Errors: Understanding the Constitutionality of Stop-and-Frisk as a Program, Not an Incident,” University of Chicago Law Review 82 (2015): 159–179. 73 Bandes, “Video” supra note 36 at 19. 74 For a discussion of these harms, see Bandes, Pryor, Goff and Kerrison supra note 21. 75 Alyssa Rosenberg, “Shut down all police movies and TV shows. Now,” Washington Post, June 4, 2020. 76 Dave Zirin, “The Game Done Changed: Reconsidering “The Wire” Amidst the Baltimore Uprising,” The Nation, May 4, 2015. 77 See Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), for a discussion of the under-policing of South Central in LA and similar neighborhoods in which murders go unsolved. 78 See I. Bennett Capers, “Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044,” New York University Law Review 94 (April 2019): 1–60; Jocelyn Simonson, “Police Reform Through a Power Lens,” Yale Law Journal (March 2021): 778–860; Amna A. Akbar, Sameer M. Ashar and Jocelyn Simonson, “Movement Law,” Stanford Law Review 73 (April 2021) 821–884.

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SECTION 8

Alterity and Brutality in the Late-Twentieth Century

26 POLICING, THE BAR, AND RESISTANCE William Elijah Hicks

An institution must arise from a particular social situation, when the individuals concerned feel that there is the need for a change in the existing order, or the need for the creation of a new order. Thus it may be that all institutions have their origins in deviance.1 Legal proscriptions limiting the behavior, and indeed, the very presence of homosexuals have had a long and circuitous history in the United States. Policing of the homosexual community led to its rise and was the very “defining” of that community by virtue of a shared adversity. Labeled and targeted by sexual and behavioral deviance, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) community was shaped in tandem with policing pressures. Over time, restrictions intended to curb overt sexual acts were expanded to prevent homosexuals from associating with one another by limiting their freedom to assemble. Of all the locations where homosexuals and those interested in same-sex intimacy were able to meet, the bar, or more specifically, the gay bar, rose to the prominence of being the single most critical institution in the emergence of gay culture in the latter half of the twentieth century.2 As such, it was in gay bars across the country that a cat-andmouse legal struggle pitted queer Americans against police and state liquor control agents charged with shutting down such establishments. State and municipal law enforcement agencies, with varying degrees of intensity, joined in the systematic and wholesale harassment of homosexual association nationwide. The locus of the gay bar was where much of the friction between police and the gay community played out. Indeed, it was within gay bars that a militant resistance to oppression was first able to take root and flower. However, it was within this crucible of police versus sexual deviant that an entire community was defined. Circumstance corralled the sexually transgressive into the bar, yet it was within such crepuscular harbors that a community was able to develop. There would not be a gay community or culture in the United States in its modern form without the police and the refuge of the bar. Broken down into their constituent elements, communities are composed of identities. In order for a community to first draw together, individuals must assemble in specific localities to develop and articulate a shared set of values. For this synergy to occur, a location must first be communicated, and once communicated, the active participation of a potential community’s constituency is required. As a locality, the “gay bar” holds a position of unparalleled significance in the history of the gay community. The modern gay civil rights movement was launched in a bar. It was in the bars that a gay identity, gay traditions, and ultimately, a gay culture developed. These locations functioned not merely as places to imbibe, and to establish connections, sexual or otherwise, but were moreover DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-35

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the sites for transmitting ideas, communicating behavioral norms, and formulating strategies of resistance. In a society that dictated compulsory heterosexuality, an individual’s presence in a gay bar marked a measure of defiant resistance. Having arrived, an individual homosexual made entrée into a subculture that forever altered his worldview. When equipped with the knowledge of both location and subcultural norms, an individual was thus empowered to disseminate the knowledge of these localities to others, thereby promoting the further expansion of the community. In a pattern repeated countless times and over the course of generations, the gradual evolution of gay culture occurred primarily within twentieth-century gay bars and the peripheral as well as centripetal social groupings such venues propagated in the form of house parties and even back-alley meetings. The gay bar itself, is merely a location, a venue wherein a social drama unfolds. Its patrons, “a queer miscellany of individuals, marked by diverse configurations of age, race, class, gender, identity, desire – and place,” make up the actors in that drama.3 Apart from the primal desire for sexual contacts, a fundamental need to seek out camaraderie with others like oneself, drove homosexuals to the bar. Homosexuals actively sought out communion with others like themselves, and secured settings that would countenance a fuller expression of their same-sex longings. Urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg, exalts such “third places,” defining them as “the core settings of informal public life … places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”4 In light of the fact that few homosexuals enjoyed enthusiastic support of their sexual identities from their families and the fact that most faced a near-universal hostility to homosexuality’s overt expression in the workplace throughout most of the twentieth century, the desire to seek out locales such as gay bars assumed an amplified importance. The need to establish connections and have a sense of community ran strong, especially within a minority who had been marginalized, rejected, and shunned. Until relatively recently, the idea of homosexuals staking out the claim of a physical space for themselves, such as a gay bar, however tenuous that claim may have been, represented an act of resistance against a predominately homophobic culture. John D’Emilio, notes that the “bars were seedbeds for a collective consciousness that might one day flower politically.”5 The courageous defiance of individual assertions of will, determined to ameliorate the circumstances of an imposed alienation, formed a collective fodder that would fuel the flames of a politically conscious minority after the igniting spark of Stonewall. The earliest gay bars, drinking establishments that primarily, or exclusively, catered to a homosexual clientele, emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century coinciding with the subsequent medicalization (and shortly thereafter criminalization) of homosexuality. As the nineteenth century began drawing to a close, so too did late Victorian categorizations of same-sex love based on biblically rooted conceptions of “natural” laws. Classifications such as the “sexual invert” were succumbing to new taxonomies as European sexologists began the medicalization of sexualities, christening the term, and social construct, of “homosexuality.”6 In the United States, these first gay bars appeared to closely resemble the bawdy houses plentiful in nineteenth-century American cities. In fact, the homosexual, or “invert” as they were then commonly called, had long been associated with prostitution, and male prostitutes and hustlers had long plied their trade alongside their female associates in the saloons of American cities and boomtowns. Following the Civil War, American urban centers witnessed a precipitous rise in the rates of prostitution. In response to this increase, an upper and middle-class-led “purity movement,” in an effort to protect and defend its newly formulated idealization of femininity, sought new forms of legislation to curb prostitution’s rise and construct bulwarks against its further proliferation.7 To that end, an array of new legal restrictions and codes were enacted to combat prostitution. “[T]he chief regulations were the ones adopted as part of local purity campaigns – public lewdness, indecency, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and solicitation laws, some of which were tailored to target same-sex intimacy.”8 Swept up in these anti-prostitution efforts was the homosexual. Prostitution’s relationship with homosexuality was manifold. The prostitutes of nineteenth-century New Orleans’ Storyville flaunted and even capitalized on their reputation for being a hotbed of lesbian 348

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activities.9 Indeed, such exotic eroticism was part of the red-light district’s allure. Likewise, male crossdressers, fairies, and men seeking same-sex intimacy often frequented bawdy houses and sought the company of female prostitutes while soliciting and seeking assignation in a similar fashion. In fact, in the raucous and ribald setting of the whorehouse and the saloon, “many males were themselves commercial ‘trade’ – soldiers, youths, and working-class men willing to receive oral sex or give anal sex in return for money.”10 In short, long established as a repository for the scandalous and the sleazy, the saloon or bar, as a locality and antithesis of nineteenth-century middle-class values, was inherently suited as a retreat for the sexual and gender non-conformist. For the homosexual, these locations became important places for assignation. Allan Bérubé suggests that the gay bar can directly trace its origins back to the bawdy houses, saloons, and brothels of the nineteenth century and became a crucial institution in gay subculture by proving to be a relatively secure setting for individuals to relax heteronormative pretenses and engage with other like-minded individuals on an equal footing.11 Almost exclusively an urban phenomenon in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, the essential model for the modern American gay bar originated in New York. The bustling city was a primary conduit for thousands of immigrants arriving monthly from Europe and points beyond. These immigrants, along with working-class native-born citizens crowded into the tenements forming working-class communities. The Bowery, located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, constituted a center of working-class “commercialized vice” with flamboyantly effeminate “fairies” as a common feature on the district’s streets.12 In his brilliant account of New York’s gay history, George Chauncey shows how, by 1900, the city already had a thriving gay-male subculture, noting: As the anti-vice crusaders who sought to reform the moral order of turn-of-the-century American cities discovered, gay male society was a highly visible part of the urban sexual underworld and was much more fully and publicly integrated into working-class than middle-class culture.13 Chauncey offers a splendid analysis of the complex dynamics that arose from the intersections of class and gender. He notes that middle-class notions of sexuality associated the working classes with a licentious degeneracy.14 Not simply limited to New York, these dynamics played out across the United States in the opening years of the twentieth century, and did so independently and spontaneously, as evidenced in Havelock Ellis’ remark that “[t]he world of sexual inverts is, indeed, a large one in any American city, and it is a community distinctly organized – words, customs, traditions of its own; and every city has its numerous meeting-places.” This observation is significant as it suggests, not only a widespread urban phenomenon, but it also points to the development of independent queer communities and cultures centered around physical localities.15 Among the localities mentioned, Ellis devotes his primary attention to the bar: “The inverts have their own ‘clubs,’ with nightly meetings. These ‘clubs’ are, really, dance halls, attached to saloons, and presided over by the proprietor of the saloon, himself almost invariably an invert, as are all the waiters and musicians.”16 No longer viewed as deviant “perverts” perpetrating acts of sodomy, in Ellis’ analysis, these serial sodomists, as it were, now fell under the group classification of “invert.” These nascent communities of “inverts” reflect that accompanying the turning of the century, was the gradual calcifying of new definitions for an entirely new class of individuals affirming Michel Foucault’s remark that “[t]he sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”17 There can be little doubt that World War I and its attendant mobilization had a dramatic impact on New York City as it was the primary port of embarkation for US forces bound for the theaters of conflict in Europe. In response to fears of young and impressionable “dough-boys” from the farms and small towns of America being potentially led astray by the many lurid temptations provided by the great city, social purity and anti-vice groups made concerted efforts to eradicate the visible 349

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presence of prostitution in the city. Meeting with some measure of success, these guardians of morality were alarmed to detect “an apparent increase in male perversion” as, evidently, the absence of female prostitutes led to the increased visibility of the city’s native gay male population soliciting military members passing through the city. Chauncey notes the consternation of these groups as they “were confronted with mounting evidence that the war had somehow unleashed the most appalling of urban vices” leading to purity advocates targeting homosexuality, for the first time, as a serious city-wide moral concern.18 Chauncey laments that a detailed study on the effects of World War I on gays and lesbians remains to be done. The evidence that does exist suggests that the war’s limited duration and scale prevented a heightened self-consciousness among homosexuals as well as an awareness of homosexuality among society at large from developing on a scale similar to what was to occur during and after World War II.19 Famous in other US cities, like Chicago and New Orleans, and centered in the borough of Harlem, New York’s gender-bending “drag balls” during Prohibition opened up avenues for expression for many homosexual New Yorkers and provided a spectacle for adventurous tourists seeking the excitement of going “slumming.”20 Lillian Faderman captures the sentiment shared by many curiosityseeking revelers describing what it was about such spectacles that drew the onlookers: [T]hey went to Harlem to experience homosexuality as the epitome of the forbidden … Made braver by bootlegged liquor, jazz, and what they saw as the primitive excitement of Africa … They were fascinated with putative black naturalness and exoticism, and they romantically felt that those they regarded as the “lower class” had something to teach them about sexual expression that their middle-class milieu had kept from them.21 While this may have been the case for heterosexual onlookers in search of a titillating experience, the experience for the homosexual was different. For homosexuals, these events afforded them the rare opportunity to freely associate with other same-sex desiring partygoers in an environment that held some limited degree of sanction from established authorities that were at least complicit in the activities. Chauncey describes how, “Some were emboldened by the thrill of gathering with hundreds of other openly gay men at an event celebrating their style and grace, and they left the balls unwilling, at least for a moment, to accept the usual constraints on their behavior,” leaving the balls still dressed in their gender-bending attire, gleefully and audaciously acting out in public.22 Building on a rich heritage that went back centuries, Chauncey notes that the glittering spectacles of the 1920s drag balls, often drawing thousands, “were highly representative of the organization of the gay subculture and its relationship with the dominant culture,” explaining that “[l]ike most social practices of the gay subculture, [the balls] were patterned on – but gave new meaning to – the practices of the dominant culture that gay men had observed and participated in.”23 They playfully upended the established norms of gender, and often class, allowing a mingling of all segments of society, for a limited duration in a defined space, a hallmark of the masquerade tradition. Faderman cautions that, particularly with the female attendees at these balls, the libertine attitudes towards sexual experimentation were more of a marker of jazz age society and did not necessarily mark any measured rise in lesbianism, noting: One had to see oneself as a lesbian to be a lesbian. But despite the apparent sexual liberalism of many in the 1920s, the era was not far removed in time from the Victorian age, and to admit to an aberrant sexual identity must not yet have been easy for any but the most brave, unconventional, committed, or desperate.24 However, there can be little doubt that for gays and lesbians fortunate enough to have experienced these spectacles, the drag balls of New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and other cities provided homosexuals a setting where a gay culture could be taught and defined. 350

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The deprivations brought on by the Great Depression brought an abrupt end to the wild exuberances of the 1920s and “gay men and lesbians began to seem less amusing than dangerous.”25 The pendulum of relative tolerance enjoyed during the Jazz-age, swung back in an anti-gay reaction that stifled any hopes that the indulgences of a permissive past were in any real sense a measure of shifting national attitudes towards homosexuals. Lesbians during the Depression suffered doubly from the extreme difficulties they faced in finding the means of support to live a full and independent life in a dominant culture that privileged men. Often, theirs was an experience characterized by loneliness and isolation. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, in their remarkable history of the development of lesbian community and bar culture, interview one lesbian who was fortunate enough to have found a gay bar in Buffalo, New York, in 1932. The woman recalled her first encounter inside Galante’s as an eighteen-year-old: You know how it is when a new lesbian comes in. The boys were sitting downstairs. The women were upstairs. There was a big round table. If you were in, you sat at the round table, otherwise you were an outsider. Then someone came over to me and said, “You look like a nice kid,” and helped me to join. She would say things like, “Get these kids out of here. There are too many kids.” The leader insulted me several times and I would answer back, and then we became friends.26 This woman’s account describes the dynamic of one individual’s, ultimately successful, attempt to find a place for herself and a measure of acceptance from the existing bar culture. By saying “you know how it is when a new lesbian comes in,” she gives an indication that this is an oft-repeated pattern that should be familiar to the initiated listener. The woman also shows how once she passed an initiation of initial hostility, through “answer[ing] back,” she was able to gain acceptance. It all suggests a pattern whereby a lesbian newcomer is vetted, selected for admission, and eventually shepherded by the group. Such small private victories aside, the 1930s, on the whole, marked an overall rejection of the excesses of the 1920s. The staggering levels of unemployment challenged long-held notions of men being the primary “breadwinners,” thus destabilizing America’s gender hierarchy and upsetting idealized conceptions of manhood. To many, in such an environment, any deviations from a gendered norm were seen as self-indulgent and threatening. It would not be until existential threats, emanating from abroad, loomed larger that Americans were able to begin to shake themselves from the dark malaise of the Depression. Perhaps more so than any other event in US history, World War II did more to hasten awareness of the homosexual, not only by the nation at large, but more importantly, by the individual. Mobilization for war affected every corner and segment of American society. The mobilized state brought every aspect of mass media and popular culture to bear in support of a war-time footing. Significantly, the war drew millions of men and women to the cities, either in preparation for active military duty or for work in factories to sustain a burgeoning war industry. This coalescing of a largely youthful military and labor force occurred in large manufacturing centers, near military installations, and at major shipping ports. These various locations, particularly port facilities, served as the conduits through which an entire generation of Americans was swept up and shared in a powerful collective social experience. For many a young draftee or recruit coming from America’s heartland, the experience of mobilization proved to be an exciting, and perhaps enticing, culture shock exposing them to new sights, sounds and possibilities. This was certainly true of the homosexual.27 A scant 20 years had passed since America’s last major foreign engagement and the military hoped to avoid having to deal with the added burden of treating some of the long-term psychiatric problems that surfaced from modern warfare (such as “shell-shock”), the expenses of which had plagued the War Department since World War I. Homosexuals were thought to possess a peculiar proclivity to such conditions and were to be screened out during the enlistment process in order to avoid 351

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incurring future costs.28 The nation was being called to arms, and many men and women who happened to be homosexual were caught up in what was to become a struggle not simply against a declared enemy, but also against a bureaucracy within the military that sought to exclude their service. Medical officers sought to employ new methods and theories from the field of psychology to further refine and homogenize the psychosomatic make-up of the armed forces and wanted to classify homosexuality as a medical condition that should be treated outside the centuries-old military penal system which labeled offenders as sodomists.29 There were efforts made by young gay men and women to actively enlist and circumvent the cursory psychiatric screening delivered by often ill-trained examiners which often consisted simply of the question “Do you like girls?” or “boys” whichever the case may have been.30 The result of such a simple and easily circumvented line of questioning was that a great many homosexual men and women were able to enter into the nation’s military.31 Conflicts arose within the gay community at the time as to how to reconcile an individual’s desire for service and fear of being exposed and branded as an undesirable. Of course, a far greater number of homosexual Americans had little choice in the matter and were scooped up as part of the draft. Overhanging any homosexual in military service was the threat of being discovered as such and receiving an “undesirable discharge,”—commonly referred to as a “section eight” or a “blue discharge” as a “sexual psychopath,” and being sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.32 As horrific a prospect as the latter may have seemed, it marked a hard-fought improvement, on the part of “compassionate” military psychiatrists seeking to treat homosexuality as a mental illness rather than a crime worthy of a court-martial and the military’s penal system. Bérubé examines the consequence of this irony: Forced hospitalizations, mandatory psychiatric diagnoses, discharge as sexual psychopaths, and the protective sympathy of psychiatrists all reinforced the idea that homosexuals were sick people and that homosexuality itself was an illness. Ironically, the very fact that psychiatrists fought so hard to bring about a more humane military system for handling homosexuals only added to the notion that gay men and women belonged within the domain of abnormal psychiatry.33 The perception of the homosexual as a sick and diseased individual to be pitied was to firmly plant itself in the psyche of the dominant culture, particularly after the war, in the 1950s. Collectively, the gay community would find itself spending the better part of the next half-century battling to excise this opinion from the national consciousness. D’Emilio notes that “[o]f all the changes set in motion by the war, the spread of the gay bar contained the greatest potential for reshaping the consciousness of homosexuals and lesbians.”34 The types of gay bars that most soldiers were exposed to were never very long-lived. Periodic waves of anti-gay crackdowns would shut establishments down, and in short order, new ones would take their place. This coupled with the constant movement and flow of personnel coming in and shipping out, actually sped the evolution of gay bar culture, allowing for increased specialization where bars began catering to more specific tastes.35 In an additional irony, when commanding officers and MPs tried to crack down on GIs going to “queer hangouts” their “expanding antivice system helped resourceful and daring GIs to find the gay life. Servicemen used the posted off-limits lists and signs as handy guides to gay bars.”36 In stressing the social impact that the experience of the World War II had in forging a gay identity, D’Emilio writes: One can scarcely overestimate the significance of the 1940s in restructuring the social expression of same-sex eroticism. The war years allowed the almost imperceptible changes of several generations, during which a gay male and lesbian identity had slowly emerged, to coalesce into a qualitatively different form.37 This restructuring was taking place in many of the ad hoc gay bars and “dives” that sprouted up in war-time industrial centers and port cities. These bars were essentially an economic response 352

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intended to meet an existing demand, as Lapovsky Kennedy and Davis note that “in the 1940s, gay bars were opened primarily as business enterprises, rather than from sympathy or concern for the gay clientele”38 Regardless of an owner’s motivations, this exposure to this particular business model was to open up a whole new world of ideas and opportunities for an enterprising few. Indeed, it also appears to have shaped the post-war gay landscape as well. In the waning months of the war, as final victory became increasingly assured and the demand for additional manpower eased, military authorities began to more stringently enforce the military’s official exclusion policy against homosexuals.39 Inadvertently, the anti-homosexual purges conducted by the military fostered the establishment of bicoastal urban gay communities, as Faderman notes: Thousands of homosexual personnel were loaded onto ‘queer ships’ and sent with ‘undesirable’ discharges to the nearest US port. Many of them believed that they could not go home again. They simply stayed where they were disembarked, and their numbers helped to form the large homosexual enclaves that were beginning to develop in port cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston.40 The transformative effect of the war was not limited to coastal metropolises either, the model of the gay bar, as encountered and experienced by so many gay GIs, soon dispersed all over the United States, including the South. John Howard observes that gay bars “became imbedded in the Southern urban landscape after the war.”41 The war demarked a Rubicon for American homosexuals, particularly those from the continental interior, ensuring that the model of the gay bar, as experienced primarily in major US cities before the war, now spread across the country, and soon thereafter, local authorities applied the regulatory methods previously developed to combat its spread.42 Post-war fetishizing of the nuclear family by the dominant culture made deviation from the gendered ideal immediately suspect, and gay bars provided attenuate refuge for those bold enough to resist such conformist pressures. Gay bars were largely the jurisdiction of working-class homosexuals during the 1950s while “middle-class gay people concerned with respectability and protecting their jobs shied away from bars.”43 This class distinction was especially pronounced among lesbians during this time and led to the development of a distinctive subculture among working-class lesbians. The two behavioral models for one to conform to were “butch” or “femme”; there was no acceptable alternative style within lesbian bar culture of the 1950s. An individual’s failure to properly follow the established behavioral norms for a given environment may have resulted in either exclusion or censure. Lillian Faderman demonstrates how this dynamic played out in working-class lesbian bars of the 1950s. Adapting to the behavioral norms was important, “because they operated as a kind of indicator of membership. Only those who understood the roles and the rules attendant upon them really belonged.”44 At the time, there were powerful visible and behavioral cues that clearly indicated what one seeking admission into this particular lesbian subculture would need to emulate. “Butches” would adopt an overtly masculine appearance and demeanor, wearing all “male” clothing, and aggressively swaggering through the bar as they pleased, while “femmes” would assume an exaggerated and sexualized feminine appearance and present an air of “passivity.”45 One or the other had to be chosen: “Being neither butch nor femme was not an option if one wanted to be part of the young or working-class lesbian subculture. Those who refused to choose learned quickly that they were unwelcome.”46 These developments in lesbian bar culture show a dramatic amount of evolution and specialization from the standard illustrated in the bar culture of the 1930s. A myriad of factors played a role in the development of this transformation, but the point is, this transformation of a subculture played out within the locality of a bar. There was not a similar, rigid development of gendered behavioral norms in mainstream 1950s gay male culture, although there was a similar aversion, on the part of middle-class gay men, to the 353

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dangers of the bars. This led to an emerging segregation of not only the classes but also the sexes. Lapovsky and Davis note this shift when speaking of gay bars: The dominant feeling, however, was that lesbians were not welcome. Several reasons surface as explanations, primarily that lesbians in the 1950s, particularly the tough streetwise lesbians, had a reputation for fighting. A marked shift had taken place from the 1940s when men were the primary source of trouble in bars due to their drag shows or other explicit homosexual behavior; now women also brought trouble to the bars.47 The “trouble” being referred to, and the principal reason for the middle-class’ relative absence in the bars was the ever-present fear of arrest in a police raid. Newspapers at the time routinely printed the names and addresses of those detained, exposing their identities and leading many to lose employment. Homosexuals in professional fields often found the bars to be too great a risk, favoring the comparative safety of the dinner and house party with other middle-class homosexuals.48 Patterns of highly structured roles involving appearance and behavior did evolve in the gay-male culture of city bars during the late fifties and continuing into the 1960s, where a larger population permitted a diversity of bar types that catered to specific social or sexual tastes. This social dynamic can be most glaringly seen in bars that catered to a particular fetish, like “leather” motorcycle bars or sadomasochism (S&M) clubs.49 The sexualized image of a uniformed figure possessing “authority,” and thus sexual license, within avant-garde homo-erotica of the time is evidenced in the works of Kenneth Anger and Tom of Finland.50 Achilles, in her study of gay bars in the San Francisco Bay area during the early 1960s offers a simple, yet effective, strategy for quickly discerning a bar’s target clientele in a city that provided a large diversity of options for the homosexual male despite the official sanction against homosexuality at the time, noting: “The bartender has an important symbolic function, serving as a mark of identification. One swift glance at the bartender, and the initiate knows what kind of bar he is in, and what kind of people he is likely to find there.”51 With a glance, and upon observation, both patron and client have the moment to “size-one-another-up” and establish claim to an ostensibly queer space. The patron, determines the degree to which one entering could be a threat, while the newly arrived surmises their chances of a positive liaison (sexual or otherwise) based upon the visual and social cues projected by the bar staff. The bartender’s duties were complex; apart from the obvious functions of tending bar and serving drinks, a bartender needed to constantly stay on the look-out for undercover vice agents in addition to cultivating a relationship with his patrons, assembling a pool of “regulars” who would follow the bartender to next bar that opened after the inevitable raid shut down the current location. One other critical element in the forging of the gay community in the bars was the shared sufferings under a common oppressor.52 If the Stonewall riots in June of 1969 provided the spark that ignited the gay liberation movement, long-standing police oppression was its catalyst. There came a point where the community reached a critical mass of sorts and, by that time, routine pressure from police proved to be too much. Achilles noticed in the early 60s how harassment from the police served to unify homosexuals, noting that “[t]he greatest sense of group cohesion in the homosexual Community is expressed in reaction to the police.”53 Achilles’s analysis also observes that in response to police hostility “important latent functions emerge from the situation. The homosexual collectivity develops a greater unity.”54 A half-decade after that observation was made, a community of New York homosexuals rose up demonstrating just how powerful of a “latent function” united group action, however spontaneous, can be. Attending the development of the bar as a locus for same-sex desiring Americans to congregate were countervailing pressures exerted by a dominant heteronormative culture to frustrate the establishment of any and all refuges for homosexuals. While a prevailing societal attitude of scorn, contempt, and fear was largely sufficient to relegate lesbians and gay men to the periphery, society 354

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increasingly deployed legislative and statutory measures to extend that exile, if not to eradicate, to silence and to render homosexuals and homosexuality invisible. In his exhaustive exploration of America’s legislative history regarding homosexuality, Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet, William Eskridge asserts that “[t]he modern regulatory state cut its teeth on gay people.”55 With the turn of the twentieth century, the gay bar matured concomitant with the rise of an ever-expansive bureaucratic apparatus. As gay and lesbian Americans tried to carve out spaces for themselves through the establishment of subcultural institutions, concerned legislators brought forth a barrage of legislation intending to thwart the free assembly of homosexuals. Working in tandem, police and liquor control authorities presented significant obstacles to establishing any long-lasting gay bars, and most enterprises were short-lived. Homosexuals not only faced the possibility of serious criminal charges but also had to contend with a medical community that wanted to wrest control of the homosexual’s fate from the criminal justice system.56 During the 1950s and 1960s, in the years leading up to the 1969 Stonewall riots, homosexuals endured a sustained and merciless period of oppression as authorities cracked down on gay bars and homosexual associations. The Stonewall riots of 1969 heralded a new militancy in the homophile movement and a determination among gay activists to bring about legal change. Able to secure some modest legal gains in the courtroom, such hard-fought legal victories were often all too slow to manifest into visible changes in law enforcement’s aggressive posture towards gay bars. Prosecutions under similar sodomy statutes were relatively rare in nineteenth-century America as Eskridge points out: Pre-1881 prosecutions overwhelmingly focused on male-female, adult-child, or man-animal relations rather than adult same-sex intimacy. To the extent that crime against nature laws were mechanisms of social control, their objects were either predatory men assaulting women, children, and animals, or were people of color and foreign-born individuals, all “alien” to middle-class WASP America.57 This is not to suggest that society was not aware of same-sex intimacy; on the contrary, middle-class sensibilities were veritably obsessed with sexuality. Specifically, bourgeois society was fixated on affirming and reinforcing a new idealized conception of womanhood—a conception focused on heterosexual marriage. Foucault speaks to this obsession surrounding this Victorian ideal describing “a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy,” as “[t]he legitimate couple … tended to function as the norm,” while “the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex” warranted a closer inspection.58 Ironically, the terminology used to define the “homosexual” as a demographic, coined by European sexologists largely sympathetic to the sexual minority’s plight, became a marker with which to brand an entirely new class of criminals.59 Eskridge demonstrates that “[t]hese categories transformed the enforcement of sodomy laws and stimulated the creation of new laws to regulate same-sex intimacy and gender-bending.”60 Laws that were originally focused on prosecuting prostitution were expanded and new infractions, such as “public lewdness, indecency, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, and solicitation” were added to the criminal code.61 Purposely vague, these new laws forbade transgressions such as “all persons of evil fame or report,” “[a]ll persons who are idle and dissolute,” and “lewd, wanton or lascivious in behavior,” allowing for the easy targeting of homosexuals.62 High-minded civic groups, such as Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, organized in cities across the US demanding enforcement of these new laws and began “assisting the police in monitoring clubs, parks, subways, and public baths for illicit sexual activities among men.”63 These collaborative efforts signal the beginning of a systematic effort not only to stamp out homosexuality’s public presence but increasingly to deprive homosexuals of any sanctuary, most notably in bars. 355

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The first bar raids specifically targeting homosexuals took place around the fin de siècle in New York’s Bowery at Columbia Hall (more commonly referred to as Paresis Hall).64 Described by a patron as “the headquarters for avocational female-impersonators (male homosexual transvestites) of the upper and middle classes,” Paresis Hall quickly became the focus of attention for special hearings called to investigate vice in New York City.65 As a result of these hearings, authorities began articulating methods portending the use of one of the more effective means of closing down a gay bar. After hearing a series of testimonies on the matter, one committee member determined: I judge there is a way to eradicate the kind of evils complained of by this witness at Paresis Hall. These places cannot exist unless they are accorded a Raines liquor license in the first instance, and the only way to eradicate that kind of evil is to have some restrictions in the excise department not to license this kind of places [sic].66 Routine deployment of such tactics did not emerge in the city until after Prohibition, but such discussions within committee hearings demonstrate that New York was both the epicenter and laboratory for the development of a systematic state-sponsored suppression of perceived loci for homosexual association. Eskridge notes that “[p]rodded and advised by its unusually well-organized anti-vice societies, New York developed the classic response: police were organized into vice teams whose members observed gay hangouts, posed as decoys to attract solicitation, and raided gay bars, baths, and other spaces.”67 Law enforcement agencies across the country eventually were to use New York’s examples as a template in their own campaigns to harass homosexuals. During Prohibition (1920–1933), gay bars in New York were able to thrive, as all drinking establishments were illegal; however, following Prohibition’s repeal, a new and highly effective means for curtailing deviant sexualities within the setting of the bar emerged.68 Chauncey notes that Prohibition’s repeal “served to draw new boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and to impose new sanctions against the latter,” as states began to assume licensing authority over the sale of alcohol.69 Regulatory authorities sought to avoid a return of the wanton atmosphere characteristic of the pre-Prohibition saloon and established guidelines mandating that drinking establishments had to be of “good moral character” in order to obtain a permit to operate and faced license revocation if discovered to be “lewd, immoral or offensive to public decency.”70 This proved to be a powerful policing tool, as violators of these regulations ran the risk of having their primary source of income—the ability to sell alcohol—taken away. Formed shortly after Repeal, New York established the State Liquor Authority (SLA) which sought to ensure, among other things, that an establishment did not “suffer or permit such premises to become disorderly.”71 SLA investigators found one unfortunate location, Gloria’s, in violation of these standards for allowing itself “to become disorderly in permitting homosexuals, degenerates, and undesirable people to congregate,” and not only revoked the bar’s liquor license, but also refused to issue a liquor permit to any establishment at all at that location for a full year, effectively ruining the building owner’s investment.72 Although prior to World War II such methods employed by state liquor authorities to target homosexuals were limited to New York, these tactics served as a model for other states as regulatory agencies faced the rapid proliferation of gay bars during and after World War II.73 During the 1930s, just over half of all US states established their own liquor control agencies, and most of these agencies drafted rules with language worded broadly enough so that the presence of any undesirable element, be they prostitutes or homosexuals, would provide sufficient cause to revoke an establishment’s liquor license.74 Collectively, the tactics employed during the twentieth century to prevent homosexuals from congregating were components of a larger strategy designed to privilege the ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family. Margot Canaday has written extensively on the evolution of government attempts to 356

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regulate sexuality and gender arguing that a “legal regime of heterosexuality emerged … between 1930 and 1960.”75 Canaday persuasively contends that “[i]n its modern form heterosexuality is a system that joined criminal and social penalties for male same-sex behavior with severe economic constraints on women, thereby channeling both gay men and lesbians toward marriage and punishing the resistors.”76 These heteronormative pressures reached a fever-pitch following World War II, as a victorious and war-weary America began articulating a vision of the heterosexual dyad as a national paragon, while casting a suspicious eye on citizens who fell outside the boundaries of this domestic orthodoxy. This cult of conformity’s rise coincided with the appearance of shadowy gay bars and dives in cities and towns of any appreciable size nationwide. Characterizing the gay bar of the 1950s, Faderman writes, “dark, secret, a nighttime place, located usually in dismal areas.”77 Experiences during mobilization and wartime spread knowledge of the existence of gay bars, and indeed homosexuality, to gay and lesbian service members returning to homes all across the country. Historian Allan Bérubé notes that “gay life in the postwar years seemed to be growing at an unprecedented rate,” encouraging many gays and lesbians, “while government officials and the press saw it as a dangerous threat.”78 The advent of the Cold War and the coming hysteria of McCarthyism saw the conflation of the Communist and the homosexual into a new national boogeyman. Canaday emphasizes that “it would be hard to overstate the force of the law’s weight upon sex and gender non-conforming men as mid-century approached.”79 Not limited to mechanisms of jurisprudence, this organized repression extended to the medical community as well. Notable exceptions aside, the prevailing judgment of the medical establishment at war’s end provided a rationale for a continuance, if not an intensification, of homosexual persecution, as evidenced by this psychiatric journal excerpt arguing against the relaxing of any anti-homosexual legislation: The growth of a homosexual society in any country is a menace, more or less serious, to the welfare of the state … It would be malpractice for a psychiatrist to help the [homosexual] patient to remain in his pathological condition and feel more comfortable in its perpetuation … If we examine the matter objectively, trying to rise above the clouds of passion and desire, we will admit that a human being comes into the world to use his powers and functions in the service of God and the social order.80 With such chilling resolve coming from segments of the medical community, running afoul of the law prefigured the possibility of even greater risks. The potential penalties homosexuals faced were serious. In addition to possible incarceration, Eskridge points out that in some states conviction “subjected the homosexual to special psychiatric evaluation as a potential ‘sexual psychopath.’”81 If after such an evaluation a psychiatrist deemed an individual as pathological, the unfortunate person could then be locked up in a mental institution and subjected to “procedures ranging from … psychotherapy and hypnosis, to castration, hysterectomy, lobotomy, electroshock, aversion therapy, and the administration of untested drugs.”82 Although voices sympathetic to the homosexual’s plight were beginning to speak out from within the scientific community, the mere possibility of facing such a horrific ordeal only served to add to the climate of fear among the besieged minority. Most homosexuals were able to evade the clutches of a psychiatric ward orderly, yet they still had to contend with police and a criminal justice system that routinely and systematically dehumanized and intimidated lesbians and gay men. Ancillary to any discussion on the gay bar, yet integral to the pre-liberation gay male experience and law enforcement’s measures aimed at policing gay male association, is the concept of cruising. Long a staple of the gay male experience in United States, cruising, where men seek “opportunities for homosexual intercourse in so-called public places, especially restrooms or ‘tearooms,’ as they are known in gay circles,” assumed an amplified significance in areas that lacked an established gay bar.83 357

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Many of the participants were men who dared not risk being seen entering a gay bar, either because they were married or feared potentially getting caught in a raid. Some participants self-identified as homosexual; conversely, many of the other participants in overtly homoerotic acts might violently reject any suggestion that they were “queer.” Howard describes such men as “men who also like queer sex, who also engage in homosexual activity or gender nonconformity, but do not necessarily identify as gay.”84 However the men involved self-identified, the primary purpose for cruising was casual sexual encounters. Howard describes a range of the types of men that would frequent a Jackson, Mississippi, park: At one end of the spectrum, they included married, middle-class, middle-age men who circled the park in their cars, hoping to discreetly meet a partner for the most anonymous of sexual encounters or for ongoing relations of many kinds. For many such men, being seen in a gay bar was unthinkable. At the other end were out-of-the-closet gay men, crossdressers, and male sex workers. Estranged from the self-acknowledged but circumspect bar crowd, they were often young, from lower-income groups, willing to hustle for a living.85 Sexual activity in public spaces, particularly within the confines of an automobile, is by no means the exclusive purview of homosexuals, yet law enforcement agencies nationwide specifically targeted and searched for homosexual activity in public spaces by “regularly survey[ing] public cruising areas frequented by men: bars, restrooms, subways, parking lots, steambaths, and beaches.”86 Eskridge singles out the South for aggressively attacking cruising after World War II; his investigation show that “[p]olice invested unprecedented resources to search out and arrest homosexuals in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Memphis, Miami, New Orleans, Richmond, and Tampa during the 1950s.”87 Arrest records are the chief indicator of cruising’s prevalence; other than providing a general acknowledgment of its existence, few oral history narrators are willing to divulge the intimate details of their personal cruising exploits. Due to its clandestine nature and a reluctance by many to reveal their involvement in the promiscuous practice, plus the fact that, if executed successfully, none other than the participants are likely to know about the encounter, cruising, within a historical context, seems likely to remain a murky topic. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the methods and tactics used to harass and apprehend homosexuals were fine tuned. In addition to using undercover agents as decoys, police departments were increasingly implementing “jump raids,” first “[e]mployed against houses of prostitution earlier in the century, in the postwar period used the raid to disrupt homosexual socialization, usually in clubs and bars and sometimes in baths or parks.”88 The tactic’s most famous deployment marked its most spectacular backfire—June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn. Nevertheless, countless jump raids targeting gay bars in cities across the country led to thousands of arrests and contributed to a persistent tension and sense of unease besetting any homosexual courageous or foolhardy enough to patronize such establishments. A firsthand account printed in an early homophile publication reveals some detail on how police conducted a typical jump raid in Miami, Florida, in 1960: One bartender had just finished saying to the other, as they both met at the cash register to ring up their sales, “Gee I hope business doesn’t drop off now that the season is over,” when a man in a black suit walked in and stood near the door. Quickly five others moved to strategic positions around the bar. It happened so fast that no one really took notice. Once the men were scattered around the bar, the “leader” said over the voice of Mr. Johnny Mathis, “OK, all drinks off the bar. Everyone here is under arrest.” Several quiet curses were heard, and someone with bleached hair said to a friend, “Damn, not only is my life ruined, but the whole evening is spoiled.” It was the last joke of the evening; the “E” club had just been raided.89 358

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Apart from the humiliation suffered by victims of bar busts, these raids often carried consequences that extended well beyond temporary detention and fines. Many newspapers would routinely print the names and addresses of those detained in such raids potentially leading to social ostracism, and quite often, loss of employment. In “communities with small lesbian and gay populations,” such menacing possibilities were amplified.90 While the dramatic image of police paddy wagons lined up to whisk away dozens of homosexuals apprehended during a jump raid would occur with some regularity in the major coastal urban centers, such raids did not occur as frequently in the less densely populated interior. Primarily a matter of scale, the larger the population center, the larger the pool of lesbians and gay men to support the existence of gay bars, and conversely, the larger the police force capable of devoting sufficient resources to vice patrols. Campaigns conducted against gay bars varied in intensity by state and region, and the most effective means of preventing such association from within a bar remained the revocation of an establishment’s liquor license.91 Working in conjunction with state liquor control agencies, several state legislatures began augmenting existing regulations to more explicitly target homosexuals. The late 1950s and early 1960s were witness to an outbreak of particularly vicious and sustained crackdowns on gay bars by state liquor regulators. Beginning in 1954, the city of Miami, Florida, with the support of state political leaders eager to score political points by persecuting a widely despised and largely defenseless minority, organized a sustained, and largely effective, campaign to eliminate homosexuality’s visible presence from the city.92 Dade County officials drafted an ordinance that police and state liquor regulators used with ruthless effect: It shall likewise be unlawful for an owner, operator, manager or employee of a business licensed to sell intoxicating beverages to knowingly sell to, serve to or allow consumption of alcoholic beverages by a homosexual person, lesbian or pervert, as the same are commonly accepted and understood, or to knowingly allow two or more persons who are homosexuals, lesbians or perverts to congregate or remain in his place of business.93 Sensational headlines emblazoned the pages of the Miami Herald during 1954— “‘5,000 Here Perverts, Police Say’; ‘Warning for Miami: How L.A. Handles Its 150,000 Perverts’; ‘Clean This Place Up!’; ‘Ordinance Would Kill Pervert Bars’ Permits’; ‘Stiff Laws Urged on Perversion’”—leading to increased pressure for action from concerned citizens.94 Public pressure, political resolve, and a McCarthyite zeitgeist all converged creating the perfect storm dubbed the “Miami Hurricane” which succeeded in eradicating all gay bars in Miami and Miami Beach by the late 1950s.95 Lesbians and gay men in Buffalo, New York, were subjected to a similarly effective purge in 1960–1961 that eliminated an established lesbian bar presence extending back to the 1930s.96 During this same time period, California state legislators also intensified efforts to wipe out the presence of gay bars by toughening its liquor regulations and shutting down scores of bars in Los Angeles and San Francisco, although many reopened or relocated shortly thereafter.97 The New York State Liquor Authority shut down thirty gay bars in 1960 only to have them nearly all be replaced virtually overnight.98 The speed with which gay bars would often reestablish themselves bedeviled law enforcement agencies across the United States and highlights an inherent weakness in America’s overall effort to criminalize homosexuality. A severe crackdown in one city or municipality, could, and would often, push gay bars to relocate and open in neighboring cities and communities that lacked active campaigns of suppression. Following the Miami purge, police in Tampa blamed the crackdown for a surge in “perverts” fleeing to the city from Miami.99 The degree to which local authorities enforced anti-homosexual ordinances varied widely. Effective enforcement, like the 1954 purge in Miami, required a jurisdiction with a budget and the political will to commit to a sustained effort; however, once the episodic hysteria that fueled such witch-hunts subsided, and after it was no longer politically expedient, most municipalities lost their appetite to devote limited city funds and gradually 359

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forsook such endeavors. Once a climate that could countenance the existence of a gay bar reappeared, even if for only a very short period, and assuming the presence of a suitable homosexual population to support them, gay bars would quickly proliferate. Economics, a factor often overlooked, also contributed to the gay bar’s resilience, at least in San Francisco and probably in other cities as well, as such ventures were potentially “lucrative enterprises,” albeit somewhat risky gambles, as one early 1960s Bay Area bartender explains: ______’s brings in more money than any bar in the city. The only place that sells more beer is the Red Garter, and beer’s all they sell there. On a week night there will always be at least 75 guys in there, and on a weekend it always reaches 250 capacity … The gay bars are so sure to be a success that the juke box company or the beer supplier will give an owner all he needs to begin, if they know he’s opening a gay bar. Or they’ll pay his expenses if he gets into trouble, just so he keeps buying from them.100 It is most likely impossible to prove the veracity of reports of such under-the-table transactions between bar owners and liquor distributors, yet such shady dealings provide a plausible explanation for why an entrenched, urban, gay bar presence was so irrepressible. Inconsistences in regional enforcement of anti-homosexual codes coupled with the powerful incentive of money to be made, to say nothing of the collective desire of individual homosexuals to find locations to congregate, all ensured that even the most rigorous purges were ultimately doomed to failure. This whack-a-mole approach to policing gay bars was the norm in cities nationwide during the 1960s. Such were the conditions in New York at the time of the 1969 Stonewall riots. As important an event as the uprising was, Eskridge reminds that “[a]lthough Stonewall was a defining moment in gay liberation, it did not discourage police gay-bashing. To the contrary, harassment escalated.”101 This intensification of police pressure only served to further enflame and encourage militant opposition. In the aftermath, police crackdowns were met with a rapidly growing, organized resistance as well as with heightened scrutiny from an increasingly sympathetic media. Change in the cities did not come overnight, but in the face of organized groups demanding increased transparency from corrupt police departments and coalitions of bar owners mounting successful legal challenges to liquor control regulations in the courts of some jurisdictions, systematic police suppression of gay bars outside of the South (and Mormon West) gradually began eroding as the 1970s wore on.102 By the 1970s society had constructed nearly a century’s worth of legislation arrayed to privilege heteronormative behavior and criminalize same-sex affections and gender transgression. In the face of this officially sanctioned oppression, lesbian and gay men who wished to fulfill their personal longings and express themselves were forced to adapt. Eskridge observes that “just as social developments drove legal evolution, so legal developments affected social evolution.”103 The deadly serious cat-and-mouse game played in between law enforcement and homosexuals helped lead to the development of sophisticated social strategies, on the part of an emerging sub-culture to circumvent increasingly futile efforts to relegate homosexuality to the darkened closet and prevent lesbian and gay men from coming out into the open. Policing and efforts to do so, forged and hammered the “gay community” into its current form. The state delineated and defined a “community” by virtue of its deviance from proscribed sexual norms. Although locations for assignation were manifold, during the twentieth century, the locality of the gay bar became the crucible in which not only gay culture developed, but it was also where a community’s consciousness emerged in direct response to policing pressures. Of all the cultural pressures that shaped and defined the “gay community,” the police—and how to contend with them—unified and galvanized a newly defined social grouping. With all of its inherent intersectionalities, the principal constant within the LGBTQ community has been its deviation from the patriarchal heterosexual norm. This deviation garnered the unwelcome gaze of the policing 360

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authorities that in turn shepherded and drove a “community” to coalesce in response to a shared oppressor. Absent police and the shepherding forces of policing, it would seem unlikely that the LGBTQ community would have ever “solidified” into its current form.

Notes 1 Nancy B. Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar” (M. A. Thesis: University of Chicago, 1964), 53. 2 Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 200. 3 John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 236. 4 Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 16. 5 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 33. 6 Jonathan Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 314. 7 Thomas Mackey, Red Lights Out: A Legal History of Prostitution, Disorderly Houses, and Vice Districts, 1870–1917 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987). 8 William Eskridge, Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 27. 9 Katy Coyle and Nadiene Van Dyke, “Sex, Smashing, and Storyville in Turn-of-the-Century New Orleans,” in Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 63–64. 10 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 22. 11 Allan Bérubé, “Resort for Sex Perverts: A History of Gay Bathhouses,” in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History, eds. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 70–71. Originally published as “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” Coming Up!, December 1984, 15–19. This version comes from the Journal of Homosexuality 44, no. 3/4 (2003), 33–53. 12 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 34. 13 Chauncey, Gay New York, 34. 14 Chauncey, Gay New York, 35–37. 15 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 2, part 2, Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1915), 350–51. Quoted in Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976), 52. 16 Ibid. 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 43. 18 Chauncey, Gay New York, 143. 19 Chauncey, Gay New York, 144. 20 La Forest Potter, Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities (New York: Robert Dodsley, 1933), 184, 186–189, in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, edited by Kathy Peiss, 346–348, (Boston: Wadsworth, 2002). 21 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 68. 22 Chauncey, Gay New York, 296. 23 Chauncey, Gay New York, 291. 24 Faderman, Odd Girls, 67. 25 Chauncey, Gay New York, 331. 26 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34. 27 Allan Bérubé, “Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II,” in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History, eds. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 86. Originally published in the Advocate, 15 October 1981, 20–25. Revised for Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., 383–94 (New York: New American Library, 1989).

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William Elijah Hicks 28 Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 10–11. 29 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 130–131. 30 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 21. 31 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 23. 32 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 139. 33 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 148. 34 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 32. 35 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 126. 36 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 122. 37 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 38. 38 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, “’I Could Hardly Wait to Get Back to that Bar’: Lesbian Bar Culture in Buffalo in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39. 39 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 214–217. 40 Faderman, Odd Girls, 126. 41 John Howard, “The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in PostWorld War II Atlanta,” in Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 114. 42 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 56. 43 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Prosecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 165. 44 Faderman, Odd Girls, 167. 45 Faderman, Odd Girls, 170–172. 46 Faderman, Odd Girls, 168. 47 Lapovsky Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, 72. 48 John Howard, “Place and Movement in Gay American History: A Case from the Post-World War II South,” in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York: Routledge, 1997), 213. 49 Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar,” 67. 50 Fireworks (1947); Scorpio Rising (1964); and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), directed by Kenneth Anger (Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle, 2010). 51 Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar,” 67. 52 Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar,” 61. 53 Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar,” 60. 54 Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar,” 64. 55 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 43. 56 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 18. 57 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 19. 58 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 38. 59 David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 409–411. 60 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 18. 61 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 27. 62 Chicago Code, 1911, §§2012, 2018, 2030, 2031. In Eskridge, Gaylaw, 29. 63 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 23. 64 Jonathan Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 299. 65 Earl Lind, The Female Impersonators, ed. Alfred W. Herzog (New York: Medico-Legal Journal, 1922), 146. Quoted in Katz, Gay American History, 366. 66 New York State, Report of the Special Committee of the [N.Y.S.] Assembly Appointed to Investigate the Public Offices and Departments of the City of New York … transmitted to the Legislature January 15, 1900, vol. 5 (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1900), 1431–32, quoted in Katz, Gay American History, 47. 67 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 44. 68 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 45. 69 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 337.

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Policing, The Bar, and Resistance 70 Leonard Harrison and Elizabeth Lane, After Repeal: A Study of Liquor Control Administration (New York: Harper, 1936), 79–80. 71 N.Y. Alcoholic Beverage Control Law §106(6), added by 1934 N.Y. Laws. 72 Chauncey, Gay New York, 338–340. 73 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 46. 74 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 45. 75 Margot Canaday, “Heterosexuality as a Legal Regime,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. III, eds. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 449. 76 Margot Canaday, “LGBT History,” Frontiers 35 (No. 1 2014): 13; Further elaborated by Canaday in “Heterosexuality as a Legal Regime,” 442–71. 77 Faderman, Odd Girls, 161. 78 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 256. 79 Canaday, “Heterosexuality,” 450. 80 Thomas V. Moore, “The Pathogenesis and Treatment of Homosexual Disorders: A Digest of Some Pertinent Evidence,” Journal of Personality 14 (1945): 57. 81 William Eskridge, “Democracy, Kulturekampf, and the Apartheid of the Closet,” Vanderbilt Law Review 50 (March 1997): 430. 82 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 18. For more on treatments, see Katz, Gay American History, 129–207. 83 John Howard, “The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in PostWorld War II Atlanta,” in Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 110. 84 John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xviii. 85 Howard, Men Like That, 236. 86 William Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet, 1946–1961,” Florida State University Law Review 24 (Summer 1997): 718–719. 87 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 64. 88 Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence,” 721. 89 Charles K. Robinson, “The Raid,” ONE (December 1961): 16. 90 Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence,” 762. 91 Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence,” 761. 92 James T. Sears, Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948–1968 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 21–28. 93 Miami, Florida, Code of Ordinances, § 51–35 (1954). 94 Sears, Lonely Hunters, 17. 95 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 79. 96 Lapovsky Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, 145. 97 Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence,” 765. 98 Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence,” 766. See also Hall Call, “Why Perpetuate This Barbarism?,” The Mattachine Review (June 1960): 14. 99 Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence,” 730. 100 Achilles, “The Homosexual Bar,” 72. 101 William Eskridge, “Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet: Establishing Conditions for Lesbian and Gay Intimacy, Nomos, and Citizenship,” Hofstra Law Review 25 (Spring 1997): 839. 102 Eskridge, “Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet,” 953–954. 103 Eskridge, Gaylaw, 18.

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27 ANTI-BRUTALITY ACTIVISM AND NEIGHBORHOOD ANTI-CRIME ACTIVISM DURING THE 1970S Christopher Lowen Agee

On a mid-August day in 1978 when temperatures reached a sticky 92 degrees, roughly 3,000 Philadelphians—predominantly Black and working-class—converged on Philadelphia’s City Hall. The demonstrators had marched across the city from the north, south, and west to participate in an anti-police brutality protest that, to one journalist, “had the air of a grass roots movement.” In recent days, Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) officers had gunned down two restrained and unarmed Black men and viciously beaten a third unarmed Black radical in front of rolling television cameras. State representative Dave Richardson, a young Black politician, stood before the demonstrators and urged them to register to vote so that they could oust the “psychopath,” Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo. A large sign loomed over the crowd reinforcing Richardson’s call to action: “Vote for your life. Pull the switch on Rizzo before he pulls the switch on you.” After the speeches at City Hall, the demonstrators marched another eight blocks to the federal US Court House. As demonstrators then rallied for federal judicial action, Representative Richardson raced from the gathering to Washington D.C., where he joined a delegation urging the US Attorney General to open a case against the PPD.1 Across the United States during the late 1970s, campaigns against police brutality achieved a surprising depth of political legitimacy and power. These protest efforts were often motivated by the accelerating spread of paramilitary policing. Anti-police brutality activists organized large-scale demonstrations, conducted massive voter registration drives, and motivated thousands of workingclass Black voters to the polls. Anti-brutality organizers also proved adept at tapping into the broader “neighborhood movement.” During this “decade of the neighborhood,” neighborhood activists in cities throughout the country were organizing for greater neighborhood autonomy. The foot soldiers for “neighborhood power” were a varied bunch. In Philadelphia neighborhood activists included working-class and middle-class Blacks; White feminists; young White professionals; and Quaker commune members. In northern cities, neighborhood organizers saw their communities buffeted by rising crime rates, deindustrialization, and cuts in federal aid. Proponents of neighborhood power proposed responding to these crises with decentralized, face-to-face, and personally authentic governance.2 Influenced by Black Power and New Left politics, neighborhood activists argued that cities could fight crime and reverse the economic decline by reducing the citizenry’s social alienation and involving residents in a participatory democracy. Citizens who felt bound to their neighbors and invested in democratic decision-making could rescue their cities.3 Neighborhood activists regarded neighborhood anti-crime campaigns as the first necessary step on the path to neighborhood self-determination. Black and White neighborhood activists alike 364

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-36

Anti-Brutality Activism and Neighborhood Anti-Crime Activism

embraced a “politics of responsibility” that proposed to grant neighborhood residents—not the Hall of Justice—authority over police policy-making.4 Neighborhood anti-crime organizers wished to make police the servants of their neighborhoods and believed that paramilitary policing exacerbated crime by alienating citizens from each other and the city’s decision-making processes. During the 1970s anti-brutality activism and neighborhood anti-crime activism thus shared a common desire for decentralized police authority and increased police accountability. Recently, historians have pointed to the ways in which some Blacks activists during the 1970s mixed their calls for reductions in police violence with efforts for greater crime control. Peter Pihos and Simon Balto, for instance, have described how the Chicago Urban League’s Action for Survival program sought to reduce crime and police violence by making the Chicago Police Department “accountable to the community.” An organizer explained, “Black people do want better police protection, but we want it fair and we want it equitable. We don’t want black people beat to death for minor infractions of the law.”5 Beyond the groups that called for reductions in both criminal violence and police violence, there were also separate constellations of organizations dedicated to crime fighting and groups dedicated to police brutality that saw themselves as allied in a fight against centralized governance.6 Anti-brutality activists proved to be flexible in their pursuit of structural police reform, and they used their coalition with neighborhood anti-crime activists to pursue an aggressive two-pronged strategy. First, anti-brutality activists participated in electoral campaigns. Anti-brutality messages turned out young, working-class Black voters and powered the rise of many “neighborhood candidates” during the 1970s and early 1980s. Anti-brutality activists hoped that once these politicians reached office they would use their power to remake the police. Second, anti-brutality activists attempted to achieve structural police reform through the federal courts. Lawyers and plaintiffs used the partnership between anti-brutality groups and neighborhood anti-crime groups to collect accusations of police violence and to enlist federal prosecutors to the cause. Philadelphia was a national epicenter of both anti-brutality activism and neighborhood anticrime organizing. Frank Rizzo—first as the city’s police commissioner (1967–1971) and then as its mayor (1972–1979)—aimed to transform the PPD into the most self-avowedly paramilitary police force in the country.7 But in the so-called “City of Neighborhoods,” community activists from Philadelphia’s Black, Latino, and interracial neighborhoods arose in opposition. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, anti-brutality campaigns were scoring head-turning successes across the country. In 1983, for instance, Chicago activists leveraged police brutality politics to increase Black voter registration, defeat the established machine, and elect Harold Washington as Chicago’s first Black mayor.8 In Philadelphia, the activists who had participated in the 1978 City Hall protest succeeded in blocking Mayor Rizzo’s attempt at a third consecutive term and in enlisting the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) in an equitable relief lawsuit against the PPD. But as anti-brutality activists achieved this momentum, they found themselves politically vulnerable. Ironically, the victories at the polls helped splinter the alliance between anti-brutality activists and the neighborhood anti-crime activists. Concurrent defeats in the courtroom then denied anti-brutality activists new coalitions with the federal government. Anti-brutality campaigns that had enjoyed such promise during the late 1970s found themselves isolated by the mid-1980s.

Paramilitary Policing in the 1970s Following World War II, few branches of local government had experienced a more relentless movement towards centralization than America’s big-city police departments.9 By 1970 police professionalization had consolidated an unprecedented amount of institutional authority into the hands of police chiefs and commissioners, and in many cities, police leaders used that power to deploy paramilitary “special units” into Black, Latino, and interracial neighborhoods. The San 365

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Francisco Police Department’s Tac Squad, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics Unit (SWAT), and the Detroit Police Department’s Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets Unit (STRESS) were all introduced to fight crime through volume arrests and the use of force. The PPD ultimately steered 14.4% of its uniformed personnel into special units.10 The PPD’s decoy unit illustrated the high-value PPD officials placed on arrests, reduced citizen input, and the use of force. Like other decoy units in the country, the PPD’s unit adopted strategies that nearly guaranteed violence.11 Decoy teams each sent out an officer costumed as a citizen vulnerable to crime (e.g., a “vagrant” or a “granny”) in order to induce an attempted mugging. When a suspect allegedly took the bait, the rest of the team swooped in to make an arrest. In an arrangement in which the arresting officers, the “victims,” and the “witnesses” were all police, the decoy unit existed at a total remove from the community. The self-contained nature of the team was conducive brutality and false arrests. In 1981, the press discovered that one PPD decoy team had assaulted at least eight innocent citizens with fists, batons, and dogs.12 Residents in Black, Latino, and interracial neighborhoods complained that while paramilitary units came into their communities to harass and manhandle residents, PPD officers expressed a “blasé attitude about crime.” During the early 1970s, Philadelphia’s Black and Latino residents charged that Philadelphia police were often nowhere to be seen when gang members assembled for street battles. Parents of Black children further protested that police failed to protect children who had to cross gang territorial lines on their walks to and from school. Indeed, the police also regularly chose not to protect Black families from White vigilantes when disputes arose over neighborhood racial boundaries.13 PPD officers actually instigated cross-boundary racial violence against Black youth through their infamous “turf dropping” practice. In North Philadelphia, police sped their vans onto neighborhood basketball courts, jumped out, and kidnapped Black youth. Police then “dropped” these young people in the adjacent, all-White Fishtown neighborhood. There, White gangs set upon the Black youth as the teenagers tried to scramble back to their home turf.14

The Expanding Anti-Police Brutality Movement As many scholars have noted, the urban police’s brutal, arrest-focused tactics initially spurred a radical and confrontational activism from groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.15 Law enforcement often responded to this provocative politicking with overwhelming force. In 1966, Deputy Commissioner Rizzo put an end to the Philadelphia chapter of the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee when he directed a series of police raids on the members’ houses.16 Later in the 1960s, PPD raids upended Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Action Movement. None of these actions produced criminal convictions, but they fulfilled their purpose by terrorizing and draining the radical organizations. In 1970, Commissioner Rizzo responded to the murder of one police officer and the wounding of another by approving crippling raids (later ruled illegal) against Philadelphia’s Black Panther Party.17 During this assault, police forced Black Panther Party men to strip to their underwear and line up along the sidewalk for media photographers.18 As these assaults on young Black radicals accumulated, a less physically confrontational style of anti-brutality protest gathered momentum. Many of the second-wave, anti-brutality organizers were working-class, activist mothers who had witnessed police frisking and abusing their own teenaged sons. These women initially searched for recourse through the city’s official complaint channels. When word of these efforts got out, neighbors began contacting them and asking for assistance in filing their own charges of police violence. Mary Rouse, an active NAACP member in the Kensington neighborhood; Maria Bonet, the president of the Puerto Rican Fraternity in North Philadelphia; and Rosetta Wylie, a public housing activist in North Philadelphia, all acted as conduits for residents filing police brutality complaints to city officials.19 366

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Prior to working on police brutality, many of the new anti-brutality activists had waged campaigns to make Philadelphia’s schools, welfare programs, and civil service sector more inclusive of and responsive to Black and Latino people. In Northwest Philadelphia, Merrie Margo Felder and Floyd Platton formed the interracial Germantown Council for Community Control of Police (GCCP). Platton was the chief personnel officer for the city’s Water Department where he was in a position to hire more Blacks into local government, and Felder was a parent organizer at Pickett Middle School where she had led protests calling for youth employment opportunities.20 This duo had focused on extending the social welfare state’s services to Black people, and now they demanded a similar extension of equitable policing services. Platton and Felder believed the easiest way to create a fairer criminal justice system would be to defund it. Charging that the “present police budget keeps half-starved” the city’s other “underdeveloped social services,” the GCCP called for a reallocation of public safety monies.21 Very quickly, Philadelphia’s new anti-brutality activists found that the professionalized PPD “ha[d] achieved an autonomy in Philadelphia” and that city officials were unable or unwilling to respond to community complaints. Meanwhile, vengeful PPD officers made any “scrutiny of [PPD] conduct” “not only impossible but perilous.”22 Mary Rouse and Floyd Platton thus brought activists from across the city together under a new organization, the Council of Organizations on Philadelphia Police Accountability and Responsibility (COPPAR). COPPAR eventually encompassed over 20 member organizations, and similar to police brutality groups in other cities, the anti-police violence organization bridged the divide between Philadelphia’s liberal and radical activists. In North Philadelphia, for instance, Bonet’s liberal Puerto Rican Fraternity and the radical Young Lords chafed against one another, but when police subjected the Young Lords to harassment, Bonet led COPPAR’s sharp response.23 Similarly, the PPD raids on the Black Panther Party headquarters in 1970 drew protests from NAACP officials within COPPAR. Rouse commented that when the PPD “stripped those men in the street, that certainly made me and many other black citizens involved in the cause of NAACP come out.”24

The Two-Pronged Approach Unable to secure police accountability through official city channels, this new generation of antibrutality activists began pursuing structural police reform through electoral and legal strategies. In both those efforts, anti-brutality activists took an opportunistic approach to coalition building and benefited from an alliance with neighborhood anti-crime organizers. Neighborhood anti-crime organizing acted as the engine of Philadelphia’s neighborhood movement’s block-organizing campaign. In West Philadelphia working-class and middle-class Blacks and White-collar and counter-culture Whites had joined together to found Citizens Local Alliance for a Safer Philadelphia (CLASP). CLASP organized blocks around public safety, and Philadelphia’s neighborhood power campaign ultimately tapped CLASP as its official blockorganizing agency.25 CLASP insisted that crime reduction depended on residents emerging from their barricaded homes and revivifying life on the streets. CLASP worked to convince blocks to launch their own outdoor festivals, beautification projects, and volunteer Town Watch patrols.26 CLASP rejected the police’s “apprehension-oriented,” “shooting first and asking questions afterward” tactics and explained, “Unhappily, much of what has been done in the name of crime prevention has had the effect of increasing our victimization because it has ignored or eroded that neighborly spirit of mutual care and trust so essential to solve the riddle of crime and change in America.”27 Neighborhood activists regarded public safety organizing as the necessary first step in their larger campaign for neighborhood autonomy. After all, neighborhood residents regularly identified public safety as their chief concern. A White, Quaker neighborhood activist explained that his ambitions 367

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stretched far beyond crime control, but that “[Y]ou’ve got to start with where people’s heads are at, and that’s crime.”28 Block organizers hoped that once residents had established a bond of “mutual protection,” organizers could help guide neighbors to a deeper understanding of their interconnections.29 Activists did not regard public safety organizing as an end to itself but instead as a springboard to self-governance and independence from oppressive outside institutions, including the PPD. Anti-brutality and neighborhood anti-crime activists thus both sought police accountability and a decentralization of policing power. These organizers felt bound in a common cause and invested in the other’s campaigns. In 1972, COPPAR and CLASP both joined in a citywide Citizens’ Alliance that called for crime-fighting authority to be shifted out of the hands of the “repressive” PPD and into the hands of community members. “Police abuse is part of the crime problem,” one COPPAR member explained.30 Sometimes members of a single household each dedicated themselves to a different wing of the police reform alliance. Raymond Ragland, a Black pharmacologist, was beaten by two patrol officers and then falsely charged with assault and battery on an officer. Raymond responded by participating in a COPPAR lawsuit against the PPD.31 During the same years, Lenora Ragland, Raymond’s wife, served as the “security coordinator” for an interracial neighborhood anti-crime organization, Secure All Wynnefield. In that capacity, she organized civilian street patrols that phoned for district police when residents witnessed criminal wrongdoing.32 The first evidence that the anti-brutality and anti-neighborhood crime campaigns were capable of achieving electoral wins came in a race for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. In 1972, Dave Richardson ran for a West Philadelphia legislative seat on a platform prioritizing reductions in gang violence and police brutality. A former gang member himself, Richardson had been a high school-aged protestor at a 1967 Board of Education demonstration that Rizzo’s police had infamously assaulted. Now a 24-year-old young man, Richardson wore a dashiki and Malcolm X medallion, and he worked with area youth to increase job opportunities and reduce gang violence and open drug dealing. Through overpolicing and underpolicing, Richardson and his supporters charged, police adopted a “n------ be damned” attitude, and Richardson worked with COPPAR’s Mary Rouse to register Black voters around issues of police harassment and brutality.33 PPD officers themselves helped cement the alliance between anti-brutality activists and neighborhood anti-crime activists by regularly harassing and assaulting anti-crime organizers, especially those who tied peacekeeping with Black political mobilization. For instance, police singled out Falaka and David Fattah’s House of Umoja. Opened in 1969, the House of Umoja offered a home to teenagers who wished to escape gang violence, and the group negotiated gang truces and registered Black voters. In response, the police regularly stalked the Fattah’s house with rifles and dogs, and on occasion, officers viciously assaulted politically prominent House of Umoja street workers.34 It was no surprise then that the police set their sights on Richardson’s peacekeeping work soon after he defeated the Rizzo-backed incumbent in the 1972 Democratic primary. One afternoon while Richardson was on the street de-escalating a gang conflict, officers belatedly arrived on the scene, nearly ran over Richardson with a police cruiser, and then arrested the Democratic nominee on false charges. His press representative responded, “The cops don’t care who you are or what you’re doing. Anytime you get involved in constructive activities in the community, they will arrest you.” After he won his general election, Representative Richardson organized hearings into the overpolicing and underpolicing of Philadelphia’s Black community.35 At the same time that anti-brutality activists were attempting to achieve police reform through electoral victories, they were also pursuing structural change in the federal courts. In the 1961 case Monroe v. Pape, the United States Supreme Court had allowed victims of brutality to sue individual police officers—but not local governments—for restitution when those officers committed civil rights violations. In Philadelphia, the city government covered these damages, and by the mid-1970s, the city 368

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was spending nearly $500,000 per year on rights violation lawsuits.36 That price tag failed to motivate Philadelphia’s leaders towards reform. Civil liberties lawyers and anti-brutality activists thus desired forward-looking cases that would implicate PPD and City Hall officials and force them to restructure law enforcement. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court had begun to allow citizens to turn to the federal courts for equitable relief when local and state authorities refused to address unconstitutional policies.37 The Philadelphia anti-brutality campaign hoped that the federal courts would now extend this sort of standing to citizens seeking equitable relief from police departments. In 1971, attorneys filed two cases: one centered on a small cluster of police violence victims including Gerald Goode (of no relation to the future Philadelphia mayor) and another revolved around a large group of complaints collected by COPPAR. Both cases sought injunctive relief from the federal courts. A federal district judge combined the two cases as Rizzo v. Goode and then ruled that private citizens had standing to demand equitable relief from police departments. The judge found constitutional rights violations in 20 of the examples of abuse submitted by the plaintiffs, and he declared this number was intolerably high and worthy of federal intervention.38 The PPD appealed the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, and in a 5–3 decision written by Justice William Rehnquist, the Court reversed the lower court’s finding with three arguments. First, Rehnquist opined that 20 instances of rights violations was not “unacceptably high.” The justice, moreover, found no “affirmative link between” these unconstitutional actions and any “plan or policy” promulgated by police officials or city leadership. Second, Rehnquist wrote that the victims of police abuse lacked standing for an equitable relief claim. Being a victim of police violence in the past, Rehnquist reasoned, did not make a person more susceptible to police violence in the future. Thus, the plaintiffs had no clear stake in future police policy. Third, Rehnquist invoked principles of federalism to argue that federal courts had no purview over local police departments. The state Attorney General and the local district attorney, he argued, maintained sole responsibility over local police policies.39 Goode v. Rizzo ground the anti-brutality movement’s campaign for federal judicial intervention to a halt. At the same time, the case emboldened police departments to take an even tougher stand against brutality complaints. In Philadelphia, for instance, the PPD police union began providing free legal representation to officers who were charged with brutality, allowing those officers to seek defamation damages from their accusers.40

Anti-Police Brutality Activism at the Ballot Box The neighborhood movement’s political campaign against Mayor Rizzo and the PPD reached its climax in 1978 following a showdown between Rizzo and the Black radical organization MOVE. Established in 1972, MOVE was a religious group dedicated to principles of communal selfgovernance, skepticism of science and technology, and animal rights. Over the course of the 1970s, MOVE’s relationship with the PPD grew increasingly contentious. Delbert Africa, a former Black Panther Party leader and MOVE’s “Minister of Confrontation and Security,” called for the city to remove the PPD from West Philadelphia and allow community members to police their own streets. MOVE advertised the PPD’s repeated assaults on its people and soon established itself as a leading anti-police brutality voice in the city.41 In March 1978, residents of MOVE’s commune prevented a court-ordered building inspection, and Mayor Rizzo responded by ordering a police blockade of the house. Rizzo aimed to starve MOVE into submission.42 MOVE people fortified their compound behind a stockade and took positions atop the new fence line with rifles.43 In this showdown between the PPD’s military-style cordoning of the MOVE compound and the MOVE peoples’ brandishing of weapons, many neighborhood anti-crime activists—Black and White—sided with MOVE. Black neighborhood anti-crime activists began joining efforts to smuggle food through the police line.44 369

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Mayor Rizzo had placed a charter amendment on the November 1978 ballot that would enable him to run for a third consecutive term, and with that election date approaching, the mayor felt compelled to bring the MOVE standoff to an end. On August 8, 1978, the PPD assaulted the MOVE compound with a water cannon and then gunfire. When the MOVE people finally surrendered themselves to the police, officers set upon Delbert Africa, grabbing him by his dreadlocks, dragging him across the ground, breaking his jaw, and concussing him with their feet, helmets, and rifle butts. Media cameras broadcast images of that beating to the world.45 In the wake of this shocking violence, Councilperson Lucien Blackwell, a Black champion of anti-brutality politics, and Councilperson Ethel Allen, a Black proponent of neighborhood anticrime organizing, joined together to introduce a Police Complaint Procedure Bill that proposed new requirements forcing the PPD to document all brutality complaints and make them open to the public. Neighborhood anti-crime groups like CLASP backed that measure, but Rizzo and PPD allies on the City Council scuttled the bill.46 To finally seize control over the government, police reform activists initiated a massive voter registration drive among working-class Black voters. Representative Richardson, the House of Umoja’s Falaka Fattah, and others capitalized on the anger over the police assault on MOVE and encouraged young, first-time Black voters to the polls. That growing political force had already made itself felt a year before when a young White prosecutor named Edward Rendell had unexpectedly defeated incumbent Emmett Fitzpatrick in the race for district attorney. Rendell’s campaign had promised to vigorously prosecute both violent police officers and criminals preying on low-income neighborhoods. Rizzo, however, ignored the warning signs in Rendell’s victory and steered into his own electoral fight over police violence. In the Fall 1978 charter campaign, Rizzo closed with an “anti-anti-police brutality” message. In particular, Rizzo targeted Alphonso Deal, an NAACP leader and outspoken Black police officer. During the MOVE blockade, Deal had helped smuggle food across the police line, and after the assault, Deal had called on District Attorney Rendell to prosecute the officers who beat Delbert Africa. White PPD officers threatened Deal with assassination and eventually drove him out of the department. Rizzo, meanwhile, used Deal to raise the alarm over the breadth of the anti-brutality movement. The mayor charged that Deal’s NAACP had “joined hands” with radicals to convince Black Philadelphians to “vote Black.” In perhaps the most infamous quote of his career, Rizzo urged his supporters to head to the polls and “vote White.”47 The 1978 charter vote thus revolved around the issue of police violence, and the anti-police brutality campaign’s registration efforts produced a tidal wave of new Black voters. The city’s Black proportion of registered voters increased a startling 13 points, and in the November charter vote, 62,000 new Black voters came to the polls. With 96% of Black voters rejecting the charter, Rizzo’s amendment failed. Marking the beginning of the end of the Rizzo era, the charter amendment’s defeat cleared the way for a neighborhood-backed candidate. In the 1979 mayoral race, William Green, a White liberal Congressman, won the primary and general elections by securing the support of the city’s neighborhood movement.48 Anti-brutality activism had been the critical factor in Rizzo’s removal, and Mayor Green now promised to usher in a new period of police accountability.

Anti- Police Brutality Activism in the Courts The Supreme Court’s 1976 Rizzo decision had slammed the brakes on federal lawsuits aimed at structural police reforms. Without a path through the courts, Philadelphia’s civil rights and liberties lawyers had joined the electoral campaign against Mayor Rizzo’s administration. Through groups such as the Coalition for Police Accountability (CAPA), attorneys collected brutality complaints and spotlighted those incidents through press releases and demonstrations.49 CAPA’s work collecting complaints set off a daisy chain of ever-expanding investigations into PPD violence and City Hall complicity. In 1975 the attorneys at the Public Interest Law Center of 370

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Philadelphia (PILCOP) used the brutality complaints collected by CAPA as evidence in its application for a federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grant. PILCOP’s submission proposed to audit all PPD shootings during the 1970s. Recently, Pennsylvania’s liberal governor had placed Philadelphia’s LEAA regional advisory commission under the direction of Yvonne Haskins, a Black proponent of neighborhood anti-crime organizing. Haskins was a reliable supporter of proposals that sought to make the police more accountable to Black and interracial neighborhoods, and she endorsed PILCOP’s funding request.50 PILCOP’s subsequent research found that each year between 1971 and 1979, Philadelphia police shot an average of 53 people and killed an average of 18 people. At least 40% of those shot were unarmed. Youth offered little protection from this mayhem. Between 1970 and 1978, PPD officers shot at least 60 juveniles.51 PILCOP’s work attracted the attention of the city’s mainstream press. In April 1977, one month after PILCOP released its first police shooting report, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the “Homicide Files” exposé.52 This series revealed that the PPD’s homicide squad—similar to the detectives unit in Chicago a decade later—regularly employed torture in its investigations. For years, this violence had been hiding in plain sight. Between 1974 and April 1977, Philadelphia’s judges ruled that interrogations were illegal in 80 homicide cases. The Inquirer series tied the brutal interrogation room practices to the city’s leadership, describing instances when the city manager, police commissioner, and District Attorney Emmett Fitzpatrick chose not to prosecute officers for torture.53 The series noted that the head of the homicide squad was Mayor Rizzo’s old North Philadelphia patrol partner, and at least one detective told reporters that Rizzo himself had ordered the torture policy.54 The “Homicide Files” won the Pulitzer Prize, and its revelations that District Attorney Fitzpatrick was ignoring torture motivated federal prosecutors into action. Shortly after the “Homicide Files” hit the newsstands, the US Attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania identified a case in which PPD homicide detectives had beaten a false confession out of a White, mentally disabled suspect and then used violence to coerce false statements from seven witnesses. In this case, federal prosecutors successfully convicted six PPD homicide detectives for civil rights violations. After the convictions, however, the PPD chose not to discipline or even remove from active duty any of the six police as each officer appealed his case. The officers lost their appeals and spent 15 months in prison, but the DOJ emerged from the experience enraged that the PPD leadership had refused to enforce any accountability up until the moment the six police were incarcerated.55 Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had raised the prospect that it might be ready to reconsider the opinions in Rizzo v. Goode. An additional liberal justice had recently joined the bench, and in June 1978, the High Court surprised observers with Monell v. Department of Social Services. That decision backtracked on Rehnquist’s earlier federalism arguments and determined that plaintiffs could use federal courts for injunctive relief against “local governing bodies” violating constitutional rights.56 Opponents and defenders of the police both speculated that Monell might signal a new openness to rights lawsuits against police departments.57 The DOJ was thus in a receptive mood when Philadelphia’s Black political leaders called for federal intervention in the wake of the MOVE raid. Standing outside of Delbert Africa’s hospital room, Representative Richardson demanded a federal investigation into the PPD, and a delegation including every prominent Black elected official in Philadelphia then met with the US Attorney General’s office. Assistant Attorney General Drew Days III, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter and the first Black man to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, had already opened investigations into the Houston and San Antonio police departments. Days was also familiar with the PPD after spending the early 1970s teaching law at Temple University. The assistant attorney general thus agreed it was time to move beyond individual criminal prosecutions. In explaining his approach to the PPD, Days related, “[W]e’re not interested in putting police and city officials behind bars. We’re interested in making institutional changes.”58 371

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The DOJ thus submitted United States v. the City of Philadelphia, the federal government’s first attempt to sue for structural police department reform. Philadelphia had accepted 10 million dollars in federal law enforcement funds over the course of the 1970s, and DOJ prosecutors argued that this provided the federal government with an interest in the PPD’s rights abuses. Still, the US Attorney for Eastern Pennsylvania admitted, “There is no question this is uncharted ground.” Assistant Attorney General Days hoped that with new legal theories, this strategy might then allow the DOJ to sue for structural police reform in Houston, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee, and Mobile, Alabama.59 The 28-page lawsuit the DOJ filed in court was built upon a decade of local anti-brutality activism. The DOJ’s case drew from PILCOP’s investigation into PPD shootings, the Inquirer’s series on police torture, and the myriad reports of PPD intimidation and harassment against those who filed police abuse complaints. The suit charged that Rizzo had initiated many of the PPD’s violent policies as police commissioner and that Rizzo now ensured the continuation of these policies as mayor. The suit asked that the court allow the DOJ to cut off federal LEAA funds to Philadelphia until city officials agreed to structural changes addressing these rights violations.60

Electoral Victories, Legal Defeats, and the Fracturing of a Police Reform Coalition City of Philadelphia v. United States was the product of a broad police reform coalition that had spent the previous decade seeking to remake the PPD. But as prosecutors prepared their case, new fissures appeared in the police reform alliance. Anti-brutality activists backed City of Philadelphia v. United States because they suspected that their local electoral coalition might not be sufficient to enact structural reform. Appreciating the power of the institution they faced, anti-brutality campaigners desired additional, federal leverage. But some of the White neighborhood-backed politicians who had recently won office now objected to this attempt to bring in an outside monitor. District Attorney Ed Rendell had opened a new police brutality unit within his office, and he had prosecuted the officers who beat Delbert Africa, but he declared he was “dead-set” against the DOJ’s lawsuit. It would “be a big mistake,” he argued, to place the PPD under injunctive relief just “when you have a change in administration coming.” Mayor Green concurred, calling the lawsuit an “unnecessary waste of the taxpayers’ money” on the grounds that his administration would run “the Police Department well and properly.” Many of Green’s White liberal supporters agreed. One liberal columnist reported that Green’s newly appointed police commissioner—Morton Solomon—had already introduced a new neighborhood mindset within the PPD. After all, the columnist wrote, Commissioner Solomon had given “a pep talk to the entire force in which he spoke of Philadelphians as ‘our neighbors, relatives and friends.’” The new posture, the columnist affirmed, “taught us that government still responds when voters speak up, and that voters can bring about change a lot more quickly and easily than the courts can.”61 As Rendell and Green questioned the need to work outside the neighborhood coalition, both were using a neighborhood anti-crime agenda to build new bridges with Philadelphia’s downtown business interests. Shortly after each of their elections, Rendell and Green began meeting with Philadelphia’s business-run Citizens Crime Commission. The two officials found that they could adopt Crime Commission-funded and Commission-designed programs to satisfy the neighborhood anti-crime activists’ concerns over drugs, safety on public transportation, and street violence towards women. Indeed, as LEAA funding declined under Carter and then ceased under President Ronald Reagan, the Citizens Crime Commission became an even more important source of planning and funds for Rendell’s and Green’s neighborhood safety agendas.62 This pattern played out similarly just a few years later in Chicago when Mayor Harold Washington took office. Even as Washington set up his transition team, he backtracked on his calls for independent oversight over the Chicago Police Department and instead crafted a new alliance between neighborhood anti-crime activists and downtown businesspeople.63 372

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Back in federal court, the DOJ knew it might have trouble getting to trial when United States v. City of Philadelphia landed before District Judge J. William Ditter, Jr., a conservative jurist.64 On October 31, 1979, Ditter ruled that the federal government could not make a civil rights claim against a local government institution on behalf of a third party unless Congress provided it with oversight over that specific institution. Ditter noted that with respect to police departments, Congress had on three separate occasions voted not to grant the Attorney General this authority.65 In a ruling that rambled well beyond issues of standing, Ditter joined the chorus of voices insisting that Mayor Rizzo’s defeat at the polls made the federal case redundant. Anti-brutality activists did not need the federal courts, Ditter averred, because they had made themselves heard through the ballot box. The Third Circuit Appeals Court affirmed Ditter’s ruling, and the Supreme Court chose not to take up the DOJ appeal.66 City of Philadelphia v. United States thus denied the federal government a role in equitable relief cases against police departments. In the 1983 case City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, the Supreme Court also refused private citizens that same standing. Echoing its decision in Rizzo v. Goode, the Court once again determined that victims of abuse did not have a compelling stake in matters of future abuse.67 The Goode, City of Philadelphia, and Lyons cases foreclosed the federal courts as an arena for structural police reform. The anti-brutality movement was now trapped within a political arena where old coalitions were coming undone. Anti-brutality activists had played a crucial role in electing neighborhood candidates, but these same activists now found themselves marginalized for much of the next decade. Anti-brutality activists lacked any realistic avenue to structural police reform until 1994 when the Congressional Black Caucus finally granted the DOJ standing in “pattern and practice” police lawsuits through an amendment to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The results of that federal strategy have proven mixed.68 The history of the anti-brutality movement during the 1970s provides a number of important lessons. First, the story underscores the importance of the federal government’s withdrawal from issues of policing. Rightfully so, much of the recent literature has concentrated on the expanding federal involvement in law enforcement after World War II.69 But the ending of the LEAA and the refusal of the Supreme Court to involve itself in police reform had profound, negative effects on anti-brutality activism during the 1980s. Second, this history reveals the critical role anti-brutality and neighborhood anti-crime activists played in each other’s campaigns through the 1970s. Bound in a common desire to decentralize local governance, each movement during that decade owed much of its political success to the other. Ultimately, this alliance benefited one wing more than the other. By the early 1980s, the antibrutality movement found itself abandoned by the anti-crime movement it had helped to empower.

Notes 1 Philadelphia Tribune, August 18, 1978, 1, 16; Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 1978, A1, A2. 2 Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 3 Paul Levy, Justice and the City (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Civic Values, 1977), 76. 4 James Forman, Jr. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrah, Straus, and Giroux, 2017). 5 Peter Pihos, “Policing, Race, and Politics in Chicago” (PhD Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 2015), 183–86; Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 234. 6 For an example of neighborhood anti-crime organizations in Chicago backing anti-police brutality reforms, see Toussaint Losier, “‘The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves:’ The Mayoral Administration of Harold Washington and the Problem of Police Impunity,” Journal of Urban History 46:5 (September 2020): 1055.

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Christopher Lowen Agee 7 Citizens Crime Commission of Philadelphia, Study of Police Departments in Five Major Cities (Philadelphia: Citizens Crime Commission of Philadelphia, 1980), 8. 8 Losier, “The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves,” 1056. 9 Christopher Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1973 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Samuel Walker, Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice, 1950–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 10 Citizens Crime Commission of Philadelphia, Study of Police Departments in Five Major Cities, 18. 11 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 191. 12 Philadelphia Inquirer, February 28, 1980, 13B; February 1, 1981, 1; September 2, 1981, 4; September 11, 1981, 1. 13 Ibid., September 16, 1973, 6B; March 18, 1973, 1; May 8, 1979, 1; May 15, 1979, 2. 14 Pennsylvania State Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Police-Community Relations in Philadelphia: A Report to the United States Commission on Civil Rights by the Pennsylvania State Committee” (June 1972), 50–51. 15 Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 63–68; Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 70–74. 16 Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 219. 17 Philadelphia Inquirer, September 1, 1970, 1; July 17, 1991, 15A. 18 Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 197–98. 19 Countryman, Up South, 290–91; Pennsylvania State Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Police-Community Relations in Philadelphia, 50, 55, 85. 20 Philadelphia Inquirer, December 16, 1970, 28; February 2, 1979, 1B; Philadelphia Tribune, July 19, 1969, 29. 21 Philadelphia Tribune, March 2, 1971, 4. 22 Countryman, Up South, 292. 23 Philadelphia Tribune, August 29, 1970, 8. 24 Pennsylvania State Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, “Police-Community Relations in Philadelphia,” 56. 25 Citizens Local Alliance for a Safer Philadelphia (CLASP), “What is CLASP?” (press release), January 1974, 2. Swarthmore College Peace Archives (SCPA). Ross Flanagan Papers, Box 3, Folder: Ross Flanagan— Clasp—1973–1977. 26 Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1973, 2C; “Recommendations for Community Safety Growing from Community Workshops” (1974). SPCA. Ross Flanagan Papers, Box 3, Folder: Ross Flanagan—CLASP, 1973–1977; LEAA Newsletter, September 1977, 5. 27 CLASP, “Organized for Neighborhood Safety: A Practical Outline of Programs and Procedures for Reducing Crime and Regenerating Life in Your Community” (October 1973), 2. SPCA. Ross Flanagan Papers, Box 3, Folder: Ross Flanagan – Block Assn. of W. Phila. 1973; Ross Flanagan, Ellie Wegener, Jim Williams, “Organizing for Neighborhood Safety” (October 1973), introduction. Temple University Special Collections (TUSC). Spruce Hill Community Association Records, 1958–1992, Folder 10–11. 28 Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 1973, 2C. 29 John Schaar “Observations on Community” (1970) in Edward Schwartz, Building Community (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Civic Values, 1976), 20; NA, “Neighborhood Leadership Academy,” 4–5. TUSC, Philadelphia Council of Neighborhood Organizations (PCNO) Papers, Box 4, Folder: The Institute of Civic Values. 30 Philadelphia Inquirer, June 28, 1972, 8; January 18, 1971, 9. 31 Wynnefield Focus, December 1976, 3. TUSC. PCNO Papers, Series 2, Box 3, Folder: Wynnefield Residents Association—Correspondence, Newsletter Wynnefield Focus. 32 Philadelphia Inquirer, October 16, 1977, Today 34. 33 Ibid., April 26, 1972, 5A; January 4, 1973, 15D; September 16, 1973, 6B; Institute for the Study of Civic Values, “From Apathy to Involvement: Making Participation Count” (meeting flyer). TUSC. PCNO Paper. Box 4, Folder: Institute for the Study of Civic Values: Meeting announcements and meeting plans. 34 Philadelphia Tribune, November 7, 1972, 1; February 9, 1974, 1; August 18, 1978, 5; July 21, 1978, 1; Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, Youth Investment and Community Reconstruction: Street Lessons on Drugs and Crime for the Nineties (Washington, D.C.: Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, 1990), 16–17; David Fattah, “The House of Umoja as a Case Study for Social Change,” ANNALS, 494 (November 1987), 39; Zoharah Simmons and Paul Brink, “Press Release (People’s Delegation Against Repression, May 31, 1977),” 2. SCPA. Joe Miller Papers, Box 5, Folder: “P.E.J., Phila. Police Abuse.”

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Anti-Brutality Activism and Neighborhood Anti-Crime Activism 35 Philadelphia Tribune, May 16, 1972, 1. 36 Philadelphia Inquirer, January 29, 1976, 6A. 37 Stephen Rushin, Federal Intervention in American Police Departments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 87. 38 Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2, 1974, 2A; October 25, 1973, 3D. 39 “Opinion of the Court,” Rizzo v. Goode 423 US 362 (1976). 40 “The Philadelphia Office of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee Report, 1971–1978,” 7. University of Pennsylvania Archives. David Kairys Papers, Box 8, Folder 10. 41 Richard Kent Evans, “MOVE: Religion, Secularism, and the Politics of Classification” (PhD Dissertation: Temple University, 2018), 29, 32; Philadelphia Tribune, May 15, 1976, 1; August 2, 1975, 6. 42 Michael Boyette and Randi Boyette, Let it Burn: The Philadelphia Tragedy (San Diego: Quadrant Books, 2013, repr.), 88, 107. 43 John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor, Burning Down the House: MOVE and the Tragedy of Philadelphia (New York: Norton, 1987), 15. 44 Philadelphia Tribune, April 29, 1978, 13. 45 Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1978, 1. 46 Philadelphia Tribune, August 18, 1978, 1, 16; September 15, 1978, 1; “Member Organizations of Coalition for a Fair Police Complaint Procedures Ordinance, 1980.” SCPA. Joe Miller Collection, Box 5, Untitled Folder. 47 Philadelphia Tribune, August 15, 1978, 1; October 6, 1978, 1; November 17, 1978, 5; March 16, 1979, 3; September 24, 1978, 1B; Philadelphia Inquirer, April 4, 1977, 3B; August 25, 1979, 1B. 48 Sandra Featherman and William Rosenberg, Jews, Blacks, and Ethnics: The 1978 “Vote White” Charter Campaign in Philadelphia (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1979), v, 5; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 1, 1979, 3B. 49 Philadelphians for Equal Justice, “Report on Activities for 1975–76,” n.d., 2. SCPA. Joseph Miller Papers, Box 5, Folder: P.E.J., Phila. Police Abuse. 50 Philadelphia Inquirer, August 12, 1977, 2B. 51 James Fyfe, “Police Use of Deadly Force: Research and Reform,” Justice Quarterly 5:165 (1988), 182; Anthony Jackson, “Criminal Justice and Black Philadelphia,” 90–91 in Urban League of Philadelphia, The State of Black Philadelphia (Philadelphia: The Urban League of Philadelphia, 1981). 52 Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1977, 1A. 53 Losier, “The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves,” 1050; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 29, 1977, 1A; April 26, 1977, 8A. 54 S.A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 2003, repr.) 219; Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1977, 13A. 55 Philadelphia Inquirer, August 14, 1979, 6A. 56 Monell v. Department of Social Services, 435 US 658 (1978). 57 United States Commission on Civil Rights, Police Practices and Civil Rights Hearing Held in Philadelphia, February 6, 1979, April 16–17, 1979 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1979), 49. 58 Philadelphia Tribune, August 15, 1978, 1; Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1978, 1B; October 31, 1978, 2A. 59 Philadelphia Inquirer, August 14, 1979, 1A, 6A; June 19, 1979, 3B; November 4, 1979, 1B. 60 Ibid., August 19, 1979, 24A; August 14, 1979, 1A, 6A. 61 Ibid., August 18, 1979, B1; June 19, 1979, 3B; February 26, 1980, B1; March 11, 1980, 9A. 62 Philadelphia Tribune, March 13, 1979, 8; The Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley, Citizens Crime Commission Annual Report (Philadelphia: Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley, 1981), np. 63 Losier, “The Public Does Not Believe the Police Can Police Themselves,” 1057. 64 Philadelphia Inquirer, November 4, 1979, 2B. 65 Stephanie Franklin, “United States v. City of Philadelphia: A Continued Quest for an Effective Remedy for Police Misconduct,” National Black Law Journal 7:1 (1981), 186. 66 Marshall Miller, “Police Brutality,” Yale Law and Policy Review 17:1 (1998), 160; Stephen Rushin, “Federal Enforcement of Police Reform,” Fordham Law Review 82:6 (2014), 3205. 67 City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 US 95 (1983). 68 Rushin, Federal Intervention in American Police Departments, 18–19, 83. 69 Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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28 THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF THE ASSAULT ON RODNEY KING Revisiting Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 Kamran Afary

On April 29, 1992, widespread protests erupted in Los Angeles and spread to several major cities throughout the United States after four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers were found not guilty on charges of beating Rodney King, a Black motorist. The beating which took place a year earlier on March 4, 1992 was captured on video by a resident and was subsequently shown on television. The footage of the beating, as King lay prostrate on the ground, created a global media event that led to the trial of the officers and the birth of a new form of struggle against police brutality that went far beyond Los Angeles and lasted nearly a decade before it would be overshadowed by the events of September 11, 2001. During the trial of the four LAPD officers for the beating of Rodney King, the defense used an edited version of the video of the beating to argue that it was King’s attempts to get off the ground and charge the officers that caused the continued beating. The jury acquitted three of the officers on all counts and could not agree on a verdict for the fourth.1 The not-guilty verdict came as a shock to most people, but not to Kimberlé Crenshaw who saw the narrative constructed by the defense as just another example of a quotidian practice of “disaggregation” by members of the police and the courts to reframe the experiences of oppression, silencing and erasure of identities to win convictions. The framing of the video, she argued, was a “reel” version of the “real” experiences that permeate the criminal justice system.2 In four days of rioting and street protests after the verdicts were announced, over 50 people died, 2,000 were injured, 862 buildings were set on fire, over 2000 businesses were destroyed, and damage was estimated at one billion dollars. In addition, between 10,000 and 16,000 people were arrested (sources disagree on this number), over 90% of them African-Americans and Latinos.3 In the weeks that followed, the US Justice Department announced the retrial of the four officers on federal charges. On April 17, 1993, nearly a year later, a new verdict was reached. Two of the officers, Officer Laurence Powell, and Sergeant Stacy Koon were found guilty while the other two were acquitted.4 The 1992 protests that exploded into four days of rioting, gave birth to a number of multifaceted grassroots organizing campaigns that lasted for several years and impacted Los Angeles in profound ways. In 1992, Los Angeles was experiencing an economic recession with high unemployment rates in Black and immigrant Latino communities. The 1980s transition in California’s economy from

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industrial manufacturing to low pay and service jobs saw the disappearance of many higher-paying blue-collar unionized jobs. During this period as crime rates went up, the LAPD responded with increasing brutality. A 1991 report issued by the Christopher Commission after the Rodney King beating concluded that LAPD “repetitively used excessive force against the public, and persistently ignored the written guidelines of the department regarding the use of force.”5 Many in Los Angeles were also indignant at the loss of a young teenage girl, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who was shot in the back by a Korean-American store owner after being caught with a bottle of orange juice in her backpack. The shooting which took place days after the Rodney King beating was also caught on videotape and broadcast. The store owner received a minimal sentence of 400 hours of community service and a $500 fine.6 In 2020 a new Netflix documentary directed by Sophia Nahli Allison provided a nuanced narrative about Latasha Harlins’s short life through intimate and poetic memories shared by her cousin and best friend.7 Another videotaped incident that also shaped the competing narratives of the 1992 events was the beating of a White truck driver, Reginald Denny who was pulled out of his truck and beaten by several Black men. This incident was recorded from a news helicopter hovering above. Denny was rescued by four African-American neighbors who rushed to his aid and drove him to a hospital. The beating of Denny became an additional tool of “disaggregation” to discredit the protests as only mob violence and to dismiss the grievances of the tens of thousands who were arrested for participating in the protests.8 As John Fiske has explained in Media Matters, Florence and Normandie became the image of the uprising, “a focal point upon which deeply significant lines of meaning converged.”9 In the aftermath of the street rioting, some attempts at redress were made. A newly created economic redevelopment agency called Rebuild Los Angeles (RLA) was formed to encourage corporate investment and job creation in economically distressed areas. It had limited success, in large part due to entrenched racism.10 Local media outlets made public commitments to be more attentive to marginalized communities. Congresswoman Maxine Waters spearheaded several initiatives funded by the Federal Government. President Bill Clinton invited gang truce activists to attend his inauguration ceremony in January 1993. Despite these expressions of support and sympathy, a shift to greater forms of inequality and harsher forms of carceral punishment were on the rise. New legislation in 1994 instituted mandatory life sentences for those with three felonies. Cuts to social programs and welfare gained momentum after 1992. Social services to undocumented immigrants were cut with a majority vote on a proposition in California. The new police chief, Willie Williams, while emphasizing the need to carry out the Christopher Commission Report’s recommendations continued to expand LAPD’s urban warfare tactical readiness in preparation for another upheaval.11 Despite the talk of combining social aid with law and order, in the end only the latter won out. Constance Rice, a prominent civil rights attorney and later the author of a community policing report, summarized some of the policies of this period in an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times on February 17, 2000: We have revved up the war-on-crime machine and given our warriors the green light to search and destroy. So what? Outlaw cops and mass imprisonment is what. So many urban men are now in jail that demographers in Los Angeles created a new migration category called “out-migration to institutions.”12 The beating of Rodney King and the 1992 riots informed scholarship throughout the 1990s and early 2000s and gave rise to the Los Angeles School of Urban Development. The literature on the Los Angeles rebellion/riot cover several major areas. I have extensively covered both the literature and the grassroots movements during the first decade in my book Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992.13 Much of what follows in this chapter is adapted from that book which contains a wider and more detailed analysis and documentation of the gang 377

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truce movements and the grassroots women’s organizations. Documents gathered during that decade-long ethnographic study with the help of Dorothy Freeman and Michelle Gubbay,14 have been housed at the Southern California Library for Social Research and are open to researchers. Lou Cannon’s Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD15 is the only detailed journalistic account of the events of 1991–1993. Another journalistic compilation on the events is Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened and Why It Will Happen Again,16 edited by Don Hazen, containing a compendium of short articles, news reports, and op-ed essays from progressive journalists. Jah and Shah’Keyah (ed.), Uprising: Crips and Bloods Tell the Story of America’s Youth in the Crossfire17 and Anna Deavere Smith (book which later became a play), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,18 each narrate the events by highlighting the voices of the participants. Collected volumes by academics and social scientists in urban studies contain comparisons of the 1965 Watts Riot and the 1992 rebellion,19 relating the intensive and often brutal policing of public spaces to the process of capital accumulation, emphasizing the rise of technologies of surveillance and control that dehumanize the poor. Race and ethnic studies also figure prominently in the body of writings on Los Angeles. Robert Gooding Williams’s edited volume, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, contains essays from critical race and critical cultural studies perspectives by noted scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Houston Baker, Cedric Robinson, Judith Butler, and Patricia Williams.20 Several studies and collections also focused on Asian-American communities, specifically on ethnic tensions between Korean-Americans and African-Americans in Los Angeles. John Lie and Nancy Abelmann’s Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots argued that ethnicity was not always a major determinant of one’s reactions to the events of 1992 and that some working-class Koreans who worked for Korean merchants sided with the grievances of the African-American customers.21 Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres in Latino Metropolis raised a series of criticisms involving constructions of race in narratives about Latinos in the Los Angeles riots constructed as a racialized subject and caught at the intersection of multiple racializing dynamics.22 Works on media studies, such as Darnell Hunt’s Screening the Los Angeles “riots”: Race, Seeing, and Resistance also sought to measure responses to media images among different ethnicities.23 Noted communication scholar John Fiske wrote on what he called “A Tale of Three Videos,” to show how televised events that were repeatedly aired became akin to reality for viewers and materials for theatrical productions.24 Urban studies scholar Edward Soja developed his work on Los Angeles through the lens of grassroots political consciousness and energy, which he called “the politics of place.” “[N]ever before have the people of Los Angeles … been so politically involved … another of the major changes that have occurred between 1965 and 1992.”25 Soja drew on Mike Davis’s work, City of Quartz, on the closing off of public spaces in Los Angeles—the creation of a “Fortress LA.”26 He argued that Los Angeles is a “Carceral City, a geography of warlike fortification and enclosure, of ever-watchful surveillance, a place where police has become an insistent substitute for polis.”27 Some of the spirit of this new form of political involvement by new strata of society was captured in Tom Hayden’s Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence, where he explored the early attempts at gang truce before and after 1992.28 One of the more prophetic works during this period in terms of its relevance to the current movement for abolition, was Ruth W. Gilmore’s Golden Gulag.29 It explored the development of the prison industry in California and devoted a chapter to the grassroots activism of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (MROC). The 1992 upheaval was also the setting for numerous works of fiction, song lyrics, and children’s books. Los Angeles Times reporter, Hector Tobar, who assisted Anna Deavere Smith in the production of Twilight wrote a bestselling novel, The Tattooed Soldier, that is set during the 1992 Los Angeles riots as the protagonist runs into a mass murderer from the Guatemalan civil war and finds 378

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some closure from its wounds during the riots.30 The protests also inspired Eve Bunting’s Smoky Night, a children’s storybook that shows how neighbors from different ethnicities learned to become friends after the experience of the 1992 riots.31 Even before 1992, Los Angeles was central to the debates on the rise of a post-industrial society. In the 1930s, the appearance of a large industry devoted to producing images and representations played a crucial role in destabilizing the theoretical certainties of an earlier generation of critical theorists who privileged the production of material goods and relegated the production of culture to a secondary role. The culture industry, dominated by large studios, changed this simple binary. The factory discipline of the production line was extended into cultural production for mass consumption. This can be seen as early as 1944 in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s views on cultural production in their essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”32 They singled out Los Angeles as the location for the highest development of the type of society they were describing in their scathing critique of the “culture industry.” Movies, radio, and popular magazines had overwhelmed the old dichotomy between high culture and traditional working-class culture, creating a seamless, uniform system of cultural domination. The culture industry, they argued, produced a flight not so much from reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance, “freedom from thought and from negation.”33 The new construct was so potent that reality was being redefined in the popular imagination. “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies,” they concluded.34 In the late 1980s Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles extended the reach of the carceral society even wider to include shopping malls and gated residential spaces.35 He describes a “panopticon observatory” in a strip mall in the Watts area equipped with military level security against the threat of crime. He likens the nearby housing projects to the Pentagon’s construction of “strategic hamlets” during the Vietnam War: The counterpart of the mall-as-panopticon-prison is the housing-project-as-strategichamlet. The Imperial Courts Housing Project … has recently been fortified with fencing, obligatory identity passes and a substation of the LAPD. Visitors are stopped and frisked, while the police routinely order residents back into their apartments at night. Such is the loss of freedom that public housing tenants must now endure as the price of “security.”36 Davis notes, Los Angeles has placed a gigantic jail in the heart of downtown. With an aesthetically pleasing facade, the Metropolitan Detention Center, he reports, is a “postmodern Bastille” designed for high-level prisoners from the War on Drugs: This postmodern Bastille—the largest prison built in a major US urban center in generations—looks instead like a futuristic hotel or office block, with artistic charms (like the high-tech trellises on its bridge-balconies) comparable to any of Downtown’s recent architecture. But its upscale ambience is more than a mere facade. The interior of the prison is designed to implement a sophisticated program of psychological manipulation and control: barless windows, a pastel color plan, prison staff in preppy blazers, well-tended patio shrubbery, a hotel-type reception areas, nine recreation areas with nautilus workout equipment, and so on … . But the psychic cost of so much attention to prison aesthetics is insidious.37 Davis continued the theme of Los Angeles as a carceral city moving in a totalitarian direction. In his view, this is the future of all cities in late capitalism. City of Quartz revealed how in the late 1980s civil rights organizations in Los Angeles turned away from their traditional watchdog role, some even calling for harsher police methods to suppress gangs.38 This was confirmed by Michael 379

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Zinzun’s Coalition Against Police Abuse that served as a repository of the flood of complaints from abused residents.39 The aftermath of the beating of Rodney King brought Los Angeles back to the center stage as a site of the production of cultures and of economic activity. The Los Angeles rebellion marked a defining moment in the cultural and political development of the United States as it ended the twentieth century. On the one hand, the event served as a rallying point for conservative politicians who focused on crime and violence in Los Angeles to buttress their claims that residents of poor communities were morally inferior and should be subject to greater police surveillance and incarceration. These policies justified the reshaping of inner-city environments to suit the needs of neo-liberal capitalism, encouraging the use of more repressive measures of control by the state and the building of more prisons. On the other hand, the rebellion ushered in a new generation of activists—community activists and artists—who struggled to develop a compelling counter-narrative to the representations of themselves and their communities in the mainstream media.

The Rise of the Gang Truce Movement Gang Truce Parties as a new form of urban festivity burst on the scene shortly after the April 29, 1992 to May 2, 1992 rebellion. Although a vast majority of gang truce events were organized by gang members, in the decade that followed, the character of the movement changed considerably. Gang truce activists came from all walks of life and several religious and secular ideologies influenced them. There were a wide range of differences within the movement regarding ethnic and educational background, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and artistic ambitions. The gang truce movement was a diverse movement composed of both those who had experience as gang members and those (community activists and academics) who joined the movement in an expression of solidarity. During the 1980s many urban youths were being driven into illegal activities while the dominant classes sought to suppress them with increased policing and mass incarceration. Among the older generation of civil rights advocates, opposition to police brutality waned as rising crime rates instigated police departments to exercise less restraint. The beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the exoneration of the LAPD officers in 1992 caused an urban rebellion that momentarily halted this trend. The dominant discourse on the suppression of crime was broken for a short time by a series of grassroots movements and creative artistic responses. Gang truce parties were composed of a series of improvisatory rituals and ceremonies that symbolized a community’s willingness to take part in shaping policy and advocating for themselves in a rapidly changing political and economic situation. Gang activists from Watts and Compton found a new space for performing solidarity, negotiating truce, and demanding better resources. Between March 4, 1991 and April 29, 1992, the breach that appeared in the public’s perception of urban policing in the United States deepened as it went through several changes. With the popularity of cable TV, the televised court sessions of the trial of the LAPD officers attracted hundreds of thousands of avid followers. The broadcast of the videotaped beating opened the floodgates for many others who had been abused by LAPD officers to publicly air their grievances. The court proceedings created a parallel space for conversations among gang youth who had been locked into turf wars in different neighborhoods. The idea and possibility of collaboration instead of competition started to take shape and the idea of gang truce began taking hold at this crucial moment. Many of them felt that this was the moment to “go public” with their stories, as they sensed newfound sympathy for them and an openness to hear their side. With the outburst against the injustice of the verdict and as the city was burning after April 29, hundreds of residents in and around housing projects in South LA took to the streets. They held marches and called for an end to gang warfare. Within a short two weeks, drive-by shootings ceased 380

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completely. Negotiations between hundreds of subsets of warring gangs continued on a daily basis throughout southern California in dozens of locations, and the residents themselves undertook major initiatives. A number of gang activists held press conferences and unveiled their own proposals for the economic revitalization of neighborhoods. Crips and Bloods stood in front of reporters and cameras calling upon city officials and businessmen to create jobs for unemployed gang members and to include them in their efforts to rebuild the city. A key demand was to put an end to LAPD’s mistreatment of suspects, to end racial profiling, and to stop the harassment of Black drivers, often told to “get against the wall.”40 The 1992 protests undermined much of the hitherto accepted political and cultural discourses on the role and nature of crime, reactions by the police, responses by the court systems, and the impact of the prison system. The new sense of identity and self-confidence in gang youth born during this period grew into new political and cultural performance skills that had become evident during the urban protests and festivities. Large numbers of South LA residents started attending regular community and political meetings. By the end of June 1992, the LAPD had carried out several large-scale assaults on gang truce parties. Complaints against the LAPD’s heavy-handed actions were dismissed citing the parties as a nuisance (loud music, revelers throwing beer bottles at the police). After that, gang truce parties were effectively ended. Truce activists continued in many other forms, including rallies, demonstrations, commemorations, church meetings, and new cooperative participatory events. The end of the gang truce festivities marked the beginning of a new era for the truce movement. It opened the doors to outreach activities from sectors of society that had heretofore avoided working with gang youth. But it also helped solidify anti-gang initiatives and legislation, such as the Three Strikes laws, that enacted even more draconian repressive measures. Gang truce negotiations grew into a multifaceted movement throughout the 1990s, where performances and creative presentations of the self, became even more pronounced. These creative presentations of the self-included the public telling of stories by former gang members, the emergence of graffiti celebrating the truce, the wearing of clothing that symbolized friendship among gangs, and the playing of music once identified with rival gangs. The liminal experience of the truce parties had offered a rare opportunity for self-reflexivity and self-creation and led to personal changes in the lives of some individuals. Some of the original truce organizers became community activists and worked closely with the youth. Many of the women activists turned to organizing other women in South Central. Their organizing efforts to monitor police abuse and oversee court proceedings, and their subsequent sense of self as having a voice in shaping new policies, is the subject of the next section.

Women’s Grassroots Activism: Performing Motherhood Just as a significant number of gang youth felt the urgency to join the ranks of community and political activists, so did a number of working-class Black and Latina women in Los Angeles, who experienced a process of radical self-redefinition and political expression. Two organizations—the LA4+ Committee and Mothers ROC (Mothers Reclaiming Our Children) were born in this period to focus on the trials of those arrested during the street riots and protests and caught up in the postriot prosecutions. But the two organizations soon began to address various other issues, among them oppressive living conditions, police brutality, and the media’s demonization of young people of color. They articulated a new image of Black women, focusing on their identities as caring mothers, sisters, and activists, who confronted injustices and were engaged in a process of empowerment for themselves and their families. LA4+ and Mothers ROC were composed mostly of mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and their supporters, who attended court sessions. The women educated themselves about the legal process, monitored the actions of the judicial system, and mentored friends and relatives of the men 381

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on trial. They believed that they could build a movement that would offer their sons a chance for exoneration or a more equitable sentence. A flyer published in 1993 by Mothers ROC stated: It was the longing, the anger, and the need to Reclaim Our Children that gave rise to Mothers ROC. We formed it to ensure that our children are no longer alone in court at the mercy of judges and lawyers, who have no interest in justice. We formed it to be the voice of tens of thousands who are locked away and forgotten. Finally, we formed it to take our battle into the streets, to make ourselves seen and heard, to inform the powers that control and oppress us that we will build, we will grow, We Will Win!!”41 The women brought together many mothers whose sons had been arrested, held regular weekly meetings, and taught them how to be “court watchers.” This term was coined to refer to mothers and other supporters who regularly attended the trials of the young African-American and Latino men at the Los Angeles Criminal Court Building. There they took notes of the proceedings, collaborated and consulted with the lawyers of the accused, gathered evidence, and gave interviews to journalists. They signaled to the defense, prosecution, and judges that the legal system would be scrutinized and held accountable. In the process of defending their children, the women created new identities for themselves and helped overcome pervasive negative perceptions about African-American families in White society. Often the mothers were blamed as “bad mothers,” women who had pushed their sons into a criminal lifestyle. Initially, the women’s protests increased their negative portrayal. The louder they protested, the more they were seen as ominous threats to society. Even so, their vigilance and persistence in monitoring the lawyers, judges, and prosecutors ultimately yielded them many successes. These activities earned the women much community recognition as “othermothers.” Patricia Hill Collins uses the term “othermothers” to illustrate one way that Black women have historically engaged in community activism. Their engagement takes the form of complex cooperative networks throughout urban and rural Black communities that provide unique experiences for the development of community othermothers. Created and directed by Black women, these organizations played a formative role in a discourse of empowerment and agency. This discourse soon developed its own “reality,” one that implicated, admonished, and held accountable the media and the judicial system in South Central Los Angeles. Through a steady stream of flyers, interviews, and other media outlets, the LA4+ Committee and Mothers ROC presented the following argument to the public: the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion was a justified reaction of an oppressed people subjected to the LAPD’s cruel and inhuman brutality. One undated LA4+ flyer contains the following narrative: the US government tried to present the Los Angeles rebellion as a riot by people of color against law-abiding Whites and Koreans. The riot had been followed by “the largest mass arrest in US history, together with the summary deportation of over one thousand [undocumented-immigrant] people of color.”42 In response to these arrests, and especially after the criminal justice system had exonerated the police officers who had participated in the Rodney King beating from any crime, a group of young Black men overreacted and assaulted Reginald Denny at the corner of Florence and Normandie. The actions of these young Black men were wrong. However, “the retaliatory actions of an oppressed people are [not] the same or even worse than calculated brutality by trained and professional enforcers of the status quo.”43 The police officers who had beaten Rodney King were released without serving time, while the prosecutor threatened the young men who had attacked Reginald Denny with life imprisonment. How could a state have such a disproportionate response to the crimes committed by the four young men? Why were they not simply charged with battery? These arguments and questions were followed by a list of calm and measured demands for legal action, emphasizing “equal access, equal protection, and equal justice” for all.44 382

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The LA4+ Committee and Mothers ROC were able to mobilize several hundred people, who raised funds, organized public events, gathered and disseminated legal information, and maintained regular contacts with the defendants’ families. These widespread actions depended on a careful organizational structure. Appeals to an ever-greater number of activists from within and outside the Black community were combined with meticulous adherence to a democratic organizational structure and precise security measures. Women were represented in the organizations’ steering committees and constituted a majority of their rank-and-file activists. Members of both the LA4+ and Mothers ROC recognized that the battle for the defense of the incarcerated youth had to be fought in both the legal/judicial and the symbolic discursive arenas. In the pages of their newsletters, new legal developments, especially new California crime bills, were routinely discussed. These newsletters also regularly published articles written by both regular columnists and prisoners. In August and September 1995, Mothers ROC produced detailed instructions on how to deal with police officers suspected of mistreating a citizen along the lines suggested by Freeman. Freeman, who was in her early 70s, had worked with Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement. She believed that police harassment could be checked if officers realized they were being monitored by the public. In a sense, the police and the community had to change places so that the police feared the public’s gaze rather than the other way around. She knew how to make use of the talents of the most ordinary members of the group and had developed a number of specific instructions on ways of behaving in the streets, in the courthouse, and before the media, in order to bring attention to police abuse. The organizations produced counter-media images for rebuttal. They gave free replacement tapes to members who owned videocassette recorders and asked them to tape certain news programs daily and bring the tapes to the meetings. Special attention was paid to Black-owned media, including newspapers, such as The Sentinel, and radio stations, such as KJLH. They also targeted local television stations’ for unfair coverage. The group also developed a coherent policy on speaking to conservative reporters and created a counter-response to the dominant images and rhetorical trajectories of the mainstream media. Mothers ROC’s organized educational workshops and panels routinely included college professors, attorneys, sympathetic public defenders, and former and present gang members, in an attempt to teach the public about the court system’s injustices. Another tactic was to foreground the involvement of the mothers with the committee so as to counteract the dominant discourse of the inner city as a place where everyone was a thief, a drug addict, or lived in a crack-house. The defendants had to be presented as young men from loving families with attentive mothers. The focus on mothers of the men in both the LA4+ and the Mothers ROC Committees was not accidental; nor was it because these women saw motherhood as their primary vocation. As Diana Taylor has argued in the case of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a distinction must be made between the “performance” of motherhood and “essentialist notions of motherhood” that are attributed to activist women who take on that identity.45 The mothers in these organizations accentuated the latter essentialist notions. In this way, they also created confusion in the minds of commentators who focused too narrowly on the women’s role as mothers while missing the mothers’ self-conscious decision to agitate as mothers, to utilize their “gender as performance.”46 In Mothers ROC and the LA4+ Committee, unemployed members of the community who possessed some legal knowledge worked at information centers. These individuals called upon more informed members of the legal community for advice and gave family members detailed information on courtroom proceedings. This sense of care was extended to the prisoners as well. Donna Warren, one of the founding members of Mothers ROC, met with over 50 young men during her visit to the Terminal Island 383

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Federal Prison in March 1994 and gave them a message of hope and love. She asked them to maintain contact with their mothers, fathers, and others who had joined the struggle to defend them and suggested that while in prison, young men should remember that they are all brothers. As she wrote in the May 1994 issue of The ROC: “If one of them has a skill he should share it with his brother. If one can read, and another can’t, the one who can read should teach his brother.”47 The LA4+ Committee meetings gradually began to address other issues and at times challenged dominant discourses within the Black activist community. Thus, for example, in 1994–1995, and during the O.J. Simpson trial and the Million Man March, some group members took issue with the expressions of homophobia from others in meetings, especially because a pastor at one of the churches where the activists met regularly was said to be gay. Georgiana Williams, a founding member of the group, however, took the lead in speaking out against such expressions of homophobia. As she said in her 1998 talk at San Jose State University: We can’t be against the gays and lesbians because they choose to have sex in a different manner. I think what you do in bed is your business. We need to build a community and become one to get rid of racism, to get rid of injustice, and to get rid of homophobia.48 Activist women in Los Angeles during and after the 1992 LA riots combined multiple feminist approaches to ethics without concern for the traditional academic divisions on the issue. They employed a “maternal approach to ethics,” one that emphasized the daily practices of being a woman, especially the mother’s role in preserving and nurturing a child’s life. Their “feminist approach to ethics” is one that investigated the sites of power and questioned its dominant and subordinate positions. The “uprising textualities” born from these investigations found their way into at least one major performance work,49 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith which will be taken up in the next section.

A New Form of Theatre: Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles 1992 Anna Deavere Smith’s play about the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent rebellion has by now become a classic of American theatre. Productions have been staged in hundreds of high schools and colleges in ensemble forms during the last three decades. The 1993 original play at the Taper Forum in Los Angeles was later developed into a PBS documentary on the tenth anniversary of 1992.50 In 2021, a new revived version of the play was staged on Broadway. Smith’s play has become a forum for the preservation of public memory, a space to not only repeat the original words of the participants but to recreate those voices in light of new circumstances and new developments in the anti-police brutality movements. Like many others who heard the verdict on April 29, 1992, Anna Deavere Smith was perplexed by the acquittal of the four LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King and questioned the divergent perspectives in the White and Black communities. She wondered why the mostly White jurors saw the brutal beatings as acts of self-defense carried out completely within the guidelines of the LAPD policy. The White jurors saw the police as “polite, well groomed, and ready to ‘protect and serve,’” while most activists saw almost nothing but violence in the LAPD officers’ actions. To explore these dramatically different readings of an event, Smith presented a complex portrait of racism beyond a White vs Black binary, highlighting its covert and subtle, as well as overt and explicit, manifestations. Racism often operates through exclusion and lack of empathy. Smith portrayed this toxic combination of stigmatization, exclusion, and lack of empathy through her careful selection of dialogues and interviews with various participants in the rebellion. Smith’s particular skill was in the way she captured various manifestations of racism in different sectors of society, from the highest levels of official society down through the streets of Los Angeles. 384

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Smith’s postmodern theater for development, with its blend of documentary journalism, social commentary, and the arts, created new possibilities for addressing social concerns. She moved her audience beyond the exposé of White-on-Black racism and beyond an exclusive focus on relationships within Black communities. She has made it possible for audiences to see the commonalities and shared experiences of people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Smith has also depicted the sharp divides within both the Black and the White communities, showing that the conflict is not only between Beverly Hills-Brentwood and South Central Los Angeles but also within Los Angeles’s affluent and poor communities. Smith is particularly aware of the role of memory and historical experience in constructing popular and theatrical imaginaries, matrices for how we perceive the present. The participants in the Los Angeles rebellion did not come to this event as a blank slate, in a mental void, or ab novo. They viewed the rebellion through a host of past events that they witnessed personally or heard about from their parents and grandparents. Memories passed down orally of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, the Japanese-American internment camps, the mass expulsion of Mexican agricultural laborers during World War II, the Watts Riots of 1965, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the feminist movements of the 1970s and the 1980s, resonated throughout the text of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Through character sketches, Smith showed that racism takes many forms. It operates through exclusion, when even key Black politicians who represent the districts of their constituents are not involved in decision-making at the highest level of government. It is perpetrated by a lack of empathy on the part of both wealthy residents and public officials. But racism also operates through a mindset that blocks channels of communication, unleashing dangerous stereotypes that arise in times of social and economic crisis. Smith’s performances have operated to change prevailing attitudes on a number of levels. Her interviewing and selection of characters for the play created anxiety in the communities she covered. Those she interviewed, and ultimately performed, relinquished all control over how they were to be represented in Smith’s play. They watched Smith perform them, while audiences took delight in this act of mimicking. Well-known personalities, including establishment figures such as Daryl Gates, were dis-empowered, while shadowy and frightening strangers, such as gang truce activist Twilight Bey, were held up as sages. Likewise, unknown and previously unimportant figures, such as Angela King, were dignified and empowered. The camera was turned into an instrument for liberation from the disaggregating practices of dominant media. Twilight helped release Rodney King from the choke-hold of images of his repeated beating because Smith—and later Levin—disentangled the structures of interpretation and provided a context for the events that led to the beating and the jury’s decision. At the same time, audiences could experience the rare freedom of release from the grip of stereotypical views of gender, race, and ethnicity, in order to confront, instead, a sense of ambiguity with regard to some of the sketches. In these ways, the splicing together of documentary footage with the performance gave audiences both a macro and a micro view of the events.

Conclusion Revisiting the beating of Rodney King and the 1990s social upheaval in its aftermath reveals a rich history of contending visions battling for a future that was yet to be determined. The forces at work ranged from those pursuing an authoritarian carceral police-state to those searching for alternative new forms of association and solidarity that valued marginalized and silenced voices and identities. Those contending visions are still at work 30 years later, in 2022, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd during a pandemic and the global rise of vibrant movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Say Her Name, Prison Abolition, and the many calls for an end to new Jim Crow 385

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laws that sustain a system of mass incarceration. The earlier movements continue to reverberate in the new ones and speak to the desires and aspirations of a new generation of anti-police brutality activists.

Notes 1 Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD (Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1999), 260. 2 Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gary Peller, “Reel Time/Real Justice,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 56–72. 3 David O Sears, “Urban Rioting in Los Angeles: Comparison of 1965 with 1992,” in The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future, ed. Mark Baldassare (Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1994), 238. 4 Cannon, Official Negligence, 485. 5 Human Rights Watch, “Shielded from Justice: Los Angeles; the Christopher Commission Report,” (Human Rights Watch, 1998), www.hrw.org/reports98/police/uspo73.htm. 6 Cannon, Official Negligence, 192. 7 A Love Song for Latasha, directed by Sophia Nahli Allison (A Netflix Documentary, 2020), https://www. netflix.com/watch/81304985. 8 Cannon, Official Negligence, 311. 9 John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 149. 10 Gale Holland, “After the Fire: L.A.’s Rough Road to Recovery,” The Crisis 109, no. 2 (2002): 1168. 11 Cannon, Official Negligence, 588–89. 12 Connie Rice, “We Planted the Seeds of Rampart,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2000. https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-feb-17-me-65386-story.html. 13 Kamran Afary, Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). 14 Dorothy Freeman and Michelle Gubbay. Collection of documents and clippings on the LA4+ Defense Committee and Mothers ROC. Los Angeles: Southern California Library for Social Research. 1992–2001. 15 Cannon, Official Negligence. 16 Don Hazen, ed., Inside the LA Riots: What Really Happened and Why It Will Happen Again (Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992). 17 Yusuf Jah and Sister Shah’Keyah, Uprising: Crips and Bloods Tell the Story of America’s Youth in Crossfire (New York: Scribner, 1995). 18 Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). 19 Abu Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles; Baldassare, The Los Angeles Riots; Davis, City of Quartz; Soja, The City. 20 Robert Gooding Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 21 Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles New York Riots (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 22 Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2000). 23 Darnell Hunt, Screening the Los Angeles Riots: Race, Seeing, and Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). 24 Fiske, Media Matters. 25 Edward W. Soja and Allen J. Scott, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 450. 26 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990). 27 Soja and Scott, The City, 448. 28 Tom Hayden, Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (New York: The New Press, 2004). 29 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University California Press, 2007). 30 Hector Tobar, The Tattooed Soldier (New York: Penguin Books, 1998). 31 Eve Bunting and David Diaz, Smoky Night (New York: Voyager Books, 1994). 32 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 33 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 166. 34 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126. 35 Davis, City of Quartz.

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Davis, City of Quartz, 244. Davis, City of Quartz, 257. Davis, City of Quartz. Michael Zinzun, Presentation to Globalizing the Streets Conference, Videotape, John Jay College, May 1, 2001. Jesse Katz, “Police, Gangs Blame Each Other for Party Melees; Violence,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-06-09-me-263-story.html. Michelle Gubbay, Collection of documents and clippings on Mothers ROC (Los Angeles: Southern California Library for Social Research Collection, 1992–2001). Freeman and Gubbay, Collection of documents LA4+ Defense Committee. Freeman and Gubbay, Collection of documents LA4+ Defense Committee and Mothers ROC. Freeman and Gubbay, Collection of documents LA4+ Defense Committee and Mothers ROC. Diana Taylor, “Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 275–305. Taylor, “Performing Gender,” 293. The ROC: Mothers Reclaiming Our Children Los Angeles: Southern California Library for Social Research. May 1994 – Jan/Feb 1996. Georgiana Williams, “From the South to South Central,” Talk, San Jose State University, November 6, 1997. Carole Boyce-Davies, “From ‘Post-Coloniality’ to Uprising Textualities,” In Black Women, Writing and Identity, London: Routledge, 1994. Anna Deavere Smith and Marc Levin, Twilight Los Angeles, videotape (PBS Pictures, 2001).

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29 POLICE BRUTALITY IN 1990S NEW YORK CITY The Scars of Zero Tolerance and Community Struggles for Justice Paula Ioanide

Giuliani Time New York City’s municipal policies and practices grew increasingly hostile toward people of color, poor people, and immigrants in the 1990s. Residents experienced significant shifts in policing once Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was elected in 1994. Giuliani largely reversed the governing approaches favored by David Dinkins, an African-American mayor who had openly criticized police violence and instituted policies that demanded greater accountability. Only a few months into his term, Giuliani issued Police Strategy No. 5, a policy “dedicated to ‘reclaiming the public spaces of New York.’”1 This policy was established at a time when New York City was experiencing a crumbling urban landscape, abandoned buildings, and a reduction in housing, education, and health care services. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-abatement bribes were given to multinational corporations to move into the city or to stay. Every day workers, on the other hand, confronted soaring unemployment rates up to 10%. As the city’s housing became less affordable and work less available, public fears over losses in property, jobs, and security increased.2 Giuliani skillfully used such social anxieties to pass increasingly punitive policing measures that protected the property interests of the wealthiest neighborhoods and corporations while further disenfranchising the most impoverished populations. The “broken windows” theory advanced by conservative social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued that smaller crimes led to more serious ones, and that neighborhood signs of disorder produce disorder itself. In essence, Wilson and Kelling argued that showing intolerance for the smallest crimes would nurture an anticrime environment. Applying this theory into mass citywide policy and practice, Giuliani identified “homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, squatters, graffiti artists, ‘reckless bicyclists,’ and unruly youth as the major enemies of public order and decency, the culprits of urban decline generating widespread fear.”3 The “cleanup” of the city was to be accomplished by the police, who was encouraged to employ “proactive” and “zero tolerance” methods. A massive expansion of the police force took place to enforce Police Strategy No. 5. During the time William Bratton served as police commissioner (1994–1996), Giuliani increased the police force by 35%.4 In a speech to Congress in 2000, one year before the end of his tenure, Giuliani claimed that he had added 10,000 officers to the police force since taking office.5 Constraints on police power were dismantled for the sake of re-establishing “law and order.” Rather than working to create

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opportunities and structural support for the city’s most vulnerable populations, Giuliani redefined New York City residents’ freedom to be “about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”6 As Neil Smith has astutely demonstrated, Giuliani’s “[z]ero tolerance was passed off as an anticrime program. Actually, it is a social cleansing strategy.”7 Giuliani’s rhetoric of “law and order” was coded to suggest that the presence of the “culprits” posed a threat to commodified or commodifiable property. To justify their removal, the “culprits” had to be criminalized and refigured literally as “assaults” on public space. As culprits were criminalized, they became threats to those who had the power to commodify and control public space. As Taylor indicates, The extremely broad list of Zero Tolerance crimes subjected large numbers of people to arrest and pulled them into the criminal justice system. The number of non-felony offenses increased from 86,000 in 1989 to 176,000 in 1998. For example, there were 39,000 marijuana arrests made between 1987–1996. However, between 1997 and 2007, the number jumped to 362,000.8 This staggering expansion of the police force coupled with full-blown stop and frisk practices led to a remarkable surge in civil rights suits and public complaints against the police. Judith Green has shown that between 1994 and 1998, new civil rights suits against the police for abusive conduct went up by 75%.9 Willing to pay the monetary consequences of its zero-tolerance methods at taxpayers’ expense, New York City spent $87 million to settle lawsuits concerning police brutality between 1990 and 1995.10 In a single year (June 1995–June 1996), the administration settled 503 cases of brutality in court. Meanwhile, public complaints skyrocketed. A report submitted to the Public Safety Committee of the City Council indicated that between 1992 and 1996 civilian complaints concerning police misconduct increased by 60%, from 3,437 to 5,596.11 These staggering numbers should be contextualized by the fact that many people who suffer police misconduct or harassment often do not file formal complaints or lawsuits for several reasons. Lack of time, resources, and perhaps most importantly, the absence of confidence that anything will be done to redress the harm, often keep the people most affected by police misconduct from formalizing their complaints. This means that the actual scale of police misconduct and brutality during the era of zero tolerance was much larger than the official number of complaints and lawsuits suggest. Indeed, Giuliani did everything in his power to stop even the weakest police accountability measures, including rendering the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) ineffectual due to lack of funding and thwarting the Police Investigation and Audit Board through his veto power.12 The presence of the so-called urban underclass, not their actions, was redefined as “criminal.” As one of Giuliani’s aides argued, I regard someone approaching someone else, putting them in fear of bodily harm as a criminal act … The police will again be given discretion, trained properly, commanded properly, managed properly to stop that kind of behavior.13 Embodying a threat to public space, the “culprits” were systematically removed from “clean streets” but permitted to stay in what the NYPD called “dirty” blocks or streets—spaces where illicit activities were purposefully overlooked by the police. “The analogy is clear: the clean street, the clean body and body politic, clean white public space.”14 The confluence of whiteness, wealth, and commodifiable space defined “law and order” while the presence of people of color, poor people, and immigrants defined “criminality.” 389

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New York’s homeless population (estimated at approximately 100,000 in the 1990s) was cleared out to demarcate Manhattan as an attractive location for multibillion-dollar corporations like Disney. The aggressive Welfare to Work Program cut public assistance recipients by the thousands. Between 1995 and 1998, 363,000 were taken off the city’s welfare rolls. Spending for child welfare was especially targeted, and recipients could only receive checks if they performed work, usually for the city government. The city replaced thousands of full-time workers with workfare recipients whose payments translated into below-minimum wage levels.15 In this general climate of dispelling populations through restructuring policies that favored the wealthy and big businesses, it was clear that the New York City police, the Mayor, and those who supported the Mayor’s practices were set on applying various disciplinary mechanisms not only inside institutions such as prisons and asylums but at the level of everyday life and civic space. As Allen Feldman argues, [T]his externalization of discipline can be measured in a wide variety of phenomena, including the development of what Mike Davis terms scan-scapes and social control districts and the emergence of the militarized, high technology office building and shopping mall and what are locally termed by the New York City police as safety corridors, which are, in effect, sites of police colonization in inner-city neighborhoods. Gounis also has noted the establishment of privatized and volunteer vigilante police forces that patrol such areas as Times Square, Grand Central Station, and the West Village.16 A flood of police officers was sent to East Harlem, Hunts Point in the Bronx, Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, and Guy Brewer in Queens to close various public drug markets. These operations, unlike past selective raiding and arrests in drug operations, involved complex mechanisms of spatial and bodily control: cordoned street sweeps by police working with the warrant squad to arbitrarily stop and check individuals; temporarily detaining and searching young males found congregating on the streets or gathering in fast food places; roadblocks and checkpoints to stop vehicles; extensive undercover bicycle patrols; huge numbers of police units pulled from throughout the city to make the theatrical surveillance of the state perfectly clear.17 This omnipresent surveillance of poor people and communities of color endorsed by Giuliani’s rhetoric of “clean public space” affected every aspect of daily life for those whose racial identities or class status marked them as “assaults.” African-Americans, Latino/a/x people, and Black and Brown immigrants were constantly imagined as criminals and often presumed as such by the police. Black and Latino/a/x people’s bodies were part of a semiotics that identified them as threatening people intent on taking over public spaces presumed to belong to white people and/or American citizens. A 28-year-old Guyanese musician keenly summarized such normalized policing projections as follows: I am so tired of riding the train, walking down the street, or just standing still, and if cops are around, they will always ask me what I’m doing … like I’m bothering them. I would ask them why they are harassing me, but I know that they need very little motivation to shoot me. Giuliani has showed us over and over again that police have the right to shoot black men in open daylight for no reason and that they can get away with it.18 These shifts in New York City’s political geography had significant effects on the ways police officers performed their duties and the ways they understood the limits of their power. Though not all police officers used Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” methods as an excuse to abuse their authority, such punitive methods encouraged NYPD officers to feel like their power should not be challenged. Moreover, such methods fostered a police culture that was increasingly unaccountable to people’s integrity and dignity.

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Arguing that patterns of police brutality were being exaggerated, Police Commissioner Bratton cited a 1994 study conducted by the NYPD to make the claim that the police force was not excessively forceful. The study “found that although officers made nearly 275,000 arrests in 1993, fewer than 100 people were hospitalized because of these encounters. This number includes people who violently resisted arrest—including those who shot at officers.”19 Although Bratton never mentioned race as a central issue in patterns of police brutality, he was implying that people of color were suffering from false delusions. His use of statistics attempted to minimize the significance of communities of color’s everyday testimonies of police harassment, illegal searches, and arbitrary killings. Bratton did not mention that the Mollen Commission, after an 18-month inquiry, had revealed numerous instances of police officers being “violent simply for the sake of violence” in a report published in 1994.20 An exchange between the commission’s investigators and a cop working in the Bronx indicated that police officers regularly used excessive force to establish their dominance. “Did you beat people up who you arrested?” “No. We’d just beat people in general. If they’re on the street, hanging around drug locations. It was a show of force.” “Why were these beatings done?” “To show who was in charge. We were in charge, the police.”21 Systematic patterns of police brutality and arbitrary killings are purposefully obfuscated by the state. The Justice Department does not keep data on instances of excessive use of force by police officers or police killings.22 This not only makes it difficult to make sociological arguments; it helps diminish and disaggregate the testimonies of those who are most affected. Patterns of police violence are converted to aberrational instances of individuated disorder. By contrast, independent organizations that keep track of police killings confirm the testimonies of the most affected. In 1997, the Stolen Lives Project reported 27 fatal killings by the police in New York City alone.23 Most of the stolen lives are young Black and Latino/a/x people. Since the early 2000s, independently created databases like the Counted,24 Mapping Police Violence,25 and Fatal Encounters26 have allowed researchers to confirm what New York communities of color have known for decades and the government has evaded: that there are radical racial disparities in the killings of Black and Latino/a/x people. Even when cops are prosecuted for brutality, guilty verdicts are rare. Because local District Attorneys who regularly depend on the police to prosecute their cases are responsible for investigating police misconduct, the cops’ actions are rarely found legally excessive.27 Defense lawyers almost always argue that cops were acting in self-defense and feared for their lives to justify the killings, which is a low legal threshold to have to meet. As the world witnessed in the 1992 Rodney King trial, the police officers involved in the brutality, the prosecution, the judges, and the jury worked to convert King’s brutalization into police self-defense by emphasizing King’s previous police record and staging his body as a threat to the police officers—projections that could only be believed through the interpretive frames of white paranoia that normatively understand Black men as “criminal.”28

The Cases that Shook the City At an April 15, 1999, demonstration at the Brooklyn Cadman Plaza, protesters held up signs bearing witness to people who had been violated, often fatally, by police officers: “Diallo, Louima, Huang, Rosario, Baez, Bumpers, ENOUGH!” Of course, families had been scarred by many more losses than these to police violence. These visible high-profile cases were symbols of a much more

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pervasive pattern that remained largely invisible to hegemonic popular consciousness in the United States but regularly punctured the lives of communities of color in New York City.

Police Violence Against Black Women, Women of Color, and LGBTQiA+ People of Color Today, we have much more extensive evidence of the ways Black women, LGBTQiA+ people of color, and other women of color are impacted by police brutality and harassment.29 In the public discourse on police brutality of the 1990s, an intersectional and gender-specific framework for understanding police violence had not yet entered popular consciousness or media coverage. Campaigns like #SayHerName,30 which have worked tirelessly to raise public awareness of cases of brutality against Black women and other women of color, were not yet widely visible in the 1990s. Of course, the lack of high-profile coverage did not mean that Black women, LGBTQiA+ people of color, and women of color were not deeply affected by police misconduct and harassment. Indeed, the Mollen Commission Report offered accounts of egregious instances of police involvement in sexual terror, rape, and assault. Describing the Internal Affairs Division of the NYPD as a “do-nothing agency,” the Report described how police officers “raided a brothel in uniform, ordered the men to leave and the women to line up. The cops then picked their victims of choice and proceeded to terrorize and rape them without compunction.”31 Because such instances of terror, torture, and rape were regularly left unaddressed and unprosecuted, the Mollen Commission concluded that police brutality emboldened NYPD cops by making them feel invulnerable. The emotional rewards derived from exercising limitless and unchecked methods of terror gave officers a sense of invincibility. Such emotional rewards may have also produced feelings of guilt, shame, and remorse over time. But in police and legal cultures where brutality is collectively condoned, such moral affects are unlikely to change actions. In her on-the-ground accounting of police harassment and violence against Black women, LGBTQiA+ folx, and other women of color (many of them immigrants), Andrea Ritchie painstakingly demonstrates that police violence against women of color is neither aberrational nor occasional. She notes that, Racial profiling studies analyzing the experiences of women of color separately from those of men of color conclude that there is an identical pattern of racial disparities in police stops for both men and women. In New York City, one of the jurisdictions with the most extensive data collection, racial disparities in stops and arrests among women are the same as they are among men.32 Using case studies, testimonies, and quantitative data, Black women scholars like Ritchie, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mariame Kaba, and Monique Morris have tirelessly worked to counter the false perception that Black girls and women are spared the brunt of police violence and harassment because of their gender identities. While the mainstream media prominently featured Black women and immigrant women of color as bereaved mothers who had lost their sons in the 1990s, they rendered invisible the systemic impact of zero-tolerance methods, police misconduct, harassment, and sexual violence in the lives of Black women and women of color. Similarly, data on LGBTQiA+ people of color’s interactions with police officers and community members reveal a pattern where the intersections of gender, race, sexual orientation, sexual expression, and socioeconomic class work together to produce LGBTQiA+ people of color’s extravulnerability to both police and community-based interpersonal violence at radically disproportionate rates.33 Taking this grounded knowledge into consideration, organizations like The Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System have engaged in a decade-long project to create systems of 392

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protection for LGBTQiA+ people of color that do not rely on the police in Brooklyn, New York.34 Despite the tireless and grounded work of grassroots organizations, campaigns seeking justice for queer people of color in 1990s New York City did not rarely reached city-wide public consciousness.

Baez, Rosario, Vega, Huang It may be difficult to remember that videos of police encounters were not widely available in the 1990s. Since the Black Lives Matter mobilizations instigated by the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and continuing to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, public engagement has normalized the reproduction of visual displays of Black, Latino/a/x, and other people of color’s suffering at the hands of White police officers through social media circulation. The repetitious cycling of police brutality videos by those outraged by the violence suggests two underlying presumptions. The first is that the “objectivity” of the video will “prove” the innocence of the victims and the culpability of the officers. In actuality, such visual “objectivity” can never be taken for granted. This became evident in the Rodney King trial—the first high-profile case where the public believed video evidence would prove the officers’ culpability indisputably. Even the most seemingly obvious case of police brutality can be converted into an alternative, fabricated reality in court. The second presumption is that the repetitious circulation of people of color’s suffering at the hands of the police will invoke public sympathy and work to fortify judicial recognition of people of color’s humanity and grievances. In legal procedures, this presumption often fails as well. Victims are deemed undeserving of legal redress through a series of tactics: past criminal records are publicized, mug shots are displayed, families are disparaged, lies are told. Then, as now, it is the frameworks through which people see, interpret, and identify that matter. The same video, viewed by people with radically different gendered racial and political frames, can be interpreted in vastly different ways. No video evidence existed in three of the highest-profile cases of the 1990s. The public relied on media narratives, many of which relied on police accounts much more than family and community testimonies. Nonetheless, a grassroots movement, led by the mothers and families of the victims, gradually brought the issue of police brutality to the center of public consciousness. Anthony Baez, a 29-year-old Puerto Rican man who was killed by police officer Fracis Livoti using an illegal chokehold on December 22, 1994, came from a family who had been on friendly terms with cops in their Bronx neighborhood near the Jerome Avenue subway stop. Baez’s mother, Iris Baez, noted that “They used to use the bathroom [in our house] when they were on coffee break.”35 Baez’s mother became an unlikely activist in the struggle against police violence after the city’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Asking questions and not getting satisfactory answers—which would only be revealed after three indictments, two criminal trials, a departmental hearing, and an acquittal of Livoti—Baez’s mother would become part of the glue that created a persistent grassroots struggle led by the mothers and families of victims killed by police officers. Less than a week later, on January 12, 1995, 18-year-old Anthony Rosario and his 21-year-old cousin Hilton Vega were killed by detectives Patrick J. Brosnan and James Crowe in a nearby Morris Heights apartment in a barrage of bullets, most of them hitting Rosario and Vega in the back. Iris Baez met Margarita Rosario, the mother of Anthony Rosario, along with other mothers of police brutality victims, at a rally where hundreds of demonstrators had gathered on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Gradually, and with the help of organizations like the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the mothers understood what it meant to walk the families of victims through the myriad details of court procedures, civil rights suits, media sensationalism, all while grieving the losses of their children. After they named their coalition Parents Against Police Brutality, Rosario stated that “calls started. Press, families: It turned out to be something the community needed.”36 393

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The families had barely had time to organize for the Rosario, Vega, and Baez cases when sixteen-yearold Yong Xin Huang, a Chinese American youth from Brooklyn, was killed by police officer Steven Mizrahi on March 24, 1995. While the police’s account told a story of unfollowed orders to put a toy gun down and a struggle between six-foot-tall, 200+ lb Mizrahi and five foot three inches tall, less than 100 lb Huang that ended up in an accidental shooting, witness accounts told a different story. Huang put the toy gun down when ordered, Mizrahi approached the unarmed Huang with his gun still drawn. Mizrahi is reported to have slammed Huang’s face into a glass door, shattering the glass, at which point Mizrahi’s gun was fired into the back of Huang’s head.37 While initially the media sought to find culpability in Huang that would have justified the police officer’s killing, upon finding a son of a working-class immigrant family whose mother was a garment worker and father a restaurant worker with above-average grades, the narrative shifted to characterizations of a law-abiding Asian family. Immediately following Huang’s killing, the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) worked to build a cross-class coalition in Chinatown and beyond to pressure the Brooklyn D.A. to seek an indictment against Mizrahi. For CAAAV, Huang’s case was indicative of a larger pattern of harassment and false arrests against working class people in Chinatown. The purported “model minority” status of Asian immigrants had not spared them from the pervasive, everyday violence of zero tolerance methods. “In 1994 alone, CAAAV documented over thirty cases of police raids and claims of harassment and physical violence against Chinatown street vendors, and a dozen accusations of harassment and false arrests of Chinatown workers traveling to and from work.”38 As a result of tireless advocacy efforts by Huang’s older sisters, Qing Lan and Joyce Huang, the case brought visibility not only to the injustices that Huang had suffered but to antiAsian police violence in Chinatown. Importantly, the harassment and removal of street vendors was motivated by Giuliani’s push to “clean up” the streets of neighborhoods marked for gentrification and development, with Harlem, Midtown, and Chinatown as the primary targets.39 When the grand jury failed to return an indictment of Mizrahi, scores of protestors from across the city condemned the decision, many of them Chinatown workers who were part of labor unions and had themselves experienced the brunt of Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policing methods. In April 1995, the families of Baez, Rosario, Vega, and Huang joined a multiracial coalition of activists to block access to the Manhattan Bridge. As Andrew Hsiao states, The action was part of a coordinated demonstration with homeless groups, students, and AIDS activists that stopped rush-hour traffic at four major arteries to the city, forcing the arrest of 185 people. The shutdown was brief, but it threw activists from all over the city together at a time when multiracial, multi-issue protests had become virtually nonexistent.40 This multi-issue protest made numerous activist groups in New York City aware of the ongoing injustices of police brutality and murders. Margarita Rosario and Iris Baez persisted in their protests alongside 500 people in July 1995, confronting Bratton at a town hall meeting in the South Bronx. Later they would occupy the office of Bronx District Attorney Johnson, who had failed to indict Livoti, leading to Livoti’s reindictment.41 Organizations like the CAAAV worked closely with the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights to maintain pressure against Giuliani’s administration, which had made crystal clear its commitment to eviscerate any police accountability structures by the mid-1990s. None of the officers involved in these four high-profile cases were convicted. This may have left the families and their allies to conclude that legal accountability measures for police killings were completely elusive.

Louima Despite activism from the mothers and families of police brutality killings, as well as multi-issue and multi-racial coalitions, the persistence of high-profile police brutality cases continued. 394

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On August 9, 1997, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was tortured by the police and lived to testify about it. He suffered unspeakable violations at the hands of four White police officers: Justin Volpe, Thomas Bruder, Charles Schwarz, and Thomas Wiese. His torture included multiple beatings and being raped with a broomstick by Justin Volpe while other officers in the 70th Precinct in Flatbush, Brooklyn complied and condoned the torture through their silence and inaction. Elsewhere, I have relayed Louima’s story of incomprehensible racialized and sexualized violence in detail.42 Reproducing visual or written narratives of anti-Black violence always involves negotiating a structured risk. Rather than evoking indignation, repeating narratives of racial violence might instead “immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity ( … ) and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering.”43 As Saidiya Hartman asks, Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the worlddestroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? … At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator.44 Hartman cautions us against the tacit presumption that the retelling of police brutality cases will yield an empathetic response that moves people to action. The public can just as well engage in voyeurism and vengeful affective enjoyment. Yet the retelling can also engender emotional economies of outrage, indignation, and anger that can be used to create collective resistance. Those who find such scenes of violence morally indefensible can become collective witnesses that seek redress, healing, and justice. Significantly, Louima’s courage to tell his story created the possibility for others to become ethical witnesses rather than indifferent spectators. Despite Volpe’s death threats and other police officers’ complicity in covering up the story (officers initially claimed that Louima got injured at a gay nightclub), Louima began publicizing his story to journalist Mike McAlary of the New York Daily News only a couple of days after he was beaten. Louima’s audacity and inability to stay silent ruptured structures of feeling that normalize voyeuristic consumption of violence against terrorized Black bodies. Speaking for himself, he refused to have his experience go unacknowledged. This was no easy task, particularly since his admission would have to admit to the sexual dimensions of the brutality. Louima commenced a massive attack on the NYPD’s legitimacy in general and Volpe’s authority in particular. If we place police violence within a longer historical context, we begin to see that the punch dealt by Louima’s cousin was not the primary threat to Volpe and the other cops. What the cops could not integrate into their worldviews and structures of feeling was the fact that Haitians like Louima had dared to challenge their authority in front of the Haitian nightclub where the confrontation began. Because the officers’ authority was itself predicated on White male and police officer presumed entitlements, the Haitians’s defiance conjured long-established antagonisms between Black communities and White cops. In other words, the threat to the cops’ physical safety was minuscule in comparison with the symbolic threat Haitians posed to American White male police authority. The scene at Club Rendez-Vous not only suggested that Haitians were willing to defy “law and order” agents, but that they would not permit White cops to do whatever they pleased in their neighborhoods. The cops, who had mostly grown up in the white suburbs of Staten Island and Nassau County,45 viewed the Haitian neighborhood through stereotypically racist projections of “criminality” and “deviance.” Their last names—Volpe, Schwartz, Wiese, and Bruder—suggested that they were the descendants of Italian and German immigrants who had chosen the advantages of homogeneous white suburban neighborhoods. They had gained inclusion into White America by dissociating themselves from the city landscapes populated by people of color.46 395

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When Volpe came out of the precinct bathroom after raping and beating Louima, he told his fellow officers, “I broke a man down … . I took a man down tonight.” Broke a man down into what? Into an animal? Into a slave? Into a woman? To “break a man down” suggests a shattering of his symbolic and bodily integrity. The acts Volpe performed to “break down” Louima followed scripts of sexualized racial violence against Black people that had been repeated numerous times throughout US history. The sexual humiliation achieved Volpe’s goal of retribution more effectively than bodily brutality alone. Volpe sought to feminize and emasculate Louima for daring to consider himself equal to Volpe’s white male police officer authority. Rape was a way to symbolically castrate Louima of his manhood and reduce him to what hetero-patriarchal societies consider the “natural inferiority” of women or queer folx. Forcing Louima to “swallow” the phallic broomstick with which he was raped allowed Volpe to regain the patriarchal dominance he had lost when he was punched to the ground. Converting Louima into a feminized subordinate forced to figuratively “suck his dick” by placing the broomstick in his mouth gave Volpe the perverse emotional thrill gained through aggressive sexual dominance. But it also allowed Volpe to reconfigure the rape as something Louima violently wished. The sadistic sexual violence that forced Louima to swallow the phallic object constructed “a vision of the castrated black man as one actively seeking the pleasures of castration.”47 Understanding Volpe and the other cops’ actions within a White supremacist legacy that regularly used sexual brutality to subordinate Black people who dared to consider themselves equal shows us that no act of violence is simply individual. Volpe’s attempt to rob Louima of the possibility to consider himself an equal man, a rights-bearing human, a father, and a husband illuminates the ways emotional responses and actions are culturally inflected and informed. Read through discourses on sexual difference and race, consigning and disciplining Louima to the feminine position is an attempt to avert the threat of masculine sameness between White and Black men. To allow sameness between Volpe and Louima would have entailed that Louima had an equal symbolic claim to patriarchal power. In the 70th Precinct scene, Volpe spectacularly paraded the phallic broomstick covered in Louima’s blood and feces around the precinct. He recruited other police officers to participate in his sadistic scene. First, he marked the wall of the precinct bathroom with the blood and feces. Volpe then took Sergeant Wernick to the bathroom, showing him the scene of the violation and the stick used in the sexual assault. He then showed the phallic symbol to Officer Michael Schoer. Smelling the feces Schoer asked if the stick was covered in “dog shit.” To this, Volpe responded, “No, human shit.” Volpe returned the bloodied gloves he had on while raping Louima to Officer Schoefield, as if to communally display the instruments used in the violation. No officer interrupted the scene of complicit consent Volpe created. This reveals that “the power of racial abuse is not just a sign of pathology, or legal loophole, or failure in police procedure; it is fueled by a culture and community of consent.”48 None of the police officers that were involved in this scene of torture and sexual humiliation were ultimately convicted. Volpe’s sexualized acts of racial violence were complicated by the fact that he was planning to marry Susan, a 26-year-old African-American woman who worked as a civilian employee at the 70th Precinct.49 They had been dating for two years and were living together when the brutality happened. In an August 18, 1997, interview with Mike McAlary of the New York Daily News and before Volpe confessed, Susan defended her fiancée. Believing that he was incapable of committing such heinous crimes, Susan described Volpe as different from the cops at the 70th Precinct that were normatively racist. “I am an educated woman,” Susan declared. “In the police world at that precinct you have to be aware of racism,” Susan claimed. “There was nothing from Justin … What color were our children going to be? It’s just like Justin tells the guys in the station, ‘Susan isn’t my black girlfriend. She is my 396

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girlfriend, period.’” They had been on vacations together to the West Indies and the Bahamas. They had talked about racism many times. “Cried about it at night,” said Susan. Volpe had brought her to his parents’ Staten Island home. “I have been to his house many times. His father, Robert, and Justin’s mother treat me like their daughter.” Susan built a case that Volpe wasn’t racist and therefore incapable of doing what people suspected he had done. Despite her defense of Volpe, there were moments in the interview when Susan considered the possibility that he committed the act. “I can’t imagine being married to … ” She couldn’t finish the sentence, as if not wanting to pursue the line of thought. McAlary recounted: “This is like the cliché, ‘I can’t be a racist. Some of my best friends are black.’” Understanding how it sounded, Susan attempted to explain: “I know. But I know he is not an evil person. His life with me would have to be a lie. We are planning on getting married and having children. If Justin Volpe did this, he did it to me and his children.” Susan’s comments in her interview with McAlary made clear that she saw a fundamental connection between herself and Louima based on race. That is, if Volpe beat and raped Louima, Susan would have to retrospectively reconstitute her sexual relations with Volpe. Her use of the past tense (“he did it to me and his [unborn] children”), suggested that Susan saw an irreconcilable incongruence between Volpe’s sexual intimacy with her and his violation of Louima. As it became undeniable that Volpe committed sexualized torture and he pleaded guilty, Susan had to take on the unbearable task of reconciling her experience with the realities of Volpe’s capacity to brutalize a Haitian man. Louima refused to accept the long legacy of police brutality and sexual denigration legitimated by White supremacist logics without a fight. From his hospital bed, Louima recounted his experiences to McAlary. Demanding an investigation into the night’s events, he forced the police officers at the 70th Precinct to account for their roles in the August 9 events. His story implicated New York City’s and the nation’s public, asking that they position themselves as ethical witnesses rather than passive spectators. As his story became widely read in the Daily News, people began organizing. Haitian immigrants, Haitian-Americans, and the larger Brooklyn Afro-Caribbean community raised critical voices against the NYPD. They understood Volpe’s rape/beatings alongside a continuum of police harassment and violence against black immigrant communities. Five days after Louima was tortured, Brooklyn’s radio station Radio Soleil was flooded with calls by Haitians who voiced their outrage at Louima’s story, claiming it as a systematic problem. “Most people are saying that this is not some isolated incident involving one or two bad cops,” summarized Ricot Dupuy, manager of the radio station. “They are saying that they feel it’s the entire New York City Police Department.”50 Innumerable testimonies of police violence were articulated. A native of Gambia, Simbala Jauwar, described his encounters with the police: “They’ve yelled at me, they’ve kicked me, they’ve called me n----r.”51 Community leaders substantiated the complaints. Ronald Auberg, a policy analyst for the Haitian Centers Council declared, “The Caribbean community as a whole has experienced many problems with the police. There seems to be no accountability in the Police Department.”52 To New York communities of color, Louima’s story signified the constant threat of arbitrary police brutality. These communities were quite direct in waging a political critique that addressed police brutality as systemically targeting people of color. As Manfred Antoine, president of the Alliance of Haitian Migrants reiterated, “When a Haitian sees a police officer, instead of thinking this is someone there to protect them or serve them, they think this is someone to be careful around, to stay away from as much as possible.”53 Louima’s violated body signified what Feldman calls a “sacrificial model of memory formation.”54 The scenario became emblematic, symbolizing “the prescriptive memory of an entire collective.”55 On August 16, 1997, approximately four thousands of people gathered in front of the 70th Precinct to protest. Signs at the protest reflected the fact that Haitians were drawing parallels between authoritarian forms of state violence in Haiti with those in the United States. “N.Y.P.D. same 397

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as Ton Ton Macoutes,” stated one poster, referencing the paramilitary troops that enforced François Duvalier’s dictatorship in Haiti. This connection enabled Haitian immigrants and HaitianAmericans to realize that the critiques they had waged against authoritarian practices in Haiti were also pertinent in the US context and specifically apposite to the NYPD’s treatment of Haitians. Jacques Paul, who had arrived in the United States only three years before, recalled marching in protests in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. “It was very dangerous. A lot of policemen beat the people and killed them, and the people were unarmed,” he stated. When asked whether he expected similar problems in New York, he exclaimed, “To find this kind of thing? No!”56 But Haitians also articulated the different expectations they had of the United States as a nation that proclaims its ideological commitment to civil rights and democracy as foundational. Pierre Beaux, a Haitian livery cab driver, described police brutality as “a part of life” in Haiti. “But we’re not in Haiti,” he said angrily. “I have a vote here, and I have rights, and I’ll be stone-cold dead before I’ll let anyone take them away. This is what this horrible thing has taught us.”57 The August 16 demonstration in front of the 70th Precinct also drew connections between the legacy of US anti-black racist violence and Louima’s case. “KKK must go!” the crowd chanted. “Pig! Shame on You! Seven-O, KKK!” Drawing parallels between Louima’s torture, statesponsored US violence against African Americans, and authoritarian violence in Haiti, protesters were able to unravel the mythology of equality and democracy in the United States as far as communities of color were concerned. While the marches were primarily organized by Haitian organizations (Haitian American Alliance and Haitian Enforcement Against Racism), representatives from the Irish, Asian, Latino/ a/x and Jewish communities pledged their support for a march across the Brooklyn Bridge at the end of August. Anthony Stevens, a member of the Council of Dominican Educators, stated that more than 400 Dominicans from Washington Heights in Manhattan would participate in the march. Referring to inter-ethnic tensions between Dominicans and Haitians, Stevens declared, “We want to show that in New York there are no divisions between Dominicans and Haitians. We’re in this together.”58 The August 29 protest brought approximately 15,000 people out to protest police brutality. The photographs of the march across the Brooklyn Bridge, where only seven years earlier Haitians had protested the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on their blood, show a remarkable assembly of conscious people intent on being ethical witnesses to Louima and other violated Black people. Through their numbers and their racial, national, and linguistic diversity, protesters created reverberating emotional economies of care that insisted on the sanctity of people of color’s bodies and rights. Waving toilet plungers (the object Louima initially believed to have been used by Volpe), protesters revealed the illegitimacy of the state, the NYPD, and the hegemonic powers that deemed communities of color “criminal” and “undeserving.” Instead, they pointed to the criminality of state actor. Explaining the gravity of the plunger as a symbol, Haitian student Farentz LeFargee said, “Waving these plungers in the face of the police is a reminder of what happened. The plunger may become a symbol of oppression to Haitians, much as in the same way a lynching rope has become a symbol of oppression to Southern blacks.”59 Protesters played on Mayor Giuliani’s “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect” (CPR) public relations campaign, reformulating the acronym to “Criminals, Perverts, Racists.” Genevieve Lagerre Dazon, a 61-year-old Haitian immigrant, summarized her participation in the protest in fundamental terms. “We are human,” she said. “And that was not human. Just not human.”60

Diallo Kadiatou Diallo stepped out in front of the apartment complex where her unarmed son, Amadou Diallo, had been killed on February 5, 1999, by four police officers who had sprayed him with 41 398

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shots, 19 of which had hit his body. Her grief rang through the air as she cried out her son’s name, falling into the arms of Guinean women for support. Later, in interviews, she would find strength to begin a decades-long struggle in the fight against police brutality, stating, “Amadou’s blood will feed the battle for justice for everyone.”61 The four police officers who killed Diallo, Sean Carroll, 35, Edward McMellon, 26, Kenneth Boss, 27, and Richard Murphy, 26, were members of an elite Street Crime Unit that searched thousands of unarmed people each year with the purported purpose of seizing illegal guns. The results had been poor when it came to seizing illegal guns, but effective in normalizing stop-andfrisk harassment practices in Black and Brown communities. “Citywide, during the 15-month period that ended in March [1999], police officers stopped 56,499 people on suspicion of carrying a weapon but found a weapon only 2.6 percent of the time, according to the state Attorney General’s office.”62 The tactical squads of the Street Crime Unit operated aggressively, moving from one suspected offender to the next in the hopes of producing guns or drugs that would count as a “bust.” As Sidney L. Harring argues, This process generates the daily statistics that make both the squad and the precinct look good under the “comstat” computer-based police accountability programs that structure police management in New York and many other cities. The “rousts” are largely guesswork, based on police experience; at their core, they are also racial profiles. One after another, young men are confronted, ordered to stop, searched, verbally engaged for information about themselves or others, and then either let go or arrested on petty charges. The squads then move on from one roust to another, all shift long, producing the desired arrest statistics that underpin the functioning of the policing machine.63 Most of these searches do not even attempt to conduct searches in accordance with Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Rather, the practice is to conduct illegal searches and then create a justification thereafter, which is likely how the story of the officers looking for a Black rapist got created. As Harring notes, “No one who knows police practices believes that the four officers involved that night were actually looking for a rapist in a year-old rape case. The police do not operate that way with “cold” cases. The “rapist” story is the perfect cover for the illegal search.”64 This was particularly true since the vague description of a “young black man” could have applied to thousands of people in the Bronx. Due to Kadiatou Diallo’s emphatic organizing and the tactical campaign orchestration of leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton,65 Diallo’s murder incited mass protests across New York City. In their protest signs and narratives, Diallo’s mother and the public focused on the 41 shots fired at a single unarmed young black man from Guinea, who had come to the United States only two years prior to pursue a dream of working in computer science or electronics. Diallo’s mother recounted, They didn’t tell me how many bullets, because all the family wanted to protect me from the shock. But little by little I found out. Our Australian investor came in the evening, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, but they shot him many times.’ And I screamed, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Because the bullets and everything, they tried to minimize. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but they shot him many times, Kadi, too many times.’ And I told him: ‘You must tell me. How many?’ ‘He said, ‘It’s 41 bullets.’66 The number of shots symbolized inconceivable excess, as if the officers had breached all possible thresholds for regarding human life—and Black life specifically—as sacred. After the trial was moved to Albany, NY, it was evident that the chances for conviction were slim. When the officers were 399

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acquitted in February 2000, Amadou Diallo’s father Saikou told the media that the verdict was the “second killing” of his son.67

Conclusion In response to the guilty verdict for Derrick Chauvin, one of the police officers who killed George Floyd by pinning him down for eight and a half minutes, Kadiatou Diallo stated, “This verdict speaks to Amadou. This verdict speaks to many victims … Since my son was gunned down, I’ve been fighting. I’ve been advocating … Justice is a long road. Justice has not been had for many, many, many,” she added.”68 Expectant and nervous people across the country anxiously awaited news of the verdict, bracing themselves yet again for another not-guilty verdict. When the news of Chauvin’s conviction was announced, many people across the United States wept, hugged each other, and cried out in relief. There was a feeling that the legal system had finally caved under the pressure of millions of protesters to grant legal recognition not just to George Floyd, but to countless people of color whose police killings had resulted in acquittals. Given the persistence of police brutality against communities of color past and present, and the radical infrequency of police officer convictions, it is crucial that those who struggle for structural shifts in policing consider the limits of the law and the justice system in offering forms of redress. While this is almost always the path of accountability that the families of police victims will pursue, it may be crucial that publics begin imagining other forms of recognition and redress to the families of those who are killed that do not involve legal or state apparatuses. What would repair and accountability for Baez, Rosario, Diaz, Huang, Louima, and Diallo look like if we did not limit ourselves to the extremely narrow possibilities for recognition, redress, and accountability offered by the law? What would it mean for the public to create systems of reparations and redress that fall beyond the purview of legal trials? Campaigns for reparations like those won for the victims of police torture by city ordinance in the City of Chicago inspire us to think in more capacious ways about constituting recognition and repair. The fight for Reparations in Chicago was “the product of decades of activism, litigation and journalism and the culmination of a concerted six-month inspirational, intergenerational and interracial campaign co-led by Amnesty International – USA, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Project NIA and We Charge Genocide.”69 Involving the survivors of police torture in Chicago and their families and countless organizations, the city ordinance’s reparations included a holistic approach to repair by providing the following: a formal apology for the torture; specialized counseling services to the Burge torture survivors and their family members on the South Side; free enrollment and job training in City Colleges for survivors and family members (including grandchildren) as well as prioritized access to other City programs, including help with housing, transportation and senior care; a history lesson about the Burge torture cases taught in Chicago Public schools to 8th and 10th graders; the construction of a permanent public memorial to the survivors; and it sets aside $5.5 million for a Reparations Fund for Burge Torture Victims that will allow the survivors with us today to receive financial compensation for the torture they endured.70 This remarkable culmination of community and city-based recognition and repair after decades of failed lawsuits in the court system created a new imaginary for the people of Chicago when it came to considering the meaning of “accountability.” Even as the limits of the legal and court system refused to offer redress for the suffering of police torture victims, community members in partnership and coalition were able to establish different repairs by other means. Their long-term efforts leave us with a more capacious notion of justice. 400

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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24 25 26 27

Neil Smith, “Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s,” Social Text 16, no. 4 (1998): 2. Smith, “Giuliani Time,” 2. Smith, “Giuliani Time,” 3. Clarence Taylor, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 165. Taylor, Fight the Power, 165. Smith, “Giuliani Time,” 4. Neil Smith, “Global Social Cleansing: Postliberal Revanchism and the Export of Zero Tolerance,” Social Justice (San Francisco, Calif.) 28, no. 3 (85) (2001): 69. Taylor, Fight the Power, 167. Ibid.,168. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 159–75. Allen Feldman, “Philoctetes Revisited: White Public Space and the Political Geography of Public Safety,” Social Text 19, no. 3 (2001): 68. Ibid., 68. Smith, “Giuliani Time,” 7–8. Feldman, “Philoctetes Revisited,” 70–71. Ibid., 73. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield, “‘We’re Just Black’: The Racial and Ethnic Identities of Second-Generation West Indians in New York,” in Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation, ed. Philip Kasinitz, John H Mollenkopf, and Mary C Waters (New York: Russell Sage, 2004), 305. William J. Bratton, “New York’s Police Should Not Retreat,” The New York Times, 19 August 1997, http:// www.nytimes.com/1997/08/19/opinion/new-york-s-police-should-not-retreat.html, accessed 12 February 2022. Bob Herbert, “Connect the Dots,” The New York Times, 24 August 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/ 1997/08/24/opinion/connect-the-dots.html, accessed 12 February 2022. Herbert, “Connect the Dots.” Tom McEwen, “National Data Collection on Police Use of Force” (Washington D.C.: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, April 1996), https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndcopuof.pdf, accessed 12 February 2022; Jon Swaine et al., “Young Black Men Killed by US Police at Highest Rate in Year of 1,134 Deaths,” The Guardian, 31 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/ dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men, accessed 12 February 2022. Fresh in the memory of New York communities of color were numerous arbitrary deaths/beatings: Kevin Cedeno, 16, black, fatally shot in the lower back at close range by Officer Anthony Pellegrini on April 4, 1997; Charles Campbell, 37, black, fatally shot three times by Officer Richard Diguglielmo on October 4, 1996 over a parking space; Nathaniel Gaines, 26, black Navy veteran fatally shot in the back by Officer Paolo Colecchia on July 4, 1996; Lebert Folkes, Jamaican immigrant, shot in the face by undercover officer while being pulled out of his sister’s car on February 11, 1996; Anibal Carasquillo, 21, Puerto Rican, unarmed, fatally shot in chest on Jan 22, 1995 by Marco Calderon. See http://www.stolenlives.org/read/ index.php?action=show§ion=area_new_york_city_westchester_long_island.xml&display=NEW +YORK+CITY+%2F+WESTCHESTER+%2F+LONG+ISLAND&area=34, accessed 12 February 2022. “The Counted: People Killed by Police in the United States – Interactive,” The Guardian, http://www. theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database, accessed 13 January 2022. “Mapping Police Violence,” Mapping Police Violence, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org, accessed 13 January 2022. “Fatal Encounters – A Step toward Creating an Impartial, Comprehensive and Searchable National Database of People Killed during Interactions with Police.,” https://fatalencounters.org/, accessed 13 January 2022. For a detailed account of multiple cases in which police officers accused of brutality or unjustifiable shootings were exonerated, see Amnesty International, Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department, June 1996 (AI Index: 52/36/96).

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Paula Ioanide 28 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15–22. 29 Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women” (New York: African American Policy Forum and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, 2015), https://ncvc.dspacedirect.org/handle/20.500.11990/1926, accessed 12 February 2022; Monique W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: The New Press, 2016); Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds., Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, 12.10.2010 edition (Oakland: AK Press, 2011); Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2011). 30 Crenshaw et al., “Say Her Name.” 31 Herbert, “Connect the Dots.” 32 Ritchie, Invisible No More, 10. 33 Tia Sherèe Gaynor and Brandi Blessett, “Predatory Policing, Intersectional Subjection, and the Experiences of LGBTQ People of Color in New Orleans,” Urban Affairs Review, 1 June 2021, 10780874211017288, https://doi.org/10.1177/10780874211017289, accessed 15 February 2022; Stanley and Smith, Captive Genders; Raechel Tiffe, “Interrogating Industries of Violence: Queering the Labor Movement to Challenge Police Brutality and the Prison Industrial Complex,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 1 (2015): 1–21. 34 “Safe OUTSide the System (SOS),” The Audre Lorde Project, https://alp.org/programs/sos, accessed 31 January 2022; Tasha Amezcua Long Ejeris Dixon, and Che J. Rene, “Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police,” Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36812-10-lessons-for-creatingsafety-without-the-police-a-reflection-on-the-10-year-anniversary-of-the-sos-collective, accessed 29 June 2017. 35 Andrew Hsiao, “Mothers of Invention: The Families of Police-Brutality Victims and the Movement They’ve Built,” in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, ed. Andrea McArdle and Tanya Erzen (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 181. 36 Ibid., 185. 37 Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence: Organizing Asian Communities, “Police Brutality in the New Chinatown,” in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, ed. Andrea McArdle and Tanya Erzen (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 221–22. 38 Ibid., 223. 39 Ibid., 232. 40 Hsiao, “Mothers of Invention,” 185. 41 Ibid., 185. 42 Paula Ioanide, The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness, Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 61–64. 43 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 44 Ibid., 3–4. 45 Marie Brenner, “Incident in the 70th Precinct,” Vanity Fair, 1 December 1997, http://www.vanityfair. com/magazine/archive/1997/12/louima199712, accessed 16 February 2022. 46 For detailed accounts of the historical processes involved in converting ethnic Europeans into white Americans see David R Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 47 David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 8–9. 48 Ibid., 123. 49 Susan chose not to give her last name in the interview with McAlary in order to protect her family. Because of this, I refer to her by her first name. All quotes in this section are taken from McAlary’s article, “Gal Pal: He Couldn’t Do It,” New York Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/gal-palcouldn-article-1.235580, accessed 15 July 2014. 50 Jonathan P. Hicks, “Protest Call: ‘Something Has to Be Done,’” New York Times, 14 August 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/14/nyregion/protest-call-something-has-to-be-done.html, accessed 16 February 2022. 51 Zenon Zawada et al., “ABUSE NOT NEW IN THIS NABE, HAITIANS SAY,” New York Daily News, 15 August 1997, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/abuse-new-nabe-haitians-article-1. 773482, accessed 16 February 2022.

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Police Brutality in 1990s New York City 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Allen Feldman, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities,” Radical History Review 85, no. 1 (2003): 62. 55 Ibid. 56 John Kifner, “Investigators Looking at New Allegations in Brutality Case,” New York Times, 21 August 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/21/nyregion/investigators-looking-at-new-allegations-in-brutality-case. html, accessed 16 February 2022. 57 Zawada et al., “ABUSE NOT NEW IN THIS NABE, HAITIANS SAY.” 58 Garry Pierre-pierre, “Haitians Expect Thousands To March Against Brutality,” New York Times, 28 August 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/28/nyregion/haitians-expect-thousands-to-march-againstbrutality.html, accessed 16 February 2022. 59 John Kifner, “Thousands Call on City Hall To Confront Police Brutality,” New York Times, 30 August 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/30/nyregion/thousands-call-on-city-hall-to-confront-police-brutality. html, accessed 16 February 2022. 60 Ibid. 61 Ted Conover, “Kadi Diallo’s Trial,” New York Times, 9 January 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/ 01/09/magazine/kadi-diallo-s-trial.html, accessed 16 February 2022. 62 Kevin Flynn, “The Focus of Diallo Murder Trial: Testimony of Four Police Officers,” New York Times, 10 December 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/10/nyregion/the-focus-of-diallo-murdertrial-testimony-of-four-police-officers.html, accessed 16 February 2022. 63 Sidney L. Harring, “The Diallo Verdict: Another ‘Tragic Accident’ in New York’s War on Street Crime?,” Social Justice 27, no. 1 (March 2000): 10. 64 Ibid., 11. 65 Conover, “Kadi Diallo’s Trial.” 66 Ibid. 67 Jane Fritsch, “The Diallo Verdict: The Overview; 4 Officers in Diallo Shooting Are Acquitted of All Charges,” New York Times, 26 February 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/26/nyregion/dialloverdict-overview-4-officers-diallo-shooting-are-acquitted-all-charges.html, accessed 16 February 2022. 68 “Amadou Diallo’s Mother Talks Chauvin Verdict: ‘No Time for Celebration,’” PIX11 (blog), 21 April 2021, https://pix11.com/news/unrest-in-america/amadou-diallo-mother-reacts-chauvin-guilty-verdict/, accessed 16 February 2022. 69 Mariame Kaba, “Prison Culture,” Reparations Won: One Year Later (blog), http://www.usprisonculture. com/blog/tag/reparations/, accessed 27 January 2022. 70 Ibid.

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30 ENACTING AND ENABLING VIOLENCE Policing Indigenous Communities1 Barbara Perry

Say their names! George Floyd. Michael Brown. Breonna Taylor. North Americans often can “say their names” when asked to identify Black lives taken by police in recent years. But what of their Indigenous brothers and sisters who have also lost their lives through police violence? Can we say their names? Few could answer in the affirmative. Popular media have not focused attention on police violence raining down upon Native Americans in the same way that they have spotlighted the experiences of Black Americans. Indeed, Jean Reith Schroedel and Roger Chin found that while the vast bulk (70%) of Black-American deaths at the hands of police officers garnered national media coverage, more than 90% of Native American deaths received no coverage whatsoever.2 Sadly, academics have not fared much better in their attention to the policing of Indigenous communities. In 2009, I published Policing Race and Place: Under- and Over-policing in Indian Country. At the time, it was one of a bare handful of sources that cast a critical gaze on the disparate policing of Indigenous peoples in the United States, a point that I highlighted at the time. I argued then that despite the surge in scholarship on race and crime/justice, Native Americans were the invisible “other” whose experiences were rarely explored. More specifically, there was a significant lacuna in scholarship on their engagement with law enforcement. One might have expected some change in the intervening years, especially in light of calls for the decolonization of criminology.3 However, that does not appear to be the case. There is still a dramatic gap in American literature in this field. In contrast, however, Canadian scholars have been quietly developing a strong, theoretically informed body of literature situating police (mis)treatment of Indigenous people as a contemporary tool of settler colonialism.4 The focus there, then, is on both the American and Canadian experience. This chapter is as much a call for deeper and wider attention to the ways in which Indigenous peoples are policed through violence as it is an entry in this conversation. I begin by contextualizing contemporary patterns within the historical trajectory of colonial policing. I follow this with consideration of how police explicitly engage in violence against Indigenous people. I illustrate how the “colonial project” continues to be supported by police killings of Indigenous peoples, police violence against women and girls, and excessive force exercised against Indigenous protestors. I also provide a brief note on the other side of the equation: the ways in which police inaction—or under-policing—facilitates broader forms of violence against Indigenous people.

Policing the Colonial Project The grand aim of “nation building,” from the perspective of Europeans and North Americans greedy for land and resources, demanded the control and in fact removal of the Indigenous peoples 404

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who initially occupied the land. Law enforcement bodies—in varied guises—were thus developed to support the colonialist project of the state. The social and legal order defended by police was also that of a colonial state, seeking to exclude or at least regulate native peoples who were seen to stand in the way of “progress.” Specifically, law enforcement became the key means by which to “police” racialized spaces, and by which to facilitate the assimilative process. The race and place of Indigenous North Americans were defined and regulated by an array of intertwined formal and informal mechanisms of social control: missionaries, boarding schools, the military, and even public health facilities.5 Underlying the power and success of each of these, however, were formal policing agencies. In the American context, BIA schools could not function without compulsory attendance laws and BIA police to arrest or threaten parents for not sending children to school. BIA farmers could not teach the Indians to farm without laws and police to prevent Indians from killing their stock for food. Christian churches could not convert without laws to bar traditional ceremonial activities. Land could not be allotted without laws to punish Indians who resisted.6 Thus, police functioned explicitly to force the imposition of Western values and behaviors, and the suppression of traditional ways of living. They acted as “guardians” or administrators of the regulatory practices of containment and control.7 They would provide fundamental support for policies intended to outlaw Native traditions: religious rituals, long hair and braids, use of Native languages, and other related indicators of culture. For example, in 1897, the American government went so far as to call for a military occupation of Zuni territory in an effort to forcibly halt traditional practices. In short, police have been and continue to be not just complicit but actively engaged in historical and contemporary strategies of colonialism, from clearing the way for western expansionism, to enforcing “pass” and reserve systems, to seizing Indigenous children and relocating them to residential schools that could “kill the Indian in the child.” This is not simply an historical artifact, but a practice that continues today, as Derek Gregory observes: “the capacities that inhere within the colonial past are routinely reaffirmed and reactivated in the colonial present.”8 Moreover, these “capacities” are often enacted through police violence as a means of containment. Sherene Razack concurs, asserting that Settler colonialism is an ongoing project that preserves intact its colonial, spatial and legal structures. Dispossession continues apace with extraction as the engine that drives the racial project of accumulation. We can expect, then, that both the ghost of slavery and the ghost of settler colonialism animate institutions such as prisons and policing.9 Consequently, police and the power they exert are experienced as colonial apparati. People of color may, at any time, cross the appropriate physical and social boundaries which otherwise insulate them from Whites—as when Indigenous people forcefully assert their rights, or even when they leave the “res.”10 This is where the police enter; they are situated as guardians of these borders, charged to “protect whiteness against violence, where violence is the imminent action of that black male body.”11 Police violence is legitimate in this schema—it is a defensive act, intended to restore the essential boundaries. Consequently, police violence is especially likely to occur where the victims have forgotten their “appropriate” place in the racial order, and in situations wherein minority individuals or communities are attempting to construct oppositional racial identities. These efforts challenge the marginal or subordinate position which has been assigned to them, and which is expected of them. Harassment and violence become resources by which to restore the balance, whether in the context of the street or the protest arena. Selective enforcement, too, is an ongoing pattern of response on the part of law enforcement. In short, like so many other racialized communities, Indigenous communities are both over-and 405

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under-policed. In his 1991 report to the Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec, Jean-Paul Brodeur concluded that “[i]n the Canadian context, Aboriginals are submitted to over-policing for minor or petty offences—e.g., drinking violations—and suffer from under-policing with regard to being protected from more serious offences, such as violent offences against persons (particularly within the family).”12 It is thus not sufficient to focus on police brutality alone; it is also crucial to pair this with consideration of the ways in which police (in)action enables other strategies of violence. This dichotomy represents an important distinction. The two strategies constitute a dual assault on the rights and freedoms of already marginalized, often stigmatized groups. In the final report of the Canadian Inquiry into the Administration of Justice and Aboriginal People, A.C. Hamilton and C.M. Sinclair articulate both the differences and the links between the two: Over-policing generally results from the imposition of police control on individual or community activities at a level unlikely to occur in the dominant society. Under-policing usually results from a lack of preventive and supportive police services. While the possibility of simultaneously experiencing those two problems may appear unlikely at first glance, both arise because police forces are not under Aboriginal community direction, and [police] likely do not know community priorities or cultural assumptions.13 More than a decade later, a Human Rights Watch report on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada highlighted both abusive policing of Indigenous women and girls, as well as police failure to protect them from other forms of violence. So, too, did an Amnesty International report identify similar patterns in the United States: There have been complaints of brutality and discriminatory treatment of Native Americans both in urban areas and on reservations. Complaints include indiscriminate brutal treatment of [N]ative people, including elders and children, during mass police sweeps of tribal areas following specific incidents, and failure to respond to crimes committed against Native Americans on reservations.14 Both forms of police (mis)treatment of racialized minority groups leave them vulnerable and devoid of the protections afforded White citizens. On the one hand, over-enforcement implies that the “task of police is to keep them under control.” On the other hand, under-policing deprives them of civil and legal protections, implying that “the police have little responsibility for protecting them from crime within their communities.”15 Like many other people of color, Native Americans may very well perceive themselves to be in need of protection from the police, rather than being able to rely on the police to protect them.

Police Killing of Indigenous People Law enforcement officers frequently step over the boundaries of “legitimate” force to engage in the illegitimate and excessive use of force. Recent years have called attention to this tendency, especially through the highly publicized cases stretching from Rodney King in 1991 to George Floyd, 30 years later in 2020. These cases also highlight the fact that people of color are dramatically overrepresented as victims of police violence.16 However, limited attention has been paid to police violence against Indigenous people in North America. Their experiences clearly parallel those of Black communities, in that especially in reservation border towns, “Native Americans are treated as second-class citizens by police and public agencies in ways that echo the experience of black Americans in towns like Ferguson, Mo.” In fact, proportionately, police killings of Indigenous 406

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people eclipse the risk for Black people, as they are more than three times likelier to be killed by police.17 They are six times more likely to be killed than White people. Fatal Encounters, a database of police killings, provides details of 318 such deaths among Native Americans between 2000 and 2021.18 The situation in Canada is even more dramatic, in that Indigenous people there are more than 10 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a White person. Between 2017 and 2020, 25 Indigenous people were shot and killed by the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) alone.19 Indeed, police violence continues to be an integral strategy in the reaffirmation of the line between “us” and “them.” Like profiling—but more forcefully—police use of violence is a means of keeping racial minorities “in their place.” It is thus a territorial defense of cultural “space.” It is a means to reassert the marginality of the other who dares to transgress. Like hate crime perpetrated by civilians, the racialized violence exercised by police are exclusionary acts motivated in part by offenders’ desires to assert power over a given space, whether it be a neighborhood or public street. The effect of such acts is to send a “message” to members of the targeted group that they are unwelcome. In addition, hate crimes and responses to them contribute to the meaning of a place, representing a struggle between the meanings informing offenders and those informing other groups.20 Away from the gaze of the public eye, police are able to shift their methods of control and restraint, to become less circumspect in their behavior. Robynne Neugebauer observes the ways in which officers direct the “rhythm of exchange” between themselves and those they may load into their cruisers, such that power is maintained through a combination of “exaggerated displays of legal power and physical prowess.”21 This display of “physical prowess” was very much on display in March of 2015 when Winslow, AZ police officer Austin Shipley shot and killed Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year old Navajo woman. The 200-pound officer was inexplicably unable to physically contain the 100-pound woman, and instead shot her when she brandished an inch-long pair of scissors. As the ensuing investigation would reveal, Shipley had a lengthy record as “an aggressive police officer who was easily provoked and who had a particular interest in asserting his power over Indians, and young Indian women in particular.”22 In the Canadian context, similar displays of police power over Indigenous bodies are evident in the practice known as Starlight tours, by which Indigenous people are loaded into police cruisers, driven to remote areas and left to find their way back to the city—often without their coats, sometimes without shoes, and generally in sub-zero temperatures. Perhaps the most highly publicized case was that of Neil Stonechild in 1990. Five days after he was last seen wearing a heavy school jacket, the 17-year-old Saulteaux First Nations youth was found frozen to death in a field outside of Saskatoon SK. He was found in the snow, with only one shoe, no jacket, and with abrasions on his face and arms. A decade later, another half dozen similar cases in the same province garnered attention, with hundreds of reports of other incidents reported to First Nations organizations.23 The resultant uproar finally provoked an inquiry into Starlight tours, with little discernible effect on the practice, as evidenced by Elizabeth Comack’s interviews with Indigenous youth in Winnipeg MB which indicated that it is an ongoing and widespread practice, presumably intended as an exercise of might and control by police. As Comack puts it, it is “one of the strategies that police utilize to reproduce order in their dealings with troubled and troublesome people” who are, incidentally, Indigenous.24 Sadly, those deemed to be “troublesome” and thus a challenge to the police authority are all too frequently suffering the effects of mental illness. In the United States, nearly 25% of all victims of police killing experienced mental health crises, but nearly half of all Native American victims 407

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were in crisis.25 Illustrative examples of the compounding risks of Indigenous status and mental illness are legion in both Canada and the United States. Consider just a few: In 2015, Lynn Eagle Feather called police to report that her son Paul Castaway, a Rosebud Sioux tribal member, was armed with a knife, and appeared to be in an episode of serious mental health crisis. She told dispatch that he had a lengthy history of mental illness and drug addiction. Within seconds of arriving, Denver police had shot and killed him, claiming that he was threatening them with a knife. Surveillance cameras, however, showed that Castaway was holding the knife to his own throat.26 In 2017, Zachary Bearheels left South Dakota by bus to visit his mother in Oklahoma. He was barred from boarding the connecting bus in Omaha due to “erratic” behavior said to be disturbing other passengers. The following day, when he had not arrived in Oklahoma, his mother called Omaha police, stressing that he experienced significant mental health challenges, including schizophrenia and bi-polar. He was found behaving strangely in front a convenience store and officers handcuffed him and put him in their cruiser. They were denied authorization to transport him to a hospital for supervision so instead took him back to the bus station where he slipped the handcuffs and attempted to run off. In spite of the fact that no crime had been committed, police tasered him a dozen times, and punched him in the head, the combination of which proved fatal.27 In 2020, Rodney Levi, a Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq man, was killed by police in rural New Brunswick. Responding to a report of a man “acting strangely,” officers found Levi armed with knives. When tasers failed to subdue him, he was shot twice in the chest less than 20 minutes after police arrived. Levi had long struggled with mental health and drug dependency issues for which he was unable to access treatment. He was described as depressed in the days before his death. A family member expressed her frustration that “That officer showed up, knew Rodney was Indigenous and decided that Rodney was not worth the effort to talk to. Because the very next week, a white guy at the Miramichi hospital held a nurse at knifepoint. They gave that man a hostage negotiator and hours to talk him down. Our Rodney was given 20 minutes! That’s the hardest part – knowing Rodney’s life was only worth 20 minutes of their time.”28 In each of these cases, Indigeneity and mental illness combine to elicit police violence as a means of subduing perceived—but often not genuine—threats. The intersectionality of identities and the “inherent” dangerousness they pose individually and collectively provide the backdrop against which police officers interpreted their options. Often with very little time or effort devoted to deescalation, law enforcement instead waste no time opening fire on Indigenous bodies.

Police Violence against Women and Girls The intersection of gender and Indigenous identity—and thus of sexism/misogyny and racism—also leave women especially susceptible to violence at the hands of law enforcement. Indeed, as noted above, law enforcement and the “justice” system of which it is a part have historically played the role of containing Indigenous bodies along lines of both race and gender. Colonial narratives of the suspect nature of Indigenous women shape the violence police officers exercise against them. Just as the trope of the “drunken Indian” has been used to excuse public and private violence against Native men, so too have sweeping caricatures of Indigenous women normalized their violent experiences. They are at one and the same time debased and sexualized, named as “whores” and “squaws.”29 The vilification of Indigenous women shapes and enables the violence that accompanies the narratives. 408

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Far more attention has been paid to police failure to protect Indigenous women than to their victimization by law enforcement, a trend that Pamela Palmater describes as willful blindness.30 However, the first cannot be understood without the second. A comprehensive Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published in 2013 highlights the continuum of police violence that affects Indigenous women to this day. In brief, the report reflects three overlapping forms of violence: abusive policing tactics, and both physical and sexual violence. With respect to the first, HRW heard accounts of young girls under 18 experiencing excessive use of force to the point of broken bones, often targeting those who had called the police for protection. For example, a 17-year-old girl shouted at a woman to call the police as she was being chased by gang members. She described the scene in which four police cruisers arrived, with three officers in each. She was immediately approached and thrown to the ground, while I was yelling at them saying: “I was the one who called for help. Why are you guys chasing me?” And they didn’t say anything else … They roughed me up. They handcuffed me and put me in the back of the police car and would not allow my mother to come see me … One of them came up and said [through the police car window], “Keep kicking and see what happens.” … He punched me in the face more than six times. Half of his body was in the police car.31 Other acts of violence were also reported including the use of batons, pepper spray, and excessively tightened handcuffs. Other young girls and women described the unnecessary use of tasers, troubling cross-gender searches, and exposure to unsafe and unsanitary conditions in holding cells. Some described incidents that paralleled the Starlight Tours mentioned above, in that they were released, in freezing temperatures, without weather-appropriate clothing or transportation to a safe space. Women speaking with the HRW team reported violence at all stages of interaction with police, from initial contact to arrest, to the period during and immediately after arrest resulting in injuries including bruises, abrasions, and broken bones. One Indigenous woman was stopped by police as she was walking home from a bar. When she asked them to take her home, officers instead told her “the only ride you’re getting is to the drunk tank.”32 When she refused to get in the vehicle, officers forced her to the ground tearing a ligament in the process. Affirming the risk of calling the police for help, another woman describes the police response to her call for assistance after she had been beaten up. They picked her up, but then They tore my sweater off and jeans off in the holding cell. There were three or four of them – men – a female guard was watching. I tried to sit up and they pepper sprayed me twice. They kept pushing me down and tearing my clothes off. I was all dressed up before I went in there. They ripped off my jeans and put them in a bag.33 Even after she was released—without charges—she was not allowed to put her jeans back on before being let onto the streets. Sexual violence perpetrated by police was equally common, including gang rapes and successive assaults by the same officer over time. The HRW team also described a civil suit in which multiple officers were accused of sexually assaulting a woman they had arrested. After taking her to a private home, she was i ii iii

Forcibly confined in the basement against her will; Repeatedly struck, punched, and kicked while being verbally denigrated and threatened with the death and disappearance of her family; Forcibly stripped to a state of nakedness, sexually assaulted, and sodomised.34 409

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So common were incidents of sexual violence by police in one community that a women’s support organization kept a supply of underwear for street-involved Indigenous women. It was, apparently, standard practice for police to rape these women and keep their underwear as “souvenirs.” Among the enabling practices that seem to allow police to rain violence upon Indigenous women with impunity is the subsequent failure to hold them accountable. Palmater observes that even where there is a formal action against the officers, they are treated as internal disciplinary cases rather than what they are—criminal violence. Moreover, it is challenging to counter a problem about which there are no formal or systematic data; there are few if any answers to basic questions such as “how many women and girls generally, or Indigenous women and girls specifically, have been victims of police physical and/or sexual abuse or exploitation; how many have reported it; or the charge or conviction rate (impunity rate) among police forces for such crimes.”35 This failure of accountability is illustrated by a 2015 case in Manitoba in which an RCMP officer arrested an Indigenous woman, then took her home from the police cell with the intention of forcing her to engage in sex with him. What is most shocking, however, is the response of a senior officer who allegedly told him "You arrested her, you can do whatever the fuck you want to do."36 Such a gross failure of leadership contributes to the environment that enables victimization to continue unchallenged and unabated. In short, as aptly summarized by Jaskiran Dhillon, Indigenous women and girls are subjected to gross levels of state violence through the dispatching of colonial power vis-àvis the institutional of policing—reports of physical abuse by both police and judges, sexual assault, the terrorizing of Indigenous communities through hypersurveillance, unjust detainment for intoxication, racist threats, and zero accountability for police misconduct litter the pages.37 And to what end? To render them fearful and thus docile, in the interests of maintaining the social order demanded by a colonial power. It is not enough to have rendered Indigenous people landless; they must also be reminded of the might of that colonial power, and its capacity to employ violence as a means of silencing its subjects. This need to control the “savage” Native becomes perhaps even more necessary where they are asserting their rights.

Policing protests—The Indigenous “Terror Threat” In the name of preserving what few resources have been left to them, Native Americans since the 1960s have engaged in often dramatic politics of resistance. From the occupation of Pine Ridge to the Northwest fish-ins to litigation in Euroamerican courts, Native Americans have signaled their refusal to be deprived of their “last treaty rights.” Yet, as noted, these efforts toward empowerment are commonly met with equally steadfast reactionary mobilizations. Rights claims have triggered hostile and frequently violent reprisals from what might loosely be called an anti-Indian movement.38 Unfortunately, the posture of entitlement often taken by Native American activists are often seen as an affront to white dominance, in that the activists are perceived to be violating the anticipated rules of behavior. Instead of accepting their subordination, they resist it. In such a context, incidents of racial violence often escalate in retaliation. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights confirms this: I have noticed that initially, I think, the racism that was directed towards Indians was more of an almost paternalistic or benevolent kind of racism in that Indians that were good Indians were the step-and-fetch-it Indians that didn’t rock the boat. Those that rocked the boat were somehow upstarts who really should be ignored. When the Voigt decision came down, then all Indians became rapers of the resources and a general caste was put upon all.39 410

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To paraphrase, the only good Indian is a quiet Indian. Should they step outside the permissible boundaries that define “a good Indian,” they become vulnerable to retaliatory violence. Seen in this light, police violence—like hate crime—can be seen as a reactionary tool, a resource for the reassertion of whiteness over color. It is a form of “resistance to any diminishment in the authorial claims of a particular white identity.”40 It is available as a response, albeit violent and extreme, to the Other who is out of control, who has overstepped his or her social or political or even geographical boundaries. For Native Americans, this dates back to the mid-1800s, when, for example, in 1862 in Minnesota, 39 people were executed by the federal government in the aftermath of the LakotaSioux uprising. A century later, violence would still serve to contain Native American protest. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was a favored target of police repression. Organized to resist the allocation and exploitation of Native American lands, and the more generalized oppression of Native peoples, AIM was fated to be seen as a dissident group that threatened the racial order. Nowhere did the campaign turn more deadly than on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. AIM took a leading role in challenging a proposed transfer of mineral-rich land back to the federal government. In response, local police departments, the FBI and a tribal ranger group—the GOONsquad—mustered massive resources and ammunition against the Native American organizers. In the end, dozens of Native Americans had been killed, hundreds more injured by gunfire, beatings, and cars forced off the road.41 This contemporary “Indian war” took a tremendous toll: Even if only documented political deaths are counted, the yearly murder rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation between 1 March 1973 and 1 March 1976 was 170 per 100,000. By comparison, Detroit, the reputed “murder capital of the United States,” had a rate of 20.2 per 100,000 in 1974. The U.S. average was 9.7 per 100,000.42 What these patterns of police brutality illustrate is that violence is an appropriate means with which to confront counter-hegemonic racial mobilization. When people of color organize to upset the racial balance, it is acceptable to put them back in their place quite forcibly. Those who cross the political, social, or cultural boundaries are, first cast as a criminal, potentially even extremist threat.43 Consequently, they can also be constructed as legitimate targets of “necessary” police violence. Cunneen and Tauri draw the connection between over-policing and policing protests, observing that it becomes particularly apparent when Indigenous people assert their rights. In this context, examples of the escalation of police responses against Aboriginal people can be seen in Canada at Oka (1990) and at Ipperwash (1995), when people asserted their rights over land and resources. In these cases, the affirmation of rights became politically transformed by the state into a policing problem of maintaining public order, with the use of riot police, tactical units and (at Oka) the military.44 The sort of police violence that often emerges out of the containment of Indigenous protests is an extension of historical forms intended to ensure the social order that defines the relative place of colonized and colonizer. Indigenous claims—often erroneously considered “counter-claims”—are held up as baseless, illegitimate, even dangerous in contradistinction to the settler “claims” to the land and its resources regardless of prior treaty agreements. It is in the face of such “danger” and especially of such challenges to the authority of the colonial state that law enforcement is called in to police the action. Successive campaigns to violently challenge the exercise of Indigenous treaty rights illustrates this pattern clearly. When I was conducting interviews with Native Americans in the Great Lakes region 411

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of Minnesota and Wisconsin, respondents frequently spoke of the role of law enforcement on the sites of anti-Indian activism intended to disrupt local Chippewa exercise of traditional spear fishing rights on local lakes in the 1990s. On the one hand, officers tacitly or actively enabled attacks on the rights defenders, refusing to intervene. However, people also spoke of police violence during these arrests, as in the following case: My brother and I were thrown in separate cruisers – I hit my head on the way in. When I talked to him later he said the cops leaned in through the open door swinging their batons at his head and stomach. One jammed his in my stomach a couple of times too. I know others got the shit beat out of them then. You couldn’t trust the police (Male, Wisconsin). More recent instances continue the trend. Devin Clancy assesses how both in the Ipperwash (1995) and Caledonia (2006) conflicts in Ontario, Canada, “police use(d) violence to maintain social order and reproduce the geography of settlement.”45 In the midst of World War II, the Canadian military seized a large portion of the Stony Creek Reserve in Ontario, home to the Aazhoodena First Nation, renaming it Camp Ipperwash. From the end of the war onward, the Aazhoodena people were unsuccessful in negotiating the return of the land to their people, resulting in a last-ditch attempt by land defenders in the mid-1990s to reclaim the territory through occupation. The tactic was met by a fierce “law and order” approach that saw the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) swarm into the territory in anything but a peaceful manner. They beat one elder, and fired shots into a vehicle on the scene. The day— September 6, 1995—ended with the tragic shooting of Dudley George, one of the land defenders. A decade later, another group of land defenders mobilized in an effort to reclaim lost territory, this time against a corporate housing development in Six Nations land near Caledonia, Ontario. Although the defenders were generally peaceful in their demands, they were met by an aggressive police response on April 20, 2006. Officers deployed batons, pepper spray, and tasers. That they were prepared for worse is evidenced by the fact that snipers were in position throughout the area, highlighting the police perception of the “dangerous Native.”46 American parallels are legion. I noted at the outset of this section the historical use of violence to contain and constrain AIM. Subsequent protest movements have also been subject to police (mis)use of force against demonstrators—most of whom are doing little more than asserting land and treaty rights. Among the most recent such cases have been those revolving around the pipeline protests across western states. While resistance to the building of gas and oil pipelines has proliferated across western North America, and drawn both Indigenous and non-Indigenous “land defenders” and “water defenders,” one of the epicenters has been in South Dakota. There Sioux people and their allies challenged the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, running near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, in the interests of both sacred cultural protections and protection of the land and water table from potential contamination. Beginning in 2014 and 2015, the ongoing, largely peaceful, protests were met by increasingly aggressive police action that the suit described as “heavyhanded, dangerous tactics exposing the water protectors to risk of grave harm.”47 The trajectory reached a crescendo on the night of November 20, 2016, when law enforcement descended upon a large group that had gathered to pray and protest. They were confronted with armored vehicles, tear gas, and water cannons. When the incursion ended, more than 200 protestors had been injured, some quite seriously. The case brought against police and the municipality described the level of violence among police: Defendants unleashed a violent, unjustified, and unprovoked physical attack on Plaintiffs and others, without warning or opportunity to disperse. As a direct result of Defendants’ illegal use of force, Plaintiffs suffered severe injuries, including a 21-year-old woman 412

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whose arm was nearly torn off by an explosive grenade and is currently undergoing multiple surgeries and facing permanent disability, and another woman who was shot in the eye causing a serious eye injury with ongoing severe pain and possible permanent blindness in that eye. Defendants deployed an arsenal of dangerous implements and devices, including SIM (such as lead-filled, shotgun-fired ‘beanbags’ and high-velocity plastic and foam rubber ‘sponge rounds’); explosive flashbang-like grenades such as “Instantaneous Blast CS grenades” and Stinger grenades; other chemical agent devices; and a high pressure water cannon and fire hoses, despite the subfreezing temperature.48 The incidents described here are part of the longer trajectory by which rights assertions—and thus challenges to the legitimacy of settler colonialism—have become increasingly securitized and in fact militarized.49 Police violence is both a historical and contemporary strategy by which Indigenous people are contained and constrained.

Under-Policing: Enabling Violence Additionally, however, Donald Black reminds us that, while discrimination is generally taken to refer to the tendency toward harsher treatment of people of color viz. White people, this oversimplifies police behavior. In fact, Black argues, police are as likely to disregard the complaints of people of color. So for example, “Wealthier whites who offend blacks are expected to be treated leniently, while poor blacks who offend other poor blacks are expected to be handled with less severity than whites.”50 Sherene Razack concurs: “Ghosted while still alive, Indigenous lives not only count for less, but are not even counted.”51 Deliberately withholding protection from the victimization of racialized communities is among the most destructive manifestations of racial oppression and injustice.52 Moreover, under-policing itself enables public forms of violence targeting Indigenous people. I would thus be remiss if I did not provide some brief comments on the ways in which “selective enforcement” mirrors the explicit violence perpetrated by police. With respect to under-enforcement, the Canadian and Australian bodies of literature are especially informative. Cunneen and Neugebauer speak to the tendency of law enforcement officers to take less seriously the victimization of Aboriginal people—less seriously than their offending, and less seriously than the victimization of White people. Cunneen draws particular attention to selective policing as it affects Aboriginal women who are victims of domestic violence.53 There is some evidence of such trends in the United States as well. Indeed, the policing literature is clear on the fact that virtually all racialized communities within the United States are subject to law enforcement’s tendency to under-police—and thus under-protect—their communities.54 It is indisputable that this is a universal problem for non-Whites across the country. Clearly, Native Americans are subject to the same lack of attention and urgency in response to crime problems in their communities, whether rural or urban, on- or off-reservation.55 And this pattern is largely conditioned by myriad structures of systemic discrimination. Native American communities are also disadvantaged by some unique structural factors, including jurisdictional issues. The jurisdictional complexity of policing in “Indian Country” in the United States lends itself to a failure to adequately protect Native Americans. This is a feature that plagues Native Americans alone, in that, in Indian Country “Native communities operate in a maze of law and policy well beyond that visited on other racialized people in the United States.”56 This allows crime in and around Indian country to fall through the cracks when there is any confusion as to who is intended to take the lead. However, there is also a contributing factor that is shared by many racialized communities, and that is the reliance of police on popular constructions of identity—in this case, “Indian-ness”—that subsequently inform their over-policing. Neugebauer argues that police use racial identity as a resource, to the extent that they “generalize situations in terms of fixed racist stereotypes located in 413

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both the occupational and the popular culture.”57 Underlying the stigmatization of Native Americans is a cluster of stereotypes that generally paint Native Americans as morally and intellectually inferior. Elevated rates of school drop-out, substance abuse, and unemployment are seen as causes rather than effects of their marginalized status. Those same racialized perceptions of Indian identity are often used to blame the victim so as to deny the significance—or even the reality—of their victimization. Gerry McNeilly observed in his study of racism among Thunder Bay Police in Ontario that even in the case of homicides officers appeared to turn to “generalized notions about how Indigenous people likely came to their deaths and acted, or refrained from acting, based on those biases.”58 In short, Indigenous people are thought to be “less worthy victims,” resulting in a corresponding lack of urgency in responding to their targeting. The difficulty of police inattention to Indigenous victims of crime is amplified when those victims are women. Indeed, Chris Cunneen claims that “the question of over-policing is misconceived if it fails to consider the fact that the levels of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal women do not receive attention from police authorities. In the arena of protecting women the issue has been identified as one of under-policing.”59 Research in Canada and the United States has consistently established the enhanced vulnerability of Indigenous women on the basis of intersecting systems of oppression. Successive NGO and government-sponsored commissions and inquiries highlight the inattention to other forms of victimization. So, too, have provincial commissions across Canada established both the widespread racialized and gendered violence against Aboriginal women, and the lack of adequate police response to the same (most notably in Manitoba). In contrast, American evidence is largely drawn from independent research projects, that nonetheless come to the same daunting conclusions.60 As a previous section indicated, police are not themselves above victimizing vulnerable women. However, they also facilitate violence by creating an enabling environment through negligence. It is, in fact, a cyclical problem, as a Human Rights Watch report suggests. Referring to both the apparent apathy of police with respect to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and domestic violence, HRW observes that there what is seen among affected communities as a “widely perceived failure of the police to protect women and girls from violence. Not surprisingly, indigenous women and girls report having little faith that police forces responsible for mistreatment and abuse can offer them protection when they face violence in the wider community.”61 Similarly, a Canadian study, for example, found Indigenous women to be very dissatisfied with police responses to their complaints of violence at the hands of their partners.62 Two respondents provided especially powerful testimony to the tendency of police to deny the harm to the victims. Both had called the police so frequently—with little impact on their situations—that the police response was to become angry at them. Multiple sources have documented widespread failure to protect women from murder and disappearances due, cumulatively, to the risk of police abuse, victim-blaming, dismissive and apathetic responses to complaints and reports, and failure to devote resources to investigation.63 An IACHR report summarized the deficiencies, observing that Family members coming from small communities have described dismissive attitudes from police officers working on their cases, as well as a lack of adequate resources allocated to the missing women and a failure, for a significant amount of time, both to investigate and to recognize a pattern of violence. During the visit, many families of missing and murdered Indigenous women complained that police officers did not take their reports seriously and frequently stereotyped the women as transient.64 One family testified that, over an eight-year span, they reported a female family member missing as many as nine times, with little action from police. Incredibly, another family who reported a woman 414

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missing was told by the responding officer that “whoever is doing this is cleaning up the streets.”65 This reflects the tendency noted above to identify “deserving” and “undeserving” victims. Here, it is intimated that indigenous women are at fault for their own victimization thereby legitimating the tepid response to their plight. Ultimately, the “breakdown in police protection and investigation, coupled with the projection of criminality onto Indigenous girls, works to sustain violence against Indigenous women and girls because male perpetrators believe they will be exempt from legal ramifications as a result of their actions (and they often are).”66 The malign neglect of Native American victimization leaves communities vulnerable, cutting off as it does access to the protections afforded non-Native victims of crime. These negligent practices extend a powerful message and justification for the violent marginalization of Native American victims of crime. They signal to perpetrators, criminal justice personnel, and the rest of society that anti-Indian violence will not be punished. Another context in which this is especially apparent revolves around policing protests. Above I described the ways in which police are actively involved in the violent suppression of Indigenous resistance. However, they also countenance the violence of others through their inaction. This was evident, for instance, throughout the US mid-western spear-fishing conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s where police acted in sympathy with the protesters, against Native American spear-fishers.67 The police response was disturbingly reminiscent of police involvement in lynchings or in the Klan earlier in the century. So apparent were the parallels that many Wisconsin interviewees referred to their state as the Deep North. Indeed, anti-Indian demonstrators could rely on the complicity and support of law enforcement in their harassment of Native spear-fishers and their supporters: My mother took a jacket with a hood and put it over and started to disguise herself and sort of infiltrated the anti-Indian group. She made her way towards the law enforcement area— they were talking—because it was rather tense. The leadership was talking amongst themselves about what they would do if any violence broke out, for example, and they were all looking towards this talker for guidance, and basically what the question was, if violence breaks out, what should we do? And the gentleman stated frankly, “protect the whites!” And my mother did not know who this guy was until a couple of days later, there was a news story about Lieut. Gov. Scott McCallum and she said “that’s him, the guy who said that” (Male, Wisconsin). And, in fact, it appeared to onlookers that “protect the whites” they did—not the Native spearfishers. In spite of the hundreds of incidents of death threats, vandalism, guns, and wrist rockets fired, rocks thrown and more, over the course of several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, police made very few arrests of protestors. This generally occurred only in the most blatant of cases, as when police cruisers were rammed, or when officers themselves were somehow affected.68 Clearly, the Native Americans exercising their rights were not deemed worthy of protection. Rather, police were in sympathy with protestors’ assertions of “special rights” and “overfishing” among the Chippewa, such that protestors could readily violate Native peoples’ basic human rights to be free from threat and personal injury. Similar patterns played out on Canada’s east coast in 2020 when Mi’kmaq fishers were under threat from other commercial fishers. After more than 20 years of “negotiation” with the federal government over treaty rights to fish the coastal Atlantic, in September 2020, the Sipekne’katik First Nation launched their own lobster fishery, out of season in accordance with their interpretation of the treaty. The fall of that year would see sporadic protests—up to 200 people—violence, vandalism, and arson target the Indigenous fishers. On one day alone (October 3, 2020), over 200 people protested a lobster pound in one Nova Scotia town, vandalizing the property and stealing lobsters, while a smaller protest elsewhere culminated in a vehicle being burned. Just a few days later, another 415

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lobster pound was torched, with one person sustaining injuries, and the remaining lobsters were poisoned, rendering them unfit for sale.69 Video and still footage from the sites show law enforcement standing back rather than challenging the non-Indigenous protesters. So lackluster was the police intervention that even Prime Minister Trudeau acknowledged the ineffectual response of the RCMP, stating that "We need to make sure that our police, our security officials are there to make sure everyone is protected.”70 His Indigenous Services Minister made a similar claim saying that the Mi’kmaq fishers had been “let down by police” in the midst of the violence. It was only after Indigenous fishers, their allies and the Nova Scotia Attorney General put pressure on the federal government that additional RCMP officers were deployed in an attempt to defend them. The position of law enforcement on the blatant under-policing in Nova Scotia was underscored by the head of the RCMP union who claimed—in spite of the ongoing intimidation, harassment, vandalism, arsons, and violence—that it was not a policing issue.71

Protesting Policing: BLM and ILM/NLM In the end, both the forms of over- and under-policing highlighted in this chapter serve to underscore the ongoing suppression and colonization of Indigenous peoples in both Canada and the United States. Policing has been and continues to be “an essential state vehicle through which conquest becomes inscribed on the ground. Indigenous peoples, thus, experience policing itself as a colonial force, an apparatus of capture imposed externally by a government they have not authorized and do not have effective participation within.”72 This is not to say that Indigenous people have not pushed back against these processes. As noted above, resistance has also been a historical reality among first nations people in both countries. This includes pushing back against police violence. When the Black Lives Matter protests emerged across both Canada and the United States in the 2010s and 2020s, Indigenous people joined them in solidarity, recognizing a shared legacy of police brutality and oppression. The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), for example, urged its followers to support a week of action framed as “In Defense of Black Lives” in June 2020, acknowledging the ways in which the histories of both communities were shaped by “systems of racism, sexism, and the concentration of wealth and power among the few.” Yet, like many other groups, they centred anti-Black racism, stating that The Indigenous Environmental Network stands with Black Lives. We kneel with Black Lives. We cry with Black Lives and we fight for Black Lives. We dedicate ourselves to the liberation of Black people. We believe in protecting and expanding investment in community-led health and safety strategies, not funding racist police forces. We pledge to work alongside our Black relatives to collapse capitalist patriarchal colonial systems.73 Other Indigenous activists also created parallel movements called Indigenous Lives Matter (Canada) and Native Lives Matter (Canada and United States). The BLM movement had loudly revealed and resisted police violence against Black communities, thereby inspiring other affected communities to articulate their own parallel yet discrete experiences. Consequently, so too are Indigenous people “shouting out the names of their dead, calling for media attention, and demanding justice.”74 For example, the Native Lives Matter Facebook page describes the movement as “a grassroots organization run by Indigenous Justice Families, advocating awareness and justice for Missing Murdered Indigenous Relatives and Native Lives killed by police violence, past and present.”75 The activism that has been at the root of so much violence, and the backlash associated with it, has engendered a renewed pride in American Indian identity, and with it, a recognition of the need to pursue that which is theirs by right. In short, it has mobilized Native Americans around their cultural identity, their political sovereignty, and indeed their safety. So while many Indigenous people have joined 416

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BLM activists to decry anti-Black racism, many others have also taken to the streets in their own name to call out the legacy of colonial police brutality. It is to be hoped that the resurgence of activism within Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States will force change in how people of color are policed, whether that means “defunding police” or the development of “crisis response teams” or options in between. This is the long game that must continue to be a core focus. In the short term, however, the emergence of movements like Native Lives Matter, and Idle No More at least draw Indigenous issues out of the shadows. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, Indigenous concerns—and especially violence at the hands of police—have been rendered invisible.76 Only by forcing attention on the continued use of law enforcement power in the interests of preserving white settler privilege can the balance begin to be righted. As one observer remarks, “The struggle for violence and crimes against Indians to be recognized as important enough to publicize and investigate is just one step toward ending police atrocities.”77

Notes 1 Portions of this chapter are derived from Barbara Perry, Policing Race and Place: Under- and Over-policing in Indian Country (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2009). 2 Jean Reith Schroedel and Roger J. Chin, “Whose Lives Matter: The Media’s Failure To Cover Police Use Of Lethal Force Against Native Americans,” Race and Justice 10 (April 2020): 150–175. 3 Tamari Kitossa, “Criminology and Colonialism: Counter Colonial Criminology And The Canadian Context,” Journal of Pan African Studies 4 (January 2012): 204–226; Michaela Mary McGuire and Ted Palys, “Toward Sovereign Indigenous Justice: On Removing the Colonial Straightjacket,” Decolonization of Criminology and Justice 2 (No. 1 2020): 59–82; Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri, Indigenous Criminology (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016); and Chris Cunneen, “Colonial Processes, Indigenous Peoples, And Criminal Justice Systems,” In The Oxford Handbook Of Ethnicity, Crime, And Immigration, eds. Sandra Bucerius and Michael Tonry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 386–407. 4 See, for example, Andrew Crosby, “The Racialized Logics Of Settler Colonial Policing: Indigenous ‘communities Of Concern’ And Critical Infrastructure in Canada,” Settler Colonial Studies (2021) DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2021.1884426; Sherene H. Razack, “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine,” Feminist Legal Studies, 28 (No. 1 2020): 1–20; and Elizabeth Comack, Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters with the Police (Halifax: Fernwood, 2012). 5 Jonathan Rudin, Indigenous People and The Criminal Justice System: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Toronto: Emond, 2018). 6 Sidney L. Harring, Crow Dog’s Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, And United States Law In The Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13. 7 Chris Cunneen, Conflict, Politics And Crime: Aboriginal Communities And The Police (Sydney AUS: Allen and Unwin, 2001). 8 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 7. See also Mary Kate Dennis, “Collecting grief: Indigenous peoples, deaths by police and a global pandemic,” Qualitative Social Work 20 (No. 1–2 2021): 149–155; and Cunneen and Tauri, Indigenous Criminology. 9 Razack, “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror,” 17. 10 Barbara Perry, “Nobody Trusts Them! Over- and Under-Policing Native American Communities,” Critical Criminology 14 (September 2006): 411–444. 11 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprisings, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Penguin, 1993), 18. 12 J.-P. Brodeur, Justice for the Cree: Policing and Alternative Dispute Resolution (Grand Council of the Crees of Quebec, 1991). 13 A.C. Hamilton and C.M. Sinclair, The justice system and Aboriginal People: Report of the Aboriginal justice inquiry of Manitoba (Winnipeg: Queen’s Printer, 1991), 595. 14 Amnesty International, United States of America: Rights for All, 1998, 38.AMR 51/35/98. 15 Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, The Evolving Strategy of Police (Washington DC: National Institute of Justice, 1990), 28. 16 James M. Jones, “Killing Fields: Explaining Police Violence Against Persons Of Colour,” Journal of Social Issues 73 (December 2017): 872–883; and Kristin Nicole Dukes and Kimberly Barsamian Kahn, “What Social Science Research Says About Police Violence Against Racial And Ethnic Minorities:

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Understanding The Antecedents And Consequences—An Introduction,” Journal of Social Issues 73 (December 2017): 690–700. Stephanie Woodard, “The Police Killings No One is Talking About: A Special Investigation,” In These Times, 17 October 2016, https://inthesetimes.com/features/native_american_police_killings_native_lives_ matter.html. See https://fatalencounters.org/. Brandi Morin, “The Indigenous People Killed by Canada’s Police,” Al Jazeera, 24 March 2021, https:// www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/24/the-indigenous-people-killed-by-canadas-police. Rini Sumartojo, “Contesting Place: Anti-Gay And -Lesbian Hate Crime In Columbus, Ohio,” In Spaces Of Hate: Geographies Of Discrimination And Intolerance in the U.S.A., ed. Colin Flint (New York: Routledge, 2004), 105. Robynne Neugebauer, “Kids, Cops And Colour: The Social Organization Of Police-Minority Youth Relations,” In Criminal Injustice: Racism In The Criminal Justice System, ed. Robynne Neugebauer (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2000), 92. Razack, “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror,” 12. Mervin Brass, “Starlight Tours,” CBC News, 2 July 2004, https://www.cbc.ca/news2/background/ aboriginals/starlighttours.html. Comack, Racialized Policing, 117. Woodard, “The Police Killings No One is Talking About.” Tristan Ahtone, “Protesters Question Denver Police Killing of Mentally Ill Native American,” Al Jazeera, 22 July 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/22/denver-police-shoot-mentally-ill-nativeamerican.html. Samantha Schmidt, “A Mentally Ill Man Died After Police Shocked Him 12 Times. The Chief Wants 2 Officers Fired,” Washington Post, 12 June 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/ 2017/06/12/a-mentally-ill-man-died-after-police-shocked-him-12-times-the-chief-wants-2-officers-fired/. Morin, “The Indigenous People Killed by Canada’s Police.” Cherry Smiley, “A Long Road Behind Us, a Long Road Ahead: Towards an Indigenous Feminist National Inquiry,” Canadian Journal of Women & the Law 28 (August 2016): 308–313. Pamela Palmater, “Shining Light On The Dark Places: Addressing Police Racism And Sexualized Violence Against Indigenous Women And Girls In The National Inquiry,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 28 (August 2016): 253–284. Human Rights Watch, Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2013), 50–51, https://www.hrw.org/report/2013/02/13/those-who-take-us-away/abusive-policing-and-failures-protection-indigenous-women. Ibid., 62–63. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 61. Palmater, “Shining Light On The Dark Places,” 260. Holly Moore, “Mountie Takes Woman Home from Jail to ’Pursue a Personal Relationship,’” CBC News, 8 January 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/mountietakes-woman-home-from-jail-topursue-a-personal-relationship-1.2893487. Jaskiran K. Dhillon, “Indigenous Girls and the Violence of Settler Colonial Policing,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4 (No. 2 2015): 12. Rudolph C. Ryser, The anti-Indian movement in the Wise Use movement: Threatening the cultural and biological diversity of Indian Country (Kenmore WA: Center for World Indigenous Studies, 1993), http://www.nzdl. org/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-0ipc--00-0----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-0l--11-en50---20-about---00-0-1-00-0--4----0-0-11-10-0utfZz-8-00&cl=CL1.1&d=HASH011265ded924c70 e1f47f991&x=1. SubSubcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Anti-Indian Violence (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988). Barnor Hesse, Dhanwant Rai, Christine Bennett, and Paul McGilchrist, Beneath the Surface: Racial Harassment (Aldershot UK: Avebury Press, 1992), 172. James W. Messerschmidt, The trial of Leonard Peltier (Boston: South End Press, 1983). Bruce E. Johansen and Roberto Maestas, Wasi-chu: The continuing Indian wars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 83–84. Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan, “Settler colonialism and the policing of Idle No More,” Social Justice 43 (No. 2 2016): 37–57; and Shiri Pasternak, Sue Collis, and Tia Dafnos, “Criminalization at Tyendinaga:

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Securing Canada’s Colonial Property Regime Through Specific Land Claims,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 28 (No. 1 2013): 65–81. Cunneen and Juan Tauri, Indigenous Criminology, 73. Devin Clancy, “Policing Indigenous Land Reclamations from Ipperwash to Caledonia,” The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research 6 (2017): 65. Ibid. Dundon v. Kirchmeier, No. 17–1306 (8th Cir., 14 Nov. 2017). Ibid. Eliav Lieblich and Adam Shinar, “The Case Against Police Militarization,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 23 (No. 1 2017): 105–153. Donald J. Black, The Manners and Customs of the Police (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 13. Razack, “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror,” 4. Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). Cunneen, Conflict, Politics And Crime; and Robynne Neugebauer, “First Nations People and law enforcement: community perspectives on police response,” in Interrogating social justice: Politics, culture and identity, ed. Marilyn Corsianos and Kelly Amanda Train (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 1999), 247–269. Black, The Manners and Customs of the Police; Cunneen, Conflict, Politics And Crime; and Elizabeth CookLynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Perry, Policing Race and Place. Dian Million, “Policing the Rez: Keeping no peace in Indian Country,” Social Justice 27 (No. 3 2000): 102. Neugebauer, “Kids, Cops And Colour,” 87. Gerry McNeilly, Broken Trust: Indigenous People and the Thunder Bay Police Service (Thunder Bay: Office of the Independent Police Review Director, 2018), 9. Cunneen, Conflict, Politics And Crime, 161. Roe Bubar and Pamela Jumper Thurman, “Violence against Native Women,” Social Justice 31 (No. 4 2004): 70–86; Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Boston: South Side Press, 2005); and Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). Human Rights Watch, Those Who Take Us Away, 8. Greg Marquis, “Law, Crime, Punishment and Society,” Journal of Canadian Studies 36 (February 2001): 166. Human Rights Watch, Those Who Take Us Away; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in British Columbia, Canada (Toronto: Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2014); and Perry, “Nobody Trusts Them!” Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in British Columbia, Canada, 35. Ibid. Dhillon, “Indigenous Girls and the Violence of Settler Colonial Policing,” 23. Perry, Policing Race and Place. Rick Whaley and Walter Bressette, Walleye Warriors: An Effective Alliance Against Racism And For The Earth (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994). Michael Tutton, “Lobster catch destroyed, vehicle burned as tension rises over Indigenous fishery in N.S.,” CTV News, 15 October 2020, https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/lobster-catch-destroyed-vehicle-burned-astension-rises-over-indigenous-fishery-in-n-s-1.5144540?cache=yes/. Amanda Connolly, “Trudeau calls for calm in lobster fishery dispute: ’We need to find a solution,’” Global News, 16 October 2020, https://globalnews.ca/news/7401566/justin-trudeau-mikmaq-lobster-dispute/. Catharine Tunney, “Minister Says Mi’kmaw Fishermen In Nova Scotia Being ‘let Down’ By Police In Wake Of Weekend Blaze,” CBC News, 19 October 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencydebate-lobster-fishery-dispute-ministers-1.5767602. Dhillon, “Indigenous Girls and the Violence of Settler Colonial Policing,” 8. “Indigenous Solidarity Actions in Defense of Black Lives,” Indigenous Environmental Network, 2 June 2020, https://www.ienearth.org/indigenous-solidarity-actions-in-defense-of-black-lives/. Lois Danks, “Native Lives Matter Campaign Takes Off in South Dakota,” Freedom Socialist (April 2015) https://socialism.com/fs-article/native-lives-matter-campaign-takes-off-in-south-dakota/. See https://www.facebook.com/nativelivesmatter1/about/?ref=page_internal. Schroedel and Roger J. Chin, “Whose Lives Matter”; and Danks, “Native Lives Matter Campaign Takes Off in South Dakota.” Danks, “Native Lives Matter Campaign Takes Off in South Dakota.”

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SECTION 9

Police Brutality in the Twenty-First Century

31 MAKE VISIBLE Akua Njeri, Breonna Taylor, and Critical Amplification of Police Brutality Aaminah Norris, Nalya A. F. Rodriguez, Maha Elsinbawi, Abigail Cohen, and Dale Allender

Introduction The movement for Black lives has largely focused on the murders of Black men and boys by law enforcement and White supremacists. We conducted a qualitative study from March 2019 to December 2021 to comparatively analyze the ways that narratives of Akua Njeri (formerly Deborah Johnson) and Breonna Taylor’s experiences with police violence were transmediated across film and social media. The objective of this study is to examine how users of the social media platforms Twitter and YouTube and viewers of the film Judas and the Black Messiah transmediated stories of police violence against Black women by focusing on narratives told about the 1968 murder of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago Chapter, at the side of his then-pregnant girlfriend Akua Njeri (formerly Deborah Johnson), and the 2020 murder of emergency medical technician, Breonna Taylor at the hands of Louisville, Kentucky police. We analyze the uses of the hashtags and web searches “Akua Njeri,” “Fred Hampton,” “Breonna Taylor,” “George Floyd,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Say Her Name” to uncover ways digital and hashtag activism focus on police brutality against Black women and girls and influences informal educational practices in networked publics. In 2015, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) disseminated a blueprint for addressing the disproportionate and intersectional experiences of police violence against Black women and girls on social media entitled the Say Her Name campaign which, “sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in order to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally.”1 Since the inception of Say Her Name, countless Black women and girls have experienced police violence. Despite the mobilization of the online hashtag #SayHerName campaign, Black women continue to be forgotten in the larger conversations of police brutality. We conducted a comparative analysis of the transmediated stories of Akua Njeri and Breonna Taylor, two women whose experiences of police brutality occurred approximately 50 years apart from each other. On December 4, 1968, Chairman Fred Hampton was murdered by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) after being drugged by an FBI informant. Hampton was shot to death while he slept next to his pregnant girlfriend Deborah Johnson who has since changed her name to Akua Njeri.2 Njeri was also a member of the Black Panther Party. Like the FBI assassination of Fred

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-41

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Hampton, the police murdered Breonna Taylor while she slept. Taylor, a 26-year-old aspiring nurse, and a certified emergency technician was shot and killed by law enforcement in Louisville, Kentucky on March 13, 2020. Police officers served a no-knock warrant during the middle of the night related to alleged crimes involving Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. At the time, Breonna Taylor was in her apartment asleep next to her then-boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Almost a year after Taylor’s murder, in February 2021, Judas and the Black Messiah, a film that depicts the relationship between Fred Hampton, Akua Njeri, and the FBI informant who infiltrated the Chicago Panther Party leading to Hampton’s murder was released. The similarities between the murders of Hampton and Taylor in their bedrooms as they slept highlight the historical continuities of police violence against Black people in the United States. Through a comparative analysis of social media users’ narratives of Akua Njeri and Breonna Taylor’s experiences of police violence, we seek to understand how these stories being transmediated over time leads to what we term critical amplification. We define critical amplification as a process of intentional repetition and sharing of content to combat dis-, mis-, and mal-information and shift power relations and structures. The goal of this paper is to better understand the role transmedia storytelling plays in critical amplification by examining two stories of police violence inflicted on Black women that were transmediated. Our findings reveal that the release of the film Judas and the Black Messiah influenced social media users to critically amplify stories of police brutality inflicted upon both Akua Njeri and Breonna Taylor.

Theoretical Framework/Perspectives Our theoretical framework is based on a conceptualization we call critical amplification or the intentional repetition of messages that combat dis-, mis-, and mal information and challenge power relationships and structures. We draw on the work of George Lakoff, who asserts that ideas are physically instantiated initially in the brain. According to Lakoff, repeated experiences create unique neuronal structures where ideas live and often reflexively influence our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.3 We contend that the physical instantiations, which Lakoff describes as occurring in neural structures can be bypassed, inhibited, modified, and even delegitimized through critical amplification. We see critical amplification as having the capacity to (re)-humanize our concepts and perceptions with progressive and liberating ideas that challenge limiting thoughts. Thus, critical amplification has a powerful goal—reflexive action toward the collective health, well-being, and liberation of marginalized and oppressed peoples. To better understand how critical amplification occurs in the context of stories of police brutality, we must first define transmedia storytelling. According to George Pratten, stories are transmediated, “across multiple platforms, preferably allowing audience participation.”4 Our purpose is to uncover how the stories of Akua Njeri and Breonna Taylor’s experiences with police violence were transmediated by social media users of Twitter and YouTube and in the film Judas and the Black Messiah. Henry Jenkins explains the theory of transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms. He points out: Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but on complex [fictional] worlds, which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world, which always expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically construed narratives, where we expect to leave the theater knowing everything that is required to make sense of a particular story.5

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In our previous work, we make a clear distinction between the theory of transmedia storytelling in fictional and nonfictional worlds particularly as it pertains to #SayHerName. We contend, “#SayHerName differs from Jenkins’ theorization in that it is a nonfictional, multifaceted, transmediated story told by a multitude of authors who describe instances of police brutality inflicted against Black women from different backgrounds and lived experiences.”6 To illustrate the way that #SayHerName differs from fictional transmediated storytelling, we centered the experience of Sandra Bland who exemplifies a transmediated story of police violence. We found that storytellers diverged in their transmediation of Sandra Bland’s story, particularly when it came to blaming a villain for Bland’s death. Specifically, we discovered that Sandra Bland’s transmediated story was indeed a mystery without a clear villain. This current research on Njeri and Taylor revisits the process of nonfictional transmedia storytelling across social media platforms and film to understand how over time storytellers might converge to critically amplify narratives of experiences of Black women and girls. To do so, we rely on an interview Henry Jenkins conducted with Lina Srivastava who describes the importance of the transmediation of nonfictional stories, “we have to recognize that agency and self representation are crucial to social change [,] and people’s perspectives of their own situations matter.”7 Srivastava points to a need for communities to tell their own stories to inspire and motivate activism. Our examination of the violence inflicted against Akua Njeri and Breonna Taylor and the subsequent discussions across media platforms seeks to uncover how users represent these women and their stories and thus change their narratives. Examining the ways narratives shifted following the 50-year anniversary of Akua Njeri’s eye witnessing of Fred Hampton’s assassination and the later murder of Breonna Taylor by police offers temporal affordances for uncovering how critical amplification changes the dynamics of digital activism against police brutality.

Akua Njeri, Breonna Taylor, and the Criminalization of Black Women Understanding the historical ways Black women are criminalized is central to the movement for Black lives. W.E.B. Du Bois argues that during Reconstruction, rather than creating institutions that were based on the abolition of democracy, institutions that were created replicated the same racist social relations. This includes a shift from the use of property law to criminal law as a means of confinement, intimidation, and subjugation of Black people.8 Through criminal law, White people continued the legacies of slavery, and the indiscriminate use of racial terror to maintain racial boundaries and hierarchies. As Courtney Echols argues, the historical anti-Black legacies of chattel slavery and lynching are directly linked to the likelihood of Civil Rights era police violence in a particular place. In other words, the higher rates of enslavement or an increase in a county’s Black population corresponds to a higher likelihood of police violence in that county during the Civil Rights era.9 These historical legacies of enslavement and lynching provide context to understand how the Black Panther Party was targeted throughout the United States. The expansion of the prison industrial complex post-Civil War has continued the development and institutionalization of gendered racial capitalism, which is evident in the criminalized experiences of Black women. Sarah Haley argues that the criminalization and treatment of incarcerated Black women served to construct white human value through the disposal of Black people and their labor. “Woman-ness” was tied to whiteness, meaning that laws that were passed to protect women from inhumane treatment in confinement only pertained to White women.10 The movement of Black people in any way thus continues to be surveilled for transgressions from White patriarchal and heteronormative standards. These racialized surveillance practices, as theorized by Simone Browne, render Black people hypervisible and un-visible at the same time, 425

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in what Browne names as “black luminosity as a form of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the black body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch, or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob.”11 The metaphor of light is consumed by dark matter and rendered invisible, present but unseen. Black people are “criminalized by this legal framework as outside of the category of the human and as un-visible.”12 This is evident in the criminalization of Akua Njeri after the murder of Fred Hampton at her bedside. Rather than acknowledging her presence and witness to the murder, a pregnant Njeri was arrested, held at gunpoint, and charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault.13 During the trial, Njeri and the other survivors were not allowed to testify to the actions of the FBI because of the charges they were facing for the same incident. Consequently, Njeri is made both un-visible in the courtroom and hypervisible in the evidence, as she was lying in bed with Hampton when he was first shot and was in the room when he was killed. Akua Njeri was not only a member of the Black Panther Party, but she was also an eyewitness to Fred Hampton’s assassination and was one of the three survivors of police violence that night, including Verlina Brewer.14 Although Njeri and Brewer survived the assassination attempt and witnessed the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, they are never mentioned as victims of police brutality in police accounts. Akua Njeri states: “We are not in the oppressors’ court because we recognize the legitimacy of their laws, for it is their very laws that they continue to create and bend to deny our existence.”15 Here, Njeri points to the ways that she and other Black people are both erased and criminalized by laws and law enforcement. This erasure makes them un-visible in the eyes of the law. Unlike Njeri who was an eyewitness to an assassination, Breonna Taylor was murdered by the police. Like Njeri, Taylor’s experience was made un-visible. None of the three officers involved in Taylor’s death were charged with her murder; further demonstrating how Taylor, Njeri, and other Black women are rendered invisible in the law.16

Black Women and Trauma in the Media Criminal law is not the only sight of the erasure of Black women.17 Black women’s experiences with systemic and institutionalized racism, are rarely depicted in the media. As bell hooks argues “[black women] are acutely aware of cinematic racism--its violent erasure of black womanhood.”18 Movies, for example, focus on individual racism and Civil Rights victories. Few films depict the physical and psychological trauma experienced by Black women activists at the hands of White supremacists and state actors. In her film critique, Kristen Hoerl points out that witnessing the murder of Black activists increases the trauma experienced by Black people.19 The display of Black women’s private lives and trauma for consumption in dominant media commodifies the police violence of Black people. Moreover, in "The Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law," Osucha describes the importance of the study of social movements and the sociology of race and racism, using content analysis and drawing on media framing and color-blind racism theories.20 Similarly, our research uses discourse analysis to compare how social media users as storytellers frame Black women’s experiences with police misconduct. There is a dearth of research pertaining to Njeri’s experiences, especially during the period surrounding Hampton’s assassination. Akua Njeri and the Black Panthers attempted to resist unvisibility and hypervisibility by documenting their walk through of the apartment where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered to recreate the night for community members. This dialectical construction of the case by the Black Panthers is deeply rooted in a Black Feminist practice attempting to contradict the hegemonic narratives of White innocence and violence against Black people as represented by the police officers who raided the apartment.21 Breonna Taylor equally was rendered hypervisible and un-visible when she was murdered. In the warrant used to enter her home, Taylor was not named as a target and her home was considered a 426

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“soft target.”22 She was un-visible in the warrant, and her murder made her hypervisible to the experience of police violence and the lack of police accountability. Since none of the police officers who were responsible for her death were charged for her murder, Breonna Taylor was also rendered un-visible in the law.23 Through a comparative analysis of both Njeri and Taylor’s experiences of police violence, we seek to highlight how police brutality against Black women is rendered hypervisible and un-visible. Our research specifically examines relationships between transmedia storytelling and the critical amplification of Black women’s experiences with police brutality. Thus, we seek to understand how the critical amplification of both Njeri’s and Taylor’s experiences of police violence informs the movement for Black lives.

Methods This study employed digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis from March 2019 to December 2021. This project consists of two separate data sets. The first data following the anniversary of the murder of Fred Hampton were collected on YouTube and Twitter over a 33-month period beginning in March 2019. Only publicly available demographic information was collected. Using the advanced search feature on Twitter, we searched for public tweets with either the hashtag “Akua Njeri,” “Say Her Name,” “Black Lives Matter, “Fred Hampton,” or more than one of the hashtags in the tweet, as well as tweets in response to articles, videos posted on YouTube, and the film Judas and the Black Messiah. In both data sets, articles published from major news sites were downloaded and coded based on themes we uncovered through analysis of the discussion of the murders. Tweets in response to these articles were also included. The second data set was collected beginning in April 2020 after the murder of Breonna Taylor and concluding in December 2021. Over the course of 20 months, we collected data from Twitter and YouTube by downloading articles, pictures, memes, and videos that used the hashtags “Breonna Taylor,” “George Floyd,” or “Say Her Name.” Due to the inability to holistically determine demographic information, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and age, most of the profiles are anonymized based on their online presence. This means that unless specific demographic information is publicly available, we use neutral, non-gendering language to describe users. We only include users with public profiles in this collection. All users were provided pseudonyms. To look at how discussions of Akua Njeri, Fred Hampton, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and Say Her Name trended between March 2019 and December 2021, we used Google Trends data to calculate the ratio of search interests of these topics compared to all searches made on Google. Google Trends calculates the percentage of total search interests relative to the highest point of engagement during each week in the period selected. Our start date is March 2019, which nearly marks the 50th anniversary of Hampton’s assassination. We ended in December 2021 following the trials of the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor.

Results The following is a chart that reveals Google Trends for hashtags “Akua Njeri,” “Fred Hampton,” and “Breonna Taylor,” during 2021 the year the film Judas and the Black Messiah was released (Table 31.1).24 Google Trends Chart 1 reveals that the release of Judas and the Black Messiah in February 2021 led to a 100% spike in the number of searches for Fred Hampton, 10% for Akua Njeri, and 8% for Breonna Taylor. The spikes for Njeri occur in tandem with other spikes for Hampton that year. The spikes for Taylor in March coincide with the anniversary of her murder. The April spike also coincides with announcements made concurrently on April 9, 2021 of a Kentucky law limiting the use of no-knock warrants, and April 26, 2021, of the Justice Department’s intention to investigate 427

Aaminah Norris et al. Table 31.1 Graph of Google Trends on Searches for Njeri, Taylor, and Hampton in 2021

Taylor’s murder. In November 2021, Jamarcus Glover, Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend was convicted, and the officer involved in her shooting was granted an appeal hearing so that he might return to work for the Louisville Metro Police Department. Subsequently, the spikes in searches may be associated with the aforementioned. We also conducted a Google Trends search for “Fred Hampton,” “Breonna Taylor,” “George Floyd,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Say Her Name,” from March 2019 through January 2021. Google Trends Chart 2 shows the results of that search (Table 31.2). We begin our analysis of the Google trend in March 2019, following the release of the ABC News article in which Akua Njeri gives an eyewitness account of Fred Hampton’s murder.25 The Google Trends Chart 2 reveals no searches for Hampton at the time. The chart also reveals that immediately following Breonna Taylor’s murder in March 2020, there was no visible Google trend. Table 31.2 Google Trends on Police Violence Against Black People, Between March 2019 and December 2021

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However, Taylor’s assassination becomes more prevalent in searches that occurred in May 2020 after police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis.26 Searches related to Hampton were slightly more prominent in February 2021, the month the film Judas and the Black Messiah was released. We know from Google Trend Chart 1 that the uptick in searches of Hampton also included increases of searches of both Njeri and Taylor. This suggests that transmediation of different narratives of police violence against Black people affords more attention and leads to discussions of police brutality. Although searches for Black Lives Matter had significant search interests we do not see a trend for Say Her Name. Most starkly, compared to the other searches in this inquiry, the Say Her Name topic had less than 1% or 0% of searches during the period we analyzed. The Google Trends charts show that there is a relationship between gender and the movement for Black Lives. The purpose of the AAPF blueprint was to focus on and center the experiences of police violence inflicted upon Black women and girls. It appears that when Breonna Taylor is murdered, her name is not mentioned with Black Lives Matter. However, following George Floyd’s murder, we see an increase in both the Black Lives Matter and Breonna Taylor searches. This leads us to conclude that George Floyd’s death brought significant attention to Black people’s experiences with police brutality including that of Breonna Taylor. Thus, George Floyd’s assassination makes Breonna Taylor’s murder more visible. Additionally, the film Judas and the Black Messiah brought attention to Hampton’s murder. It also, for the first time in more than 50 years, helps to make Akua Njeri’s story more visible while also making Breonna Taylor visible. Our study reveals that transmediation can lead to critical amplification of Black women’s experiences with police violence because it brings more attention to their stories and moves to make them visible. To provide more nuance to how stories of police brutality inflicted on Akua Njeri are transmediated, we analyzed tweets connected to a YouTube video posted on December 10, 2009. The YouTube channel that posted the video from Democracy Now!, mediagrrl9, has approximately 18.9 thousand subscribers. By the time this research concluded in December 2021, there were 373 comments on the video, and 148,720 views. Of the comments posted in 2021, few mentioned Akua Njeri. YouTube Video Data Table 31.3 provides examples of comments posted that discuss Njeri.

Table 31.3 YouTube Video Data YouTube User

Comment on Video

User N. I

to see the pain in that woman’s eyes … I hurt so bad. The way they ran up in the spot killing folks … I hurt so bad. I love Fred Hampton man he was truly for the people. And I hate the fuckin’ racist pigs- everywhere Long live Chairman Fred! We love you brother and we will never forget you! Thank you, Sis, for telling us how wicked the pigs were! We love [you] I love that Ms Johnson kept callin them pigs you can see the exhaustion and frustration in her eyes. RIP Chairman Fred . Sister Deborah really beautiful and strong! Fred Hampton belongs on the same plateau of Malcolm X and MLK. His spirit will always guide black folk

User Y Anonymous User User D.O

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The first transmedia storyteller, User N.I doesn’t use either the name Deborah Johnson or Akua Njeri in the comment. User N.I describes Njeri’s pain and points out that seeing her experience is hurtful. This storyteller expresses love for Fred Hampton and describes him as “truly for the people.” User N.I shares a visceral reaction towards the structural racism in law enforcement while uplifting Hampton’s memory. The second storyteller, User Y contends that Hampton is cherished and to be remembered. User Y doesn’t call Njeri by her name. However, User Y writes “Sis” to describe Njeri which can be viewed as a term of endearment. This user both thanks and uplifts Njeri for shedding light on the atrocities of police violence. The Anonymous User credits Akua Njeri for drawing attention to police brutality. This storyteller also acknowledges that the work Njeri has done is frustrating and tiring. They center Hampton’s legacy as a victim of police violence by saying “RIP,” an acronym for rest in peace. The Anonymous User expresses solidarity by including the black fist emoji in the comment. Finally, User D.O describes Njeri as representing strength and beauty. User D.O mentions Hampton’s name as a victim of police violence to be remembered alongside other notable civil rights leaders who were assassinated, namely Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. The comments on the YouTube video seek to uplift Akua Njeri by expressing solidarity and appreciation for her. They also reveal how racial uplift is not removed from our understanding of the pain suffered from the loss at the hand of police and other state actors. YouTube users’ comments express their grief at the loss of Fred Hampton’s life and connect him to the larger struggle for civil rights. Also, in this story, Njeri is viewed as a supporter whose experience of police violence is indelibly tied to Fred Hampton’s murder. Like Akua Njeri’s story is forever linked to Fred Hampton, Breonna Taylor’s story became more visible after George Floyd was murdered. Despite Taylor being murdered in March 2020, her story did not receive international media coverage until George Floyd a Minneapolis, Minnesota resident was killed by police on May 25, 2020. In March 2020, more than 50 years after Hampton’s assassination, Breonna Taylor was shot to death by Louisville, Kentucky police while she slept next to her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.27 We found that Twitter users narrate Breonna Taylor’s murder as directly resulting from systemic racism. Users as storytellers hold the police accountable for Taylor’s death. For example, despite user H.A. only having 610 followers on Twitter, he tweeted, “(brown fist emoji) Good job speaking on #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor during the #OKCvsHOU game tonight @MarkJackson13 & @MarkJonesESPN. #NeverForget how #LMPD and #Louisville prosecutors tried to offer a plea deal to #JamarcusGlover to falsely implicate #BreonnaTaylor! #NBA (nba emoji).” This tweet critically amplifies a message given at a basketball game with approximately 4.11 million viewers “the mostwatched NBA game since the Portland Trail Blazers and Los Angeles Lakers contest on Jan. 31.” This example of critical amplification challenges dominant narratives that blame Breonna Taylor for her own death. The grand jurors in Kentucky who participated in the indictment against the Louisville police officers also sought to hold the police responsible. In other words, social media users as storytellers challenged dominant narratives that seek to criminalize Breonna Taylor. In the Twitter Data Table 31.4, we see additional examples of storytellers on Twitter who are critically amplifying the need for police accountability and the continued legacies of racism in law enforcement. Specifically, our research shows that the critical amplification of Black women’s experiences with law enforcement shifts the oppressive narratives that blame and criminalize them to uplifting them and holding police responsible for their brutality. Pacelli, who has over 9000 followers on Twitter, retweeted an article posted by Democracy Now, about how two grand jurors involved in the trial against police officers narrated accounts of Breonna Taylor’s murder. The two grand jurors claimed that the attorney general manipulated the trial in such a way that prevented them from charging police officers as criminals for their actions. Pacelli critically amplifies the grand jurors narratives about the continued bias from the state and their call for police accountability. Of the articles retweeted in our Twitter data, 430

Make Visible Table 31.4 Twitter Data on #BreonnaTaylor Participant

Tweet

R.J 9.3 K Followers

(Today is Thursday October 29th 2020 Critically amplifying racial disparities in how victims 231 days since the murder of of violence are treated and #BreonnaTaylor 231 days no arrest, no justice! If this was a white girl calling for police accountability would we still be counting the days? Everyday I will ask for Breonna! #SayHerName #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor #BlackLivesMatter (emoji of three multi colored fists in mi vida loca form) Today would be a great day to arrest the Critical amplification of cops who murdered #BreonnaTaylor continued bias from the (with link to Democracy Now article/ state and calling for police retweet of DN article tweet that said: accountability Breonna Taylor Grand Jurors Say Police Actions Were (Criminal); Never Given Chance to Indict Cops https://bit.ly/2Hz50f3 [alt text: breonna hugging on kenneth walker bf] The police officer who killed Critically amplifying structural #breonnataylor suing her boyfriend racism and continued just reinscribes the trauma that he’s racial trauma by law inflicted on Kenneth Walker & his enforcement community. What a horrifying turn of events in an already horrific tragedy. This is structural racism in action.

S.P 9.34 K Followers

R. S 2.73 K Followers

Role

Response 21 likes 12 Retweets

62 Likes Retweets 1 Quote Tweet

17 Likes

nearly half challenged state narratives of police violence against Black people by amplifying the grand jurors stories, and by acknowledging Kenneth Walker’s right to shoot his gun as a citizen in a state which has “stand your ground” laws (See Appendix A). The transmediation of police violence against Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black victims of police brutality appears in the comments of a video posted to YouTube by the channel Hezakya News and Films. The YouTube channel that posted the video, has approximately 130,000 subscribers. By the time this research concluded in December 2021, there were 1,128 comments on the video, and 241,810 views. In the YouTube Comments Table 31.5, we see four examples of the transmediation of narratives of police violence in relation to the assassination of Hampton. In this video, we are provided a walkthrough of the apartment, a counternarrative to the police accounts of that night. In the comments to this video, we see how Taylor and Floyd are explicitly named as similar stories occurring in 2020, and we see how this historical film was found by User K.P. and user H.P. after having watched other films on the lives of Black men who were victims of police violence. Although YouTube user M.J. attempts to discredit organizers in the movement for Black lives, they connect the assassination of Hampton and the Civil Rights era movement for Black people’s human rights to modern-day killings of Black people. This connection is made by H.P. who states that they watched this YouTube video after having watched a documentary on the trials of the Chicago Seven in 1969, which was released in 2020. The transmediation of narratives of police 431

Aaminah Norris et al. Table 31.5 YouTube Video Data Table Participant

Comment

Role

M.J

These are real social justice leaders. Not the clout chasers that exploited the death of the floyd guy

M.C

“states attorneys office says its men were fired upon after identifying themselves at the door” Sounds familiar - breonna taylor They kill black people NOW!!!! just like they did then. This man was a threat to the police and the president back then it’s no different today then it was back then STILL KILLING AFRICAN AMERICANS because they feel like we are a THREAT. George Floyd, and many others killed at the hands of fearful white people or police for that matter for NO REASON. Judgment will come from our GOD and they will have to stand for what they have done AND THEN JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED REST IN PEACE CHAIRMAN FRED!!!!! Rip god be with union heaven!!!! I feel like I am the only one watching this after watching the Trial of the Chicago 7 where Bobby Seale announces to the court that the Chicago police assassinated him. Here after watching Judas And The Black Messiah

Transmediation of narratives of police violence against another Black man, Floyd. Transmediation of narratives of police violence. Comparing experiences to Taylor’s murder. Transmediation of narratives of police violence. Comparing experiences to Floyd’s murder.

S.C

H.P

K.P

Transmediation of narratives of police violence from movies to Youtube.

Transmediation of narratives of police violence from movies to Youtube.

violence against Black people helps to critically amplify discussions of police brutality. Through critical amplification users uplift the AAPF’s Say Her Name blueprint and larger conversations around Black victims of police brutality.

Significance Transmedia storytelling in the non-fictional world of police violence inflicted against Black women and girls can lead to a process of critical amplification that shifts limiting narratives by uplifting them and making their stories more visible. Thus, we can shift power relations and structures by intentionally sharing content that holds law enforcement accountable for brutal acts and makes Black women seen in the law and in the media. We can see through our study that although Say Her Name as a hashtag may not be invoked, as a practice it can lead to transmedia storytelling and therefore critical amplification. Fifty years after Akua Njeri witnessed the assassination of Fred Hampton and experienced police violence, she is made visible. Storytellers indelibly connect her to Hampton and his legacy in the fight for civil rights. Breonna Taylor becomes more visible as storytellers call for justice and police accountability. #SayHerName, then, remains present in the movements against police violence enacted upon Black women. Our study is significant because it provides an example of transmedia storytelling as critical amplification that cultivates a break in the consistent and pervasive criminalizing of Black women and girls as victims of police brutality and hope for the futurity of online social justice work. 432

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Appendix A: Table of Themes Highlighted in Tweeted Articles

Article/Code Found

Police as Manipulation State Criminals of the Law by Justification State/state for Murder agents

CBS News “Breonna x Taylor grand juror says Louisville police actions before her death were ‘criminal’” Democracy Now!: “Breonna x Taylor Grand Jurors Say Police Actions were ‘Criminal’; Never Given Chance to Indict Cops” CNN: “Breonna Taylor grand jurors say there war an ‘uproar’when they realized officers wouldn’t be charged with her death” CBS News: “Louisville police officer sues Kenneth Walker, boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, for emotional distress, assault and battery” CNN: “Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend has been arrested and says she had nothing to do with the alleged drug trade” Daily Beast: “Breonna Taylor’s Ex Offered Plea Deal Required Him to Implicate Her in Crimes” The Hill: “Grand Juror in Breonna Taylor Case calls Kentucky Attorney General ‘liar’” CNN: “Virginia’s governor signs legislation banning no-knock warrants” Yahoo News: “Officer sues Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend over emotional distress”

x

x

x

x

x

x

Community Response

Facts Legal of the Protection murder of White people

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Challenging state narrative

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

(Continued)

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Article/Code Found

USA Today: Breonna’s Law signed in Virginia, the third state to prohibit no-knock search warrants WDRB: “Drug suspect offered Plea Deal if he would admit Breonna Taylor part of ‘organized crime syndicate’”

Police as Manipulation State Criminals of the Law by Justification State/state for Murder agents

Community Response

x

x

Facts Legal of the Protection murder of White people

Challenging state narrative x

x

Notes 1 Kimberle Crenshaw, A. Ritchie, R. Anspach, R. Gilmer, and L. Harris, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women,” African American Policy Forum, 2015, 4, https://www.aapf.org/_files/ugd/ 62e126_9223ee35c2694ac3bd3f2171504ca3f7.pdf, accessed 22 February 2022. 2 Craig S. McPherson, “Fred Ain’t Dead: The Impact of the Life and Legacy of Fred” (Thesis: Georgia State University, 2015); and Prince Williams, “The FBI Killing of Fred Hampton,” Harvard Political Review, 15 October 2021, https://harvardpolitics.com/fred-hampton-assassination/, accessed 22 February 2022. 3 George Lakoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics (New York: Penguin, 2008). 4 Robert Pratten, Getting Started with Transmedia Storytelling (New York: Wordpress, 2011), 2. 5 Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” 2007, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_ storytelling_101.html, accessed 22 February 2022. 6 Aaminah Norris and Nalya Rodriguez, “#SandraBland’s Mystery: A Transmedia Story of Police Brutality,” in # Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 71. 7 Henry Jenkins, “Telling Stories: Lina Srivastava Talks About Transmedia Activism.” Confessions of an Acafan, 2016, http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2016/01/telling-stories-lina-srivastava-talks-abouttransmediaactivism-part-one.html, accessed 22 February 2022. 8 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 151. 9 Courtney M. Echols, “Anti-Blackness is the American Way: Assessing the Relationship Between Chattel Slavery, Lynchings, & Police Violence During the Civil Rights Movement,” Race and Justice January 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/21533687211073299 10 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 164. 11 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 129. 12 Ibid., 151. 13 Pascal Sabino, 50 Years Ago, Fred Hampton Was Murdered By Police. Each Year, His Loved Ones Tell His Story: “The Legacy Is Under Attack.” Block Club Chicago, 4 December 2019, https://blockclubchicago.org/2019/ 12/04/50-years-ago-fred-hampton-was-murdered-by-police-each-year-his-loved-ones-gather-to-tell-hisstory-this-legacy-is-under-attack/, accessed 22 February 2022. 14 Richard Belzer and David Wayne, Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country’s Most Controversial Cover-Ups (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012). 15 Akua Njeri, “My Dance with Justice,” Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, 1991, 9–11, https://openyls.law. yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/7725, accessed 22 February 2022. 16 Vadala 2021 was not in the references. Need citation. 17 bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: Southend Press, 1992), 22–39; and Diamond Howell, Aaminah Norris, and Krystal L. Williams, “Towards Black

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20

21

22 23 24 25 26

27

gaze theory: How Black female teachers make Black students visible,” Urban Education Research & Policy Annuals 6, no. 1 (2019): 20–30. hooks, “Eating the Other,” 291. Kristen Horel, “Remembering Racial Black Dissent: Traumatic Counter-Memories in Contemporary Documentaries about the Black Power Movement,” in Race and Hegemonic Struggle: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protests, eds. Michael G. Lacy and Mary E. Triece (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 69–90. Eden Osucha, “The whiteness of privacy: Race, media, law,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 67–107; and Monisola M. Vaughan, “Radicalized Media Frames: The Role of the Media in Shaping the Production of Black Power and Black Powerlessness” (PhD diss: Vanderbilt University, 2018). Sampada Aranke, “Fred Hampton’s murder and the coming revolution,” Trans-Scripts 3 (2013): 116–139; Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence. In Exceptional Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2021). Tessa Duvall, “FACT CHECK 2.0: Separating the truth from the lies in the Breonna Taylor Police Shooting,” Louisville Courier Journal, 16 June 2020, https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/crime/ 2020/06/16/breonna-taylor-fact-check-7-rumorswrong/5326938002/, accessed 22 February 2022. Browne, Dark Matters. Data source: Google Trends, https://www.google.com/trends. Guobin Yang, “Narrative agency in hashtag activism: The case of #BlackLivesMatter,” Media and Communication 4, no. 4 (2016): 13–17. Aaminah Norris and B. Kwanele, “(Un) Hidden Grief and Loss Inform the Movement for Black Lives,” International Journal of Human Rights Education 5 (No. 1 2021): 9; and Aaminah Norris and N. Rodriguez, “#SandraBland’s Mystery: A Transmedia Story of Police Brutality,” in #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation, eds. Abigail De Kosnik and Kieth P. Feldman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 68–83. Nicole Chavez, “These are the people at the center of the Breonna Taylor case,” CNN, 24 September 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/23/us/breonna-taylor-case-people/index.html, accessed 24 February 2022.

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32 #BLACKLIVESMATTER Louis M. Maraj

When news about the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin began circulating on social media and then traditional news media outlets in 2012, it felt like déjà vu, like we had been there before. Martin, a 17-year-old African-American boy from Miami Gardens, Florida, was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic-American man. Zimmerman believed the boy was “suspicious” and his recorded phone call to the police pinned that belief to how Martin looked and how he dressed. Zimmerman’s fatal attack, described by him and his defense lawyers as “self-defense,” triggered an incredibly public response on social media. Within a month of the shooting, Trayvon Martin’s name was used on Twitter over two million times.1 “Justice for Trayvon” saw many donning hooded sweatshirts or hoodies at in-person protests and in online seflies and saw the hashtag “I am Trayvon Martin” become a popular mode of engaging with racial justice. Even US President Barack Obama claimed identification with Martin. While many Black people in the United States and around the globe sought association with the dead boy in this way, some questioned whether protesting with a selfie was an empty performance of solidarity. Indeed, as visual culture expert Nicole Fleetwood contends, “Digital media make it easy to substitute and circulate oneself in place of the subject of racial violence, and the hooded selfie became a popular way to claim progressive politics with minimal efforts.”2 Highlighting the unsettling politics of such representations, Fleetwood adds that “The millions of portrait protests and statements taking on Martin’s identity are a discomforting form of substitution. Simply put, none of the hooded protestors is Trayvon Martin.”3 However, Martin’s death would become a catalyst for what would become #BlackLivesMatter and eventually the Black Lives Matter Global Network. The identification with one victim of white supremacist violence would be mobilized into identification with many to come. When Zimmerman was acquitted for Martin’s murder in July 2013, three Black queer feminist activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi would coin the hashtag “Black Lives Matter” in response. They would become figureheads for the movement in some ways and publicly assert its philosophies and ideologies. The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 led to even larger public protests online, in Ferguson, and in major US cities, and #BlackLivesMatter quickly turned into a global force. The “Ferguson Uprising” was the site of violent clashes between protestors and police and military, and also a moment when Black Lives Matter would be defined in relation to past racial justice movements and its ideologies made clear. Between 2014 and 2019, various instances of police and vigilante violence would prompt political resistance in the form of in-person (and online) protests identified with the movement in the US and Canada (and beyond), including but not limited to the deaths of: Eric Garner, Dontre Hamilton, 436

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-42

#BlackLivesMatter

Pearlie Golden, Laquan McDonald, Ezell Ford, Jerame Reid, Antonio Martin, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Charley Leundeu Keunang, Corey Jones, Jeremy McDole, Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill, Natasha McKenna, Jonathan Sanders, William Chapman, Eric Harris, The Charleston Nine (Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Clementa C. Pinckney, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson), Freddie Gray, Samuel DuBose, Meagan Hockaday, Deborah Danner, Abdirahman Abdi, Alfred Olango, Keith Lamont Scott, Terence Crutcher, Paul O’Neal, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Korryn Gaines, Bruce Kelley Jr., Sylville Smith, Joseph Mann, Jocques Clemmons, Atatiana Jefferson, and Elijah McClain, among others. Arising within the Obama presidency in the United States, the movement (indirectly) pushed back against racially colorblind and post-racial sentiments that attempted to deny the impact of antiBlackness and anti-Black violence using Obama as evidence for such arguments.4 Public opinion on the movement before 2018, according to the New York Times was “net negative,” though Black Lives Matter grew more popular during 2019 and 2020 at the tail-end of the Trump presidency, during a marked public uptick of white supremacist fervor in the United States.5 Within the emphasized health disparities of the Coronavirus pandemic which began in early 2020 that disproportionately impacted poor Black communities and peoples across the globe, the Black Lives Matter movement would again rise to the fore of public discourse in the United States and elsewhere after the police and vigilante murders of, among others, Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia in February, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky in March, and particularly with the video-recorded police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May. During the swell of protests in the summer of that year, the deaths of Nina Pop, a Black trans woman who was found stabbed in Sikeston, Missouri and Tony McDade, a Black trans man who was shot by Tallahassee, Florida police, among others like the police murder of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia continued to fuel mass racial unrest. Black Lives Matter’s approach to protesting such police brutality and vigilante violence and, by extension, anti-Blackness writ large mobilizes a decentralized approach to resistance that allows for sometimes conflicting but pluralistic stances on the problem of the prison industrial empire. This chapter first lays out the ideologies behind the Black Lives Matter movement, specifically explaining how Black Lives Matter attempts to break from the tactics of the US Civil Rights movement and how the former deploys media in ways different from those previous struggles. I then explain the movement’s Black feminist politics, its rhetorical strategies, and its media use in relation to its frameworks. The third section discusses the impacts of its decentralized approaches, describing how it has led to the misuse of Black Lives Matter for capitalist gain and confusion about who the movement is for. I conclude by suggesting that, despite misuse, Black Lives Matter, through its decentralized politics, teaches us about pluralities in Blackness and Black resistance and urges us to, at the very least, recognize what emerges from inter- and intra-racial and political differences. This essay thus emphasizes the importance of understanding how Black Lives Matter protests antiBlackness and police violence, a key aspect of why the movement seems to re/appear in public consciousness at various historical moments in the last decade or so. That “why” results from Black Lives Matter’s decentralized structures, philosophies, and meaning-making politics.

“This is not the Civil Rights Movement. This is the Oppressed People’s Movement.” The above declaration comes from Tory Russell of “Hands Up United,” a Black Lives Matter protestor who was interviewed by PBS Newshour in 2014 about the Ferguson protests.6 They echo the words of Tef Poe, a hip-hop artist and activist, at the “Ferguson October” forum that year who 437

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pronounced “this ain’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement.” Poe made the statement to then NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, amidst several young audience members physically turning their backs in response to Brooks’ speech at the forum.7 As Black feminist political scientist and activist Cathy Cohen highlights, these younger activists resist the still popular idea that Black Lives Matter represents a more updated version, or continued iteration, of the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.8 Philosophically, the activists suggest departures not only from established Black political organizations but also from their philosophical and practical investment in certain kinds of power. These breaks emanate from aims different from the centralized goal of the Civil Rights movement to fully enfranchise African Americans as a means toward national equality in the US, its engagement with media and media representation, and its leadership structures. Unlike the US Civil Rights movement, Black Lives Matter—understood as a coherent but concatenated political body—does not expressly desire for any particular tangible end goal or change in the law. While the US Civil Rights movement focused on attaining voting rights for AfricanAmericans, Black Lives Matter “is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”9 This ideological orientation means that the work of Black liberation and those doing the work toward it do not solely rely on governments, rules and regulations, or seeking justice for any particular entity of the movement. Because Black Lives Matters endeavor not to change any law or set of laws alone, the movement finds itself distributed across national, ethnic, religious, and other such boundaries. Since the movement also views anti-Blackness as systematic and wide-ranging, it sees police brutality as only the tip of an iceberg—the symptom of a disease that manifests itself elsewhere in criminal justice systems, Western education systems, gender and sexual normativity, discrimination against people with disabilities, environmental racism, and other social ills. Its various localized chapters and branches, therefore, mobilize resistance against a number of social issues affecting different populations of Black peoples and uses varying tactics according to their respective geopolitical and sociopolitical contexts. Black Lives Matter’s various and varying relationships to media and media systems are also markedly different from previous Black liberation movements. As media historians show, the Civil Rights movement often relied on mainstream media—on television and print news coverage—to publicize and circulate their messages to White audiences.10 While the Black press in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s did important work to mobilize against systemic racism—which should not be discounted—these White audiences were fundamental to advocating for changes in local and federal laws. Many entities in these television and newspaper industries would, however, go on to paint Black liberation efforts of the 1970s and 1980s as militaristic and violent, while continuing to fuel social stereotypes of Black people as hyper-sexual, opportunistic, lazy, and criminal. Because Black Lives Matter arose in the age of the internet, that movement has been able—to some extent—to send and circulate grassroots and oft-ignored messages to large and global publics. And although wealthy White people and corporations control and operate social media giants like Twitter and Facebook, social media virality allows Black activists to spread narratives that might otherwise not be covered in mainstream media. Thus, with a rich diversity of everyday news sources—particularly those folx “on the ground” and involved in protests themselves—Black Lives Matter’s messages represent less top-down information concerned with white representational politics. Black Lives Matter also pushes against centralized leadership structures and the kinds of leaders/ leadership that drove previous Black liberation movements. Alicia Garza, one of the three Black queer women who coined the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on social media, emphasizes this important distinction between it and previous movements against antiBlack injustice. In her “Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Garza writes that Black Lives Matter is a “tactic to (re)build the Black Liberation movement,” by centering “those that have been marginalized within Black 438

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liberation movements.” She stipulates that “it goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities … keeping straight cis[-gender] Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.”11 Indeed, the centralized nature of the US Civil Rights movement meant that those with the most sociopolitical power—(often older) educated Black men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for instance—were seen as the leaders of that cause and their work was celebrated, while much work toward social change by Black women, Black disabled people, and Black trans and queer people went unnoticed in public spaces and messaging. Citing Civil Rights activist Ella Baker’s read of the Black youth she worked alongside in the 1960s, Black activist historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor asserts that “The tactical and strategic flexibility of the youth activists flowed from developing politics that could not be constrained by a narrow agenda of voter registration or a simple electoral strategy” or even leader-centered group organization. In relief of this kind of organizational structure and rights-based approaches, Taylor adds that “In Ferguson, these emerging politics were embodied by the emergence of young Black women as a central organizing force.”12 Black Lives Matter, then, strives to make visible the labor of, and include, all Black peoples in the movement by highlighting the political power of its various sub-organizations, chapters, and identity markers, particularly through its group-centered Black feminist leadership.

Approaches to Protest, Black Feminist Foundations “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” —Assata Shukur, “To My People” (1973)13 This proclamation comes from Assata Shakur: a radical Black revolutionary to some, a wanted criminal to the US Federal Bureau of Investigations. Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, actively challenged global white supremacy and the heteropatriarchal frameworks of Black liberation organizations. The quotation, which focuses on the interconnected obligations of a collective fight for justice, can be heard widely at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The use of Shakur’s words in this way emblematizes the Black feminist foundations of the Black Lives Matter movement that disavows what is known as “respectability politics.” In repeating the words of a Black woman deemed a “criminal” by the US state, Black Lives Matter protestors reject the ethos of such a designation and emphasize Black women as knowledge-agents—the first key epistemological tenet of Black feminist thought, as outlined by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins.14 As Black feminist historian Barbara Ransby explains, the movement rejects “the hierarchical and hetero-patriarchal politics of respectability.”15 Meaning—that to be offered humanity relies on one to conform to white standards of being human where one must be “respectable”: polite, “proper”-speaking, lawabiding, and “properly” dressed to be viewed as worthy of life. Often, when Black folx fall victim to state government apparatuses—anywhere in the world—their character comes under scrutiny and dominant media and discourse portray their humanity as less-than. Publics often mobilize alleged “evidence” of their criminality, like Trayvon Martin’s digital footprint which included Tweets about rappers and rants against his high school and its teachers, to implicate victims as somehow deserving of the fate that befalls them. Michael Brown refused police officer Darren Wilson’s order to walk on the sidewalk on August 9, 2014, which led to his premature death. Yet footage of Brown allegedly stealing from a convenience store earlier that day was circulated by news outlets and on social media to criminalize Brown as deserving of death. These examples mirror the frequent police raids in poor, Black communities across the globe where 439

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the so-called “targeting” of drug dealers leaves many dead. These raids occur often in areas like Laventille in my homeland of Trinidad and Tobago and in areas like Jacarezinho, where on May 6, 2021, 25 people were left dead in that district of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.16 But Black Lives Matter insists that there need not be “a correlation between ‘sainthood’ and Black citizenship.” The 2014 death of Michael Brown on a Ferguson street prompted “an important shift in the discourse about who is or is not a sympathetic victim of injustice. Brown did not have to be a church-going, law-abiding, proper-speaking embodiment of respectability in order for his life to matter, protestors insisted.”17 And that insistence, of course, arose from a refusal to the devaluation of Black life—a devaluation that predates Black Lives Matter. As Black feminist theorist Christina Sharpe argues, we are living in the wake, the afterlives of Transatlantic slavery, where Black death always hovers, both immanent and imminent.18 More recently, however, as Ransby shows in her history of the Black Lives Matter movement, the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic, Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on the US South in 2005, and the rise of mass incarceration in the 1990s and early 2000s contributed to the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives.19 In 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic would converge with the movement to significantly impact its meanings, representations, and structures. Those fighting against anti-Blackness in its many forms such as police brutality, gendered and sexual violence, mass incarceration, political violence, health disparities, and state irresponsibility have been organizing and fighting for much longer. Though Black Lives Matter is the first major, global Black-led social movement that centers Black feminist principles, many of its activists take their specific philosophical cues from Black feminist organizations from the 1970s onward. These include the Combahee River Collective (CRC), Black AIDS Mobilizations (BAM), the Black Radical Congress’s (BRC)’s feminist caucus, Critical Resistance (CR), and INCITE! Women of Color against Violence.20 The Combahee River Collective in particular, offers a central idea to how the Black Lives Matter movement understands its fight for social justice. Garza’s “Herstory” italicizes the idea that “When Black people get free, everybody gets free” as fundamental to grasping the radical racial politics of the Black Lives Matter movement. The idea comes from the Combahee River Collective Statement that insists, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”21 The idea that various interlocking systems must be dismantled in order for freedom to come to all resonates through the Black feminist concept of intersectionality—an important approach in how Black Lives Matter operates. In fighting against these interlocking matrixes of domination, Black Lives Matter utilizes decentralized political structures that mirror its rejection of hierarchies and heteropatriarchy. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) represents a coalition of over fifty groups including the Black Lives Matter Global Network. While Black Lives Matter is most visible in its push against police brutality, several chapters and branches address issues affecting other violences against Black peoples across the globe, such as abuses within the prison system, environmental racism, violence against trans and gender non-conforming people, the plights of Black undocumented immigrants and refugees, and issues affecting people with disabilities. Various chapters of Black Lives matter operate on their own terms, as the M4BL now acts as an umbrella connecting distributed political interests of Black people worldwide. Black Lives Matter’s distributed meaning-making strategies reflect its political structure that disperses power and decision-making capacities along localized lines. Because of the movement’s rise through, and use of, social media, it creates knowledge and shares information in fluid and dispersed ways. Tweets, retweets, posts, and hashtags offer crowd-sourced and crowd-funded means to share information about systemic racism, police brutality, and other examples of, and messages about, antiBlackness. Hashtags have become a powerful means to spread information without relying on news media outlets or state apparatuses. In real time, grassroots activists can share videos, pictures, and 440

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textual accounts of injustices to large audiences via trending tags. This was the case with #Ferguson in 2014, when in one week 3.6 million tweets documented and reflected on the death of Michael Brown.22 Tags like #ICantBreathe and #HandsUpDontShoot offer extensive historical accounts of Black Lives Matter-related events and content. They also share vital information and tactics during protests crucial to surviving counter-protestors and police presence at rallies. The circulation of information on social media has spurred international relations between Black Lives Matter supporters on different continents and between Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements globally. From as early as 2014, “in South Africa and London there were solidarity actions that linked the injustices faced by Black people [in those countries] with the struggles of the people of Ferguson.” Messages on social media and delegations of people at Black Lives Matter protests held signs that showed the support of Palestine.23 Black Lives Matter activists would advocate similarly for Palestinian efforts in 2021. And, of course, the summer of 2020 saw massive worldwide Black Lives Matter protests following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others in the United States that year. Social media additionally allows Black people to participate in sending protest messages related to in-person Black Lives Matter events but not explicitly about those events. Hashtags like “#IfTheyGunnedMeDown” demonstrate how national and cable news media often use stereotypically criminalizing photos to tarnish the characters of Black victims of police and vigilante violence as social media users juxtaposed two photographs of themselves to make statements about antiBlack racism. The tweet asks: “If I were gunned down, which images would the media use to portray me?” These digital protests by thousands of Black social media users offered them a chance to participate in creating widespread messages of resistance that expose racist tropes of Black people in the United States and beyond.24 They emphasize how, through media and media representations, Black Lives Matter as a decentralized collective makes dispersed and fluid Black meaning. As I explain elsewhere, these digitally mediated representations demonstrate the rhetorical possibilities of Black Lives Matter for educational purposes.25 In a 2016 big-data study of the #BlackLivesMatter movement on Twitter, Deen Freelon, Charlton McIlwain, and Meredith Clark, likewise, emphasize the specific potentials of the hashtag for public teaching about social injustice. They found that one of “the primary goals of social media use among [their] interviewees” was “education,” along with the “amplification of marginalized voices.”26 The decentralized, distributed structures of Black Lives Matter, consequently, suggest that opposing anti-Black racism need not only be pursued by those who label themselves “activists.” Social media opens up possibilities for anyone who sees themselves as a part of the Black Lives Matter cause or as allied with it to become involved in its protest structures. Sharing information online, as low-stakes and as simple as it seems, then, offers one way to “love each other and support each other” through interconnectivity.27 This “ethic of caring” underscores tangible ways in which Black Lives Matter remains grounded in Black feminist philosophies. At in-person protests, activists, more often than not, work to ensure that water and other refreshments, along with medical care and supplies remain available for those present. Empathy, to its expressed limits, drove some of the key in-person tactics of throngs of differently raced people showing up at Black Lives Matter gatherings. For instance, in some cases, protest leaders encouraged white able-bodied accomplices to take up strategic positions within a crowd in attempts to minimize police violence against, and arrests of, the most vulnerable present. And while those associated with the movement have been adamant about emphasizing the “Black” of Black Lives Matter to drive home the message that systems of oppression feed off antiBlackness as “the fulcrum around which white supremacy works,” decentralized coalitional frameworks have proved an important lifeblood for Black Lives Matter.28 Still, acknowledging multiple and differently situated Black women as knowledge agents within the movement’s politics—whether through the published narratives of its co-founders or the space and attention given to the mothers of victims of police and vigilante injustice like Sybrina Fulton and Samaria Rice—stays key. As Hill Collins 441

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contends, “it is possible to be both centered in one’s own experiences and engaged in coalitions with others” in doing Black feminist work. This collective “capacity for empathy” among Black and nonBlack figures associated with the movement distributes its focus and accountability in many ways, though some of those channels have come to be challenged, exploited, and sources of contradiction.29

“To Pimp A Butterfly”: Impacts of Decentralized Structure As much as the decentralized power structures and communicative mechanisms of the Black Lives Matter movement offer chances for radical love and support in the pursuit of localized and global social justice initiatives, so too do they provide chances for opportunism and capitalist exploitation. With no theoretical “leader” or face of the Black Lives Matter movement to be held accountable or steer the movement, various entities have taken advantage of the ubiquity of Black Lives Matter for capitalist gain, while police and state apparatuses continue to especially target poor and other vulnerable Black folx. Black people, and Black people from the Global South, in particular, have also suffered disproportionately from the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement became more and more popular in 2020 during the pandemic, it has also become hyperprofitable for some. Two instances stand out as particularly problematic: first, the significant monetary gains made by the three women who started the Black Lives Matter hashtag, Garza, Tometi, and Cullors and the fame (and subsequent profit) harnessed by US “social media influenceractivist celebrities” like Shaun King, DeRay McKeeson, Tamika Mallory, and others. In late 2020, however, grassroots activists both inside and outside of Black Lives Matter called attention to such exploitation and began to enact efforts to combat it. Garza and Cullors benefit from the publication of best-selling books, all three women deliver talks for high speaker fees, and “the [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation] became the principal beneficiary of millions of dollars in individual and corporate philanthropy” with donations coming in from around the world. The distribution of this foundation’s funds remains at the discretion of the three women and have been used for their favored projects. Several local chapters, activists, and many on social media believe that the three women disproportionately benefit from the movement. Thus, several Black Lives Matter chapters (now known as the #BLM10) demanded that the foundation and its recently created internal systems for accountability—the Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee and BLM Grassroots—“be made financially and politically accountable.”30 Chapters in Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Hudson Valley-New York, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Denver, Vancouver, Washington, San Diego, California, and New Jersey issued the “Statement from the Frontlines of the Black Lives Matter Movement” calling for financial and political equity within the movement. The website https://www.blmchapterstatement.com/ where the #BLM10 house the statement also contains missives and media from various other Black activists and organizations—such as Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, Black Lives Matter Inland Empire, and Mike Brown’s father—who, since 2021, have divested in various ways from the Black Lives Matter Global Network.31 As more social media influencers, celebrities, and musicians made public declarations that “Black Lives Matter” in 2020 and onward, many believe that they stand to benefit much more financially from these statements than activists doing the work on the ground and even the parents and families of victims of police brutality. Several audio tracks and music videos that speak directly to and about Black Lives Matter’s cause and politics dropped in summer 2020. These included R&B artist H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe,” rapper Dax’s “I Can’t Breathe,” and rapper Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture.” Television shows included special episodes around the themes of protest, police violence, and/or Black Lives Matter specifically. And although such was the case earlier in Black Lives Matter’s history (and arguably, even before it)—with examples like Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 442

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“Alright” and ABC’s Black-ish’s 2016 episode “Hope”—the proliferation of these topics in popular culture hit different in 2020 with heated and often conflict-riddled responses. One example, the 2021 Grammy Award-performance of Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture,” in particular, illustrates how the Black Lives Matter movement has been taken up by, and represented in, popular culture to divisive ends. An image of a police-stop of a Black male motorist, protesters throwing fire bombs, buildings ablaze, and men of color in police line ups preface a scene where a group of protestors, placards in hand, surround Tamika Mallory at a podium on several microphones. The social media influencer activist declares in a spoken word poem: “It’s a state of emergency. It’s been a hell of a year—hell for over 400 years. My people, it’s time we stand; it’s time we demand the freedom that this land promises. President Biden, we demand justice, equity, policy, and everything else that freedom encompasses, and to accomplish this, we don’t need allies, we need accomplices. It’s bigger than black and white. This is not a trend. This is our plan: until freedom! Until freedom! Until freedom!”32 Following this performance in March 2021, Samaria Rice accused Mallory of profiting off the movement while the parents of victims of police brutality face financial hardships and sometimes homelessness. Samaria is the mother of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African-American boy who was killed by Cleveland, Ohio police in 2014 while playing with a toy gun. Her allegation prompted growing fears that fractures in the movement have grown unfixable, while some interpret messages like Mallory’s and Lil Baby’s as powerful means to shed light on anti-Blackness and hold governments accountable through their platforms. Similarly, the widespread use of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” by corporate entities in summer 2020 following massive global protests induce questions as to whether these companies actively contribute to social justice efforts or are using the platform to sell their wares. When several soccer teams and individual soccer players in Europe began wearing “Black Lives Matter” and related messages on their uniforms, taking knees, and raising fists at the restart of premier league play following the initial wave of the COVID pandemic, many embraced the move as international solidarity and support for the message ringing loudly around the world following George Floyd and Breonna Taylor protests. With larger institutional bodies like the US’s National Basketball Association featuring “Black Lives Matter” emblazoned on their courts alongside their corporate logo, the social justice message felt somewhat strange to some. When the US’s National Football League promoted materials sending the “Black Lives Matter” message though, it felt like too little too late. The same league had blackballed Colin Kaepernick in 2016 for protesting against police brutality by taking a reverent knee during the US national anthem. With these appropriations by large institutional and corporate bodies and particularly by multinational corporations like Amazon, Apple, and the like, we might wonder if black lives only matter because they can be pedaled for profit. These seemingly contradictory messages sent when money mixes with social justice rhetoric resemble what some might think of as conflicting messages and philosophically divergent factions within the Black Lives Matter movement itself. One particular example emphasizing these rifts might be found in the protest chants, initiatives, and stances of various parties within the movement in relation to the law and criminal justice system following the murder of George Floyd. At protests in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, protestors donned banners and painted graffiti that read “Arrest All 4”—referring to the four police officers who were involved in Floyd’s murder, since only Derek Chauvin had initially been charged. This message rang across protests burgeoning in other major US cities and traveled as far as places like Seoul, South Korea as evidenced in protest signs there sending messages like: “Reform the police; Vote in state and local elections; #BLACKLIVESMATTER.”33

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The chant and hashtag #ArrestAll4 communicate a philosophical orientation that justice systems perpetrating anti-Blackness might be used to address anti-Black murder: if all four of Floyd’s killers are jailed then some justice might be found. Likewise, in the example from South Korea, voting in elections offers possibilities for reform, suggesting that some justice might be sought through systems of government and democratic processes. Other similar plans involve the passing of government legislation. The “Breathe Act,” outlined at breatheact.org/, for instance, places the responsibility of defunding the police and “a new vision of public safety” on the same government systems that perpetrate systemic racism and anti-Black violence with plans to “hold political leaders to their promises and enhance the self-determination of all Black communities.”34 These types of plans rely on assimilating the aims of some within Black Lives Matter into current political structures, which seems at odds from the movement’s previously expressed beliefs. On the other hand, in the United States and elsewhere, protesters chanted, held signs, and sent messages that said, “Defund the Police” and “Abolish the Police” sometimes, seemingly contradictorily, at the same rallies where “Arrest All 4” might be resoundingly heard. The rhetoric of taking resources away from, and bringing an end to, state and national policing relies not on assimilating into the current structures of the policing system but on a complete divorce with police as a means of state control. Spurred by this message emanating from Black Lives Matter protests, many groups and coalitions have gotten behind efforts laying out plans for alternatives to policing and prison systems. For example, #8toabolition’s proposal starts with defunding the police but gradually reimagines a different future—with some steps of the plan reliant on government intervention, and others not. Outlined at 8toabolition.com/, the plan’s steps include: “1. defund the police; 2. demilitarize communities; 3. remove police from schools; 4. free people from jails and prisons; 5. repeal laws that criminalize survival; 6. invest in community self-governance; 7. provide safe housing for everyone; 8. invest in care, not cops.” The authors of this plan describe themselves as “people who are Black, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Muslim, white, trans, queer, migrant, disabled, sex working, caregiving, and working-class” and provide documentation for it in English, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, Mandarin, Russian, Tamil, and American Sign Language (via video).35 The agenda itself, the orientations of its coalition of authors, and its presentations in various languages all gesture at the concatenated ways in which police brutality rests within complex systems of antiBlackness and racism and augur the idea that dismantling white supremacy means addressing its symptoms across various social spectra and institutions—though, importantly, the proposition begins with defunding the police. Yet, one might be confused as to why the Black Lives Matter movement and related activists send seemingly conflicting messages. What does Black Lives Matter stand for when various factions send differing messages, corporations actively declare the slogan, and social media activists continue making careers off of the tragedies of poor Black families? Why would we have renewed faith in racist, white supremacist, and anti-Black systems to fix themselves? How can one reform an oppressive criminal justice system while at the same time abolishing it? What does justice look like when the families of victims of police brutality take to legal action against activist structures constructed using the images and names of their dead children?

Conclusion: So Just How Do We “Get Free”? These difficult questions, remain, for the most part, unanswered as premature death continues to envelop Black people in the United States, across the Global South, and beyond. To suggest that they might be answered easily or at all, however, would be facetious. Yet some, but not all, of these arguably disparate messages, philosophies, and stances represent not contradictions but pluralities. These pluralities emerge specifically because of the decentralized structures, communication strategies, and political philosophies of the Black Lives Matter movement. And while some might seek

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to profit from its decentralized structure, those who disagree in the movement feel empowered enough to question such motives—if we look to examples like the #BLM10, Samaria Rice, or the Black Lives Matter Inland Empire. At the very least, some within or related to the movement have found means to call out and push back against the ways that Black Lives Matter continues to entangle with racial capitalism, even if that has meant divestment from the cause’s banner and flagship structures. Differences generate revolutionary change, similar to the ways that Blackness and Black peoples—which/who scholars note have been historically and sociopolitically cultured as “difference in extremity”—have historically and continue to interrogate oppressive status quos.36 If the Black Lives Matter movement’s pluralities, its expressions, and philosophies teach us something about culture, it might be that radical beauty might come out of anti-Black violence that remains so routine, mundane, and indiscriminate worldwide. On social media platforms, hashtags like “#BlackGirlMagic” and “#BlackBoyJoy” set out to reframe the affects associated with Blackness in a world where images of Black death, criminality, and hyper-sexuality regularly play on repeat. Whether change-agents seek reformation or abolition or some mash-up of both, they hope to make inroads into oppressive systems in whatever way they can because we must: “we have nothing to lose but our chains.” The various representations of Blackness collected through “#IfTheyGunnedMeDown,” which—while critiquing news media for funding racial stereotypes—demonstrate that Blackness cannot be reduced to one style, one affect, one gesture, or stereotypes. Because hashtags can continually be added to and constantly transformed and re-transformed, their capacities for making flowing meaning offer us one way to think about the dynamic fluidities of Blackness that Black Lives Matter has brought to light.37 The hashtag as a medium of information—like the multiple protest signs, gestures, performances, philosophies, and local and global expressions of the Black Lives Matter movement—shows that Blackness and Black power cannot “be” one static thing despite constant attempts to codify and commodify it since the invention of race in the European middle ages. Through time, through rifts, disagreements, and the oh-so-constant violence of existing on earth, difference offers means to connect, gather, and attempt to engage each other across languages, nation-states, ethnicities, and cultures. These established “truths of power,” genres of being human, as Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter calls them, that govern our existence—race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, etc.—must be constantly destabilized.38 And the pluralities of voices, philosophies, stances, peoples, and cultures that come together toward dreaming just futures must stop them from being forces for domination and violence. Black lives must matter abundantly and fluidly—they must challenge those central ways of being “human” we have been cultured to accept: proper, correct, and normatively “right.” By perhaps ridding ourselves of the idea that differences in expression, gesture, language, dress, and racial being should be controlled and shaped into one unified “human” form, we might get closer to grasping the potential of Black political critique and embracing difference as radical love. Doing so could perhaps get us to places, worlds, or planets where we can breathe, free of that threat of a cop’s knee at our necks.

Notes 1 Frances S. Robles, “What is known, what isn’t on Trayvon Martin’s death,” Miami Herald, 31 March 2012, archived 27 September 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20130718121422/http://www.miamiherald. com/2012/03/31/v-fullstory/2725442/what-is-known-what-isnt-about.html (accessed 1 September 2021). 2 Nicole R. Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 23. 3 Ibid. 4 Louis Maraj, Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Logan: Utah State University Press). 5 Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy. “How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter.” New York Times. 10 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes. html (accessed 1 September 2021).

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Louis M. Maraj 6 PBS NewsHour, “Why Do You March? Young Protestors Explain What Drives Them.” PBS NewsHour. 8 December 2014, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfC_pfsqLqw&feature=youtu.be. (accessed 2 September 2021). 7 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 161. 8 Cathy Cohen, “Whose Black Lives Matter? The Politics of Black Love and Violence,” Speech presented at Ohio State University, 6 March 2015, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfO4AViCgZ8& t=306s (accessed 2 September 2021). 9 Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza,” Feminist Wire, 7 October 2014, https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/ (accessed 1 May 2021). 10 Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Sage Goodwin, “The Civil Rights Movement and the Media.” Communication, Oxford Bibliographies, 26 June 2019, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/ obo-9780199756841-0231.xml (accessed 11 October 2021). 11 Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” 12 Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 163. 13 Assata Shakur, “Assata Shakur: To My People July 4, 1973,” The Talking Drum, ed. Jacuma Kambui, http:// www.thetalkingdrum.com/tmp.html (accessed 2 April 2021). 14 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed (New York: Routledge, 2000), 266. 15 Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 3. 16 Flávia Milhorance and Ernesto Londoño, “Police Operation in Rio de Janeiro Leaves at Least 25 Dead,” New York Times, 6 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/world/americas/brazil-rio-policeshootout.html (accessed 15 May 2021). 17 Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter, 149. 18 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 19 Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter, 13. 20 Ibid., 12–18. 21 Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977),” in: How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 3. 22 Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42 (No. 1 2015): 4–17. 23 Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter, 72. 24 Wendy S. Hesford, “Surviving Recognition and Racial In/justice.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48 (No. 4 2015): 536–560. 25 Maraj, Black or Right. 26 Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark, Beyond the Hashtag: #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice (Washington, DC: Center for Media and Social Impact, 2016), 5. 27 See Jennifer C. Nash, “Teaching about Ferguson: An Introduction,” Feminist Studies 41 (No. 1 2015): 211–212, and the rest of that journal’s special issue for more on the pedagogical possibilities of Black Lives Matter, specifically in relation to the Ferguson protests. 28 Alicia Garza, “Alicia Garza,” in: How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 163. 29 Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, x, 263. 30 Glen Ford, “BLM Chapters Demand ‘Accountability’ from Trio that Cashed in on the Movement,” Black Agenda Report, 3 December 2020, https://www.blackagendareport.com/blm-chapters-demandaccountability-trio-cashed-movement (accessed 1 September 2021). 31 BLM10, “Tell No Lies,” 2021, https://www.blmchapterstatement.com/ (accessed 1 May 2021). 32 Lil Baby, “The Bigger Picture,” speech presented at the 63rd GRAMMYs, 15 March 2021, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK3PQ_KY_0s (accessed 2 September 2021). 33 Jason Strother, “Protesters in Seoul, South Korea, rallied in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement on June 6, 2020,” The World, Public Radio International, 8 June 2020, https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-0608/america-s-blm-protests-find-solidarity-south-korea (accessed 2 September 2021). 34 Movement for Black Lives. The Breathe Act, 2020, https://breatheact.org/ (accessed 1 May 2021).

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#BlackLivesMatter 35 #8toAbolition, “How,” 2020, #8toAbolition.com, https://www.8toabolition.com/ (accessed 1 May 2021). 36 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 37 Maraj, Black or Right. 38 Sylvia Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto,” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1 (No. 1 1994): 3–11; and Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Reimprisoned Ourselves in the Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desetre: Black Studies toward the Human Project,” in: A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Jane Gordon and Lewis Gordon (London: Blackwell, 2007), 107–118.

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33 SMARTPHONES AS TECHNOLOGIES OF ACCOUNTABILITY Exposing and Investigating Police Brutality Using Smartphone Cameras Ajay Sandhu

Introduction Two of the most compelling criticisms of the American police institution concern the persistence of police brutality1 and the lack of accountability measures used to hold officers responsible for their brutality.2 This chapter argues that the use of smartphone cameras to film police work addresses these problems in two ways. First, smartphone cameras allow citizens to document police brutality3 which, once shared using social media applications and mainstream media outlets, can be used to raise public awareness of police brutality and contribute to political campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter.4 Second, smartphone cameras allow for the creation of visual evidence which can be used by formal oversight systems to investigate officers for their role in controversial use-of-force incidents. In support of this chapter’s argument, I reference two specific incidents of police brutality: the killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island5 and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.6 In both cases, videos recorded on smartphones were used to bring the incident to public attention and to support social movements concerned with racial inequality7 and police transparency.8 Video footage was also used in each case as visual evidence in internal investigations, sometimes resulting in the loss of employment and criminal convictions of involved officers, as well as the creation of new use-of-force standards including the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act9 and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.10 Given these results, smartphones can be optimistically understood as a way of exposing police brutality and a way of improving police accountability. However, this chapter nuances this understanding of smartphones by considering the role of meditators in publicizing, presenting, and interpreting videos of police violence. Accordingly, this chapter concludes that the power of mediators such as the mainstream media outlets must be carefully considered when assessing the impact of smartphones on police brutality. This chapter is split into three sections. The first section begins with a discussion of how smartphone cameras can be used to record police officers and police work and can, therefore, operate as technologies of accountability. The second section proceeds by drawing on two real-world cases exemplifying the impact of smartphones on police brutality. The chapter concludes with a third section

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-43

Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability

discussing the production, presentation, and interpretation of videos of police work, each of which complicates the impact of smartphone videos on police brutality.

Section One: Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability This chapter is premised on the theory that interactions between citizens and police officers are increasingly defined by the presence of smartphones. This is because the invention of user-friendly and high-tech smartphones has made it relatively easy for citizens to film police officers and produce high-definition footage of police behavior.11 Police officers are, as a result, subject to new forms of observation by a diversity of smartphone videographers and internet viewers, many of whom are skeptical about the efficacy and ethics of police work.12 Consequently, an officer must now contemplate the implications of being seen by a massive audience capable of observing, recording, and scrutinizing their every action.13 The far-reaching implications of what Andrew Goldsmith calls the police’s “new visibility”14 are yet unknown and questions regarding the impact of smartphones on police behavior,15 including controversial concerns about the potentially distracting and obstructive nature of smartphones for police work, continue to be studied.16 Among the most popular questions surrounding police visibility concerns the idea that smartphones can expose police brutality and improve police accountability. This argument is perhaps most apparent in the rhetoric surrounding social activism organizations like CopWatch which encourage the use of cameras to expose police misconduct.17 This rhetoric features an optimistic idea that smartphones may operate as technologies of accountability by creating visual records of police misconduct, improving public awareness of abuses of police authority, and creating evidence that can be used to investigate incidents involving use-of-force. The idea that smartphones can operate as technologies of accountability is grounded in the related idea that police misconduct is facilitated by the traditionally low visibility of police work, making high visibility an obvious solution. The association between low visibility and police misconduct is a compelling theory as frontline police officers who “work the street” have historically existed in highly mobile and out-of-sight conditions which limit oversight mechanisms.18 Unlike most office workers, for example, patrolling police officers often find themselves rushing to an obscure location to address an unexpected call-to-action. The mobility of their work makes tracking that officer and observing their work difficult, which may give the officer the opportunity to bend rules and abuse their authority without being seen. For example, police officers patrolling dark alleys in a large city environment can potentially invoke their legal powers to physically abuse citizens while out of the sight of supervisors, journalists, investigators, witnesses, and other oversight systems. In the past, the primary and perhaps only way that such a police-citizen interaction was documented would be in a police officer’s logbooks which could be biased and suspicious in terms of accuracy. Accordingly, police officers have historically had near-complete discretion over if interactions with citizens were documented, how they were documented, and whether they were labeled interactions with “criminals.”19 The limits of oversight systems in policing have been the cause of extensive criticism throughout the history of modernized policing. For example, police organizations have regularly faced criticism for racial profiling and excessive use-of-force which were often coupled with calls to improve the documentation of police work.20 The mainstream media have expressed similar criticisms as evidenced by editorials exposing cases of police brutality and calling for improved police oversight.21 Public demonstrations and protests have played a similar role in modern criticism of police as evidenced by recent social movements such as BlackLivesMatter which, through their public demonstrations, have raised awareness of specific cases of police brutality and called for the establishment of improved police oversight.22 Despite the successes of some police reform efforts,23 research studies have found that police officers continue to make questionable decisions while 449

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out-of-sight, including decisions about when and how to apply force, especially when interacting with racial minorities or persons with a mental illness.24 In response to ongoing concern about how low visibility can facilitate police misconduct, smartphone cameras have sometimes been framed as a means of placing police officers in view and increasing oversight.25 Smartphone cameras may be particularly appealing when addressing police brutality targeting racial minorities as the technologies allow for the documentation of police brutality in an institution known for a tendency to conceal discriminatory practices,26 an example of what is scholarly known as “hidden racism.”27 Accordingly, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have encouraged citizens to use smartphones to document interactions with police and have created smartphone apps to make the sharing of resulting videos easier.28 Scholars sometimes call those who film police “citizen journalists,” a term which refers to individuals not affiliated with formal journalism institutions who document and publish newsworthy information.29 Citizen journalism can involve the use of smartphone cameras and social media platforms to report on a range of newsworthy events but reporting on police work is a particularly popular trend, likely due to the controversial nature of the police institution.30 Citizen journalism reflects a change in the nature of knowledge production about police in contemporary society. Rather than relying on official sources of information, including the professional journalists and the police themselves, citizen journalism is an alternative, third-party, and potentially rawer source of information.31 Access to citizen journalists’ information is also not restricted to those who have the appropriate news subscriptions or to those who can produce a successful freedom-of-information request. Instead, citizen journalists’ videos are available to anyone with access to the participatory culture of websites like YouTube where audiences can view, re-view, and discuss images of police at their leisure.32 Citizen journalism is described as “democratizing” by those who see it as an alternative and more accessible source of information about the police.33 However, citizen journalism has also been subject to extensive criticism due to a lack of journalistic standards.34 After all, anyone can upload a video of police officers and use it to make unsubstantiated claims about police misconduct. The debatable nature of citizen journalist is, in part, a reflection of the diversity of politics which can inform the surveillance of police. For example, an officer might be recorded by a smartphone camera owned by a random and unbiased bystander. On the other hand, an officer might be recorded by a smartphone camera owned by a “blue lives matter” activist or a smartphone camera owned by a “defund the police” activist.35 The footage from each of these cameras can make unconfirmed claims about police work and, once uploaded to social media websites, they can be used to produce inaccurate knowledge about policing.36 Given the diversity of contributors to citizen journalism, police visibility is best understood as the result of a “surveillance assemblage”37 of individuals and technologies which increase police visibility without a single or unified goal. The implications of the police’s new visibility are, therefore, likely to be mixed and inconsistent. That said, one of the implications of the police’s new visibility is undoubtedly the creation of new opportunities to expose police brutality and to hold involved officers responsible for their actions. This claim is supported by infamous cases of police brutality captured by smartphone cameras including the Eric Garner case and the George Floyd case.

Section Two: Technologies of Accountability in Practice Discussions about the efficacy of citizen journalism for exposing police brutality often cite the beating of Rodney King.38,39 Though it remains a key example, the King case is also now technologically out of date. The case, which occurred in 1991, relied on a Sony brand Handycam for the production of relatively low-quality videos of police brutality and, because social media did not exist at the time, the presentation of the videos relied exclusively on mainstream media networks such as 450

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CNN.40 Recent examples of citizen journalism are significantly different. Most of them now rely on much higher-quality videos recorded by smartphone cameras and also on a mixture of mainstream media and social media platforms for the presentation and distribution of videos. Together, these technological advancements make the creation and sharing of videos easier and faster. Given the advanced capabilities of citizen journalists today, this chapter relies on two recent examples of smartphones used to document police brutality: the 2014 Eric Garner case and the 2020 George Floyd case. Both cases give credence to the idea that smartphones can function as technologies of accountability by not only documenting and exposing cases of police brutality but by creating visual evidence which can be used to formally investigate cases of police brutality and hold involved police officers responsible for their abuses of power.

Eric Garner Eric Garner was a 43-year-old black man who was killed by a New York City Police Department officer on July 17, 2014. Garner’s death was one of a series of police killings across America that reinspired conversations about race, inequality, and police brutality.41 For clarity’s sake, I begin this section by summarizing the events that led to Garner’s death and the subsequent impact smartphone videos had on awareness of, legal investigations into, and political responses to the case. The events that led to Garner’s death began in front of a beauty supply store in Staten Island at approximately 3:30 pm. Garner, who had a history of selling loosies (single cigarettes), was approached by officers Justin D-Amico and Daniel Pantaleo. As the officers approached, Ramsey Orta, a friend of Garner’s, began recording the scene with his smartphone camera. Pantaleo attempted to arrest and handcuff Garner, but Garner pulled his arms away. Pantaleo responded by putting his arms around Garner’s neck in a chokehold. Garner went to his knees and then to the ground. Pantaleo removed his arms from around Garner’s neck before pushing his face into the sidewalk. As Garner lay face down and now in handcuffs, he seemed to be in distress and repeated “I can’t breathe” 11 times.42 One of the police officers on scene called an ambulance in response but expressed doubt that Garner was indeed struggling to breathe.43 Garner lay motionless for several minutes until the ambulance arrived. After a brief assessment, emergency medical personnel placed Garner on a stretcher and transported him to a medical center. Garner was pronounced dead one hour later. Orta’s video of Garner’s interaction with Pantaleo was posted on the internet and aired on mainstream media channels giving the world a close-up and unhindered view of the chokehold. As the video spread, it inspired protests challenging police brutality and racial inequality. These protests expanded when, in December 2014, a Grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo.44 Citizens across New York City gathered to stage “die ins” by lying in the street and to participate in rallies to express frustration with police violence and a seeming lack of accountability. Many chanted “we can’t breathe” to demonstrate their fury and despair.45 There is no way of knowing if the Garner incident would have received the same public attention without Orta’s video. Several police killings have inspired protests before the invention of smartphones and without the presence of videos. However, it can be reasonably argued that Orta’s video played a central role in bringing awareness to the Eric Garner as evidenced by the video’s popularity on social media and the diversity of responses from internet users who, began to post “social media vents” expressing their frustration with the decision not to indict Pantaleo.46 The video also became central to formal investigations into Garner’s death. For example, Orta’s video was used by medical professionals conducting an autopsy as part of their analysis of the cause of death.47 The New York City Medical Examiner’s Officer eventually ruled the death a homicide caused by the compression of the neck and chest.48 Orta’s video was also used as evidence in a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of New York, the police department, and the involved 451

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police officers. The parties reached a $5.9 million dollar out-of-court settlement in July 2015.49 Pantaleo was eventually dismissed from the NYPD in 2019 after a police administration found him guilty of violating the police department’s ban on chokehold based on an investigation that also utilized Orta’s video.50 In June 2020, New York passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act stipulating that any officer in New York who injures or kills a person through the use of a chokehold or similar restrain can be charged with a class C felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.51 The Garner case exemplifies the multiple ways that smartphones can operate as technologies of accountability. Smartphone cameras allow citizen journalists like Orta to bring police work in view by producing close-up and high-definition videos of incidents like Garner’s death that may otherwise lack the attention that they may have warranted. Smartphone cameras also provided a unique and third-party source of visual information about Garner’s death. Rather than drawing solely on secondary reports by police officers and witnesses who happened to be at the scene, Orta’s video made police brutality visible to anyone with access to the internet. This enabled a firsthand opportunity for observation and scrutinization by the general public and by formal authorities carrying out investigations into the case. Though formal responses were controversial as they included what many community members considered to be a failure to indict police officers for their violence, many of the formal responses to the Garner case nonetheless illustrate that smartphone videos can be central to official investigations of police brutality. Orta’s video was used to terminate the involved officer, to contribute to the Garner family’s civil lawsuit, and in inspiring what Andrew Cuomo, the New York Governor in 2020, called a “long overdue” change to police policy.52 Accordingly, the Garner case offers support for the idea that smartphones can operate as technologies of accountability by documenting and exposing police brutality and by creating visual evidence which can be used to hold officers responsible for their misconduct.

George Floyd George Floyd was a 46-year-old black man who was killed by a Minneapolis Police Department officer on May 25, 2020. Some have argued that the filming of George Floyd’s death is among the most politically influential events in recent American history,53 not only because it inspired protests across the United States but because it inspired a global social movement criticizing police organizations and supporting anti-racist politics.54 Again, due to confusion surrounding events it is worth summarizing George Floyd’s case, as well as the role of smartphones in documenting it. Smartphone videos had a dramatic impact on public awareness, legal investigations, and political responses to the case. The events that led to Floyd’s death began in a convenience store at 7:57 pm where Floyd tried to buy cigarettes. He had spent April recouping after contracting COVID-19 and his visit to the convenience store is believed to have been one of his first ventures outside of his home after his recovery. When convenience store clerks suspected Floyd of using a counterfeit $20-dollar bill to pay for his cigarettes, they called the police. Two police vehicles arrived on scene soon after and found Floyd seated in his blue SUV. When the officers removed Floyd from his vehicle, one bystander began recording the interaction with their smartphone from a nearby sidewalk. Floyd is reported to have been in distress especially when he was asked to enter a police vehicle. Accordingly, Floyd can be seen in the bystander’s video refusing to enter the police vehicle and then claiming to be “claustrophobic.”55 Around this time, two more officers arrived on the scene, including Derek Chauvin, an officer with a history of citizen complaints.56 More bystanders began recording and their combined footage shows four officers gathered around Floyd as he is held face down on the ground. Chauvin then knelt on Floyd’s neck to hold him down. Chauvin and Floyd would remain in that position for 9 minutes and 29 seconds.57 At 8:20pm, Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe” (the same statement made by Eric Garner as he was choked) more than 20 times,58 before passing out. The police called for medical assistance and, when they arrived, Chauvin finally lifted 452

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his knee so that Floyd could be loaded into an ambulance. Floyd was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 9:25pm. Third-party autopsies later ruled his death a homicide.59 In addition to three smartphone cameras, Floyd’s death was filmed by a local security camera and cameras worn by the involved police officers highlighting the diversity of people and cameras which contribute to police visibility.60 However, it was only the smartphone camera footage that was made immediately available on social media and then aired by mainstream news. Internet audiences, political commentators, and journalists expressed criticism of Chauvin, referring to Floyd’s death as an example of police brutality targeting Black Americans.61 The incident inspired protests across the globe.62 Despite stay-at-home orders, hundreds of American citizens gathered in large cities to express their frustrations. While most protests were peaceful, some became violent and featured the vandalization of police vehicles, the smashing of windows, and tense interactions between protestors and police officers.63 Though there is no way of arguing that the Floyd incident would not have received the same public attention without the smartphone videos, it can be reasonably argued that the videos played a central role in bringing awareness to the case by providing video evidence of Chauvin’s knee. The videos also made Floyd’ last words, “I can’t breathe” audible to a community of protestors who would, once again, re-adopt those words as a slogan.64 The video was also used as evidence in various formal investigations into the case. For example, videos of George Floyd’s death were key pieces of evidence in Derek Chauvin’s trial after he was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The citizen journalists who recorded the videos testified in the trial as well.65 In April, a jury found Officer Chauvin guilty on three counts; unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.66 In March 2021, a bill named after George Floyd was passed67 that included new restrictions on the use of force, the creation of a national database of officer misconduct, as well as the requirement for federal officers to wear cameras.68 In many of the same ways as the Garner case, the Floyd case illustrates the multiple ways that smartphones can both expose police brutality and formally contribute to police accountability. The Floyd case also provides a particularly strong example of the role of social media platforms in exposing police brutality and organizing online and offline protests. As the video of Floyd’s death spread on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook using tags like #georgefloyd,69 it inspired a variety of online responses in support of Floyd’s family and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as in criticism of the American police. Many of these responses were creative taking the form of online “memes” as well as creative artistic pieces tagged #georgefloyd and #icantbreathe.70 Many offline protests were also organized using social media as internet users posting dates and times to allow leaderless crowds to meet and vocalize their criticism of police brutality.71 The Floyd case offers support for the idea that smartphones can operate as technologies of accountability by not only creating visual evidence of police brutality, but also by scaling72 social justice movements with the use of social media and online protests.73

Section Three: Complicating the Relationship between Smartphones and Police Accountability The Eric Garner and George Floyd cases both suggest a relationship between increased police visibility and improved police accountability. However, to conclude this chapter, I argue that the long-term impact of the police’s growing visibility must be nuanced by considering the complexities of the production, presentation, and interpretation of smartphone videos. Many of these complexities are built from a critical response to the adage “the camera never lies,” a notion which implies that videos documenting police work are objective records.74 This idea is not without some value especially when videos of police work are compared to traditional systems of tracking police 453

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work such as police logbooks. Whereas police logs are largely dependent on a police officer’s memory, videos offer visual and auditory information which are not as susceptible to forgetfulness. This is not to suggest that police logs are without any merit. Rather it is to suggest that the citizen journalist can capture a more complete record of police work and create an opportunity for a more rigorous examination of use-of-force incidents. However, the notion that the camera never lies is nonetheless flawed. While smartphone videos are potentially fuller and more accurate records when compared to logbooks, videos produced using even the most technologically advanced smartphone cameras are not objective. Rather, the meaning given to smartphone videos is heavily influenced by the politics of the individuals who record the police and the politics of the individuals who present and interpret these images. Accordingly, before asserting a simple relationship between smartphones, police visibility, and police accountability, careful consideration must be given to how smartphone videos are produced, presented, and interpreted. In this section, I outline a few complications that can impact the relationship between smartphone cameras and police accountability. First, videos of police can be produced in a way that does not accurately represent a use-of-force incident. Such incidents are often complicated by contextual details which are not always captured in smartphone videos. For instance, an officer’s decision to use their baton to subdue a threatening individual may be based on that individual’s previous and violent efforts to harm the officer. If a citizen journalist begins recording only after the officer uses their baton, resulting videos may miss vital contextual details resulting in an uninformed assessment of the officer’s actions. This is not a suggestion that any and all videos of police completely lacking context and that videos, therefore, cannot be used to assess police work. It is, instead, a reminder that many videos are produced out of context and using them to assess police work without contextual information may result in flawed conclusions about a use-of-force incident.75 This suggests that the production of citizen journalist videos must be considered with an awareness of contextual details that are included and the contextual details that are missing before the videos are used to assess police use-of-force decisions. Second, videos of police can be presented in a way that does not accurately represent a use-offorce incident. Citizen journalists may produce false knowledge or “fake news” when they misrepresent the incident by attaching inaccurate titles, descriptions, and comments to their videos.76 This is exemplified by conservative commentators who presented videos of Floyd’s death alongside conspiratorial claims. These included the claim George Floyd was not actually killed and that his interaction with police had been faked in an effort to support left-wing politics and anti-racist movements.77 These misrepresentations of the George Floyd case illustrate how videos of police work cannot guarantee objective renderings of truth. The meaning of a video is, instead, dependent on the ways that that video is presented by commentators. These issues are again exemplified by conspiratorial “brick” videos recorded on smartphones which were shared in response to the protests following the killing of George Floyd. The brick videos were used to suggest that police officers were planting bricks for protestors. By planting these bricks, the police could justify a more aggressive response to protestors who could now be said to be equipped with dangerous projectiles.78 There is no evidence that police planted these bricks, but this did not stop smartphone videos from creating rumors about the polices’ plans to abuse protestors. Finally, videos of police can be interpreted in a way that does not accurately represent a use-offorce incident. Differences in a viewer’s political ideologies mean that the same images can be perceived as evidence of effective police work by some and police brutality by others. Put another way, the meaning of a video of police work often depends on the point of view of a particular viewer.79 Acknowledging the interpretability of videos is not a suggestion that a relativist understanding of truth must be adopted. Some interpretations of videos will undoubtedly be more accurate than others, especially if they come from viewers who are knowledgeable about use-of-force policies and, therefore, able to make a more reliable assessment of a police officer’s actions captured on film. Nonetheless, the interpretability of videos highlights how understanding the viewer and the 454

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viewing process is vital to understanding why footage of a use-of-force incident is interpreted in a certain way. This section raises questions about who can mediate the presentation and interpretation of videos by influencing how they are watched, edited, labeled, and distributed.80 The most prominent example of such a mediator is the professional journalist who dissects a citizen journalist’s videos and provides a commentary track instructing viewers about what they are seeing and, therefore, how they should interpret a particular set of images of police work.81 As mentioned, citizen journalists reflect a diversification of sources of knowledge about police work, especially when distributed through social media platforms where their display and interpretation are not as dependent on mainstream media channels. However, it is important to remember that videos created by citizen journalists are often seen first and most often on nightly news where professional journalists mediate the viewing experience.82 Professional journalists are therefore atop a hierarchy of mediation as they remain the primary means of viewing citizen journalist videos and the primary guide to interpreting those videos.83 When mediating the citizen journalist’s video, the professional journalist, therefore, reclaims their status as a primary source of public knowledge and downgrades the citizen journalist to a cameraperson whose primary role in the production of knowledge of police brutality is simply to share visuals which professional journalists then explain to audiences.84

Conclusion In summary, the Eric Garner and George Floyd case highlight how smartphones can be used to document police brutality and improve police accountability. Nonetheless, the relationship between police visibility and police accountability is a complex one. Videos of police work are not objective records and must be understood by considering how they are produced, presented, and interpreted. Police visibility must be understood as an “assemblage” as mediators with different and contradicting intentions pool their resources to give images of police work meaning. The implications of police visibility are, therefore, likely to vary depending on the particular assemblage of mediators at work at any given time. In some cases, the most powerful mediators may be those who support police officers and are therefore able to encourage an interpretation of a citizen journalist’s video that justifies an officer’s use-of-force. In other cases, the most powerful mediators may be those who criticize police officers and are therefore able to encourage an interpretation of a citizen journalist’s video which criminalizes an officer’s use-of-force. These complexities are likely to grow as police officers become involved in the production of videos as they adopt technologies like the body-worn camera.85 Rather than operating as a technology of accountability, such technologies may operate as technologies of replication as they produce videos that seemingly justify use-of-force according to a police-approved narrative.86 The implication of the police’s growing visibility is therefore likely to depend on a variety of factors that influence how videos of police work are produced, presented, and interpreted. Having acknowledged the complexities surrounding the production, presentation, and interpretation of smartphone videos, this chapter concludes that the smartphone camera is ultimately a technology of accountability that improves society’s ability to hold police responsible for their actions. Smartphones do so by allowing for the documentation of police brutality. Smartphones also do so by inspiring political commentary which ranges from YouTube comments to mainstream media debates to public protests. Finally, smartphones contribute to police accountability by creating visual evidence which can be used as part of formal investigations into police use-of-force incidents. The smartphone is, therefore, a technology that has the potential to contribute to contemporary efforts to remove police work from its traditionally low visibility conditions, enabling new opportunities for scrutiny, investigation, and new opportunities to hold officers responsible for any abuses of power. 455

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Notes 1 Jill Nelson, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology (New York: WW Norton, 2001). 2 Samuel E. Walker, and Carol A. Archbold, The New World Of Police Accountability (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2018). 3 Andrew John Goldsmith, “Policing’s new visibility,” British Journal of Criminology 50 (No. 5 2010): 914–934. 4 See https://blacklivesmatter.com 5 See, for example, Al Baker, J. David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold,” New York Times, 13 June 2015, A1. 6 Evan Hill, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christiaan Triebert, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis and Robin Stein “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, 31 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html, accessed 18 May 2021. 7 For more, see https://blacklivesmatter.com. 8 For example, see http://www.berkeleycopwatch.org. 9 New York State Senate, Senate Bill S6670B, “AN ACT to amend the penal law, in relation to establishing the crime of aggravated strangulation,” 26 August 2019, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2019/ s6670, accessed 18 May 2021. 10 H.R.7120 - George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020, 6 June 2020, https://www.congress.gov/bill/ 116th-congress/house-bill/7120 11 Goldsmith, “Policing’s new visibility.” 12 Kevin D. Haggerty and Ajay Sandhu, “The Police Crisis of Visibility [Commentary],” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 33 (No. 2 2014): 9–12. 13 Ajay Sandhu and Kevin D. Haggerty, “Policing on camera,” Theoretical Criminology 21 (No. 1 2017): 78–95. 14 Goldsmith, “Policing’s new visibility.” 15 Gregory R. Brown, “The Blue Line On Thin Ice: Police Use Of Force Modifications In The Era Of Cameraphones and YouTube,” British Journal of Criminology 56 (No. 2 2016): 293–312. 16 Heather MacDonald, The War On Cops: How The New Attack On Law And Order Makes Everyone Less Safe (New York: Encounter Books, 2017). 17 See, for example, Berkeley Copwatch: http://www.berkeleycopwatch.org 18 Michael K. Brown, Working The Street: Police Discretion And The Dilemmas Of Reform (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1981). 19 Richard V. Ericson, Making Crime: A Study Of Detective Work (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981). 20 Jerome H. Skolnick, and James J. Fyfe, Above The Law: Police And The Excessive Use Of Force (New York: Free Press, 1993). 21 Jerome H. Skolnick and Candace McCoy, “Police Accountability And The Media,” Law & Social Inquiry 9 (No. 3 1984): 521–557. 22 See “The power of protest and the legacy of George Floyd,” Economist, 11 June 2020, https://www. economist.com/leaders/2020/06/11/the-power-of-protest-and-the-legacy-of-george-floyd 23 Eugene McLaughlin, The New Policing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007). 24 Cassandra Chaney and Ray V. Robertson “Racism and Police Brutality in America,” Journal of African American Studies 17 (No. 4 2013): 480–505. 25 Goldsmith, “Policing’s new visibility.” 26 Mike Rowe, Policing, Race and Racism (New York: Routledge, 2012). 27 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism And The Persistence Of Racial Inequality In The United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 28 See “ACLU Apps to Record Police Conduct,” https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/ reforming-police/aclu-apps-record-police-conduct. 29 Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen, eds., Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, vol. 1 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). 30 Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin, “We Predict A Riot? Public Order Policing, New Media Environments And The Rise Of The Citizen Journalist,” British Journal of Criminology 50 (No. 6 2010): 1041–1059. 31 Chris Greer and Eugene Mclaughlin, “Righting Wrongs: Citizen Journalism and Miscarriages of Justice,” in Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, vol. 2, eds., Einar Thorsen and Stuart Allan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014): 39–50. 32 Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2018). 33 Kelly Kaufhold, Sebastian Valenzuela, and Homero Gil De Zúñiga, “Citizen Journalism And Democracy: How User-generated News Use Relates To Political Knowledge And Participation,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 87 (No. 3–4 2010): 515–529.

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Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability 34 James P. Walsh, “Social Media And Moral Panics: Assessing The Effects Of Technological Change On Societal Reaction,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 23 (No. 6 2020): 840–859. 35 See Juliana Kim, Michael Wilson, “‘Blue Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund the Police’ Clash in the Streets,” New York Times, 22 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/nyregion/ny-back-the-blue-livesmatter-rallies.html 36 Haggerty and Sandhu, “The Police Crisis of Visibility [Commentary].” 37 Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51 (No. 4 2000): 605–622. 38 Skolnick and Fyfe, Above the Law. 39 James R. Lasley, “The impact of the Rodney King incident on citizen attitudes toward police,” Policing and Society: An International Journal 3 (No. 4 1994): 245–255. 40 Lou Cannon, “The King Incident: More Than Met The Eye On Videotape,” Washington Post, 25 January 1998, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/01/25/the-king-incident-more-thanmet-the-eye-on-videotape/2248e35e-178b-47e9-a8db-0734f88b46e0/, accessed 21 May 2021. 41 See Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez, Michael LeFloria, “Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe,’” New York Times, 28 June 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2020/06/28/us/i-cant-breathe-police-arrest.html 42 See Ashley Southall, “‘I Can’t Breathe’: 5 Years After Eric Garner’s Death, an Officer Faces Trial,” New York Times, 12 May 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/nyregion/eric-garner-death-danielpantaleo-chokehold.html 43 See Al Baker, J. David Goodman, Benjamin Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death,” New York Times, 12 June 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garnerpolice-chokehold-staten-island.html 44 See “For Fifth Day, Hundreds Protest Grand Jury Decision in Garner Case,” New York Times, 7 December 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/nyregion/hundreds-protest-grand-jury-decision-in-ericgarner-chokehold-case.html 45 See “‘I Can’t Breathe’ Is Echoed in Voices of Fury and Despair,” New York Times, 3 December 2014, https:// www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/nyregion/i-cant-breathe-is-re-echoed-in-voices-of-fury-and-despair.html 46 See “After the Eric Garner Decision: Social Media Vents,” New York Times, 4 December 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Wh4y3H_VQ 47 See Baker, Goodman, and Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold.” 48 See Massimo Calebresi, “Why a Medical Examiner Called Eric Garner’s Death a ‘Homicide’,” Time, 4 December 2014, https://time.com/3618279/eric-garner-chokehold-crime-staten-island-daniel-pantaleo/ 49 See J. David Goodman, “Eric Garner Case Is Settled by New York City for $5.9 Million,” New York Times, 13 July 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/nyregion/eric-garner-case-is-settled-by-new-yorkcity-for-5-9-million.html 50 See Ashley Southall, “Officer in ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Chokehold Was ‘Untruthful,’ Judge Says,” New York Times, 18 August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/nyregion/daniel-pantaleo-eric-garnerchokehold.html 51 See Baker, Goodman, and Mueller, “Beyond the Chokehold.” 52 See “N.Y. Gov. Cuomo Signs Sweeping Police Reforms Into Law, Says They’re ‘Long Overdue’,” WLNY CBS New York, 12 June 2020, https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/06/12/n-y-gov-cuomo-signssweeping-police-reforms-into-law-says-theyre-long-overdue/ 53 See Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, 3 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/georgefloyd-protests-crowd-size.html 54 See Damien Cave, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Iliana Magra, “Huge Crowds Around the Globe March in Solidarity Against Police Brutality,” New York Times, 6 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/world/ george-floyd-global-protests.html 55 See Holly Bailey, “George Floyd warned police he thought he would die because he couldn’t breathe, according to body camera transcripts,” Washington Post, 8 July 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ national/george-floyd-death-transcripts/2020/07/08/a7050efe-c15c-11ea-b178-bb7b05b94af1_story.html 56 See Evan Hill, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christian Triebert, Drew Jordan, Willis Haley, et al., “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, 31 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html 57 See Eric Levenson, “Former officer knelt on George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds – not the infamous 8:46,” CNN, 30 March 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/us/george-floyd-timing-929-846/ index.html

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Ajay Sandhu 58 See Baker, Valentino-DeVries, Fernandez, and LeFloria, “Three Words. 70 Cases.” 59 See Frances Robles, D.S. Audra Burch, “How Did George Floyd Die? Here’s What We Know,” New York Times, 1 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-autopsy-michael-baden.html 60 See Richard A. Oppel, Kim Barker, “New Transcripts Detail Last Moments for George Floyd,” New York Times, 8 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/george-floyd-body-camera-transcripts.html 61 See Kenya Evelyn, “In life and death, George Floyd’s plight reflected the burden of being black in America,” Guardian, 6 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/george-floydplight-reflected-burden-of-being-black-america 62 See “The killing of George Floyd has sparked global soul-searching,” Economist, 11 June 2020, https://www. economist.com/international/2020/06/11/the-killing-of-george-floyd-has-sparked-global-soul-searching 63 See Bryson Derrick, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” New York Times, 30 May 2020, https://www. nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html 64 See Derrick, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline.” 65 See Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Tim Arango, “Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed George Floyd’s arrest, testifies at the trial,” New York Times, 30 March 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/us/ darnella-frazier-video-george-floyd.html 66 See Tim Arango, Shaila Dewan, John Eligon, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Derek Chauvin is found guilty of murdering George Floyd,” New York Times, 20 April 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/us/ chauvin-guilty-murder-george-floyd.html 67 See Nicholas Fandos, Catie Edmondson, Karen Zraik, “The House passes a policing overhaul bill named for George Floyd, whose death spurred nationwide protests,” New York Times, 4 March 2021, https://www. nytimes.com/2021/03/04/us/george-floyd-act.html 68 See “The George Floyd Act is a police-reform smorgasbord. Would it work?” Economist, https://www. economist.com/united-states/2021/05/27/the-george-floyd-act-is-a-police-reform-smorgasbord-would-it-work 69 See “George Floyd is remembered around the world,” Economist, 27 May 2021, https://www.economist. com/graphic-detail/2020/06/09/george-floyd-is-remembered-around-the-world 70 See Antonio DeLuca, Jaspal Riyait, “‘The World is on Fire:’ Artists Respond to the Protests,” New York Times, 5 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/george-floyd-protests-artists.html 71 See John Eligon, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, “Today’s Activism: Spontaneous, Leaderless, but Not Without Aim,” New York Times, 3 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/leadersactivists-george-floyd-protests.html 72 Marcia Mundt, Karen Ross, and Charla M. Burnett, “Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter.” Social Media + Society 4 (No. 4 2018): 1–14. 73 Nikita Carney, “All Lives Matter, But So Does Race: Black Lives Matter And The Evolving Role Of Social Media,” Humanity & Society 40 (No. 2 2016): 180–199. 74 Emmeline Taylor and Murray Lee, “The Camera Never Lies?: Police Body-worn Cameras And Operational Discretion,” In Police on Camera: Surveillance, Privacy, and Accountability, ed. Bryce Clayton Newell (New York: Routledge, 2020), 80–94. 75 Bryce Clayton Newell, “Context, Visibility, And Control: Police Work And The Contested Objectivity Of Bystander Video,” New Media & Society 21 (No. 1 2019): 60–76. 76 Jeff Kosseff, “The hazards of cyber-vigilantism,” Computer Law & Security Review 32 (No. 4 2016): 642–649. 77 See Alba Davey, “Misinformation About George Floyd Protests Surges on Social Media,” New York Times, 1 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/technology/george-floyd-misinformation-online.html 78 See “George Floyd protests: Misleading footage and conspiracy theories spread online,” BBC, 2 June 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/52877751 79 Ben Brucato, “The New Transparency: Police Violence In The Context Of Ubiquitous Surveillance,” Media and Communication 3 (No. 3 2015): 39–55. 80 Forrest Stuart, “Constructing Police Abuse After Rodney King: How Skid Row Residents And The Los Angeles Police Department Contest Video Evidence,” Law & Social Inquiry 36 (No. 2 2011): 327–353. 81 Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin, “Trial by Media’: Policing, The 24–7 News Mediasphere And The ‘politics Of Outrage,” Theoretical Criminology 15 (No. 1 2011): 23–46. 82 While professional media is given special attention in this chapter, it is worth noting that in addition to professional journalists, mediators include legal authorities who narrate a citizen journalist’s videos to judges and jurors assessing charges against officers involved in controversial use-of-force incidents. This point is exemplified by the legal authorities who successfully defended the police involved in the Rodney King case by controlling how Holliday’s videos were displayed to court. Other important mediators include social media users who are in a position to title, commentate-on, share, as well as delete videos of police work on YouTube and similar video-sharing platforms.

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Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability 83 Brian P. Schaefer and Kevin F. Steinmetz, “Watching the Watchers And Mcluhan’s Tetrad: The Limits Of Cop-watching In The Internet Age,” Surveillance & Society 12 (No. 4 2014): 502–515. 84 Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns, “’Preditors’: Making citizen journalism work,” in Notions of Community: A Collection of Community Media Debates and Dilemmas (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 245–70. 85 Michael D. White and Aili Malm, Cops, Cameras, And Crisis: The Potential And The Perils Of Police Body-worn Cameras (New York: NYU Press, 2020). 86 Wendy M. Koslicki, “Accountability or efficiency? Body-worn cameras as replicative technology,” Criminal Justice Review 44 (No. 3 2019): 356–368.

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34 POLICE BRUTALITY AND THE MILITARIZATION OF POLICING Lesley J. Wood

In 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. In response, protests and riots of grief and anger filled the streets in many cities in the United States and elsewhere. US police forces responded with Armored Personnel Carriers, pepper balls, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. Many of these police efforts further intensified public criticism and outrage. The interactive sequence of police brutality—public outcry—militarized police repressionfurther public outcry is numbingly familiar, but not well understood. Such episodes have given leverage to recent efforts to defund and abolish the police, but the interplay between criticisms of police brutality and processes of police militarization aren’t new. Condemnations of police brutality have led certain tactics and practices to be abolished, and new ones to be adopted. This paper will examine the interplay between accusations of brutality and the police adoption of three militarized less lethal weapons—pepper spray, TASERs, and flashbang grenades. It shows how campaigns against police brutality are sometimes neutralized by the promises of “better” new weapons and technologies. When police authorities argue that the new weapons are more professional, legitimate, and effective, they often simply change the form that brutality takes, while further shoring up police legitimacy and resources. Police brutality and police militarization are often conflated in public discourse. This volume examines police brutality in great detail, but I will simply note that there are two ways to think about police brutality. It can be understood as an aberration or excess, or as a foundational component of policing. The former understanding of police brutality remains dominant. It assumes that in a Hobbesian world of violence and chaos, the police maintain order. Brutality occurs when the police exceed the legitimate use of force. This might include physical force, verbal assault, or psychological intimidation.1 Amnesty International defines police brutality as “human rights violations by police. This might include beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, torture, or indiscriminate use of riot control agents at protests.” The assumption is that some use of force by the police is legitimate. Brutality is not. In contrast, an abolitionist understanding of police brutality sees this violence as foundational, that cannot be eliminated without eliminating the institution, and indeed, the extractive structures of racial and class inequality. Each of these two understandings of police brutality can have different inflections. In the former, police brutality’s excesses may be criticized for its inequity—the disproportionate harm to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) or homeless communities, or aspects of its particular form. Abolitionist criticism of brutality may argue that most social disorder would not exist outside of capitalism, making the police unnecessary or that anti-social behavior could be managed through federated popular assemblies or autonomous militias. 460

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-44

Police Brutality and the Militarization of Policing

Contemporary policing institutions emerged partly from a process of demilitarization of statecontrolled armed forces, and partly from the nationalization and regularization of private, local armed groups—including slave overseers and town watchmen. Since the emergence of urban public policy in the early nineteenth century their tactics, routines, and powers have been contested; sometimes by sporadic community opposition and at other times by formal social movements. These efforts range from the early fights against the “plague of blue locusts” that stopped the police from entering certain neighborhoods to the campaigns against police cameras and surveillance, to movements to diversify the police, and against the racist police killings of Black and Indigenous people.2 While the periodic struggles around the legitimacy and operation of police practices lead the police to tweak their operations, the police effort to maintain the status quo endures. The legitimacy of the modern police rests on the idea that policing is consensual, fair, and effective.3 So, when a community or part of a community names police brutality, it challenges that legitimacy. The impact of that challenge depends in part on the social, political, and economic capital of the critics, and in part on the timing of the challenge. At times, accusations of police brutality create crises, both for the police and the political system that supports them.

Challenging Police Legitimacy There is a familiar sequence. First, the police injure or kill someone, often a Black or Indigenous person. If this brutality is noticed, named, and gains attention, there will be demands for charges to be laid on the police, for an investigation, and for accountability. The police response to such accusations will vary, depending on their interpretation of the critique, and the critics. They may attempt to ignore it. If they cannot, they will begin by defending their officers and justifying their actions, and correspondingly, blaming the victim or the circumstance. If the pressure continues, they may attempt to smear, to question the legitimacy of their critics. If there are physical protests, the police may tolerate them or repress them.4 If these strategies cannot quash opposition, the police may respond in additional ways. They will offer their own investigation and internal process. They may agree to a public inquiry or investigation. If they accept that an error was made or a harm was done, police leaders may offer a statement, and a promise of more research, training, reorganization, leadership replacement, or disciplinary processes for “bad apples.” If the critics are able to persist in their claims of systemic or patterned abuse through ongoing protest, political pressure, media coverage, or lawsuits, sometimes the police will offer to make some change. This may include the altering of an existing practice or the introduction of a new tactic or weapon. In order for a new tool to be introduced, it must be seen as legitimate, from a legitimate and respected source, and appropriate for their use. In such a moment, police decision-makers will follow influential leaders in the field; on other police agencies, on the security and defense sectors, and on the military. When change, they seek to do so in ways that the police leadership and institution see as legitimate, and that correspond with the ‘best practices” of professional policing.

Professionalization The history of urban US policing has been punctuated by periods of reform. The modern police agencies were promoted as a legitimate, armed alternative to the military, and private and local forces including slave patrols and night watchmen. The formation of the first publicly funded, centrally organized police department in the US didn’t occur until 1838 in Boston and in 1838 and 1845 in New York City. This was part of an international trend—led by the launch of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. From their initiation, the regional variations in policing 461

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reflected their national context. The US tradition kept central the decentralized federated idea of local, non-militarized officers; sometimes managed or appointed by an elected official.5 This model of policing implicitly contrasted with a European model that was seen as more militarized, centralized, and political. Early US urban police forces were reliant on local political machines, and faced criticism for being armed thugs of local establishments—corrupt, violent, and ineffective. By the late 1880s, this generated pressure for reform. Gradual professionalization of policing included an increased emphasis on training, standardization, research, and autonomy from partisan political control.6 This process was facilitated by professional associations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), formed in 1893. The IACP sought to: Advance professional police services; promote enhanced administrative, technical and operational police practices; foster cooperation and the exchange of information and experience amongst police leaders and police organizations of recognized professional and technical standing throughout the world.7 Through the twentieth century, a this professionalization of policing in the United States accelerated. The US model spread internationally through a more general globalization of political and economic institutions accelerating during the neoliberalism of the 1990s. In this new globalized field of professional policing, police leaders were increasingly able to access the “best practices” of policing through trainings and trade shows. This integration saw private security and defense corporations seeking new markets becoming increasingly important, and legitimate actors. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the boundaries between private security and public policing, between police and military, between domestic and international and between national security and policing had become more porous. In this fuzzier new field, police leaders sought strategies to respond to the accusations of police brutality. These responses included various trends in management, community policing, intelligence gathering, information technology, and militarized less lethal weapons. There was no single, centralized plan of militarization as a way to defend police legitimacy. There are more than 18,000 policing agencies in the United States. However, when the biggest and most influential agencies in the country adopted militarized tactics and approaches—the model spread widely.

Militarization Militarization is understood in different ways. One of the most cited researchers on the topic, Peter Kraska defines it as “the process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.”8 This can include: • • • •

Increased access and use of military weapons. Increased use of Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs) including special weapons and tactics teams (SWAT), emergency response teams (ERT), and special response teams (SRT). Increasing emphasis on “warfare” mentality—with control over population and territory is seen as central to the mission. Increasing organizational logic associated with the military—including increased centralization and direction by political authority

There are debates about the extent of militarization in US policing. Different research emphasizes different components.9 Some also argue that the process is not new—noting the longstanding use of

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militarized tactics against sections of the population. Despite these cautions, there is no doubt about the increasing number of paramilitary-style specialized units, and the use of weapons previously used only in a military context. There is also a recognition that US policing is increasingly integrated into national initiatives. Three federal “wars” have built stronger links between the military and the police. The first was Johnson’s War on Crime, and his Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, itself a reaction to the Black rebellion. This project provided new funds to the police, particularly for riot control.10 The second, the War on Drugs, launched in 1971—involved massive spending both within the United States and beyond, with the ostensible aim of eliminating the trade and use of illegal drugs.11 This “war” at home saw the increasing use of Police Paramilitary Units (SWAT) in Black and other racialized communities.12 By 1975, the Center for Research on Criminal Justice argued that the police were using a counterinsurgency framework in their policing of racialized communities. The third was the War on Terror—announced in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.13 That period established a new “Homeland Security” infrastructure, that included a new grant program, to help local and state law enforcement agencies to purchase surveillance equipment, weapons, and provide advanced training for law enforcement. This is similar to the 1033 or Law Enforcement Support Office Program, itself based on older legislation. This program legally requires the Department of Defense to provide various surplus equipment to law enforcement agencies.14 Initially justified as part of the War on Drugs, it has become an element of counter-terrorism preparations. This source of material can be combined with Department of Homeland Security (US DHS) grants that can fund “planning, equipment, training, and exercise needs … [in order to] prepare, prevent and respond to terrorist attacks and other disasters.”15 Such policies help to explain how from 1997 to 2020, 8,200 local law enforcement agencies received $5.1 billion in military material from DOD.16 Referred to as 1033 transfers, the equipment included ammunition, cold weather clothing, sandbags, medical supplies, sleeping bags, flashlights, and electrical wiring but also small arms and vehicles such as aircraft, watercraft, and armored vehicles. After images of armored personnel carriers confronting protesters in Ferguson flashed around the globe, President Obama moved to limit and prohibit the transfer of certain types of equipment, but this order was reversed by President Trump in 2017.17 The flow of material and information was not unidirectional. Militarization was also built on increased exchanges between police and military, both nationally, and in war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. Such experiences reinforced and spread a militarized logic of risk and threat assessment, that encouraged police to evaluate the territory it control as a space under they control, where potential threats and risks must be preempted and eliminated, rather than a space with multiple types of activities and communities who needs and interests must be facilitated and balanced. This blur red the lines between policing and military; between law enforcement and national security. It also appeared to increase the likelihood of subsequent police brutality. Casey Delahanty and a group of coauthors found “positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings.”18 Since at least the early 1990s militarized solutions have been proposed as responses to accusations of brutality—because these strategies are understood to be legitimate and effective best practices. However, militarized weapons do not reduce brutality. When we examine the introduction of pepper spray, TASERs, and flashbang grenades, we will see that although each new weapon is justified as a way to reduce violence, it merely shifts that violence into a new form, one that is more enmeshed with the military-industrial complex, and one that reinforces the foundation of police power.

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Pepper Spray—Between the Baton and the Gun Many of the uprisings in Black communities that occurred during the late 1960s were prompted by police brutality.19 The police response to these protests and riots was often more violence. The combination of these events led to a number of governmental inquiries and commissions. These included the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice which recommended the development of nonlethal weapons as an alternative to lethal force for law enforcement officers.20 Researchers explored numerous options, and in 1987 the FBI endorsed pepper/OC as an official chemical agent.21 In 1991, this endorsement attracted additional support in the wake of the incendiary video of four Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King, a Black motorist. When the police were acquitted, riots ensued. In the days that followed, more than 50 people died, including 10 people shot and killed by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) or the National Guard, 2000 were injured and almost 6000 were arrested. After 14 years as Chief of the LAPD, Daryl Gates, resigned. The public confidence in police collapsed.22 In the midst of this crisis, the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) hosted a brainstorming session to consider the possibilities of less-lethal weapons technologies. The participants in the 1991 session were given a set of criteria to evaluate less lethal weapons. They were told to look for technologies that would be inexpensive, would improve police practice, could not overburden an officer, or require extensive training or dedicated personnel, the liability issues had to be manageable and they had to work.23 Building on its FBI endorsement, Pepper/OC spray fit the bill, and by the end of 1991, more than 3000 local police agencies had adopted it.24 It was heralded spread widely as a weapon tool that was between the baton and the gun. By the end of the 1990s, despite growing concerns about toxicity, and misuse, pepper spray had virtually replaced the use of baton, Mace, or CS/CN sprays on combative subjects.25 While originally intended to be used only against such individuals, police use pepper spray more and more as a crowd control tool at protests and other events. During the 2020 wave of protests against racist police brutality, police officers used pepper spray against protesters in many cities, prompting public outrage, criticism, and lawsuits.26 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called its use against non-threatening protesters “excessive and unconstitutional use of force and violates the right to peaceably assemble.”27 In the five days between May 26 and 31 2020, US police used pepper spray against protesters at least 27 times, in 19 different cities. Clearly, pepper spray is not the response to criticisms of brutality, nor is it resolving questions of legitimacy. By 2013, 94% of all police departments had authorized the use of pepper spray, including 100% of all forces in jurisdictions with populations of 500,000 or more. But its legitimacy wanes as the increasing criticism, advocacy, and lawsuits have called it into question. The National Institute for Justice found that pepper spray was being used less often because of: • •

•

“A more advanced understanding of pepper spray’s effects on subjects and officers. A belief that pepper spray is less reliable than a CED activation, with a real risk that the spray will contact the officer, other officers, or bystanders, exposing them to the same symptoms as the subject. Research also has shown that OC is generally less effective than CEDs in subduing subjects. Court decisions since 2000 making it clear that overuse or improper use of pepper spray can constitute excessive force in violation of the subject’s constitutional rights.”28

Such changes show how celebrated less lethal weapons can lose their luster of legitimacy. Pepper spray’s been reputation as an innovative solution to accusations of excessive force is being replaced by CEDs/TASERs. By 2008, the National Institute for Justice found that Conducted Energy

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Devices, like TASERs had “become the less lethal weapon of choice for a growing number of law enforcement agencies.”29

Tasers—“253,368 Lives Saved” 30 The inventor of “Thomas A Swift’s Electronic Rifle” or TASER developed the Conducted Energy Device (CED) as a less lethal alternative after two high-school acquaintances were shot by a neighbor. There are other companies that produce and sell Conducted Energy Devices, but TASER International, now known as Axxon, is the most well known. The company was launched in 1993, and by 1998 the company had expanded sales to law enforcement and military. Like the introduction of pepper spray, the police adoption of Conducted Energy Devices was motivated in part by public outrage associated with police brutality, particularly lethal force.31 As journalist Matt Stroud says in an NPR interview about his book, Thin Blue Line, “It was kind of the first time that this kind of weapon was used as a solution—was presented as a non-lethal solution in the wake of an incident involving a police killing.”32 But the police and municipalities were not eager to adopt the technology. In its annual report, the manufacturer noted that the decision for an agency to adopt a new weapon was a slow and controversial one, involving police agencies, political decision-makers, and the federal government. In order to speed the adoption of its product, the company strategically integrated itself into policing and military networks, arguing that TASERs “saved lives.” TASER International explains that the devices are intended to provide … “solutions to violent confrontation by developing devices with proprietary technology to incapacitate dangerous, combative or high risk subjects who pose a risk to law enforcement officers, innocent citizens or themselves in a manner that is generally recognized as a safer alternative to other uses of force.”33 It is unclear whether CEDs actually reduce the use of firearms or the level of lethal force. Michael White and Justin Ready’s research on police use of TASERs 2002–2004 found that TASERs were effective at incapacitation and taking people into custody.34 Bocar Ba and Jeffrey Grogger, as well as research by Eugene Paoline, William Terrill, and Jason Ingram, found that the expansion of TASER use by Chicago PD found that TASER availability didn’t reduce the use of firearms by police. “The policy change initially led to a large increase in the use of Tasers, with limited substitution from other types of force. After a period of re-training, substitution between Tasers and other types of force, both greater and lesser, increased. While police injuries fell, neither injury rates nor the number of injuries to civilians were affected. There is no evidence that Tasers led to a reduction in police use of firearms.”35 Nor is it clear that the use of TASERs reduces fatalities, as there have been numerous high-profile deaths involving TASERs.36 The research website fatalencounters.org shows that since 2010, there have been at least 513 cases in which subjects died soon after police used Tasers on them.37 3 TASERs have been condemned for being used as torture devices, for being unsafe, subject to misuse and excess. When TASERs are used in ways that draw criticism and attention, sometimes local authorities put conditions on their use. But rather than being banned or abandoned, TASER innovates. There have been six generations of TASER since 1994. Each new model responds to concerns with the previous edition. Today’s TASER 7, has an integrated camera, in response to concerns about misuse and brutality. TASER/Axon argues that this cycle of innovation will lead to a world without police killings. A 2021 article in Forbes quoted TASER/Azon CEO Rick Smith saying that the company would make the police pistol redundant by 2030. “We’ve got to outperform the police pistol … I think we’ll get there, where, by 2030, we’re going to have nonlethal weapons so good, it will actually be a faster time to incapacitation more reliably than a police pistol.”38 Arguing that the use of their product will allow the police to control without killing, 465

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business is booming for the company, which also dominates the body-worn camera market. The 2020 annual report of TASER/Axxon reported revenue of $681 million, up 28% compared to fiscal 2019. Despite the growth in sales, it is clear that, the introduction of and use of TASERs does not necessarily “protect life.”

Flashbang Grenades—Reducing Deadly Force Flashbang grenades, also called Fuel Air Distraction Device (FADD), stun grenades, or diversionary devices were introduced as a way to reduce the use of deadly force. The grenades were first developed for the British Army’s Special Air Service’s Counter Terrorist unit to be used in hostage-taking and training situations. When used, they emit a flash of light, or multiple flashes, and a loud sound, which disorients those in the area, limiting their ability to see and hear. Al Baker writes in the New York Times that the grenades are “intended to cause momentary disorientation, often in surprise raids, to give officers a few vital seconds to make an apprehension, and to make less imperative the use of deadly force.”39 The US military began to use them in the 1980s and police SWAT teams quickly adopted them for use in “no knock” drug raids. Like other less-lethal weapons, police argue that flashbangs reduce violence because they stun criminals “who might otherwise shoot.” One study by the ACLU, looked at their use in Little Rock, Arkansas, and found that between 2011 and 2013, flashbangs were used during 84% of home ‘no-knock’ raids, mostly in racialized communities.40 Like the other less lethal weapons discussed here—their use has become increasingly controversial and banned in some jurisdictions. They New York Police Department first acquired flash bang grenades in the 1980s, used then in raids in the 1990s, and then stopped using them in 2003 when a woman had a heart attack after her apartment was mistakenly raided by police using grenades. Flashbangs are dangerous. At least 50 Americans, including police officers, have been seriously injured, maimed, or killed by flashbangs between 2000 and 2015. The figures are likely higher as the use of the grenades is largely unregulated and untracked. There are no national requirements for police using the weapons. The National Tactical Officers Association, the trade group for SWAT teams, strongly advises against untrained officers to using flashbangs. Long used in authoritarian regimes and in conflict zones, aerial flashbangs are increasingly used in crowd control contexts in the US, despite condemnations by groups like Physicians for Human Rights. Police are expanding their use of this tool, using it in a range of contexts beyond the one for which it was first intended.41 Analysis of the media sources included in scanning the media included in the Nexis Uni database, it appears that The first time US police used flashbangs against US protesters was in 1992 in Seattle during protests inspired by the acquittal of officers who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles. The next use against protesters was seven years later in the same city during the protests against the World Trade Organization. Indeed, before the 2020 wave of protests against police brutality, flashbang grenades had only been used 23 times in the United States. However, between May 26 and June 2, 2020, police in 30 cities deployed flashbang grenades 37 times against protesters.

Conclusion When police agencies are accused of brutality, their leaders, and the politicians who support them often turn to the technical solutions that the security and defense industry promotes as legitimate ways to reduce death and injury. But such responses do not eliminate brutality, only change its form. They may shore up police legitimacy temporarily, but these “solutions” do not change the underlying problem. Police brutality cannot be eliminated through the use of militarized tactics. Its source the use of militarized tactics is rooted in the nature of police organizations as defenders of the status quo. For the past 200 years, elites have used the police to contain and eliminate internal threats to their 466

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power—including armed challengers, but also threats to the legitimacy of their rule including poor people, racialized communities, drug users, and the mentally ill. When their strategies for control fail, the public and private proponents of militarization step in and offer products that promise order and stability. While the turn to increased militarization may allow those elites more control over the police, and more opportunities for profit, it also shapeshifts the form of brutality in ways that lead away from justice, civilian oversight and the possibility of increased accountability. Examining the incorporation of less lethal weapons into policing shows us the sequence of interactions behind this trend. Although less lethal weapons are framed by their proponents as means to reduce violence, their adoption exacerbates it in three ways. First, less lethals injure and kill people in new ways, second, they justify increased funds and legitimacy to police, increasing their capacity, and finally, they provide profit and legitimacy to the security and defense industries, potentially increasing their influence on political and economic decision making. Of course, we know that militarization is not limited to tactics and weapons, the process also blurs the lines between police and military, between public and private, and between domestic and international in ways that limit local control, and the capacity of civilian oversight over police. Militarization holds within it, a centralized, top-down logic that perceives those outside of its control as threats. This includes BIPOC and poor communities, who become the enemy of police in a war on crime, on drugs, and on terror. If the goal is an end to police brutality, and an increase in real safety, a different, and anti-militarist logic is required, one that puts care, relationship building, and protection at its core.

Notes 1 Perry Lyle and Ashraf M. Esmail, “Sworn to Protect: Police Brutality--A Dilemma for America’s Police,” Race, Gender & Class 23 (No. 3–4 2016): 155–185. 2 Robert D. Storch and Friedrich Engels, “The Plague Of The Blue Locusts: Police Reform And Popular Resistance In Northern England, 1840–57,” international Review Of Social History 20 (No. 1 1975): 61–90; Laura Huey, Kevin Walby, and Aaron Doyle, “Cop Watching In The Downtown Eastside: Exploring The Use Of (Counter) Surveillance As A Tool Of Resistance,” in Surveillance and Security (New York: Routledge, 2006), 161–178; and Jerome J. Blakemore, David Barlow, and Deborah L. Padgett, “From the Classroom To The Community: Introducing Process In Police Diversity Training,” Police Studies: International Review of Police Development 18 (No. 1 1995): 71. Quote from Storch and Engels. 3 T.R. Tyler, “Enhancing Police Legitimacy,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 593 (No. 1 2004): 84–99. 4 Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, H. (2018) “Protesting the Police: Anti-police Brutality Claims As A Predictor Of Police Repression Of Protest,” Social Movement Studies 17 (No. 1 2018): 48–63. 5 Albert J. Reiss, “Police Organization in the Twentieth Century,” Crime and Justice, 15 (1992): 64. 51–97. 6 Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations Of International Police Cooperation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Reiss, “Police Organization in the Twentieth Century.” 7 “International Association of Chiefs of Police Mission,” in Police Chiefs Desk Reference: A Guide for Newly Appointed Police Leaders (Washington: Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2012), 1. 8 Peter B. Kraska, “Militarization and Policing—its Relevance To 21st Century Police,” Policing: a journal of policy and practice, 1 (No. 4 2007): 501–513. 9 See, for example, Kraska, “Militarization and Policing”; Peter B. Kraska and Victor E. Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems 44 (No. 1 1997): 1–18; and P.A.J. Waddington, ”Swatting Police Paramilitarism: A Comment on Kraska and Paulsen,” Policing and Society 9 (No. 2 1999): 125–140. 10 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Jill Lepore, “The Long Blue Line,” The New Yorker, 13 July 2020. 11 ACLU, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2014). 12 Kraska and Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police”; and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). 13 Anta Plowden, “Bringing Balance To The Force: The Militarization Of America’s Police Force And Its Consequences,” University of Miami Law Review 71 (No. 1 2016): 281.

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Lesley J. Wood 14 K. Cyr, Rosemary Ricciardelli, and Dale Spencer, “Militarization of police: a comparison of police paramilitary units in Canadian and the United States,” International Journal of Police Science & Management 22 (No. 2 2020): 137–147. 15 USH DS quoted in Cyr, et al., 2020. 16 Brian Barrett, “The Pentagon’s Hand-Me-Downs Helped Militarize Police. Here’s How,” Wired 6.2.2020. https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-hand-me-downs-militarize-police-1033-program/ 17 Adam Goldman, “Trump Reverses Restrictions on Military Hardware for Police,” New York Times 28 August 2017. 18 Casey Delehanty, Jack Mewhirter, Ryan Welch, and Jason Wilks, “Militarization and Police Violence: The Case of the 1033 Program,” Research & Politics 4 (April-June 2017): 1–7. 19 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). 20 Institute for Defense Analyses, United States, President’s Commission on Law Enforcement, and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: Science and Technology: A Report to the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1967); and Eugene A. Paoline, Jacinta M. Gau, and William Terrill, “Race and the Police Use of Force Encounter in the United States,” British Journal of Criminology 58 (No. 1 2016): 54–74. 21 Lesley J. Wood, Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing (New York: Pluto/Between the Lines, 2014), 29. 22 James R. Lasley, “The Impact Of The Rodney King Incident On Citizen Attitudes Toward Police,” Policing and Society: An International Journal 3 (No. 4 1994): 245–255. 23 Lois Pilant, “Less-Than-Lethal Weapons: New Solutions for Law Enforcement,” International Association of Chiefs of Police (December 1993), available at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/181653.pdf. 24 Detective Habernero 2000. A Short and Sordid History of Pepper Spray. Earth First Journal Dec/Jan 2000. http://www.nopepperspray.org/sordid.htm 25 Mace or CS or CN sprays were taken off the market because of a high number of injuries associated with them, and because of their inability to influence individuals affected by alcohol and/or drugs. Pilant, “LessThan-Lethal Weapons”; and National Institute of Justice, “Oleoresin Capsicum: Pepper Spray as a Force Alternative,” March 1994. 26 Andy Newman, “Lawmakers Sue N.Y.P.D., Saying They Were Beaten With Bicycles at Protest,” New York Times, 28 June 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/nyregion/zellnor-myrie-diana-richardson-lawsuitnypd-protests.html, accessed 17 July 2021. 27 Katherine Q. Seelye, “Pepper Spray’s Fallout, From Crowd Control to Mocking Images,” New York Times, 22 Nov 2011. 28 National Institute of Justice, “Pepper Spray: Research Insights on Effects and Effectiveness Have Curbed Its Appeal,” 1 May 2019, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/pepper-spray-research-insights-effects-and-effectivenesshave-curbed-its-appeal, accessed 18 July 2021. 29 Ibid. 30 From death or serious bodily injury. From Axon, “How Safe are TASER Weapons?”. 28 July 2021. https://global.axon.com/how-safe-are-taser-weapons. Page cites M.W. Kroll, J.D. Ho (eds.), TASER 1 Conducted Electrical Weapons: Physiology, Pathology, and Law, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-85475-5_24, 2009. 31 Frank V. Ferdik, Robert J. Kaminski, Mikaela D. Cooney, Eric L. Sevigny, “The Influence of Agency Policies on Conducted Energy Device Use and Police Use of Lethal Force,” Police Quarterly 17 (No. 4 2014): 328–358. 32 Matt Stroud, Thin Blue Lie: The Failure Of High-Tech Policing (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019); and Michael Martin and Amanda Morris, “Police Are Investing In New Technology. ‘Thin Blue Lie’ Asks, ‘Does It Work?’” National Public Radio, 7 April 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/04/07/706161006/ police-are-investing-in-new-technology-thin-blue-lie-asks-does-it-work, accessed 12 July 2021. 33 TASER International, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K. Year ended December 31, 2009 https://www. sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1069183/000095012310024799/c97679e10vk.htm accessed 28 July 2021. 34 Michael D. White and Justin Ready, “The TASER as a Less Lethal Force Alternative: Findings on Use and Effectiveness in a Large Metropolitan Police Agency,” Police Quarterly 10 (June 2007): 170–91. 35 Bocar Ba and Jeffrey Grogger, “The Introduction Of Tasers And Police Use Of Force: Evidence From The Chicago Police Department,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper w24202 (January 2018), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w24202, accessed 18 July 2021; and Eugene A. Paoline, William Terrill, and Jason R. Ingram, “Police Use of Force and Officer Injuries: Comparing Conducted Energy Devices (CEDs) to Hands- and Weapon-Based Tactics,” Police Quarterly 15 (June 2012): 115–36.

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Police Brutality and the Militarization of Policing 36 Ferdik, Kaminski, Cooney, Sevigny, “The Influence of Agency Policies on Conducted Energy Device Use and Police Use of Lethal Force”; and Robert J. Kaminski, “Research on conducted energy devices: Findings, methods, and a possible alternative, see 31 ” Criminology and Public Policy 8 (No. 4 2009): 903–913. 37 Jo Ciavaglia, Josh Salman, and Katie Wedell, “Lethal Force? Tasers Are Meant To Save Lives, Yet Hundreds Die After Their Use By Police,” USA Today, 23 April 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/indepth/news/investigations/2021/04/23/police-use-tasers-ends-hundreds-deaths-like-daunte-wright/ 7221153002/, accessed 15 July 2021. 38 Thomas Brewster, “Taser Founder And CEO Says Police Won’t Need Guns In Ten Years,” Forbes, 14 April 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/04/14/mistaking-a-taser-for-a-gun-20-billion-nonlethal-weapons-giant-axon-thinks-it-can-replace-the-police-pistol-for-good/?sh=4800a9cf1b78, accessed 18 July 2021. 39 Al Baker, “The Flash Bangs are Stilled,” New York Times, 4 February 2021, https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes. com/2010/02/04/the-flash-bangs-are-stilled/, accessed 18 July 2021. 40 Julia Angwin and Abbie Nehring, “Hotter than Lava,” ProPublica, 12 January 2015, https://www. propublica.org/article/flashbangs, accessed 18 July 2021. 41 Ibid.

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SECTION 10

Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues in Police Brutality

35 TO END POLICE BRUTALITY, WE MUST END THE POLICE Meghan G. McDowell

Introduction In April of 2021, the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin began. Chauvin was convicted on three charges, including second- and third-degree murder in the death of George Floyd, a Black man whose life was brutally extinguished by Chauvin for all the world to see. The uprising that followed Floyd’s death was sustained, militant, and international. There were protests in all 50 US states and a new cadre of radicalized people joined the ongoing and rejuvenated abolitionist struggle. The state of Minnesota deployed all the tools of domestic warfare at their disposal, including the National Guard, to regain control and reconstitute order. Many see the conviction of Chauvin, a first in the state of Minnesota, as integral to the state’s efforts to recuperate legitimacy. Indeed, the trial of Chauvin was heralded by some as evidence that “the system works” and killer cops can be prosecuted for their crimes. Just three weeks into the trial, police in a suburb of Minneapolis shot and killed a 20-year-old Black father, Duante Wright, following a traffic stop that was reportedly initiated because Wright had “multiple” air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.1 Minneapolis residents displayed their characteristic fearlessness, taking to the streets by the hundreds. The offending cop, Kim Forrester, notable only for being a White woman, was promptly arrested in an effort to quell further unrest. Wright’s death at the hands of a White cop is a recurring nightmare; what has become a quotidian dialectic of racially gendered premature death, followed by resistance, repression, and reform. The twin cities metropolitan area encompassing St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the surrounding suburbs have become the epicenter for struggles over the future of police and therefore, the racial capitalist state form in this country. The death of George Floyd was one spark among many that fueled the movement for Black lives. In cities and states that saw the most sustained and rebellious protests, state actors moved more quickly to implement what is now a familiar litany of reforms to policing. These reforms require resources, personnel, and equipment. Put differently, reforms use the social wage to invest in policing, the very same apparatus that is responsible for causing death and harm in the first place. Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this response, is former President Obama’s task force on twenty-first-century policing. The task force, comprised of academics, policymakers, and law enforcement personnel, proposed 59 reforms to policing that emphasize procedural fairness, communityoriented policing, and cultural shifts within departments.2 Since the report was published in 2015,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-46

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roughly 40% of the country’s largest police departments have adopted some of the recommendations, particularly use-of-force policies, body-worn cameras, and adjustments to officer training.3 To fund these reforms, state and local government spending on police has ballooned from 42 billion in 1977 to over 115 billion in 2017.4 Law enforcement typically monopolizes anywhere from twenty to forty-five percent of local budgets, in addition to the sizeable funding police departments receive from the federal government.5 As a case in point, President Biden unveiled his plan for criminal justice reform that includes a 300 million dollar federal investment in local community-oriented policing programs to hire more diverse officers, and to train officers “to develop less adversarial relationships with communities.”6 The state’s effort to use policing to save policing, reveals itself as farce at every turn. Reforms and convictions are tools of pacification, not sincere strategies to address egregious harms perpetrated by law enforcement officers. Police across the country continue to kill Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor people at astonishing rates. According to a registry of police killings compiled by the Washington Post, since the death of Michael Brown in 2014, police have killed roughly 1000 people every year.7 This explains why analyses of policing in the so-called United States often begin with a re-narrativization of violence: the police have killed a young Black person; the police have attacked water defenders; the police have harassed and ticketed queer youth on the streets; the police have forcibly evicted a family from their home. We have come to call these acts “police brutality” in an effort to denote an exception to the otherwise benevolent work of law enforcement. In this chapter, I take aim at this exception, joining a radical chorus that claims otherwise. “We are not against police brutality” the chorus sings, “We are against the police!” I proceed by laying out the arguments for police abolition as the only appropriate response to policing. I begin by engaging with historical, empirical, and theoretical literature to answer two primary questions: What is police power? And, relatedly, what are the police for? The second half of this chapter examines the praxis of police abolition in the contemporary moment. How do we build a world where police power is unthinkable? What would a world without police power look like?

To constitute the Social Order: Theorizing Police Power Why do some people believe law enforcement can be reformed, while others seek to abolish police power altogether? Reformists see a “broken system” and abolitionists see a system working exactly as it was designed. How do police abolitionists theorize and historicize the origins of police power and apply this analysis to better understand contemporary policing in the United States? Is the problem with individual officers or even a rotten precinct? Or is the problem with police power writ large? In this section, I synthesize the primary historical and theoretical arguments police abolitionists make to support our claim that policing in all its forms must be eliminated. To address questions about the historical origin of police power, critical theorists direct us to the history of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism and policing coevolve, as police are necessary to manage the violence and inequality endemic to capitalist production. Police scholar Mark Neocleous argues that police power is central “to all regimes of capital.”8 Following Marx’s description of the history of capitalism being “written in blood,” Neocleous frames our understanding of the relations of capital as “nothing less than a social war” between classes.9 The constitution and organization of the racial capitalist state required police power to destroy the commons and its associated modes of sociality that were “either useless or antithetical to accumulation.”10 In the United States, the development of police power in northern and southern cities coincided with the economic engines of industrial and agricultural production. Striking workers and “dangerous classes” in the north were disciplined by the police officer’s baton and in the south, slave patrols were an early form of police power. Tasked explicitly with controlling the movement of slaves and preventing insurrection, the development of “racially focused law enforcement groups,” 474

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was a uniquely “American innovation.”11 Ethnic Studies scholar Jodi Melamed suggests that racial capitalism is a technology of anti-relationality, partitioning human life into hierarchies of value, thus producing hyper-life and premature death in the service of capitalist accumulation. “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism,” writes the preeminent Black studies scholar Cedric Robinson, “was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”12 Building on this scholarship, contemporary analyses of police power reveal the persistent “extra penological function” of law enforcement violence enacted upon Black bodies in particular, and non-normative bodies in general.13 For example, Ben Brucato explains that the routine surveillance, harassment, and physical violence carried out by law enforcement officers patrolling communities of color, operates, in part, symbolically to make the identity of the non-white criminal “functional, reliable, and durable.”14 Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton argue that violence of police power acts to reproduce “the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world,” thereby creating a distinction “between those whose human being is put permanently in question and for those for whom it goes without saying.”15 This research suggests that anti-Black violence is a constitutive feature of, rather than a departure from, the US policing project. In sum, the northern and southern forms of police power were and are critical to the reproduction and maintenance of white supremacist and capitalist relations of power in the United States.16 How do police reformists account for this history? Surely the official mandate of law enforcement—to protect and serve—must be reread in light of these incisive theoretical and historical analyses. State protection has never been universally available and claims that police power operates in the service of some greater good obscures the fact that law enforcement, prisons, and courts are often sites of violence, rather than sources of remediation and justice.17 More rules, better training, diverse officers, new technology, and stronger community engagement will not stop police from harming people. The Minneapolis police force was considered a leading example, adopting many of the reforms suggested by President Obama’s task force on twenty-first-century policing. Yet, George Floyd still lost his life. Mariame Kaba argues, “the surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police.”18 In the next section we examine people who are organizing to do just that.

Police Abolition Praxis Movements to abolish police are part of a long freedom struggle to resist the US nation-state project. Led by the insurgent activities of enslaved peoples, the nineteenth-century Abolitionist Movement sought to eliminate slavery and constitute what W.E.B. Du Bois called an “abolition-democracy.” The Abolitionist Movement was successful to a point. Chattel slavery was formally abolished through legal reform in 1865. However, Du Bois’s vision of abolition-democracy—the creation of new democratic institutions free from relations of domination—never came to be, as white terrorist formations organized alongside state actors to secure a cross-class alliance that ensured a democratic republic for white families and tyranny for everyone else.19 The contemporary abolitionist movement was reinvigorated by the formation of Critical Resistance in 1997. Critical Resistance is a national organization that fights for prison industrial complex abolition, described as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”20 In this chapter, I adopt a broader definition of abolition offered by Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a co-founder of Critical Resistance and a political geographer: “Abolition is a plot against racial capitalism, which is all capitalism, not just some of it. It is a plot in a narrative sense. It is a plot in which the arc of change is always going resolutely 475

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toward freedom. It is a plot in a geographic sense. It is a plot in which we aim to make all space, not just some space, free in two senses. Free in the sense that it cannot be alienated, which is to say sold, by anybody to anybody. And free in the sense of non-exclusive, there is no boundary or border that would keep somebody in or keep somebody out. That is abolition, that’s the plot, that’s my plot. It is an internationalist impulse that is part of what many of us call the black radical tradition, which is open for all.”21 Gilmore’s definition underscores the centrality of anti-capitalist ethics and the importance of land, interdependence, and internationalism to the project of abolition. The very things that racial capitalism seeks to destroy are the foundation for the world abolitionists are fighting to build: a return to the commons, kinship, solidarity, the radical imagination, and our collective, agential power. Making police a central focus of abolitionist organizing is a more recent phenomenon. This is not to say police power has been an afterthought, but rather, that the contemporary movement has responded to material conditions on the ground, where the relentlessness of police killings has been more visible through the use of live streaming and cellphone recordings. The objective of police abolition is to eliminate police power; however, there is no “one size fits all” approach to abolishing the police. For example, the slogan, “disarm, divest, and disempower the police” reflects the different, but related strategies adopted by organizers across the country to abolish policing. In the rest of this section, I will discuss three approaches to police abolition: (1) campaigns to defund the police; (2) efforts to establish community control over the police; and (3) experiments in disempowering the police.

The Battle for the Social Wage: Campaigns to Defund the Police Following the George Floyd rebellions in 2020, campaigns to “defund the police” were initiated across the country. At their core, these campaigns are battles over the social wage, “that amount of deferred wages that goes toward the creation of various publicly available goods, such as public transportation, health services, schools, parks, postal delivery, safety, and so forth.”22 The social wage, while universal in theory, has always been distributed unevenly in practice, supporting white people, particularly men, who “thrived on the benefits from the accumulated deferred wages of all people.”23 Given that exploitation and inequality are endemic to racial capitalism, it is perhaps not surprising that law enforcement institutions have always received a lion’s share of the general fund—revenue generated by property, income, and sales taxes. A study conducted by the Justice Policy Institute estimates that, on average, police departments receive one-third of the general fund allocation in most cities, despite the fact that increased spending on law enforcement has no measurable impact on public safety.24 Defund campaigns recognize the cruel irony here. For the North Carolina based collective Durham Beyond Policing, enough is enough: “[E]ssentially, Black and Brown taxpayers fund our own harassment, degradation, and deaths. We are here to say no! Not on our watch. Not on our dime.”25 Thus, the premise of defund campaigns is relatively simple: reallocate the money from the general fund that is spent on policing and instead, invest it in life-giving community services. Defund campaigns often utilize direct action and popular education, particularly around civics and budgeting processes, to generate support for a world where police power is obsolete. The battle is as much ideological as it is material, fighting against the common sense idea that police power is legitimate, immutable, and a noble profession. To combat this position, defund organizers have created a range of open-source, popular education tools. For example, “Police Abolition 101: Messages When Facing Doubts,” is a collaborative zine based on material from three abolitionist organizations: MPD 150, Interrupting Criminalization, and Project NIA. The zine responds directly to frequently asked questions, such as “Without the police who will protect us?” and “Why not fund the police and these alternatives? Why is it an either/or?” The zine also 476

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engages the Socratic method to introduce readers to abolition and to offer a counter-hegemonic vision of safety and justice.26 Defund collectives also host an array of public forums, inviting people to participate in conversations about policing and community safety, and offering “Budget 101” workshops to learn about how local budgeting processes work. These popular education strategies attempt to demystify police work by breaking down how police spend their time (spoiler alert: it is not predominantly spent solving violent crime)27; analyzing 911 calls to determine what needs the community has and how to develop non-police responses to those needs; and discussing the historical, political, and economic context of police power in the United States. Examining the budget and budgeting processes reveal the magnitude of investment in policing and the relative abandonment of social services like public health, education, housing, and jobs programs that could provide people with much-needed resources and support. These efforts often result in the development of a “People’s Budget,” a counter-proposal that details how cities can reallocate resources typically spent on policing. For example, in Durham, North Carolina where I reside, we learned through a series of “budget deep dives” facilitated by Durham Beyond Policing, that funding for mental health services has remained stagnant for years, while funding for law enforcement during the same time period has steadily risen. This led to the development of a “10 to Transform” campaign where we advocated for a ten percent reduction in the Sheriff’s budget, with the money then reallocated to mental health services that do not rely on policing. Several of these campaigns have had measured success. According to the Community Resource Hub, since May of 2020, defund campaigns in cities across the United States have “secured divestment of over $840 million dollars from police departments and secured investments of over $160 million dollars in communities.” In addition to divestment and reallocation, defund campaigns have also successfully kicked police officers out of public schools in over 25 cities, freeing up $34 million dollars to be redirected toward student support services.28 Cities like Austin and Oakland have made significant reductions in police budgets. In Austin, the city council voted to decrease the police budget by $150 million dollars. This figure was reached by reducing the total amount allocated from the general fund, but also through canceling police training, reducing overtime spending, and making more modest investments in hiring.29 The city will use some of this money to invest in supportive housing with wraparound services for people experiencing homelessness.30 The Oakland city council voted in favor of a budget that redirects eighteen million dollars of proposed police spending to violence prevention programs that do not rely on law enforcement. Though just a fraction of Oakland’s $3.8 billion dollar budget, the redirected funds reflect six years of coalitional organizing, led by the Anti-Police Terror Project (APTP). The city will also invest four million dollars in Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland, a program championed by APTP to send trained personnel to respond to mental and behavioral health calls instead of cops.31 Not surprisingly, state actors are responding to the success of defund campaigns with a series of repressive measures intended to extinguish the movement. John Pfaff, a noted criminal justice scholar who has been tracking these efforts, argues that “state pre-emption” which he describes as a “technocratic, legalistic” process poses one of the most significant threats to the defund movement. Preemption allows state governments to overturn local laws at their discretion. In states with conservative governors at the helm, pre-emption has been deployed to block progressive policies enacted in cities, like living wage ordinances, anti-discrimination rules, and tougher COVID-19 restrictions. Pfaff estimates that at least 10 states have already passed or are advancing legislation to punish cities who defund the police, including withdrawing state aid altogether. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the most aggressive legislation to date: any cut to police budgets can be appealed to the Governor’s Office, who can then restore funding; a process that is not subject to appeal.32 President Biden and former President Obama, both democrats, have also spoken out against defunding the police, suggesting that the movement is “counterproductive” to progress on criminal justice reform.33 477

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Efforts to defund the police join a history of international campaigns that use divestment to put pressure on corporations, nations, and local governments to end oppressive regimes like Apartheid in South Africa and ethnic cleansing in Israel against the Palestinian people. Using the tools of popular education, campaign organizing, and protest, the defund movement has revitalized the struggle over the social wage and cultivated important practices of participatory democracy that can enrich the communal life of our cities. The strategy is not invulnerable, because it still works within, not outside of, racial capitalism, the possibility for co-optation, neutralization, and reformism remains strong. The organizer Nnennaya Amuchie sums up the promise and caution of the defund movement well, writing, “As an abolitionist, I do not see defunding the police as a ∗pathway∗ to abolition. Abolition would necessitate the complete destruction of the United States. However, defunding the police is a popular demand that can help build the power, infrastructure, resources, and knowledge to open up abolition possibilities.”34

‘Radical Practicality’: Community Control of the Police Establishing community control over the police is another, albeit contested, strategy organizers are proposing to abolish law enforcement. Community control over the police is ostensibly underwritten by principles of self-determination, de-centralization, and direct democracy, turning the labor of police work—hiring, firing, training, policies, objectives, discipline, and so forth—over to an elected council of community members. The idea of “community control” was first outlined by the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1969 during the United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland, California. The conference brought together over 5,000 organizers from across the country to build a national coalition to combat state violence and what many saw as incipient fascism in the United States. On the final day of the conference, BPP members unveiled a new strategy to address police violence: “[Panthers] proposed amending city charters to establish autonomous community based police departments for every city which would be accountable to local neighborhood police control councils comprised of 15 elected community members. They launched the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), a multiracial nationwide network, to organize for community control of the police.”35 Less than a year later, in April of 1970, there were at least 18 chapters of the NCCF across the country working to establish community control over the police. The Berkeley NCCF came the closest, receiving enough signatures on a widely circulated petition to put the issue to the voters in the next local election cycle. Known as “Proposition 1” if passed it “would give control of the police to community elected neighborhood councils so that those whom the police should serve will be able to set police policy and standards of conduct.”36 The amendment to the city charter would do the following: (1) set up three autonomous police departments for the three existing communities in Berkeley; (2) create elected neighborhood councils which will “control the police departments on instructions from the people. All officials will be subject to recall at any time”; and (3) require that all police live in the communities where they work.37 Though the proposition was voted down by residents, the Berkeley proposal and the Panther’s vision of community control over the police continue to resonate today. The Pan African Community Action (PACA) group and the revived National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression have taken up the “unfinished project” of establishing community control over the police. The current proposal developed by PACA and adopted by the NAARPR, is faithful to the Berkeley model, envisioning “the creation of new police departments, on the district level, that is entirely distinct from the existing police” and controlled by a rotating group of community members, selected by sortition (similar to how a jury pool is determined), and supported by a professional staff. Each district would 478

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have its own “civilian control board.” In a recently published article, PACA offers a concise summary of their position: What we mean is clear: the budget and responsibilities that are now granted to police departments should be surrendered to communities. This would allow us to restructure around public safety as we define it, not as the colonial, capitalist power structures do. We need control over the resources: not ‘civilian oversight’ or ‘community policing’ public relations strategies, which keep control in the hands of the current structure. We believe this goal should be achieved by organizing communities rather than by petition to city councils or mayors, and so we aim to use the ballot initiative process to advance this.38 Advocates of this model emphasize the importance of self-determination, political education, and of shifting power into the hands of oppressed communities: “We need community control over the police to abolish the police,” argues PACA member and political theorist Olufemi O. Taiwo, “because the police state won’t dismantle itself.”39 Taiwo is responding to critics, who argue that community control is, at best, misguided praxis, and at worst, fundamentally antithetical to abolition (Ervin, Morales, Richardson, & Stegall, 2021).40 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully unpack this political disagreement, what follows is a brief summary of the critique of community control. The primary arguments leveraged at this movement are as follows: conceptually, the idea of community control might have made sense in the 1960s and early 1970s, but the development of modern policing, which is infinitely more complex in our era of “surveillance capitalism,” paired with material and social changes in US society means the idea is no longer logistically feasible, if it ever was. Moreover, critics argue, “it is especially vulnerable to co-optation; it seeks to replace the transformative vision of the abolition movement with a bureaucratic “solution” that would turn community leaders into police administrators; it assumes that community boards will support a progressive agenda; and it does not address the underlying causes of crisis, violence, and deprivation in our communities.” PACA and its partner organizations, maintain that community control is aligned with, not counter to, abolition. Community control, PACA (2021) explains, “is not an alternative to abolition. Abolition requires community control: the power to implement or enact the abolishment of anything …” Seattle is held up as an example to illustrate that defund campaigns and efforts to establish community control over the police can co-exist. In response to persistent and widespread public pressure, the Seattle city council divested $12 million dollars from the police budget and reallocated those funds to a participatory budgeting process that will enable Seattle residents to determine how the money is spent.41 The Seattle model gives residents authority over the budget, an important principle for advocates of community control. Advocates use the language of “radical practicality” to describe their efforts to abolish the police. One could also think of it as a form of pragmatic incrementalism, where abolition does not happen overnight, but rather through the steady transfer of power away from state agencies and into the hands of residents. Whether this transfer of power results in abolition or merely “tweaks Armageddon,” to borrow a phrase from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, remains an open question.

Disempower the Police: Building the New World in the Shell of the Old A third strategy adopted by people organizing to abolish the police is disempowerment. This strategy employs a diverse range of tactics that aim to corrode police power and to establish a new common sense, where safety and harm reduction have nothing to do with policing and everything to do with communal care, strong relationships, and an abundance of resources.42 Disempowering the police is long-term work that requires imagination. Police abolition, argues the organizer Mariame Kaba, “is one of the most important sites of practicing imagination, because you need to think about 479

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creative ways to resolve problems.” When you stop calling the police, Kaba continues, “then you have to constantly be thinking about, what are people’s wants? What are people’s needs? What can actually be offered?”43 As Kaba makes clear, disempowerment strives to create a world where the function of policing itself is rendered obsolete, in part, through the development of community-organized infrastructure that can respond to people’s basic needs and address harm without relying on the state. In this section, I discuss two examples of efforts to disempower the police: (1) establishing “police-free” zones; and (2) practicing transformative justice.

Police-Free Zones In Chicago, the police department runs a secret interrogation program where more than 7,000 Chicago residents have been “disappeared”—held in a nondescript warehouse in the city.44 Known as “Homan Square” the site is used to detain, intimidate, torture, and unlawfully question Chicago’s Black and Brown residents. In the summer of 2016, organizers came together for 41 days to occupy a scraggly patch of land adjacent to the black site, renaming it “Freedom Square.” Explicitly abolitionist in its orientation, Freedom Square was open to all and offered: an outdoor kitchen, tents to sleep in, a library, play areas, political education, a free store, a first aid tent, and an art-making space. These spaces represent the seven resource areas organizers believe the city of Chicago should invest in instead of police: restorative justice, education, mental health, employment, fair housing, arts, and nutrition. At the conclusion of their occupation, organizers with the Let Us Breathe Collective released a statement that I quote here at length: “Freedom Square accomplished more beautiful things in each of its 41 days than we can name: we built relationships with survivors of Homan Square torture, we fed 200–300 people a day, we taught kids pottery and about Assata Shakur, we chanted, we marched, we roasted marshmallows, and in every moment, we stood for love, no matter how violent or chaotic things became … The Freedom Square occupation was a laboratory for the politics of abolition. We were building what we’re in favor of, not protesting what we’re opposed to. Organizers had the opportunity to co-create a new society within the shell of the old, a world where it was easier for people to share their gifts without intimidation. It was a project of liberation and most of the structures that society has taught us are not liberating. The occupation did not end because we ran out of energy or we were overwhelmed by the logistics of the site. It ended because it illustrated the tension between the world as it is and the world as we imagine it to be (emphasis added).”45 Freedom Square became a blueprint for abolitionists interested in building dual power and exercising their radical imagination. These experiments in abolition are prefigurative, people practice non-carceral modes of sociality in the present, however fleeting. Following the death of George Floyd, freedom squares popped up across the country, most notably in Minneapolis and Seattle. People reclaimed public spaces, declaring them “cop free” and “autonomous zones.” Mirroring the services offered in Chicago, Seattle’s autonomous zone offered free food, political education workshops, a community garden, and a free medical station. “The goal of this zone,” one participant explained, “is to set an example for the world, that we do not need the current police system to maintain order.”46 Making law enforcement obsolete requires the creation of a sustainable infrastructure in this moment that can respond to harm when it occurs and work to reduce instances of harm overall. As I’ve written elsewhere, by taking over basic state functions, like community health care and violence prevention, cop-free zones create dual power situations, however fleeting, wherein neighborhoods self-organize within and against the system, much like the Black Panther Party’s community self-determination programs. Self-organization reduces our reliance on the police and, more significantly, “presents autonomous locations where new forms of 480

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sociality emerge.”47 The revival of community self-defense practices, the implementation of mutual aid projects, and the emphasis on prefiguration are crucial methods in the struggle to disempower police.

Transformative Justice Transformative justice is a political orientation and an approach for addressing violence, harm, and abuse.48 Rather than individualize acts of violence, harm, and abuse, TJ focuses on a structural analysis that seeks to identify root causes in an effort to “respond to violence in ways that not only address the current incident of violence, but also help to transform the conditions that allowed for it to happen.”49 Developing our collective capacity to address harm, violence, and abuse without relying on the state or punishment is not easy. Several collectives across the country have been laboring for years to create and refine community accountability processes to guide us in this work. Generation FIVE is a collective that aims to end childhood sexual abuse in five generations and is considered a leader in the field of transformative justice. Through their work, Generation FIVE has developed four core principles of TJ (1) safety, healing, and agency for survivors; (2) accountability and transformation for people who abuse and do harm; (3) community action, healing, and accountability; and (4) transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence. The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) developed the concept of “pods” to help operationalize how we can practice transformative justice in our everyday lives. Who are the people in your life that you would call on for support if you were addressing abuse, harm, or violence, either as a survivor and/or as a perpetrator? The people that you would call on in these instances comprise your pod. As BATJC founding member Mia Mingus explains, “people who experience violence, harm and abuse turn to their intimate networks before they turn to external state or social services. Most people don’t call the police or seek counseling or even call anonymous hotlines. If they tell anyone at all, they turn to a trusted friend, family member, neighbor or coworker. We wanted a way to name those currently in your life that you would rely on (or are relying on) to respond to violence, harm and abuse.”50 Pods also establish the infrastructure necessary for disengaging with the police. Groups like INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence and the Movement for Black Lives have popularized the practice of not calling the cops when you witness or experience harm. There are numerous resources available that offer “alternatives to the police” or to calling 911.51 Transformative justice is integral to our collective efforts to excise the cop in our hearts and our heads and to relearn how to address harm, abuse, and violence as it manifests in our daily lives. In this section, I have reviewed three strategies—defund campaigns, community control over the police, and disempowerment—that people are using to achieve a world free from police power. While these approaches are open to contestation, political disagreement, and state repression, they share a commitment to changing the common sense around safety and justice; dislodging what I have described elsewhere as “carceral safety”—the use of state-organized banishment, mass criminalization, and law enforcement as the only legitimate responses to harm, abuse, and violence.52 “To transform this mindset,” Mariame Kaba argues, “we have to actually transform our relationships to each other enough so that we can see that we can keep each other safe. You cannot have safety without strong, empathetic relationships with others.”53 At its core then, abolishing the police is about changing how we respond to harm, replacing punishment and criminalization with healing, transformative justice, and new, insurgent understandings of safety.54

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the only way to end police brutality is to abolish policing in all its forms. As the historical record makes clear, in a capitalist society, the institution of law enforcement is charged with managing the forms of inequality endemic to a mode of production organized 481

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around perpetual dispossession, extraction, and expropriation. “These antinomies of accumulation,” Jodi Melamed explains, “require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires.”55 Policing then, is a war against social life. This remains true despite the fact that reformists would have us believe otherwise, suggesting time and again that policing can save policing with more policing. What can be done instead? If policing cannot address our social ills, what can? Abolitionists have a plan, or a plot, to use Gilmore’s conceptualization. This plot—to get everyone free—is indebted to and inspired by the Black Radical Tradition. Cedric Robinson, the great theorist of this tradition, taught us that the most expansive freedom dreams were not those oriented toward assimilation, but rather, those activities and modes of sociality that focus on “reconstituting the community.” A practice of world-building, in other words, that makes “no compromise between liberation and annihilation.”56 Defund campaigns, efforts to establish community control over the police, and battles to disempower law enforcement are experiments in abolition. These experiments, while imperfect and sometimes fleeting, embrace the abolitionist imperative to imagine, to build, and to align our movements with what Dylan Rodriguez describes as “the creative possibilities of insurgency.” The very things that the racial capitalist police state seeks to destroy—loving relationships, interdependence, performances of collectivity—are also the seeds of its own demise. Police reformers have had their turn. The time is ours.

Notes 1 “Daunte Wright killing by police near city sparks unrest,” BBC News, 12 April 2021, https://www.bbc. com/news/world-us-canada-56714346. 2 Julie Hirschfeld-Davis, “Obama Calls for Change in Policing,” New York Times, 3 March 2015, A20. 3 Becky Sullivan, “How Recommendations Of An Obama Task Force Have, And Haven’t Changed US Policing,” National Public Radio, 22 June 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/22/881814431/howrecommendations-of-an-obama-task-force-have-and-havent-changed-u-s-policing. 4 Center for Popular Democracy, Freedom to Thrive: Reimagining Safety & Security in Our Communities (Washington: Center for Popular Democracy, 2017), 3–4, available online at https://www.populardemocracy. org/sites/default/files/Freedom%20To%20Thrive%2C%20Higher%20Res%20Version.pdf. 5 Inarú Meléndez, “Congress Must Divest the Billion Dollar Police Budget and Invest in Education,” Center for Popular Democracy, 10 June 2020, https://www.populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/congressmust-divest-billion-dollar-police-budget-and-invest-public-education, accessed 31 July 2021. 6 “Biden Suggests More Police Funding, No Jail For Drug Offenders,” Reuters, 16 February 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-police-idUSKBN2AH0C6. 7 Sullivan, “How Recommendations.” 8 Mark Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power (New York: Verso, 2021), 10. 9 Ibid., 14. 10 Ibid., 22. 11 Hadden quoted in Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Policing and Police Power in America (Oakland: AK Press, 2015): 75. 12 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26. 13 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities, 9 (No. 2 2003): 225–240; and Christa Noel and Olivia Perlow, 2014, American Police Crimes Against African and Women of Color (Chicago: Women’s All Points Bulletin, 2014), available at https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CERD/ Shared%20Documents/USA/INT_CERD_NGO_USA_17744_E.pdf accessed April 7, 2021. 14 Ben Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy: From Slave Catchers to Petty Sovereigns,” Theoria 141 (No. 61 2014): 48. 15 Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, 2003, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities, 9 (No. 2 2003): 177. 16 Williams, Our Enemies in Blue. 17 Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 18 Mariame Kaba, We Do This Till We Free Us (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2021), 16.

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To End Police Brutality, We Must End the Police 19 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 20 “What is the PIC? What is Abolition?” Critical Resistance, http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-socommon-language/, accessed 26 April 2021. 21 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “What Do We Mean By Abolition?” Interview on Rustbelt Abolition Radio, 1 January 2017, transcript available here: https://rustbeltradio.org/2017/01/01/ep01/, accessed 2 August 2021. 22 Vijay Prashad, “Second Hand Dreams,” Social Analysis 49 (Summer 2005): 191. 23 Ibid., 192. 24 Justice Policy Institute, “Rethinking the Blues: How We Police in the US and at What Cost,” May 2021, https://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/rethinkingtheblues_executive_summary. pdf, accessed June 1, 2021. 25 Durham Beyond Policing quoted in Meghan G. McDowell and Luis A. Fernandez, “‘Disband, Disempower, and Disarm’: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition,” Critical Criminology 26 (July 2018): 385. 26 Police Abolition 101: Messages When Facing Doubts, https://issuu.com/projectnia/docs/policeabolition101_ zine_digital_singlepages Accessed July 28, 2021. 27 Aggregated data from across the country suggests that police departments only spend on average, a mere four percent of their time handling violent crime. Put another way, serious violent crimes made up just one percent of all calls for service. Jeff Asher and Ben Horwitz, “How do the Police Actually Spend Their Time?” New York Times, 19 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-policetime-violent-crime.html. 28 Community Resource Hub, “What is Defund the Police?” Defund the Police, 1 June 2021, defundpolice.org. 29 “Update on a movement: How ’defunding police’ is playing out in Austin, Texas,” National Public Radio, 22 February 2021, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/970107572. 30 Meg O’Connor, “Money cut from police budget to establish supportive housing,” The Appeal, 27 January 2021, https://theappeal.org/austin-cut-police-budget-supportive-housing-homelessness/. 31 “Oakland Just Redirected $18 Million Away From Police - Into Violence Prevention Programs,” KQED, 18 June 2021, https://www.kqed.org/news/11879404/oakland-just-redirected-18-million-away-frompolice-into-violence-prevention-programs?fbclid=IwAR00vTuzydTojzJf6P9MpgCZMDUR5VP9MLO fWq8UkcWpQT3JBw6jBDxz3Cg. 32 John Pfaff, “The Greatest Threat to Defunding the Police? State Pre-Emption,” The Appeal, 29 April 2021, https://theappeal.org/defund-the-police-pre-emption/. 33 Rebecca Shabad, “Obama Suggests Slogans Like ’Defund the Police’ Are Counterproductive,” NBC News, 2 December 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/obama-suggests-slogans-defundpolice-are-counterproductive-n1249717. 34 Nnennaya Amuchie, “Defunding Police: Addressing the Patriarchal Roots of Policing,” Hood Communist, 10 September 2020, https://hoodcommunist.org/2020/09/10/community-control-of-police-v-defundingpolice-addressing-the-patriarchal-roots-of-policing/ 35 Robyn C. Spencer, “The Black Panther Party and Black Anti-Fascism in the United States,” Duke University Press Blog, 27 January 2017, https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/the-blackpanther-party-and-black-anti-fascism-in-the-united-states/. 36 “Community Control of Police No. 1,” Berkeley Monitor, 8 August 1970, available at http://www. itsabouttimebpp.com/Community_Control/pdf/Community_Control_Police_No1.pdf. 37 To review archival materials related to the Black Panther Party and community control over the police, see http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Community_Control/Community_Control_Police_index.html. 38 Pan African Community Action, “The Radical Practicality of Community Control Over Policing: A Reply to Our Critics,” Spectre Journal, 18 February 2021, https://spectrejournal.com/the-radical-practicality-ofcommunity-control-over-policing/. 39 Olufemi O. Taiwo, “Want to Abolish the Police? The First Step Is Putting Them Under Democratic Control,” In These Times, 25 August 2020, https://inthesetimes.com/article/abolition-communitycontrolpolice-abolition-safety-power-whitesupremacy. 40 See Dubian Ade, “The Argument Against Community Control of the Police,” Hood Communist, 6 August 2020, https://hoodcommunist.org/2020/08/06/the-argument-against-community-control-of-the-police/; Amuchie, “Defunding Police”; Carl Williams and Christian Williams, “Community Control Won’t Fix What’s Wrong with Cops,” In These Times, 25 August 2020, https://inthesetimes.com/article/carl-christian-williams-policecontrol-abolition; and Woods Ervin, Ricardo Levins Morales, Zola Richardson, and Jonathan Stegall,

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41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

“The Fantasy of Community Control of the Police,” The Forge, 4 February 2021, https://forgeorganizing.org/ article/fantasy-community-control-police. Manjeet Kaur, “Seattle Cut Its Police Budget. Now the Public Will Decide How to Spend the Money,” The Appeal, 28 January 2021, https://theappeal.org/politicalreport/seattle-participatory-budgeting-defund-police/. Meghan G. McDowell and Luis A. Fernandez, “‘Disband, Disempower, and Disarm’: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition,” Critical Criminology 26 (No. 3 2018): 373–391. Solana Rice and Mariame Kaba, “Practicing Imagination,” The Forge, 20 May 2021, https://forgeorganizing. org/article/practicing-imagination. Spencer Ackerman, “Homan Square,” The Guardian, 2015–2016, investigative series of pieces located at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square, accessed July 25, 2021. To read the full statement, visit: https://www.letusbreathecollective.com/freedomsquare. Ian Morse, “In Seattle a ‘Project’ Toward a Cop-Free World,” Al Jazeera, 12 June 2020, https://www. aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/12/in-seattle-a-project-toward-a-cop-free-world. McDowell and Fernandez, “Disband, Disempower, and Disarm,” 373. Mia Mingus, “Transformative Justice: A Brief Description,” Transform Harm, 30 June 2021, https:// transformharm.org/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/. Ibid. Mia Mingus, “Pods and Pod Mapping,” Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, 15 June 2016, https:// batjc.wordpress.com/resources/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/. For a city-by-city list of alternatives to calling the police, visit: https://dontcallthepolice.com/. The interested reader can also study the Community Resource Hub’s “12 things to do instead of calling the cops.” Available here: https://communityresourcehub.org/resources/12-things-to-do-instead-of-calling-the-cops/. Meghan G. McDowell, “Insurgent Safety: Theorizing Alternatives to State Protection,” Theoretical Criminology 18 (No. 4 2017): 1–17. Kaba, We Do This Till We Free Us, 98. McDowell, “Insurgent Safety.” Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (Spring 2015): 77. Robinson, Black Marxism, 317.

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36 POLICE TERROR AS TOTALITY Reformism and the Ensemble of Counterinsurgency Dylan Rodríguez

Introduction: Counterinsurgency and the Limitations of “Police Brutality” “Police brutality” remains a vastly misused term. While the phrase is constantly invoked when describing and criticizing the actions of law enforcement officers who have presumably abrogated the protocols and policies of the policing state, it is almost always the case that the acts in question are formally or effectively sanctioned by both institutional policy and (criminal) law.1 That is, the police behavior under scrutiny is almost never illegal, or for that matter, altogether abnormal. David Correia and Tyler Wall argue in their indispensable text Police: A Field Guide that “this fact highlights the pitfalls of the term, since what commonly goes by police brutality works to demarcate between acceptable and unacceptable state violence, and therefore simultaneously works to legitimate all sorts of police violence that might not be deemed excessive or illegal.”2 In what follows, i depart from a summary overview of the endemic problems with “police brutality” as a descriptive, conceptual, analytical, legal, and activist lexicon, suggesting that a rigorous understanding of the relationship between police terror, counterinsurgency, and reformism provides far more supple and useful tools for understanding historical conditions of asymmetrical domestic and hemispheric (police) warfare. Stuart Schrader has detailed how an influential bloc of “security experts” worked from the 1950s through the 1970s to transform “the counterinsurgency program of police assistance to Third World countries, into a key instrument of domestic policy.”3 Contemporaneous with this expansion of police power and infrastructure, the early foundations of a counterinsurgent nonprofit industrial complex were under assembly, rapidly developing through the shared, crisis-driven brainstorming of philanthropic foundation executives, liberal community leaders, police administrators, and elected officials across the United States.4 Informed by the historical blurring of global war-making, domestic policing, and reformist reaction, i argue that counterinsurgency is a multidimensional technology of twenty-first-century policing that increasingly deputizes liberal-to-progressive activists, elected officials, academics, students, nonprofit community organizations, social and health care workers, and other nonpolice actors to reproduce and/or re-legitimate the totality of police terror. I pay focused attention to how police terror is reproduced and re-legitimated through the ideological, cultural, and political ensembles of reformism.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-47

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Non-Accounting as Infrastructure of Police Violence The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” project, which has continuously tracked fatal shootings by on-duty police from 2015-present, notes that “despite the unpredictable events that lead to fatal shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people annually.” According to the best available empirical evidence, on-duty police have consistently killed about 1,000 people annually in the United States since 2005. Of these, 121 instances resulted in the arrest of an officer for murder or manslaughter, 95 of those cases reached the juridical conclusion (negotiated pleas or completed trials), and 44 resulted in conviction, though such convictions were frequently for significantly reduced criminal charges (e.g., manslaughter rather than seconddegree murder). Annual arrest rates for such deadly police acts hover between 1% and 2%.5 The rate of fatal on-duty police activity has remained consistent through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, seemingly unaffected by increased media and investigative reporting, massive protest movements, ever-present cell phone cameras, multiform rebellions against police authority, showcase prosecutions of individual police officers, or implementation of police reform agendas.6 Heightened global attention to ongoing, state-sanctioned antiblack police violence in the United States has reminded many researchers, activists, journalists, and survivors of policing that “there is no national system for reporting police misconduct, and state agencies are often reluctant to release any details about investigations into police wrongdoing.”7 Police departments, in generalized conjunction with local-to-federal state bureaucracies, constantly reproduce an infrastructure of nonaccounting that evacuates the archive of empirical, state-organized factual knowledge about the vast casualties resulting from legal, unexceptional, routine state violence. There is a gaping vacuum of official state information regarding fatal police interactions with civilians in particular; an October 2021 article in the flagship medical journal The Lancet frames fatal police violence in the United States as a public health crisis while plainly stating that, Current data on deaths from police violence are constrained by the limitations of government-run vital registration systems. Vital registration data are often considered high quality for cause of death estimation; however, vital registration systems can be biased. Considerable evidence in the USA suggests government vital registration data underreport police violence.”8 Placed in the broader context of contemporary state-proctored information technologies, the absence of accessible, transparent state-reported data on civilian fatalities at the hands of police suggests a comprehensive, systemic, active neglectfulness. While the modern information-gathering apparatus of the US state constantly culls, refines, and periodically weaponizes the personal data of hundreds of millions of people in and beyond its national borders, it has developed no protocols for collecting or coordinating rudimentary factual evidence of homicidal police actions.9 This selective data deprivation is not reducible to bureaucratic dysfunction or a failure of will among state (police) administrators, elected officials, or data bureaucrats. Rather, this evacuation of “official facts” is part of a generally underappreciated—and perhaps undertheorized—technology of modern policing: the protocols and rituals of self-legitimation. The processes of knowledge evacuation, factual non-accountability, and unarchiving are not a failure of state bureaucracy or police accountability but are primary technologies of such legitimation. Inaccessible, uncoordinated, and dysfunctional/unreliable data on police-induced civilian casualties actively produce the epistemic and ideological contours of a political culture that thrives on disappearing, concealing, and/or obscuring the evidence of everyday police terror and its various forms of atrocity. Further, the policing regime prevails in the cultivation of such vast official

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ignorance to reinforce the state’s plausible deniability when presented with accusations and credible suspicions that police power is a direct expression of the historical continuities of gendered antiblackness, colonial genocide, normalized White supremacy and White nationalism, and violent repression of working class, displaced, labor expendable, and criminalized people. Put succinctly, the non-transparency and inaccessibility of state data regarding the fatal casualties of US police violence is constitutive of the regime of police terror, not merely a corollary outcome of after-the-fact institutional complicities. The policing state, in the totality of its operation from local to federal scales, effectively sanctions, empowers, and reproduces police terror by obscuring its casualties behind bureaucratic curtains of confidentiality, systemic dysfunction, planned incompetence, and routinized non-accounting. To confront this capacious, cross-institutional, shared protocol of non-accounting—understood as a primary infrastructure of police terror—is to further demystify the conceptual and explanatory limitations of “police brutality.” While this prevalent critical term tends to minimize the scope of police violence to discrete physical acts, and often frames those acts as exceptions to the (otherwise non-brutal?) rule of policing, police terror is as defined by a regime of state-organized and state-sanctioned archival, empirical, and knowledge control as it is by targeted physical violence and asymmetrical domestic war.

From Police Brutality to Police Terror Perhaps the casualties and extended suffering created by violent policing are better understood as the logical consequences of a historical totality of police terror, an archive of targeted atrocity that is inseparable from the global formation of racial capitalism. Contemporary regimes of policing, in their overlapping antiblack, racial-colonial, queer- and transphobic, ableist, misogynist global iterations, do not generally engage in “police brutality.” The explanatory coherence of “police brutality” generally rests on four intertwined assumptions: 1 2 3

4

That the violent behaviors identified as “police brutality” are, in fact, illegal acts and/or infringements of specific rules of conduct. That those who engage in acts of police brutality are individual police officers or identifiable groups of officers. That the violation, public betrayal, and harm created by police brutality can be grieved, redressed, and/or corrected in part (or at all) through existing judicial and institutional mechanisms (for example, citizens’ complaints, whistleblower grievances, internal investigations, and criminal prosecutions of individual police officers). That it is possible to reduce or even eliminate police brutality through the implementation of reform measures that include bias and diversity trainings, changes in recruitment and hiring practices, increased use of body cameras, and revisions of use of force policies (e.g., eliminating specific chokeholds), among other institutional adjustments.10

The conceptual integrity of police brutality fractures and implodes when accounting for the overwhelming totality of targeted casualties and lived atrocities extracted by lawful, policy-abiding officers who are generally fulfilling the historical mission of police power: reproduction of antiblack chattel and apartheid sociality, domination of workers, punitive control of borders, and protection of private property, especially under terms of antiblack corporate, White supremacist, and colonial ownership.11 Cedric Robinson identifies police terror as a symbiotic historical corollary of “racialism,” a term he uses to describe the foundational and historically persistent relations of warfare and violence enabling the rise of racial capitalism as a social, economic, and symbolic/cultural order. Robinson’s historical analysis of United States racial capitalism in the post-Civil War period includes a concise 487

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theoretical description of the ensemble of historical power within which policing plays an indispensable role: Complemented by the terror of state militias, company police, and security agents, the persistent threats of immigration controls, the swelling ranks of reserve labor, racialism was reattired so that it might once again take its place among the inventory of labor disciplines.12 [emphasis added] Robinson’s choice of conceptual terms in describing the continuities of police power in the postbellum period—“terror” rather than brutality or even violence—references the technological complexity, transgenerational impact, hemispheric singularity, and transatlantic movement of policing as a paradigm of antiblack chattel and carceral power. Terror lingers, moves, leaks, and permeates. It invades, deforms, and damages physiology, genealogy, imagination, and access to futurity while undermining the collective capacity to manifest personhood and shared autonomy (peoplehood). A protracted conceptual, practical, poetic, and theoretical centering of police terror may help to constructively obsolete (or at least demystify) “police brutality” as a primary organizing rhetoric and a keyword for collective mobilizations of critical, insurgent, and abolitionist responses to the asymmetrical domestic warfare waged by the modern US state. Dwelling in the long historical, real-time archive of police terror can induce a dynamic approach to studying and responding to the technologies, rhetorics, and institutional rituals of counterinsurgency that constantly attempt to liquidate radical critiques of and movements against police terror while (simultaneously) empowering, fabricating, and/or materially endorsing ensembles of liberal reformism that reproduce the legitimacy of police power by compartmentalizing its terror as fixable brutality.

Reformism as Counterinsurgency Taken in its totality, the archive of counterinsurgency is an extended, insidious mutation of the Civilizational “American” text. Counterinsurgency attempts to toxify imagination while laying siege to collective practices of radical freedom and autonomy. It is not only formed in the state’s repressive military, policing, and political might, but is also advanced through the narratives, aesthetics, rhetorics, and institutional solicitations of reformism. Various institutional responses to the global uprisings of 2020 openly expropriate the language, thought, and creativity of radical, abolitionist, revolutionary, and anti-colonial movements as part of a cultural ensemble of counterinsurgency. The symbolic, aesthetic, pedagogical, and other cultural productions of counterinsurgency attempt to domesticate the lexicons of revolt in what might be conceptualized as a strategic reformist conquest of ideas and imagination, knowledge and language, pedagogy and aesthetic. Published in 2006, the US Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency field manual (also known as US Army Field Manual 3-24) articulates multiple pedagogical strategies and tactics as primary methods for subduing and pacifying resistance to US militarism and empire. While much of the text familiarizes readers with on-the-ground military protocols for neutralizing insurgencies against US occupation and “integrating civilian and military activities” (Chapter Two), it also weaponizes “The Learning Imperative” as a primary technology of occupation. Counterinsurgency directs Army and Marine Corps officers to Open channels of discussion and debate … to encourage growth of a learning environment in which experience is rapidly shared and lessons adapted for new challenges. The speed with which leaders adapt the organization must outpace insurgents’ efforts to identify and exploit weaknesses or develop countermeasures.13 [emphasis added]

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There is nothing in Counterinsurgency to suggest that its contents are not as applicable to the political geographies of the United States as they are to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mindanao. Addressing the text’s interdisciplinary and multiple methodology approach to pacification, Wendy Brown writes in her 2008 review of Counterinsurgency that its contents exhibit a “relentless confounding of conventional boundaries among military, political, economic, and anthropological spheres of activity, on the one hand, and [an] upending of conventional military structure and protocol, on the other.”14 That this text was downloaded about 1.5 million times within a month of its publication in December 2006 further indicates that it has been perused by a broad audience of readers that extends well beyond Army officers, War on Terror soldiers, or professors and students at West Point (the US Army’s prestigious military academy).15 Counterinsurgency, in other words, seems to be a versatile publication with a remarkably wide circulation that belies its origins and intended usage. Perhaps it is worth considering how this military text both reflects and informs a geography of war that encompasses the reformist responses to an early twenty-first-century crisis of police legitimacy. In resonance with Brown’s critical review, I would situate Field Manual 3–24 as part of an extended statecraft of counterinsurgent domestic warfare in continuity with the long legacies of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO).16 Counterinsurgency departs from COINTELPRO, however, by adopting a more expansive approach to asymmetrical warfare and (domestic) pacification. While retaining the broad, urgent objective of slowing and neutralizing militant opposition to and revolt against US police/colonial power, the field manual foregrounds interdisciplinary methods of solicitation, selective empowerment, and reform, including piecemeal changes to economic, governmental, and schooling infrastructures. Counterinsurgent reformism, in this instance, is a primary composite of an ensemble of legitimation: notably, the text introduces a discrete discussion of this matter with the boldfaced heading “Legitimacy Is the Main Objective.”17 The broad directive for fulfilling the pacification mandate indicates an aspiration toward a twisted version of Gramscian hegemony: “counterinsurgents achieve [pacification] by the balanced application of both military and nonmilitary means.”18 Accounting for the fact that hegemonic consent is not possible under conditions of conquest, occupation, or displacement, the strategic goal of legitimacy—a term that must be distinguished from both hegemony and consent—relies on reformism as a technology of policing. To clarify, i am not merely thinking of reforms to the police in this instance, but am conceptualizing the full cultural, political, aesthetic, and infrastructural apparatus of reformism as a marshaling of police power that includes and exceeds the discrete institution of the police. Alongside the immediately recognizable counterinsurgency protocols of infiltration, assassination, and blunt military/police force, Field Manual 3-24 outlines a strategy of reformist triage that ostensibly addresses the material conditions underlying occupied/policed peoples’ revolts: [K]illing insurgents—while necessary, especially with respect to extremists—by itself cannot defeat an insurgency. Gaining and retaining the initiative requires counterinsurgents to address the insurgency’s causes through stability operations as well. This initially involves securing and controlling the local populace and providing for essential services. As security improves, military resources contribute to supporting government reforms and reconstruction projects.19 This passage extends a strategic narrative that draws lessons from the US state’s protracted, multifront response to Black radical, liberation, and revolutionary movements during the mid-to-late twentieth century. As Robert Allen details in the classic study Black Awakening in Capitalist America, a coalescence of philanthropic foundation executives, elected politicians, police officials, academics, opportunistic community-based liberal reformers, and other counterinsurgent actors played a central 489

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rather than corollary role in institutionalizing the suppression of domestic Black radicals and revolutionaries during the late-1960s and 1970s. Describing an opening scene in this period of reformist counterinsurgency, Allen shows how Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy averred his organization’s involvement in the orchestration of a national agenda that in contemporary terms might be described as a philanthropic “social justice” commitment. Speaking at the annual banquet of the National Urban League in 1966, Bundy revealed to banquet attendees that the Ford Foundation, the biggest foundation in the country, had decided to help in the task of achieving “full domestic equality for all American Negroes.” This announcement came as no immediate surprise to Bundy’s hearers. For some time the foundation had been involved in efforts to upgrade [B]lack higher education, and it had given money to Urban League projects in the field of housing … . What the Urban League delegates and the American public did not know was that the gigantic Ford Foundation, which had already fashioned for itself a vanguard role in the neocolonial penetration of the Third World, was on the eve of attempting a similar penetration of the [B]lack militant movement.20 Here it is worth re-emphasizing that the rise of such domestic philanthropic initiatives cannot be disentangled from the broader strategic and tactical network of state-organized and state-condoned political/cultural repression that targeted organizations like the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, Robert and Mabel Williams’ chapter of the NAACP in North Carolina, the post-1964 iteration of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other Black radical groups during this period.21 In fact, this ensemble of pacification is a relatively durable one that is overtly endorsed by Counterinsurgency: [C]ounterinsurgents typically have to adopt different approaches to address each element of the insurgency. For example, auxiliaries might be co-opted by economic or political reforms, while fanatic combatants will most likely have to be killed or captured.22 If ongoing and emerging movements in the first quarter of the twenty-first century are refusing the normalization and long perpetuity of police violence, terror, and gendered antiblack killings, then the US Army’s Field Manual would properly characterize them as an “insurgency,” and its most militantly committed participants as domestic “insurgents.” The US state’s mobilization to create a counterinsurgent “learning environment” has and will continue to rely on a combination of state and extra-state strategies to circulate waves of police reform messaging through the efforts of elected officials, philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations, schooling, and educational institutions, corporations, industrialized professional sports, and religious leaders, among others. Echoing Geo Maher’s assertion that “police reform has been largely successful in its own task: to legitimize the police,” Schrader suggests that such reform has historically “aimed to bolster the legitimacy of the institution and rehearse new modes of regulating and producing social order.”23 A stream of counterinsurgency thus works through both “reform” and “reformism,” terms that are often conflated but which require clear practical and conceptual differentiation. For the sake of clarity, it is helpful to conceptualize “reform” as a logic of institutional maneuvering rather than a discrete agenda or outcome. It represents an approach to social change that concedes the existence of prevailing social, economic, political, and/or legal systems, including those organized through the power of antiblack, racial capitalist, colonial, apartheid, and other violently

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oppressive (anti-)social forms. Agitating for reform within such systems entails identification and adjustment of relatively isolated aspects of their operation, often for the announced purpose of increasing (perceptions of) access and equity in their administration and everyday functioning: think voting rights reforms, police training and hiring reforms, and criminal justice policy reforms (e.g., the emblematic Obama era reform of sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine possession).24 In many cases, the purpose of a given reform is to protect systems against collapse, whether caused by internal contradiction and dysfunction or external forces of opposition. “Reformism,” on the other hand, is a militant ideological and political position that is often sanctioned by a combination of state power and the institutions that constitute gendered racial capitalism, including those encompassed in the formation of the nonprofit industrial complex that Allen’s 1969 study so astutely anticipated at the time of its publication. Reformism militantly stakes the claim that the cultural and political ensemble—including the epistemological structure—of an existing order ought to be protected, legitimated, and sustained rather than transformed, abolished, or creatively disrupted. As a defense of the existing order, the reformist position may passively and/or actively criminalize and endanger those people, communities, and movements that seek fundamental—that is, radical, abolitionist, anti-colonialist, or revolutionary—change to an oppressive arrangement. As Erica Edwards has demonstrated, reformism often pivots on gendered racial performances of (Black) respectability, which often induce or converge with cultural logics of commodification and racial fetish as well as entrepreneurial (neoliberal brand building) opportunism.25 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, reformism attempts to delimit the imaginative horizon of political possibility to that which is seen as achievable within the protocols and power relations of existing institutional forms. Under the conditions of antiblack policing and asymmetrical domestic war, “reform” at best functions as a method of (asymmetrical) casualty management, while “reformism” is a primary pedagogical, political, and cultural strategy of counterinsurgency against those undertaking radical, abolitionist, revolutionary, and liberationist projects of community, collective power, and futurity. The following section pays a brief visit to a recent, typical example of reformist counterinsurgency undertaken by the top administrative officials at the author’s employing institution.

Case Study UCOP Initiated as a high-profile administrative response to University of California student, faculty, and staff participation in and support for the spread of global uprisings against antiblack policing in 2020, the latest round of UC administrative reformism largely recycled the methods, rhetorics, narratives, institutional processes, and policy recommendations of similar UC Office of the President (UCOP) efforts from the prior decade, including the 2012 Robinson-Edley Report (catalyzed by the infamous 2011 pepper spray incident at UC Davis) and the 2019 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Universitywide Policing, convened by former UC president Janet Napolitano.26 Under new president Michael Drake, UCOP released its “Community Safety Plan” in August 2021 on the heels of two daylong, tightly curated online “campus safety symposia” in February and March of the same year.27 No live on-camera or on-microphone participation was allowed for symposia attendees. While a few panelists in the live-streamed symposia attempted to introduce abolitionist approaches to campus safety and security that would not require the presence of police, the UC administration seemed to have predetermined that any institutional recommendations or material changes would encompass only the most tepid, police-friendly versions of reform. As one who paid close attention to all seven hours of the UCOP symposia proceedings, read hundreds of pages of UC task force documents and emails, and waded through the numerous public statements of concern and solidarity from UC campus chancellors, provosts, diversity officers, and deans, i can credibly characterize these administrative reformist rituals as both entirely predictable 491

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and deeply boring in content and presentation.28 Here i wish to emphasize that the profound boringness of such scripted institutional reformism is a central characteristic of counterinsurgency’s grinding, low-intensity violence. The administrative reformists’ shared arsenal of doubletalk, neologism, tautology, and empty optimism numb the mind, especially when conveyed through the often bizarre melding of police-and-corporate speak, including the coining and repetition of clichéd phrases like “transformational change,” “community-driven,” “meaningful progress,” “a new vision of campus safety,” and “tiered response model,” alongside seemingly endless though always empty declarations of the “University’s principles of community.”29 A few aspects of UCOP’s Community Safety Plan are symptomatic of the scripts of administrative auto-reform through which many institutions attempt to pacify insurgency and cultivate a climate of liberal consent. I will concisely mention three such dimensions here. One of the most gaping (though under-analyzed) features of the UCOP Community Safety Plan is that it preemptively eliminates the possibility of creating a process to foster institutional accountability and reparation for past UC Police Department (UCPD) violence, of which there is a long and ongoing historical record.30 The Community Safety Plan magically clears the slate and resets institutional memory, conveniently erasing the lived archive and ongoing consequences of police terror and violence. A second feature of the UCOP police reforms is the prioritization of “deterrence and violent crime prevention” over so-called petty crimes; those casually familiar with accounts of contemporary antiblack and racist policing will recognize how this provision follows the logic of “broken windows policing,” which is functionally synonymous with racial profiling and asymmetrical antiblack and racist policing.31 Thirdly, the UC administration’s plan establishes ceremonial “police accountability” boards charged with reviewing “investigation reports regarding complaints filed against UCPD.” While these bodies “include students, faculty and staff,” they are only empowered to provide non-binding, unenforceable “recommendations” to the UC police and administration. Typical of police review boards created all over the United States by city and county administrators and elected officials, these accountability boards have no enforcement power, no budgetary power, and no formal leverage to extract compliance from the UCPD or from the administrators who supervise them. Rather than lament the sloppiness and endemic pro-police disposition of the UCOP Community Safety Plan, it may be more productive to address it as a primary text of police terror that reinstitutes the UCPD’s institutional legitimacy by defacing notions of justice, accountability, transformation, security, and safety. The UC administration developed this document as a form of mundane, bureaucratic, boring counterinsurgency against the accelerated activity of militant (Black) radical, abolitionist, and proto-abolitionist collectives and communities throughout the summer of 2020, a surge of rebellion that included far-reaching criticisms of school and university-based police violence while encouraging focused, protracted analysis of the UC police’s long traditions of antiblack harassment, Islamophobia, the violent suppression of progressive student-led movements and protests, militarized ableism (including a refusal to wear masks in public settings at the UC Riverside campus), transphobia, and other forms of targeted intimidation and terror. Throughout 2020–2021, numerous UC faculty and students (including the author) contributed to the creation and rapid growth of the Cops Off Campus abolitionist movement (copsoffcampuscoalition.com), which quickly spread across North America and often featured the work of the statewide California network.32 The UC administration’s public-facing response to the abolitionist and proto-abolitionist revolts of 2020 can be framed as a militant reformist defense of the UC police’s legitimacy that sanctions while periodically apologizing for the UCPD’s long record of harassment, profiling, political repression, and physical violence. UCOP’s recommendations and reforms effectively expand rather than reduce policing infrastructure while deputizing non-police university staff to exercise mediated versions of police power—these functional deputies include “mental health, wellness, basic needs, 492

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[and] bias/hate response” workers as well as the nebulous category of “non-sworn security personnel.”33 These campus employees administer their duties under provisions that require and encourage them to summon the UCPD at a moment’s notice, a protocol that extends rather than interrupts the toxic asymmetries of antiblack, trans and queer-phobic, misogynist, ableist, and gendered racist perceptions of danger and threat that pervade such workers’ inheritance and inhabitation of a long, continuous culture of domestic war. UCOP’s Community Safety Plan attempts to disorient and drown radical and abolitionist counter-institutional imagination and planning that would both defund campus police budgets and redistribute precious campus resources to address the vast and growing vulnerabilities created by massive student/employee debt as well as persistent housing, food, health, and economic insecurities experienced by students, staff, contingent faculty, and members of surrounding communities. Far from being provincialized to institutions of higher education, such models of reformist counterinsurgency resonate across institutional venues and geographies, including comparable and analogous efforts shaped by city councils, district attorneys, mayors, nonprofit organizational leaders, and celebrities. To invoke a phrase from Field Manual 3–24, a counterinsurgent “learning environment” has and will continue to rely on waves of reformist messaging that ride on the efforts of elected officials, philanthropic foundations, schooling and research institutions, corporate publicity campaigns, social movement entrepreneurs, industrialized professional sports, and religious leaders, among others. UCOP’s effort is symptomatic, not exceptional.

Conclusion: “Deep Responsibility” as Liberation War While the coordination between repressive state/state-condoned violence and the fraudulent empowerments of reformism are often contentious and periodically fracturing, the totality of struggle, negotiation, and institutional change coheres through the logic of counterinsurgency. A twisted, violating insult animates the reformist ensemble in this context: reformism suggests that the densely historical, asymmetrical misery and casualties produced by police violence are fixable flaws in a regime of governance that can be magically disabused of its inequities, disparities, biases, corruptions, and genocidal tendencies. Reformism is thus a Civilizational fantasy in which justice, freedom, and equality are achievable within an existing totality of legitimated police terror that is alleviated of “police brutality.” In some ways, this is a problem of mistaken or misplaced horizons. Of course, horizons are a matter of interpretation and imagination; they are projected as a matter of necessity; horizons are political art, cultural praxis, a collective abstraction of space that takes place within regimes of spatial endangerment. Hence, there is plenty of room to engage in meaningful and creative collective praxis but doing so requires that the problem of political horizon be posed in the first place as a problem, of the type that renders reformist solutions obsolete and perhaps resituates them as an accomplice to the terror behind and around, infiltrating thought and imaginary. As a pedagogical tool, i often rely on the concept of domestic warfare to re-narrate the normalized conditions of the United States against liberal frameworks of reformable inequality, fixable disparity and solvable “systemic” dysfunction.34 Crucially, the bare, persistent facts of asymmetrical casualties regularly suffered and involuntarily inherited across multiple generations of targeted peoples do not speak for themselves. Rather, these facts must be placed in the service of storytelling that undermines and destroys the sturdy, pseudo-religious common sense assumptions that vindicate existing cultural, economic, and state institutions as capable and/or worthy of reform and preservation. Asymmetry not only conveys the quantitative and experiential incomparability of Civilizational warfare’s brutal consequences for Black and Indigenous collective life (to take modernity’s paradigmatic cases) but also suggests the generalized presence of a social-historical logic that instigates 493

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and reproduces targeted Black suffering and Indigenous colonization as both the premises and modus operandi for modern sociality in-and-of-itself. Such asymmetry is not merely a symptom of Civilization’s collateral damages, it is Civilization—you are wrapped up in this violence because you could only have entered this world through it, in it, even because of it. There is no universal “you” in this instance, only a totality of violent conditions that destroy the possibility of the liberal humanist “we.” Put another way, police brutality is the least of some folx’ troubles, because they already inhabit a terrorized position. This is unshared, targeted terror—a living archive of collective encounter that separates embodied categories of endangered existence into singular (collective) positions of shared breath, mutual survival, and insurgent community amidst living nightmares of antisociality and state violence. The work of the reformist counterinsurgency is to disarticulate, reassemble, and re-narrate these singular facts into texts of patriotic reform, gendered racial teleology, and liberal vindication. The labor of the abolitionists, Black liberationists, anticolonialists, and beautiful insurgents, then, is to turn the terror on itself, to wage unrelenting creative violence against it for the sake of destruction, to be sure, but also as a preliminary condition for honoring what Amika Tendaji, co-founder of Ujimaa Medics, calls the “deep responsibility” of care, grace, and militantly defended life against the atrocity in blue.35

Notes 1 Dylan Rodríguez, “Beyond ‘Police Brutality’: Racist State Violence and the University of California,” American Quarterly 64 (June 2012): 301–313. 2 David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide (London: Verso, 2018), 217. 3 Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 8. 4 See Jennifer R. Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: Foundation Center, 1990); Dylan Rodríguez, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, eds. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 21–40; and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, eds. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 41–52. 5 The work of criminologist (and former police officer) Philip M. Stinson (Bowling Green State University) is likely the most widely cited, comprehensive source of information regarding on-duty police killings and subsequent criminal prosecutions of police officers for murder or manslaughter. Stinson’s Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database compiles data on 13,214 criminal arrests of (nonfederal) police officers between 2005–2016 (see https://policecrime.bgsu.edu/). The Police Crime Database serves as a primary source for numerous investigative reports and academic research articles, including recent, widely read pieces such as Shaila Dewan, “Few Police Officers Who Cause Deaths Are Charged or Convicted,” New York Times, 24 September 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/us/police-killings-prosecution-charges.html, accessed 2 October 2021; Mark Berman, “When police kill people, they are rarely prosecuted and hard to convict,” The Washington Post, 4 April 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/04/ when-police-kill-people-they-are-rarely-prosecuted-hard-convict/, accessed 2 October 2021; and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, Nathaniel Rakich and Likhitha Butchireddygari, “Why It’s So Rare For Police Officers To Face Legal Consequences,” FiveThirtyEight, 4 June 2020, https://fivethirtyeight. com/features/why-its-still-so-rare-for-police-officers-to-face-legal-consequences-for-misconduct/, accessed 2 October 2021. 6 See “Fatal Force” online database, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/ investigations/police-shootings-database/, accessed 1 November 2021. 7 Thomson-DeVeaux, Rakich and Butchireddygari, “Why It’s So Rare For Police Officers To Face Legal Consequences.” 8 Fablina Sharara and Eve E Wool (co-first authors) and GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, “Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression,” The Lancet 398 (October 2021): 1240.

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Police Terror as Totality 9 By way of example, a November 2021 investigative article published in The Intercept describes the US Treasury Department’s successful efforts to gain access to location and other data culled from unsuspecting people’s smartphones for the ostensible purpose of identifying and surveilling tax and sanctions avoidance. See Sam Biddle, “The US Treasury is Buying Private App Data To Target and Investigate People,” The Intercept, 4 November 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/11/04/treasury-surveillance-location-data-babel-street/, accessed 2 November 2021. 10 This schema reflects some of the author’s thinking in “Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword,” Harvard Law Review 143 (No. 6, 2019): 1575–1612. 11 While the vast and growing critical interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship on policing and police violence exceeds a simple endnote citation, a few standout works are worth mentioning. These include Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (originally published 2005; Oakland: AK Press, 2015); Correia and Wall, Police: a Field Guide; Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (La Vergne: Verso, 2021); Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders; Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Mark Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power (New York: Verso Books, 2021); and Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (London: Verso, 2018). 12 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, third edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 188–189. 13 United States Army and Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency (Field Manual No. 3–24) (Washington: Department of the Army, 2006), paragraph 7–46, (ch. 7, p. 9). 14 Jeffrey C. Isaac, Stephen Biddle, Stathis N. Kalyvas, Wendy Brown and Douglas A. Ollivant, “Review Symposium: The New US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis,” Perspectives on Politics 6 (June 2008): 354. 15 Raphael S. Cohen, “A Tale of Two Manuals,” Prism 2 (December 2010): 87; https://ciaotest.cc.columbia. edu/journals/prism%20/v2i1/f_0024108_19657.pdf, accessed 3 October 2021. 16 See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: the FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990). 17 Counterinsurgency (Field Manual No. 3–24), para. 1–113 (ch. 1, p. 21). 18 Ibid. 19 Counterinsurgency (Field Manual No. 3–24), para. 1–14 (ch. 1, p. 3). 20 Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytical History (originally published 1969; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 22–23. 21 See Allen, “The Social Context of Black Power,” in Black Awakening in Capitalist America, 21–88. 22 Counterinsurgency (Field Manual No. 3–24), para. 1–68 (ch. 1, p. 13). 23 Maher, A World Without Police, 73; Schrader, Badges Without Borders, 35. 24 See Kara Gotsch, “Breakthrough in US Drug Sentencing Reform: The Fair Sentencing Act and the Unfinished Reform Agenda,” The Sentencing Project white paper report, Washington Office on Latin America, November 2011, https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/FederalCrack-Cocaine-Sentencing.pdf, accessed 2 November 2021. 25 See Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 26 See Christopher F. Edley and Charles F. Robinson, Response to Protests on UC Campuses: A Report to University of California President Mark G. Yudof (Berkeley: University of California, 2012), https://campusprotestreport. universityofcalifornia.edu/documents/protest-report-091312.pdf, accessed 2 November 2021; and Presidential Task Force on Universitywide Policing. Report of the Presidential Task Force on Universitywide Policing (Berkeley: University of California, 2019), https://www.ucop.edu/policing-task-force/policing-task-force-report_2019. pdf, accessed 2 November 2021. 27 See University of California, Community Safety Plan, https://www.ucop.edu/community-safety-plan/_ files/uc-community-safety-plan.pdf, accessed 21 September 2021. Full video and audio of the February and March 2021 UC Campus Safety Symposia are posted at https://www.ucop.edu/community-safety-plan/ safety-symposium-part-one.html, accessed 30 August 2021. 28 The University of California Global Health Institute compiled administrative statements of all ten UC campuses and the UC president on a webpage titled “Statements from UC Leadership on Death of George Floyd.” See https://ucghi.universityofcalifornia.edu/statements-uc-leadership-death-of-george-floyd, accessed 21 September 2021. 29 See Community Safety Plan, 2–4, 6.

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Dylan Rodríguez 30 For a recent example, see Felicia Mello and Vanessa Arredondo, “Students push UC to abolish police departments,” Cal Matters, 26 June 2020, https://calmatters.org/education/2020/06/students-push-uc-toabolish-police-departments/, accessed 22 September 2021; and Dylan Rodríguez, “Beyond ‘Police Brutality’: Racist State Violence and the University of California,” American Quarterly 64 (June 2012): 301–313. 31 In addition to previously cited works by Maher, Schrader, Williams, Seigel, and others, see Nick Pinto, “NYPD’s Inspector General Shatters Bratton’s ‘Broken Windows’ Policing Strategy — Now What?” Village Voice, 28 June 2016, https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/06/28/nypd-watchdog-shatters-brattons-brokenwindows-now-what/, accessed 27 August 2021. 32 See Cops Off Campus Coalition website, “Who are you and how did you get started?” https:// copsoffcampuscoalition.com/faq/, accessed 27 August 2021. 33 Community Safety Plan, p. 4. 34 See Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). 35 Conversation with Amika Tendaji for The Hastings Center, 26 April 2021.

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37 POLICE UNIONS The Police Shield for Abuse and Brutality in America Perry L. Lyle

Introduction Police unions in America have long been a petri dish for the breeding of abhorrent police behavior, which has fostered an increase in police bullying and brutality of its citizenry, particularly those of color.1 In the contemporary political spectrum of 2020, the left is willing to excommunicate police unions while the conservative right embraces police unions as part of their political agenda of law and order. Instead of creating cultures of trust and a mindset of guardianship, formidable union leaders have capitalized on political powerbases to achieve “home-rule” status.2 Police union leaders, predominately all White males, have skillfully engineered far greater protections for legions of their membership over the past three decades, transitioning from the Community era of policing to the present-day Militarization era.3 For any real reforms to take place, department chiefs and lawmakers will have to get past the police unions that have fought not only for higher wages, benefits, and improved working conditions, but have served to block effective disciplinary practices by their leaders.4 Police unions notably serve as the first line of defense for an officer under disciplinary review or even indictment of wrongful actions. Newly formed police departments in America were heavily influenced by England’s Metropolitan Police Act. The Metropolitan Police Act (MPA) in 1829 has been credited to Sir Robert Peel.5 It gave rise to the first paid professional police department in London, England. The MPA served as a template by which America would model their police departments. Sir Robert Peel laid out a foundation for the nine principles, which promoted ethics as an overarching core value to establish legitimacy of police. Peel served as Prime Minister of England from 1834 to 1835 and from 1841 to 1846. Peel’s nine principles are enumerated below: 1 2 3 4 5

The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions. Police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force. Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-48

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6 7

8 9

Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public, and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

The principles are crucial for the establishment of police legitimacy. It will be important to see these themes as identified below emerge throughout the Reform, Community, and Homeland Security Eras of policing in America and unionization. Note community trust, engagement, and reasonable force as a last resort for professional policing.6 Historically, while these principles serve as a model, they have not been fully embraced by most lawmen in the United States as demonstratively illustrated throughout all formalized policing eras by historic events. The chapter is organized to provide a historical perspective of the rise of police unions alongside patterns of abuses against citizenry in the United States juxtaposition in the development of policing eras: 1840–1900—The Political Era; 1900–1980—The Reform Era; 1980–2000—The Community Era; and 2001-Present—Homeland Security Era/Militarization Era.7

The Political Era The political era is often referred to as the first era of policing in the United States, and it began around the 1840s with the creation of the first bona fide police agencies in America. History records that police departments in America began to formally organize to meet the challenges of a society moving away from the agriculturally based economy toward the industrial revolution gripping the new nation. At the same time, people were struggling against a newly developing system of oppression against people of color and, more specifically, Africans who were enslaved, NativeAmerican Indians, and Mexicans at the southern borders. The latter two groups systemically forced off their native lands. “Paddyrollers,” or slave patrols, first appeared in the South during the 1700s. Historically, these patrols were organized to maintain control over the slave populations. Later, duties were expanded to keep control over White indentured servants as well. Searches were made of slave lodges and known or suspected roadways or routes to the North. The Charleston South Carolina Police Department by 1837 had approximately 100 officers, and their primary function was slave patrol. Officers guarded against slave revolts, checked documents, enforced slave codes, and caught and returned runaway slaves to plantation owners. Many of these officers would transition to publicly funded police agencies in the South after the Civil War.8 During Reconstruction, the federal military, state militias, county sheriffs, and constables all had a hand in maintaining control over African American citizens. Along with the Ku Klux Klan, these groups, which had earlier slave patrol responsibilities, were known to be more violent than their predecessors.9 Harriet Tubman escaped her captives during the Civil War and heroically set upon helping her bound brothers and sisters to escape by setting up an underground railroad as a conduit from the southern US states into the North. Recognized by the Union Army, Harriet Tubman made some 19 trips at personal peril and risk of death if caught by the Confederate armies freeing an estimated 300 slaves. Tubman was considered the first African American woman to serve in the military both 498

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as a scout, spy, and guerrilla soldier for her exploits. Harriet Tubman was later memorialized as the “Moses of her people.”10 It was during Tubman’s era that urban police departments began forming. New York’s department was founded in 1845, Chicago’s in 1855. Jacksonville’s came earlier in 1822, Detroit’s in 1865, and Portland’s in 1870. Philadelphia’s force, founded in the eighteenth century, was a decided outlier.11 The Boston Police Department was formalized in 1838, although the city then had a day and night watch system in place before 1838. The General Court of the community passed an order allowing the city to appoint police officers in 1838. Two hundred fifty sworn officers with a chief made up the first organized police department in the United States. The newly appointed police officers began to carry billy-clubs, a six-foot bull, and a pole used as a means of self-protection replacing the “hook-n-bill” agricultural brush-blade axe used to clear land. The billy club is often used by police in related physical abuse cases by striking citizens into submission. Symbolically, it has been used to highlight police brutality in America.12 A few Black men found their way into America’s policing toward the end of the nineteenth century. However, the Supreme Court’s finding that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional all but nullified the advancement into the ranks of policing.13 The United States saw tremendous growth in the east, and significant expansion was unfolding in the west. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had fewer than 100,000 population by the beginning of the nineteenth century and more than a million by 1890.14 Major cities were booming, and trade with European countries made it possible for the young nation to capitalize on immigration for labor following the abolishment of slavery, which is when the Political Era of policing was set into motion.15 The policing era was defined by politics, chiefly, because laws and courts as known today had little interaction with citizens. Home rule was the order of the day in dispensing order and justice. To fully appreciate police union development, a review of early law enforcement is essential. The system of capitalism made it possible for those with money, power, land, and political connections to make their fortunes on the back of workers suffering brutish and impoverished lives. Cities like Chicago had their populations increase three-fold, becoming the great Midwest metropolis, which teemed with immigrants from Europe crammed into slum housing. It was ripe for public corruption at all levels in the city, state, and federal government.16 Before the first formal police unions, police officers began to hold a meeting to petition their leaders for better wages, equipment, and benefits. These groups were informal and had a brotherhood or fraternal atmosphere. Before the turn of the nineteenth century, these informal associations of police morphed into a culture to embody officers’ interests publicly and promote camaraderie privately. In 1892, The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association was formed in New York City. The PBA’s primary mission was fundraising money for widows and children for slain officers killed in the line of duty. Such benevolent associations and fraternal orders did not enjoy collective-bargaining rights, but they did seek to inform elected officials of officers’ concerns. However, compared to recent decades, their lobbying and electioneering activities were modest.17

The Reform Era Low pay, poor working conditions, inadequate benefit packages, and low public esteem fostered the need for those in blue to bond for a common cause, generating the creation of police unionism. Officers had poor equipment, inadequate training, being called into work without overtime, few, or no disciplinary protections against arbitrary decisions by supervisors, which resulted in lost days or pay, leading them to seek collective bargaining, a process used by labor and management to bargain for wages, benefits, and improved employment conditions.18 499

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The Boston Police Strike (1919) On September 19, 1919, 80% of the Boston Police Department went on strike to protest the mayor’s refusal to unionize and bargain collectively. The attempt failed as Governor Calvin Coolidge sent in the National Guard to quell riots and restore order in Boston. Coolidge said, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” His reputation as a law-and-order leader would later lead him to the presidency.19 The Boston police force had not received a wage increase since 1854, almost since their initial founding. The cops made only half as much as the average worker’s salary during that time and to add insult to injury, cops were required to purchase their own uniforms and gear. The officers petitioned the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for recognition and were accepted. From there, almost all the police officers signed up in droves and so did 37 other locals from around the country. The police commissioner at the time termed the action to be “divided-loyalty,” which in essence meant the police could no longer be counted on for defending the capitalist’s interests.20 As with social movements in the 1960s, twentieth-century police unionists borrowed their tactics to become successful and influential. Marvin Levine reports that collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) cover more than 70% of police in America.21 Local and state government executives and leaders have to analyze police collective bargaining strategies of today and determine whether unions have become too powerful by blocking reforms urged by the community and progressive police leaders. Primarily, in the private sector, bargaining is a bilateral process between the management (company) and the union representing the workers. The two factions determine the wages and benefits through negotiations and sometimes through backroom deals. In the public sector, politics is seen as a third equitation that must be dealt with as multilateral labor relationships. Ultimately, it can affect the length of time that a public executive can remain in their position. In other words, the community should be able to evaluate the services on both economics and performance. Police unions struggle to find their place at the table. Following the dismal failure of the police to gain public and private support, police unions started the progression with a unique and divisive role in American labor. Union leaders with the right to collectively bargain across the nation quickly learned how to leverage their membership’s ability to instill fear within communities by organizing “slow-downs,” “blue-flus,” and outright threats of job “walk-offs,” tactics designed to gain the upper hand at any bargaining table. Union agreements began to bargain for lax disciplinary policies that have influenced police behavior problems.22 Historically, for most of the Reform Era, the police labor movement stalled, even though threats of walkouts, job walk-offs, and other fear tactics were made. While unions exist to harness individual power into collective power, most of the public, supported by state legislative laws, prevented police departments from using the strike as a weapon to leverage their cause in opposition to the private sector that does not threaten the public’s safety. The debate continues even today on the ethics of strike and no strike for positions of public safety and national security. 1970 saw members of the NYPD wage a “wildcat strike” and because this was considered unauthorized by the National Labor Board and the City of New York, each member of the police force that participated in the strike were fined two days’ pay or each day of participation. Similar actions were recorded by department members in San Francisco, Baltimore, and New Orleans.23 In the runup to the 1960s, the public sector employment rolls increased dramatically. The period was classified by rapid workforce transformation resulting from automation, and policy programs to increase public service jobs to help alleviate poverty. This led to community action programs, legal aid, Food Stamps, School Head Start, Medicare, and other manpower developments. In 1964, The Economic Opportunity Act created the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Job Corps, and expanded community work.24

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President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 gave public employees the right to organize unions and bargain collectively. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford would add their refinements to the original order bolstering public union support.25 Many of these government workers were African-Americans, thousands of whom found employment in agencies like the US Postal Service, where they fought against Jim Crow postal facilities, while many thousands more worked, often in low-paid jobs, for state and local governments.26 The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), in turn, became a major part of the civil rights movement. During the tumultuous 1960s, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the Supreme Court had been notable for his transformation of the justice system. A number of the Court’s rulings helped limit police abuses in the enforcement of laws. Miranda v. Arizona (1966), is one of the most historical limitations of police power during this reform and progressive period. Warren retired on June 23, 1969. American Presidents since the 1970s have pushed political platforms of crime control with slogans such as the “War on Drugs” and “War on Crime.” This period served as the time frame when police unions gained ground from their past dismissal performances.27 From the years of civil unrest that followed the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), civil rights leader Martin Luther King (1968), and Robert F. Kennedy (1968), the country was poised to move toward more conservative approaches toward crime and punishment. To fill the recruitment needs for police openings following the Vietnam War, police agencies recruited returning vets to fill their needs. City, county, and state governments found it a “win-win” to achieve their recruitment needs. Military veterans were given preferential hiring treatment, came already prepared with discipline, familiarization with autocratic chain-of-command, and, more importantly, a “warrior-mentality.” Unions were seen as helping new police officers find employment and to assimilate into their communities with better wages, benefits, training, and higher standards of living after service in the Vietnam conflict. Scholars have since debated, as little was known at the time about the lingering effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), whether or not, returning vets brought the war back home to the badge.28 From the 1960s to the 1970s the country moved into the Community Policing Era.

Community Policing Era The decade of the 1970s marks an historical and pivotal departure from the reform era into Community Oriented Policing, better known as COPs. The 1970s gave way to its time-honored concepts of traditional policing that came under increasingly hostile scrutiny by the public and even by law enforcement personnel themselves.29 The main driver of the era was an emphasis on policecommunity relations and less emphasis on top to bottom control, with more autonomy to the cops on the beat and a return to decentralization where the concept of community-based policing genesis was given.30 New technologies were also touted as bringing police closer to the communities they serve. Ronald Regan’s administration ushered in an unprecedented attack on the country’s national drug problem citing the huge problem of violent crime resulting from drug abuse with Nancy Regan, the First Lady, being credited with the slogan, “Just Say No,” with her efforts to develop programs aimed at drug prevention. This too was to make communities safer. However, it is President Richard Nixon that is credited in history for the slogan, “The War on Drugs” by declaring drug abuse as “Public Enemy Number One.” This was accomplished by increasing federal funding for drug control efforts and the consolidation of the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and the Office of Narcotics Intelligence into the Drug Enforcement Administration, which stands today as the national Drug Enforcement Agency.31 However, Nixon’s efforts fell short of what the Reagan administration ushered in. 501

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Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981 and greatly expanded his focus on criminal punishment over treatment and rehabilitation for fighting the drug war. Incarceration increased for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 by 1997. At the President’s urging, Congress passed the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act which among other things, authorized spending of 1.7 billion dollars on the War on Drugs also establishing mandatory minimum prison sentences for various drug offenses.32 It was also the time period that private prisons “for profit” spread throughout the landscape of America. An historical drug enforcement paradigm shift occurred during the President’s administration. That is, beyond mandatory minimums was the significant gap between the methodology of how crack and powder cocaine was treated with criminal sanctions. Five grams of crack brought on a five-year prison sentence while 500 grams of powder cocaine was used to trigger that same sentence. Power cocaine is largely used by White and upper-class individuals, while crack, more easily made, and smoked is used in the poorer “hood” neighborhoods. Crack or rock is more sinister, poses a greater health risk, and is even more addictive than regular street power cocaine.33 Unions too would feel the tough approach of the new administration. In short, order after President Reagan took office, 13,000 air traffic controllers mobilized and went on strike after their bargaining collapsed with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Reagan fired all of the workers, replacing them with military personnel in order to get the airlines back into the air. His tough approach dampened all other unions during his presidency.34 The phenomena of the harsh criminalization of the drug laws have been most notably written and discussed by Michelle Alexander. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In an era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So, we don’t. [sic] Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.35 In Miami, the Liberty City community erupted in violence, rioting, and looting of the killing of an unarmed African American man, Arthur McDuffie who had been beaten to death by a white police officer, subsequently acquitted. What ensued was three days of rioting, leaving 18 people killed and scores of injured victims. Over 1,000 people were arrested and at the time, it was estimated that $100 million dollars worth of property had been destroyed. The Miami case was a precursor of the Nation’s worst police brutality riot twelve years later, in the beating of Rodney King by four L.A. police officers. The historical episode was caught by a civilian vacationer, George Holiday, on his movie camera aired by a local T.V. station that sparked the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. The ensuing riots are still considered by experts to be the worst in American history.36 Very few police officers are convicted of police brutality because of the extremely high standards of proof required to sustain a conviction, even when there is compelling video documentation. Qualified immunity helps set the bar high.

Qualified Immunity Since 1982, the Supreme Court’s establishment of the qualified immunity standard has made the bar so high that it has been almost impossible to hold police officers and other government officials accountable in civil litigation. This includes the police and union representatives that are quick to point out the standard when a member officer is charged with police abuse or brutality. The High Court intended to keep government officials relatively unencumbered from overwhelming legal 502

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cases to the point where officials would not be able to perform their duties to the public. For example, if an officer is charged with police brutality, the union and the officer’s legal team will cite that there are no identical cases to point to make the officers specifically responsible for the alleged wrong. Approximately 30 cases on qualified immunity6 were decided by the Court with Hope v. Pelzer (2002), approximately 20 years ago that came close to establishing a precedent case.37 Without having an exact case on point, lower courts would look simply through the cases out because of the exactness of preestablished cases. It is impossible to establish the criteria if no foundation cases exist. The Supreme Court may have lowered the qualified immunity bar in Taylor v. Riojas (2020). The case is a critical decision by the High Court that lays the foundation that a correctional officer’s blatant misconduct against a prison inmate would be enough to overcome qualified immunity. The plaintiff’s prison conditions were deplorable, clearly violating the prisoner’s 8th Amendment rights.38 In their orders, the justices struck down a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that had blocked a Texas inmate’s lawsuit against prison officials. The inmate, Trent Taylor, was forced to spend six days naked in cells that contained feces from previous occupants and overflowing sewage. The significance of this case signals that the Court is lowering the bar for achieving civil actions for citizens to make claims for police brutality.

Points of View, Pro and Con, Related to Qualified Immunity Pro Opponents of qualified immunity have argued that ending the practice completely will lead to greater police accountability and punish “rogue police officers.” This false narrative is deeply misguided. There is perhaps no other profession that currently faces more external scrutiny and oversight than police officers, whose every action is scrutinized by agency inspector generals, civilian complaint review boards, the Criminal Justice Standards Training Commission, local city councils, state attorneys and grand juries.39 Con Qualified immunity fosters an environment where government agents, including police, may feel empowered to violate people’s rights with the knowledge they will face few consequences. This erodes relationships with the community and diminishes the system’s credibility. Under qualified immunity, lives can be taken with impunity. It’s [sic] past time to heed the protesters’ signs and end this doctrine once and for all.40 Many advocates and politicians have expressed their endorsement and outfight demand that the High Court becomes involved. The doctrine, as applied to cops, over the past decades essentially asks two questions: (1) Did police use excessive force, and (2) if they did, should the officer have known that their conduct was illegal because it violated a “clearly established” prior court ruling that barred that conduct? The fact that lower courts dismiss cases for having identical “clearly established cases” is a bar difficult to clear. Even against the backdrop over police brutality allegations across the landscape, the Court is not taking a stance to reexamine the day’s much-criticized legal doctrine. That is why critics of the qualified immunity doctrine have called it a Catch-22 that says to victims, in effect, “Heads, the police win; Tails, you lose.”41

Use of Force Legal Cases According to the SCOTUS case, qualified Immunity under Title 42 § 1983, attachment of liability can only be withheld if a defendant deviates from an explicit violation of clearly established statutory or

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Figure 37.1 Use of Force Continuum

Constitutional rights. This established the logic that an officer could only be held to account if the care’s circumstances and facts are congruent and identical to a previous case. This standard makes it much harder for judges to withhold Qualified Immunity. Especially if the recent case fails to align with the precedent case. While Tennessee v. Garner (1985) established the “defense of life” standard, making the shooting and killing of an escaping felon illegal unless the officer has probable cause that his or her life or another is immediately threatened with grave injury or death. SCOTUS ruled the Tennessee law unconstitutional. Law enforcement agencies across the nation immediately scrambled to establish “use-of-force-continuum” and policies to meet the new ruling by the Court (Figure 37.1).42 Graham v. Connor (1968), a case by SCOTUS, would give law enforcement and the community guidance by establishing an “objective reasonableness” in real-time to decide whether the actions by a police officer were reasonable. The old “substantive due process” gave way to whether the officer acted in good faith or maliciously and sadistically for causing harm, in most contact cases involving the seizure of a person. The new test is whether or not the officer’s use of force can be seen as a reasonable use of force from a reasonable officer’s perspective on the scene. The judge must be evaluated in real-time vs. 20/20 hindsight. Quite only, this allows the officer to introduce fear as a component of his or her mindset at the time of the split-second decision-making process. Graham’s 1983 lawsuit filed against Connor and the Charlotte, North Carolina Police Department for sustained injuries failed under the standard rendered in SCOTUS’s landmark 9–0 decision. The case law was a break for police officer use-of-force liability cases.43 From 2017 through 2019, police were favored in 57% of the courts’ reviews for police brutality. According to Reuters in their report “Shielded,” more than 36 cases were analyzed, and the officers found to have used unlawful actions were granted qualified Immunity. In 2009, Pearson v. Callahan gave judges the option to simply ignore whether a cop uses excessive force, allowing the focus to shift to whether the conduct was clearly established unlawful. “Qualified immunity balances two important interests,” the court explained, “the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly, and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably.”44 504

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Police Officer Bill of Rights The “law enforcement officer bill of rights” (LEOBR) is found in 16 states as of 2015. In 1972, Maryland was the first state to enact this legislation. Eleven others are considering similar bills while others have provisions with their union contracts.45 These rights give police officers extra protections when investigated by their agency for alleged misconduct or police violations. These naturally include abuse and police brutality. Unlike regular citizens under investigation by police, cops themselves hold out for extra protection provided by the government. Police unions have been enormously successful in engineering these provisions in union agreements and state houses.46

A Juxtaposition of Police v. Civilian Rights Consider the following analysis and comparison of the Police Officer Bill of Rights versus ordinary Civilian Rights (Table 37.1). The provisions listed above make it exceedingly difficult to remove bad actors from the police force. Historically, the original Police Officer Bill of Rights protections were conceived in good faith to bring about a level of protection for the police who are always under scrutiny by their agencies and civilians. There is no doubt that police perform high-risk jobs that require split-second decisions. Police officers hold immense discretionary powers as they well should have. It is an occupation fraught with many dangers and constant stress from outside as well as internal organizational sources. Well-intentioned or not, unions have been persuasive at raising the bar for public safety agencies in disciplinary actions against the police to hold them accountable. Prison and jail guards are usually covered by these protections, making it challenging to investigate government-operated facilities. The following case will help to illustrate these protections.

Case Histories—Holding Police Accountable? When Detective Michael Clancy retired at 62 in February 2020, he had accumulated $89, 600 in unused sick and vacation leave following 22 years of being paid his full salary that had grown over the years to $ 114,000 annually. Under Rhode Island’s retirement system, known as ERSRI (Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island), Clancy, through legal squabbling with city and state bureaucrats, could stay at home because of his original bout with a staph infection back in 1998. Clancy even received the cost of living and uniform clothing allowances during his phantom illness. His Injury of Duty (IOD) action would extend his situation out for all those years with the City of Warren, which had approximately 22 full-time officers and could ill afford the absent employee’s salary. A salary like this for a small-town agency impacts a limited budget. It is a shame that someone would take advantage of a gray area in the system, but according to Lyle, there are those without moral scruples willing to “game-the-system.” Cops are no different from teachers, politicians, or other public servants willing to exploit glitches in a system. Governor Gina Raimondo in 2019 signed a new law with language aimed to place a stricter timetable for workers to file accidental disabilities. It is a small step to correct a more comprehensive problem, one that is shared by states across the county. The more liberal your politicians are at closing language gaps, the greater the liability for costs to the taxpayer.48 In 2007, Angela Garbarino was arrested for suspicion of drunk driving in Shreveport, Louisiana. Garbarino was taken into custody by Officer Wiley Willis and had an argument with the officer about her right to make a phone call. A few moments into the processing at the jail, Willis turned off the video camera. A little later, the video reveals Garbarino lying on the floor in her blood pool. The officer’s attorney’s explained that the defendant tripped and fell while the camera was off. The video went viral on the Internet, and the department subsequently fired Willis, but not criminally charged.

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Perry L. Lyle Table 37.1 Comparison of the Police Officer Bill of Rights versus Ordinary Civilian Rights LEOBRs

Civilian Bill of Rights

Political activity permitted when off-duty including running for elected office. LEOs shall be notified of expected disciplinary action, of pending investigation, alleged violation, and outcome of the investigation and recommendations made. LEOs are to be questioned for a reasonable length of time, at a reasonable time, (unless exigent circumstances exist), and while on duty if possible. Questioning only at the place of work unless the officer waives location. LEOs are usually granted a “48-hour cooling-off period,” known in police circles as, “getting your story straight.” LEOS must be questioned only by a single investigator and informed of the supervisor’s name and rank. LEOs may have an attorney present or any other individual present during questioning.

Political activity (in general) not regulated by the government. Civilians are rarely notified by police of pending investigations nor of any status until formally charged.

LEOs may not be threatened, harassed, or promised rewards to elicit or induce information during questioning.

LEOs are entitled to a hearing following notification in advance, have an attorney or non-attorney representative present, copies of transcripts, witness statements, and or any other documents or evidence pertaining to the disciplinary action. LEOs have the privilege to comment on any adverse comments placed on their personnel record. Some states provide for an expungement of disciplinary actions after a length of time LEOs cannot be subject to retaliation for exercising their protections under LEOBR clauses.

Civilians enjoy no such privilege when being questioned by police. May refuse questioning by invoking 5th Amendment privilege. Civilians may invoke 5th Amendment privilege and avoid police custodial interrogations. Civilians are accorded no such provisions while under criminal investigation – and never in private employment matters. Civilians are generally questioned by multiple investigators trained to intimidate and even lie to elicit information and confessions of civilians. Civilians may have an attorney present during a custodial interrogation. However, civilians are routinely questioned by police as potential witnesses or while under reasonable suspicion. Civilians may be threatened or harassed by police to force responses to questions unless an attorney is present. Police investigators are training in the art of obtaining confessions. Civilians are routinely promised that things will go better for them if they cooperate with the investigation. Civilians have their day in court for criminal matters. Civilians in the private employment sector enjoy none of the privileges enumerated in the left column except by union contract. Twenty-six states are employed at will in “right-to-work” states. Civilians do not have the privilege to comment on the written reprimands or actions placed into their personnel files. In the private sector, disciplinary records generally follow the employee for the entire employment period and thereafter. Civilians must seek protections generally through the Equal Protection Clause if discriminated against. Employees must have imitated and have an active claim for their employer to be notified of any retaliatory protections. 47

In an appeal of the case, the Shreveport Municipal Fire and Police Civil Service Board voted to reinstate Willis to the police department for an error made during questioning. The polygraph examiner failed to record the Q and A, a violation of the Louisiana’s Police officer Bill of Rights. Willis was reinstated along with back pay with a settlement of $400,000 dollars from the city.49

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Homeland Security Era—Militarization Era A “warrior mentality” has engulfed a police culture in an “us vs. them” attitude often directed at the communities the police serve. In minority communities, prevailing police mistrust leads to more mistrust on both sides when really, there should be no sides at all. An “argot,” or specialized vocabulary, can evolve that only the police understand, fostering a divide between an ingroup and outgroup. This traditional type of leadership may foster a “warrior mentality” law enforcement environment. An autocratic style of heavy-handed leadership with a rigid level of command and control prevails. One common theme in all three of Max Weber’s bases of legitimate authority is the relationship between the ruler and that ruled.50 In a single event, the 1997 Bank of America’s North Hollywood shootout with LAPD police showed America just how underprepared civilian police were against a well-orchestrated armed paramilitary-style bank takeover. L.A. patrol officers at the time were typically armed with their standard-issue 9x mm or .38 caliber pistols with some units carrying traditional pump-action shotguns. The North Hollywood bank robbers carried fully automatic, high-capacity drum magazine AK-47-style weapons. The ammo is capable of penetrating vehicles and police Kevlar vests. The robbers fired approximately 1,100 rounds at officers and civilians before being killed. The bank robbers wore body protection which successfully shielded them from bullets and shotgun pellets fired by the responding patrolmen. Police noted that the service pistols carried by the first responding officers had insufficient range and relatively poor accuracy, although a SWAT team eventually arrived with sufficient firepower.51 The event helped galvanize the public’s willingness to see that police would have armament to protect them against better-outfitted criminals. Seven months after the incident, the Department of Defense gave 600 surplus M16s to the LAPD issued to each patrol sergeant; LAPD patrol vehicles now carry AR-15s as standard issue, with bullet-resistant Kevlar plating in their patrol car doors as well.52 As a result of this incident, the LAPD authorized its officers to carry .45 ACP caliber semiautomatic pistols as duty sidearms. The National Defense Authorization Act currently coordinates the transfer of excess military equipment to law enforcement agencies. As of 2014, 8,000 local law enforcement agencies participate in the militarization program that has transferred $5.1 billion in military hardware from the DOD to local American law enforcement agencies since 1997.53 Data from 2006 to 2014 show that local and state police departments obtained aircraft, helicopters, bayonets, knives, night-vision sniper scopes, tactical armored vehicles or MRAPs, rifles, and weapons grenadelaunchers, watercraft, and camouflage gear, among other military equipment.54 Many police reformers, especially in minority communities, see the dilemma for police trying to have it both ways—that is, continued militarization of their service while trying to project increased transparency, dialogue with community leaders while emphasizing more cultural diversity training legions of cops. In a 2013 piece in the newsletter of the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPs), COPS Senior Policy Analyst Karl Bickel warned that police militarization could seriously impair community-oriented policing. Accelerating militarization is likely to alienate police relationship with the community and pointed to a variety of factors that contribute to militarization, including the growth of SWAT; the increased prevalence of dark-colored military-style battle dress uniforms for patrol officers (which research suggests has a psychological effect of increasing aggression in the wearer), and “warrior-like” stress training in policing training, which fosters an “us versus them” approach.55

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Those officers with military backgrounds are more likely to use force than their civilian-trained counterparts. A national survey in August 2016 by the Pew Research Center found those police officers who had served in the military were more likely to have fired their weapon while doing police work (32% vs. 26%).56 In addition, these officers are more likely to support pro-gun rights and aggressive police tactics.

Police Unions—Impressive Influence Police unions have evolved to become a force to reckon with politically over the past few decades. Demonstratively, police unions exert enormous control over local and state politics. To some extent, their influence reaches the President and halls of Congress. Union leaders, as previously mentioned, are primarily white men, politically astute, who operate out of self-interest. These individuals are very adaptive to swaying public opinion against local mayors and other cities, county, and state officials. Armed with impressive war-chests of money, these officials pay political operatives to go after their rivals, especially when it comes to police reforms. Their political boundaries are often stretched to include the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) as allies. A prime example was illustrated when an African-American man was put into a chokehold by NYPD officers on July 17, 2014 and died of sustained injuries while being placed in custody. Eric Garner’s death case centered around racial bias in policing the street in New York. While no angel, Garner had been arrested and convicted more than 30 times for various crimes that included assault, resisting arrest, fraud, and selling untaxed cigarettes. On his last day on earth, NYPD officer Justin Damico, accompanied by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, moved in to arrest Garner for allegedly hawking untaxed cigarettes. It was easy for the cops to recognize Garner with his 395-pound frame. A friend of Mr. Garner held a cellphone camera that recorded the struggle that millions would soon see. The public saw the chokehold of the swarm of officers and heard the 11 pleas for breath.57 Mayor Bill de Blasio criticized the NYPD police tactics for racial profiling. However, he would soon find a deluge of public sentiment against his public stance by none other than the police union and their vast public support colleagues. Garner’s death began a cascade of police officer-involved killings against black men in America. NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Lie were executed while sitting in their patrol car by a shooter in revenge for the killing of Eric Garner. De Blasio called for the police protest to discontinue out of respect for the officers and faced a growing backlash from NYPD police for his publicly criticized support of protecting the citizens. The Patrolman’s Benevolent Association claimed that De Blasio had blood on his hands.58 The police brutality cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson (2014), Walter Scott in Charleston (2015), and Freddie Gray in Baltimore (2015) captured racial injustice contacts with police as witnessed in other previous police brutality cases. The police have not witnessed this level of prosecutorial and public scrutiny in past years. Nor had police unions come under intense scrutiny over support to accused police officers, especially by other private sector unions whose memberships are filled with Black, Hispanic, and working-class Whites. The only successful police prosecution was against Officer Michael Slager, who killed Scott. He received a 20-year sentence in a plea deal to avoid a second trial in South Carolina.59

Conclusion The use of deadly force by police and, to a lesser extent, by correctional officers is a high-profile and contentious issue. According to the Mapping Police Violence Project, 1,126 people were killed by police in 2020.60 That is a disturbing number of deaths for a country that touts justice and liberty for all. 508

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Even more distributing, the majority of those were African-American men. One study projects that 1 in 2,000 men and 1 in 33,000 women will die due to deadly force used by cops. Thus, the ratio for black men is 1/1,000 that will die due to deadly contacts with police in America.61 With approximately 980,000 state, county, and municipal sworn police officers making millions of public contacts each year enforcing laws that help make communities safer and holding criminals accountable, there is no doubt that mistakes will occur. Citizens understand that and recognize the dilemma confronting the country’s police officers, and the sacrifices are profound. Nevertheless, our communities do expect that our police will be held accountable for abhorrent behaviors. Sir Robert Peel’s fourth principle states, “The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes, proportionately, to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives.”62 The nation’s unions and benevolent police associations that rose out of the 60s became stronger and extraordinarily successful at raising the standard of living, sorely needed for police officers. A necessary element to help achieve those goals was the advent of many public and private schools and colleges that would advance police professionalism through education. President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988 giving public employees the right to organize unions and bargain collectively, followed by presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, adding their refinements to bolster public union support.63 Public labor-bargaining continued to flourish in the public sector pushing wages and benefits in many labor categories beyond those found in the private sector. President Bill Clinton used union support and cops to help him win the Presidency in 1991. He told the nation that he would add 100,000 cops to help fight the war against crime.64 It was a counterstrategy against the elder Bush in their presidential campaign that he (Clinton) was soft on crime. Through their public and private support, unions have amassed substantial “war-chests” of funds to push their agendas. Moreover, union leaders, mostly white males, are influential and quite willing to leverage their fear and intimidation tactics against politicians that stand in their objectives. Those bargaining wins have included lowering police standards accepted behavior or simply raising the bar for sustaining police disciplinary actions to hold police accountable. The startup of the new decade 2020 is going to be best remembered for COVID-19 and police brutality and their resulting protest marches. These two key events are heavily influencing the campaign for the 2020 presidential election. Black Lives Matter and other activists’ groups are keying on influencing other labor unions influencing their counterparts in police labor unions and benevolent associations. The AFL-CIO, Teamsters, SEIU, and others publicly reprimanded police union leaders for their failure to adopt reforms, holding their members (cops) accountable for police brutality, particularly against minorities. There are over 10,000 AFSCME contracts in the United States covering members of public service workers, and they, too, feel the effects of failures to hold police accountable.65 Activists have become increasingly aware of police union tactics that have been successful at the bargaining table: that is, keep talking and wear your opponent down. The trust of this chapter has been to illustrate the need for police reform, not abolishment. The nation’s police are critical to the freedoms enjoyed by all Americans. Effective law enforcement ensures that each member of society can work and play without the threat of those who have sworn an obligation to uphold a free society’s Constitutional guarantees. Those reforms will include the rollback of influences that police unions may have on public officials. Any recommendations would include the investment in individual police officers by having an excellent educational standard and must challenge the courts to revisit Qualified Immunity for police. Because the police are the community and the community are the police, there can be no differences that separate the standard of conduct enjoyed by each. If anything, police must be held to a higher standard and more accountable. 509

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Notes 1 Daniel DiSalvo, “The Trouble with Unions,” National Affairs, 1 October 2020, https://www. nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-police-unions, accessed 19 July 2021. 2 “The right to local-self-government and control to regulate for the protection of the public health, safety, morals, and welfare; to license; to tax, and to incur debt.” See “Home Rule,” West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, 2nd ed. (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2008), available online at legal-dictionary. thefreedictionary.com/Home+Rule, accessed 19 July 2021. 3 Eli Hager and Weihua Li, “A Major Obstacle to Police Reform, The Whiteness of Their Union Bosses,” The Marshall Project, 10 June 2020, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/10/a-major-obstacleto-police-reform-the-whiteness-of-their-union-bosses, accessed 19 July 2021. 4 Brad Howard, “How the push for law enforcement reforms runs into powerful police unions,” CNBC, 30 June 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/how-the-push-for-law-enforcement-reforms-runsinto-powerful-police-unions.html, accessed 20 July 2021. 5 Edward A. Thibault, Lawrence M. Lynch, Bruce R. McBride, and Gregory Walsh, Proactive Police Management, 9th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2015), 1. 6 “Peel’s Principles of Law Enforcement,” Ottawa Police Service, 2021, www.ottawapolice.ca/en/about-us/ Peel-s-Principles-.aspx, accessed 21 July 2021. 7 Tiffany Morey, “Policing Eras,” in SOU-CCJ230: Introduction to the American Criminal Justice System, eds. Alison S. Burke, David Carter, Brian Fedorek, Tiffany Morey, Lore Rutz-Burri, and Shanell Sanchez (Portland: Open Oregon Educational Resources, n.d.), 196–206. 8 Phillip L. Reichel, “Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type,” American Journal of Police 7 (No. 2 1988): 51–77. 9 Reichel, “Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type,” 56. 10 See, for example, Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown, 2004); Kristen T. Oertel, Harriet Tubman: Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights in the Nineteenth-century America (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Milton C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 11 Willard M. Oliver, “The Fourth Era of Policing: Homeland Security,” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 20 (Nos. 1–2 2006): 49–62. 12 See George Silver, Paradoxes of Defence (London: Edward Blount, 1599); Edward H. Savage, A Chronological History of the Boston Watch and Police: From 1631 to 1865 (Boston: s.p., 1865); Robert E. Anthony, Boston Police: Behind the Badge (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014); and Donna M. Wells, Boston Police Department (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003). 13 The United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights act of 1875, forbidding discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public spaces, was unconstitutional and not authorized by the 13th or 14th Amendments of the Constitution. Civil Rights Cases, 109 US 3 (1883); and Morey, “Policing Eras.” 14 David R. Johnson, American Law Enforcement: A History (St. Louis: Forum Press, 1981); and Roger Lane, Policing the City of Boston, 1822–1885 (New York: Atheneum, 1975). 15 Oliver, “The Fourth Era of Policing: Homeland Security.” 16 Erick Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes (New York: New Press, 2018), 51. 17 DiSalvo, “The Trouble with Unions.” 18 Daniel DiSalvo, “Enhancing Accountability: Collective Bargaining and Police Reform,” Manhattan Institute, 21 January 2021, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/enhancing-accountability-collectivebargaining-and-police-reform, accessed 21 July 2021. 19 Francis Russell, A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike (originally published 1930; Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). 20 Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes, 181. 21 Marvin J. Levine, “A Historical Overview of Police Unionization in the United States,” The Police Journal 61 (October 1988): 334–43. 22 Michael D. Lyman, The Police: An Introduction, fourth ed. (New York: Pearson, 2010), 112. 23 Ibid. 24 Jay Maeder, “BLUE FLU Cops on strike, December 1970 - January 1971,” New York Daily News, 25 June 2001, https://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/blue-flu-cops-strike-december-1970-january-1971chapter-384-article-1.911985, accessed 21 July 2021. 25 Thibault, Lynch, McBride, and Walsh, Proactive Police Management. 26 Philip F. Rubio, There’s Always Work at the Post office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 181.

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Police Unions 27 Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966); Rolando V. del Carman and Jeffery T. Walker, “Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966),” in Briefs of Leading Cases in Law Enforcement (New York: Routledge, 2020), 237–238; and Thibault, Lynch, McBride, and Walsh, Proactive Police Management. 28 John F. Hussey, “A Study Of Police Officers With Military Service Backgrounds Compared To Police Officers Without Military Service Can Military Veterans Interact And Properly Engage The Public?” Page 6. (PhD diss: City University of New York, 2020), 6. 29 Lyman, The Police, 43. 30 Ibid., 49. 31 Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (New York: Verso, 2004). 32 Ibid. 33 Dominic Streatfeild, Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Macmillan, 2003). 34 Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 35 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 2. 36 Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn, The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1984). 37 Hope v. Pelzer, 536 US 730 (2002). The qualified immunity standard protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff’s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right. When determining whether a right was “clearly established,” courts consider whether a hypothetical reasonable official would have known that the defendant’s conduct violated the plaintiff’s rights. Courts conducting this analysis apply the law in force at the time of the alleged violation, not the law in effect when the court considers the case. “Qualified Immunity,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell University School of Law, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/qualified_ immunity, accessed 21 July 2021. 38 Taylor v. Riojas, 141 S.Ct. 52 (2020); and Erwin Chemerinsky, “SCOTUS hands down a rare civil rights victory on qualified immunity,” ABA Journal, 1 February 2021, https://www.abajournal.com/columns/ article/chemerinsky-scotus-hands-down-a-rare-civil-rights-victory-on-qualified-immunity, accessed 21 July 2021. 39 John Kazanjian, “Point of View--In defense of qualified immunity,” Palm Beach Post, 27 January 2021, https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/01/27/police-union-chief-says-law-enforcement-officers-need-qualified-immunity/4260579001/, accessed 21 July 2021. 40 Ed Yohnka, Julia Decker, Emma Andersson, Aamra Ahmad, “Ending Qualified Immunity Once and for all is the Next Step in Holding Police Accountable,” American Civil Liberties Union, 23 March 2021, https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/ending-qualified-immunity-once-and-for-all-is-thenext-step-in-holding-police-accountable/, accessed 21 July 2021. 41 Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court Will Not Reexamine Doctrine that Shields Police in Misconduct Suits,” National Public Radio, 15 June 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/876853817/supreme-court-willnot-re-examine-doctrine-that-shields-police-in-misconduct-sui, accessed 21 July 2021. 42 Tennessee v. Garner, 471 US 1 (1985). 43 Graham v. Connor, 392 US 1 (1968). Title 42--Section 1983--Civil Action for deprivation of civil rights. “Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable. For the purposes of this section, any Act of Congress applicable exclusively to the District of Columbia shall be considered to be a statute of the District of Columbia.” 42 US Code § 1983. 44 Pearson v. Callahan, 555 US 223 (2009). 45 Eli Hager, “Blue Shield,” The Marshall Project, 27 April 2015, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/ 04/27/blue-shield, accessed 21 July 2021. 46 Radley Balko, “The Police officers’ bill of rights,” Washington Post, 24 April 2015, https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/04/24/the-police-officers-bill-of-rights/, accessed 21 July 2021. 47 Hager, “Blue Shield.”

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Perry L. Lyle 48 Parker Gavin, “Detective retires after 22 years on sick leave,” NBC 10 WJAR, 25 February 2020, https://turnto10.com/i-team/nbc-10-i-team-cop-retires-after-22-years-on-sick-leave, accessed 21 July 2021. 49 Mike Riggs, “Why Firing a Bad Cop Is Damn Near Impossible,” Reason, 19 October 2012, https://reason. com/2012/10/19/how-special-rights-for-law-enforcement-m/, accessed 21 July 2021. 50 Weber is perhaps best known for his thesis of the “Protestant ethic,” relating Protestantism to capitalism, and for his ideas on bureaucracy. Weber’s profound influence on sociological theory stems from his demand for objectivity in scholarship and from his analysis of the motives behind human action. Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also “Power and Authority,” Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, University of Minnesota Libraries, https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/14-1-power-and-authority/, accessed 21 July 2021. 51 Paul Vercammen, “20 years ago, gunbattle terrorized North Hollywood--and shocked America,” CNN, 28 February 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/us/north-hollywood-bank-shootout-anniversary/ index.html, accessed 21 July 2021. 52 Arezou Rezvani, Jessica Pupovac, David Eads, and Tyler Fisher, “MRAPs And Bayonets: What We Know About The Pentagon’s 1033 Program,” National Public Radio, 2 September 2014, https://www.npr.org/ 2014/09/02/342494225/mraps-and-bayonets-what-we-know-about-the-pentagons-1033-program, accessed 21 July 2021. 53 Trevor Burns, “Stopping Police Militarization,” Cato Handbook for Policy Makers, 8th ed. (Washington: Cato Institute, 2017), 217–220. 54 Rezvani, Pupovac, Eads, and Fisher, “MRAPs And Bayonets.” 55 Karl Bickel, “Will the Growing Militarization of Our Police Doom Community Policing?” Community Policing Dispatch, US Department of Justice 6 (December 2013): https://cops.usdoj.gov/html/dispatch/122013/will_the_growing_militarization_of_our_police_doom_community_policing.asp, accessed 21 July 2021. 56 Rich Morin and Andrew Mercer, “A Closer Look At Police Officers Who Have Fired Their Weapon On Duty,” Pew Research Center, 8 February 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/08/acloser-look-at-police-officers-who-have-fired-their-weapon-on-duty/, accessed 21 July 2021. 57 Chokeholds are a common technique used by police and self-defense experts to restrict the airway when pressure is applied to the neck’s front. The Los Angeles Police Department banned what is called the “bararm chokehold” in 1982. The New York Police Department banned chokeholds in November 1993, except when an officer’s life is in danger. Lawrence J. Buckfire, “Lawsuits for Police Chokehold Deaths,” National Law Review 10 (23 November 2020), https://www.natlawreview.com/article/lawsuits-policechokehold-deaths, accessed 21 July 2021. 58 “New York City Mayor Calls for Pause to Protests,” Time, 22 December 2014, https://time.com/ 3644472/bill-de-blasio-protests-new-york/, accessed 21 July 2021. 59 A.J. Baker, David Goodman, and Benjamin Mueller, “Beyond Chokehold: The Path to Eric Garner’s Death,” New York Times, 14 June 2015, A1. 60 Mapping Police Violence, 2020, https://policeviolencereport.org/, accessed 22 July 2021. 61 Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116 (No. 34 2019): 16793–16798. 62 “Peel’s Principles of Law Enforcement.” 63 Thibault, Lynch, McBride, and Walsh, Proactive Police Management. 64 Glenn Kessler, “Bill Clinton’s claim that 100,000 cops sent the crime rate ‘way down,’” Washington Post, 26 September 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/09/26/bill-clintonsclaim-that-100000-cops-sent-the-crime-rate-way-down/, accessed 22 July 2021. 65 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), AFL-CIO, is the nation’s largest and fastest growing public service employees’ union. See “AFSCME Q and A,” University of Massachusetts, Amherst, https://www.umass.edu/local1776/Flyers%2C%20Updates %20%26%20Documents_files/AFSCME%20Q%20%26%20A.htm, accessed 22 July 2021.

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38 ALL IT TAKES IS ONE BLOCK A Case Study of the History of Police Brutality in Public Health1 Alyasah Ali Sewell

Introduction No matter where you go and what ways ethnoraciality privileges and/or marginalizes you, police violence is a social problem that carries with it public health problems and, therefore, also carries with it concerns about the sociopolitical health of society. The question, then, becomes not if police violence is a societal public health issue, but how. When even attempts to seek medical help are patterned by the simplest aspect of proactive policing—the frisk, or the pat-down; then, the solution to the problem of injury prevention actually becomes a problem that impairs prevention of not just injury, but also illness—whether in the case of an emergency, or else. When people are less likely to even address their health problems within the safety net institutions of society, we might begin to question whether police violence—like ethnoracial segregation and concentrated disadvantage, underfunded schools, and unemployment—is a systemic issue that impairs a society from living up to its potential and contributing to its capacity to better the future of the generations to come. I offer to you an argument that may on face value seem preposterous and an overstatement. I offer to you that if you really want to understand how ethnoracism is a systemic issue; then, you have to consider how historical injustice contributes to lifelong problems in succeeding cohorts and provides a better opportunity to think about the interlinking of societal problems today. Markets—and, particularly, markets that dictate the provision and loss of homes—can supply quality information to consider these issues in their own right—through social processes like mass incarceration, persistent ethnoracial segregation, and rising income inequality, as well as the durable reinforcement of these institutional problems. Mortgage markets tell us not just who lives in the home—the most concrete formulation of the American Dream, but also how institutional actors keep closed the gates of who gets to exchange homeownership-related resources. By looking specifically at resource exchange in mortgage markets, I believe we can better track the institutional gatekeepers that organize and validate the practices of not just whether you have the capacity to build wealth and the nest egg of retirement, but also who gives you such capacities and under what conditions. Criminal legal enforcement’s capacity to engage in proactive and forcible practices for the purpose to control and prevent injury has seen an increase since the advent of the twenty-first century, particularly towards men. Ordinary assaults during this period have declined at the same time that assaults due to legal intervention have increased. The use of the term “legal intervention, in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-49

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my case, is not political or social; it is medical. As a state-verified medical event, such impairments are part of our nation’s health and vital statistics. This medical diagnosis infers that—if not for the legalized actions of enforcing a state-sanctioned statute, said impairments would not have incurred. A focus on such events minimizes the importance of social science fixation on establishing social causality because the causality is determined and defined by the state. A focus on legal intervention is strict, conservative—and often an issue in criminal and civil proceedings of judicial accountability. It is the question of judicial accountability—not analytical accountability—that is the heart of my argument, and the minds and hearts of society today. Even while the question of analytical accountability is a tool of science to establish legal precedent, the question of judicial accountability is central to how concerns with police brutality have evolved across the history of public health. Such concern, now at the forefront of debate among the leading public health researchers and public administers, demands the public to define police violence as a public health problem. Without such efforts, clear and systematic intervention to curb police brutality are amiss. The primary responsibility of jurors is to decide whether the police did it and whether the police should be responsible for what it did. So, my focus herein is not analytical causality but rather the social determinants that the public should consider in the criminal and civic processes that ascertain how and whether society should sanction violence as a solution to aiding efforts to buttress safety and build safe communities.

Policing Systems in Public Health A good history of the conversation around police brutality or police violence in public health would start in earnest 60–70 years ago—before the exponential hardening of the criminal legal system. During this period, police were really seen in public health as first responders. We thought about them as solutions to public health problems, like drug abuse, domestic violence, and sex trafficking. As first responders to crime and injury, they were framed as helping people, as saving communities. This conceptualization reflects an organizational model that has, in some sense, persisted. However, this organizational model has been layered atop other ways of thinking about everyday police interactions. In the 80s and 90s, there was an array of models that came about as the rise in the influence of the social sciences on public health increased—primarily, the science of psychology, the spreading institutionalization of the National Institute of Mental Health, the sociopolitical deinstitutionalization of mental health hospitals, and the social psychological model of psychiatric illnesses and mental health. The question of rising prestige in the diagnosis of mental health problems as disorders and diseases of the mind sat along an increasing desire to consider the questions of discrimination and prejudice through a social psychological and behavioral lens. The question of racial discrimination placed into focus the actions and inactions of people and specific actions and forms of public contact. Questions of injustice and accountability for unfair outcomes set in the bullseye the power of institutional gatekeepers who were socially sanctioned to engage in specific actions to socialize and professionalize members of the society across the life course, including teachers and police and even managers and individuals who were trying to provide different types of services for the benefit of society. The public health approach dealt with how a gatekeeper of an institution made you feel. This shift in conceptualization very pointedly is reflected in the rise of discrimination scales that capture everyday life events—such as, whether you feel like you have been unfairly treated due to your race, or whether you feel like you’ve experienced discrimination, prejudice, injustice, and forms of inequity—beyond even that of race and ethnicity (e.g., gender, age, poverty status, sexuality, body weight).

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The psychological models therefore drew on the social psychology literature and on understandings of both the sociality of psychology as well as psychology of social interactions. Public health begins to think about interactions, day-to-day interactions, with police as a stressor. This larger question of the long history of life events and everyday types of acute stressors was always in the conversation around public administration, captured most saliently in questions of rehabilitation, premeditation, and contextualization and of questions about injury avoidance and criminal activity. The conversations about surveillance then are not new. Police contact was already a concept in public health, but public health approaches to the agent of policing itself began building around the influence of surveillance on other forms of institutional and social life. Actors within the criminal legal system, such as social workers and judges, which were a part of the conversation in the 60s and 70s, began to be considered distinct from police and security officers. The idea that police interactions are different from other forms of institutionalized interactions that co-occur with contact with the legal system gained credence as the twentieth century waned. The term “police brutality” becomes seared into the public health consciousness with the publishing of a formidable piece in its leading journal—the American Journal of Public Health, calling forcible actions by police as “brutal.” In so doing, interpersonal and community violence joined the stage of police violence. This research continued on, as the leading scientists called for judicial change in the treatment of police violence as national public health events. The reception of this idea joined with the question of health equity, health policy, and social policy because the idea of brutal acts of violence being perpetuated by the police meant that the national government itself was a perpetuator of violence. This model dovetails with calls that state-sanctioned violence needs to be held accountable for its injury—for us to put the state in prison, if you could imagine it. This focus on and treatment of state-sanctioned violence was not common in science communities. However, if the history of social movements is a precursor of salient conversations, the conversation around police brutality has always been there. Maybe it was not forefronted by the civil rights movements of the mid-twentieth century, but still there is in this conversation a focus on the real story behind how police were treating people. Public media’s exposure of brutal crimes fed a fascination with police behavior, and also its dirtier sides, like the race riots of the 70s and embattlements at the individual level like that with Rodney King. Increasingly, public health turned its gaze beyond people at the margins of society, like street workers or drug users or addicts, to communities that underwent brutal approaches to crime control, as well as to how we control people’s bodies and control their experiences. This is evident now; however, it was not until the twenty-first century when the unfolding of this concept of brutality spread beyond marginal economies into other social domains. There, targets of policing also began to question the justice and fairness of the criminal legal system and mass incarceration. There is also a flourishing understanding of the idea of violence itself, to include not just intimate partner violence and interpersonal violence and state violence, but also police violence. So, it is not just that the police can be saviors of people who are victimized, or not just people who are controlling crime, but they are also themselves engaged in criminal acts. It is not so much a question of ethics, although that is part of the conversation, but police are perpetrators of exposure to violence in underserved and disadvantaged communities, just as other types of perpetrators. This is a trauma model, of which there are many different kinds of conversations about how you deal with trauma. More recently, we have seen the conversation around needing to count trauma as a public health event in policing, especially counting police killings as a distressing event. A public health lens creates the perfect victims, if you like that language. The medicalization of police brutality is a call to consciousness of the body politic of the United States, and really across the world, to consider who are these individuals tasked to save us, and what is the way in which they actually create part of the problems they are tasked with solving. In the twenty-first century, we see a decline in hospitalizations due to general assaults. Yet, to diagnose an injury as a legal 515

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intervention-related assaults, we identify sources of injury through intakes, nurses, technicians, or doctors themselves asking, “So who was it that hurt you?” Right in some sense, it might not actually be done. Rather, it may be that the emergency responders are saying, “Well, yes, there was a shooting here and the person who did the shooting was a police officer or a security agent. Either way, causality is established by more objectively”.

The Block as Evidence So, at the beginning of this period of the twenty-first century, we actually see a combination of antibrutality movements, generated most immediately by the murder of Amadou Diallo in New York City in 1999. If ever there were a cry to arms, it was the killing of this man. He was walking outside of his apartment, completely unaware of what was going on. The police were looking for someone. Diallo supposedly fit the description. This African immigrant was gunned down, 41 shots right to the frontal part of the body. Nineteen hit. There was in response, a coalescence of those inside the anti-police brutality movement, a formation of what would become one of the first cases to deter the implementation of stop-and-frisk policies. Similar cases began to proliferate across the country. The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a case against the NYPD Street Crimes Unit—not by the family of Diallo, but by people who experienced similar type of “fit the description” treatment as did Diallo. And really the Daniels et al. vs City of New York case was about systemic discrimination—as in: I think there’s discrimination, but there’s no way we can prove it. At this time, there was not even have records to identify how many police are stopping people or how many people are being stopped. What do police do when they stop someone? What type of officer is making such stops? In New York City there was a very concerted effort at gun control, at drug control, and really weapons control from the police, and a lot of this came out in the form of plainclothes cops. It came out in the form of no-knock warrants. And so on and so forth. Well, the Daniels case was successful in several ways. Yes, there is discrimination, the City of New York admitted, and stops were done unfairly. More importantly, there was a concession that was made by the New York Police Department, to publicly release all data on stops that were occurring to pedestrians in the five boroughs. The police also created form UF-250, which was and is supposed to be required for cops to fill out after every pedestrian stop. They give basic demographics of the individuals being stopped. The form also indicates what types of activities were engaged in by the police during the stop and whether they recovered anything from it. The forms ultimately created a database of stops. Now, you would know whether a cop committed one of nine uses of force against a person, including, anything like bringing out a baton or a Taser, and even pulling his weapon, not to shoot someone, but to use the weapon as a whip, or a threat to comply. It tracks control of bodies, and even throwing someone against the fence. We have nine different indicators of this within this database. We also know whether they were given a citation. We know whether they were arrested, and we even know whether there are other people in their group who were stopped and questioned. It is very detailed data set from an administrative perspective, essentially created out of thin air from this successful lawsuit. This database revealed an exponential rise in the number of stops that New York Police Department officers are engaged in on the street. This is happening at the exact time when the rate of crime is going down, and the number of robbery complaints are going down. There was a pointed increase in, visible surveillance practices, of the New York Police Department between 2006 and 2009. The block was hot. There was another case that was brought in 2008—the Floyd et al. vs City of New York; not so much because there were no records of street stops, but because the New York Police Department 516

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was not releasing its quarterly reports. The reports it did release aimed at justifying police behavior. Yes, these stops are not equitable. Still, are they commensurate with the amount of crime? How effective are we? Are we better at getting guns off the street? And if you want to know that answer, The answer? They were very ineffective. There was a 2% recovery rate for guns out of about six and a half million stops over a twenty year period. If a public health intervention was successful at such a rate, we would like just get rid of it—or, at least, question its functionality.

The Block as Ecology We must have some questions about the efficacy of the stop-and-frisk policy for injury prevention and crime control. We must have some questions about the very accuracy of the information reported in the street stop database. We have to have some questions around the long-term implications of these types of policies. That being said, my data focuses on administrative reports before the implementation of stop-and-frisk policy was deemed unconstitutional on August 12, 2013 by the State of New York’s Supreme Course—that is, the historic Floyd et al. vs City of New York et al case originating in 2008. The social dynamics of those stops really change after that. In the decade before the Floyd case, we know that about 85% of stops are of black and brown people in New York City, and another 80% are of men. At that intersection, we are looking at a very highrisk population—that is, black and brown men. We are looking at Eric Garner, a Black man choked to death in Staten Island no more than a year after the fall of stop-and-frisk. We know that if we aggregate these stops up to 34 community areas in New York City, my neighborhood level, there are about 30 stops per hundred residents. Over half of those stops involve some type of pat down or frisk. A fifth of stops evidence one of nine forms of force used by the police. If we take all those records of stops of Black and Brown people compared to White people, Black and Brown pedestrians are six times more likely to be stopped than White pedestrians. Black and Brown pedestrians are more than 25% more likely to be frisked. They are 28% more likely to have force used against them by the police. Living under inequitable legal surveillance is a conditioner for a range of illness risks that hamper efforts to improve public health. Alongside the conditions of living that degenerate quality of life in economically and ethnoracially segregated neighborhoods and communities, we also observe that living in proactively and aggressively surveilled communities by police and legal enforcement officers heightens the risks of physiological deterioration, mental health problems, chronic health conditions, and vulnerable conditions to some of the most pressing public health problems of the twenty-first century, including those related to the contemporaneous COVID-19 pandemic. Living in neighborhoods where police engage in proactive stop-question-and-frisk activities raises exposure risk to high blood pressure, diabetes, and asthma episodes among neighborhood residents—regardless of whether they themselves interact directly with police. Even proximate risk factors to chronic health problems, such as obesity and thinking that one’s health is poor, raises concerns about longevity and the quality of a good, healthy life. Ecological health issues contributing to endemic and progressive stress coping mechanisms often unveil themselves over decades. They go largely unnoticed during basic health screenings by primary care physicians, specialty medical care, and even rehabilitative healthcare workers. The fact that such risk factors are related to sociopolitical conditions out of the eye and under the floorboards of everyday living raises the question of how much control individuals really do have in changing the trajectory of their life. That such proximate and distal risk factors are patterned unevenly by one’s ascribed social status is perhaps even more unsettling. Research tells us that, for instance, men face a great risk of psychological distress when living in communities where police engage in use of force and bodily patdowns on one extra block of the city mile. Women, meanwhile, face a higher risk of debilitating 517

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cardiovascular events—marked by greater exposure to high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity—when they live in neighborhoods where they are legally surveilled. Such neighborhoods, for example, may have as few as three police killings in a decade. In the decade leading up to the fall of stop-question-and-frisk policies in New York City, women—compared to their male counterparts—faced a greater risk of a heart attack due to this CVD “trifactor”. These women lived in communities where medical examiners and/or coroners identified more than two legal intervention deaths. Such losses are life, they determined, would not have occurred except for the actions of legal enforcement officers and security agents engaging in behaviors to uphold the law. Those lives were taken by state-sanctioned violence. Ethnoracial inequities in health problems are linked to neighborhood exposure to the use of force. On one hand, simply living in communities where Black and Brown populations are concentrated heightens the debilitating mechanisms of police use of force. Both the marginalization of ethnoracially minoritized communities and the criminalization of any person in such communities works against them. The CVD trifactor as well as a poor outlook on the quality of one’s life is associated with exposure to pedestrians being forcefully handcuffed, thrown against the fence or wall, beaten with a baton or taser, and even the lawful wielding of police weapons against people walking through a neighborhood. The burden of effect meanwhile is quite low. On average in NYC, one in five pedestrians have such elements of force used against them during a police stop. If in a neighborhood the likelihood of police use of force increases to say 30%, then the degenerating risks of police violence set forth. Yet, such associations are not limited to ethnoracially segmented communities. Places where Whites are more likely to concentrate in NYC also show evidence of police-related surveillance stress. Here, witnessing ethnoracial inequality in police use of force is doing the trick. Where Black and Brown pedestrians are two times more likely to be forcibly detained by police than their White counterparts, residents of such communities privileged by the protective mechanisms of whiteness evidence the poorest health of all “whitened” communities. Obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and poor/fair ratings of one’s own health give pause to assumptions that police brutality is a Black and Brown problem. While any increase use of force exposure does not weaken the health benefits of whitening, perhaps it is that perceptions of inequality and, by operationalization, unequal returns to criminalization processes that make neighborhood residents—otherwise racially and economically privileged—sick. Further still, ethnoracial populations with the least contact with the criminal legal system and the best health in most cases—Asian/Pacific Islanders—face the same risk of hypertension in areas that are more aggressively surveilled by the police than when they reside in communities where police are less violent. Perhaps the most concerning public health problem of the ecological block is demonstrated by the impact of police brutality on healthcare attitudes and health services utilization. Individuals who live in neighborhoods where there is more frisking do not believe they have very good health. They are afraid, and frightened individuals who are less likely to go to the emergency room. When they do have a hypertensive or episode, they are less likely to try to get help. Public health solutions begin to question the place of police violence as a solution to its problems.

The Block as Extraction My focus on the last part of this case study is Minneapolis, where the presence of African Americans greatly increased from 1980 to 2010. That growth has primarily come in their movement into areas that were redlined by federally-funded agents of the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation. These are areas where home loans were less likely to be approved during the expansion of the modern suburb, where investors were encouraged to sell and/or rent out their properties, and where the stigma of concentrated disadvantaged detracted commercial development. Neighboring blocks sealed them 518

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into these redlined areas with restrictive covenants that kept Black and Brown people out of places of wealth nestled south and east along the desirable Minnehaha Creek. The exception to such restrictive business contracts were domestic servants of a different race who domiciled with an owner or tenant. You can come in; however, you must be working for us. George Floyd was choked to death at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Ave, one such formerly redlined neighborhood. When medical examiners tested his body post-mortem, they found that he still had COVID-19 antibodies in his system. He was diagnosed with a COVID-19 infection at the beginning of April 2020. Such diagnosis is not to be dismissed. For instance, if we were to generalize his physical condition to a random person in New York City at this time, these same medical examiners would have diagnosed George Floyd with COVID-19—but for a very different reason. There were so many unattended bodies found in NYC homes as public health workers started looking for COVID-19 cases that there were not enough resources to test all of them for infection. A public health ordinance was passed that anyone who died during this period, this same six-month period when George Floyd was diagnoses with COVID-19, would be tagged as a COVID-19 related death. NYC was not the only city to make such a process—even when other primary causes were known to be the precipitating factor to loss of life. Instead of certainty in causation, the medical community left the answers to the imagination. No one could really prove a truth. For the purposes of the National Center for Health Statistics, George Floyd would have been pronounced as a COVID-19 related death for the sheer reason that he had been exposed to COVID-19, and infected, in April; at the time of his death he had evidence of COVID-19 exposure; and, therefore, he fits the bill of a COVID-19 victim. He “fit the description”. I would argue, however, that he died of something else altogether—altogether of police brutality, altogether of COVID-19, altogether even of the bad heart of which he also was deemed a victim, altogether of his inability to withstand a knee to the neck. I would argue that he actually died of systemic racism. This cause of death was rooted more than a century ago with the placement of a restrictive covenant on a street corner 10 blocks south of George Floyd’s murder. Here begins the neighborhood of 48th Chicago. The parcel at the street corner southeast of the intersection is tied to the address of 4701 Chicago Ave. That restrictive covenant is one that identifies the “Caucasian” race as the only legal inhabitants of any structure on that property. That restrictive covenant did not expire until 1925. It was given to Harry Williams, or Harry Williams had to sign for it when he bought the property from Shenandoah Terrace, which was a suburban construction company deemed all of its parcels as restricted from owning, renting, or leasing any building or structure on that land. To boot, a cemetery and golf course would be cultivated to square off the projected wealth of the green-lined neighborhood. In 2020, that parcel is the address of a financial institution, “Wings Financial Credit Union”. Across the street sits Wells Fargo Bank. Across that a little bit further down is Health Partners Urgent Care a doggie daycare, eateries and artisan shops, alike in their display of wealth. Public health studies show us that, as you move away from such services, chronic health conditions increase, along with the psychological distress of living in neighborhoods with limited access to healthy food options and green space. We have a place that has been built to keep out Black, Brown, and indigenous people, a place, founded in 1938 by seven airline employees who reddened and stabilized the line by local credit unions and international bastions of wealth. George Floyd Square, and 38th Street and Chicago Ave. intersection, was a place of vigilant shielded from the violence of its moment, to later be memoralized as a living museum to the failures of the state to serve it and protect. Ten blocks south of the corner was a green-lined neighborhood. George Floyd Square is redlined and George Floyd was redlined. Those red lines were drawn a century ago.

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We cannot have a conversation about what it takes to transform these historically divested areas and the brutality that comes with them without understanding the salience of one block of space. One inequity that happens continuously, and time again.

The Systemic Roots of Police Brutality These larger questions of systemic inequality, discrimination, and racism have refashioned questions of racial and economic segregation, and ethnic segregation. In systemically segregated places we have competing, converging, and coupling forms of surveillance practices that invisibly control people’s behavior and the marks they leave on the world. We have not simply a structural sense of the criminal legal system, but also of policing, the gateway of that system. We can have this similar sense in the case of education—tracking; and in the case of the healthcare system—a “sick role”. Both are structural narrative-makings unto themselves. There is a patterned, strategic, and systematic process when an authorized actor within an organized system draws on their institutional role to guide and apply the rules of the institution in a moment that can to determine whether the consumer really should have access to its goods and resources. For instance, the sick role’s access is achieved by medical expert affirming that is sickened by some factor that can be evaluated by the technologies of said institution. Because that decision requires formal certification and the application of an organized set of rules, this too is a form of institutional surveillance. Admittedly, i prefer consideration of the social causes that are embedded in an actual transaction, hence why I frame legal intervention deaths as the culprit of the “perfect victim”. The perfectness is not in the hands of the killer, but rather in the hands of the medical examiner, or, the coroner, who, said, yes, my professional opinion is, that yes, he was killed by the police. Such was George Floyd’s diagnosis. So, too was Mike Brown’s. As were, the diagnoses of Breonna Taylor. Rayshard Brooks. Atatiana Jefferson. Oscar Grant. Elijah McClain. These are pointed losses of life. They are a cry for people to have a good life that is free of illness. They are a difficult proposition at best. They are by the social conditions in which we live. The story I tell is not a causal story. However, through this story, I can provide a description of the relationships that we want to consider about the types of political-economic contexts people survive. This story also describes the social conditions that expose people to different types of risk for attaining and maintaining a good quality of life. The terminology I draw on is labeled “negative illness feedbacks,” which is a process that reveals a paradox that something that should be protecting you from illness may actually not be doing so. The causal language is one of physics, where this concept appropriately marks a type of “negative feedback” because it is associated with mechanisms that in effect reproduce the problem. The problems, unlike those of the materials of physics, are sociopolitical conditions—both undesirable (thus, the “negative” denotation)—that could be avoided if either of these social facts could be deterred and/or unraveled. The outcomes considered in this book are at the heart of those well-being outcomes that pattern life and death in a pandemic and post-pandemic environment. They are the leading indicators relevant to COVID-19-related hospitalization and death. The indicators here can be precursors and evidence of such COVID-threatening conditions as cardiovascular disease, chronic pulmonary disease, diabetes, and immunocompromised illnesses. Their life-threatening capacities are hardly distinguishable from each other, even while they vary from community to community. This case study presents that illnesses of concern should not just be treated as analytical outcomes per se—but also as indicators inferring health outcomes. They are a reflection of these vulnerable conditions that curb the vitality of the nation. Police violence, then, is afforded the place of a social condition that salts and flavors a public health problem, our ability to solve that problem, and the extent to which that problem is exacerbated. No one should randomly assign systemic racism—let 520

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alone police brutality. However, if you can understand systemic racism and police brutality as historical processes, then tracking emerging social problems across time—by age, period, or birth cohort—can allow us to get at some of those actionable preconditions that we can reduce the deteriorating impact of an exogenous causal factor, like a pandemic. Because systemic racism is not an experiment – social or otherwise, we are always going to be caught between the space of understanding that context and the space of figuring out what happens as a result of the social systems that place that space. Individuals are indelibly tied to differentiating social systems, but you need them to be untied to understand the effects of the elements that govern their behavior and beliefs. Not understanding the patterns of those ties leaves us tied to those systems. So when Eric Garner is choked to death, or Mike Brown shot, or George Floyd crushed, we can have conversations ad nauseum about whether the interventions were legal, whether they were the primary cause of death, or whether the taillight really was broken. All that time, we are forgetting that the systems that have been in place for decades have been doing much of the heavy lifting, creating a system of police brutality that is a legitimate public heath problem on its own right, for those who experience it directly or indirectly.

Background Reading Acevedo-Garcia, Dolores, and Kimberly A. Lochner. “Residential Segregation and Health.” In Neighborhoods and Health, edited by Ichiro Kawachi and Lisa F. Berkman, 265–87. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Alang, Sirry, Donna McAlpine, Malcolm McClain, and Rachel Hardeman. “Police Brutality, Medical Mistrust and Unmet Need for Medical Care.” Preventive Medicine Reports 22 (2021/06/ 01/2021): 101361. Bailey, Zinzi D., Nancy Krieger, Madina Agénor, Jasmine Graves, Natalia Linos, and Mary T. Bassett. “Structural Racism and Health Inequities in the USA: Evidence and Interventions.” The Lancet 389, no. 10077 (2017/04/08/2017): 1453–63. Bonilla‐Silva, Eduardo. “What Makes Systemic Racism Systemic?”. Sociological Inquiry 91, no. 3 (2021): 513–33. Collins, Chiquita A., and David R. Williams. “Segregation and Mortality: The Deadly Effects of Racism?”. Sociological Forum 14, no. 3 (1999): 495–523. Cooper, Hannah LF, and Mindy Thompson Fullilove. From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence. JHU Press, 2020. Cooper, Hannah L. F., Lisa Moore, Sofia Gruskin, and Nancy Krieger. “Characterizing Perceived Police Violence: Implications for Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 7 (2004): 1109–18. Edwards, Frank, Michael H. Esposito, and Hedwig Lee. “Risk of Police-Involved Death by Race/Ethnicity and Place, United States, 2012–2018.” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 9 (2018/09/01 2018): 1241–48. Essed, Philomena. Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. Vol. 2: Sage, 1991. Feagin, Joe R., and Zinobia Bennefield. “Systemic Racism and U.S. Health Care.” Social Science & Medicine 103 (2// 2014): 7–14. Feldman, Justin M, Jarvis T Chen, Pamela D Waterman, and Nancy Krieger. “Temporal Trends and Racial/Ethnic Inequalities for Legal Intervention Injuries Treated in Emergency Departments: Us Men and Women Age 15–34, 2001–2014.” Journal of urban health 93, no. 5 (2016): 797–807. Fix, Michael, and Raymond Struyk. “Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America.” Washington, DC: The Field Experiments Website. Available at http:// ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura/00241.html, 1993. 521

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Grollman, Eric Anthony. “Multiple Forms of Perceived Discrimination and Health among Adolescents and Young Adults.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 53, no. 2 (June 1, 2012 2012): 199–214. Immergluck, Daniel. Foreclosed: High-Risk Lending, Deregulation, and the Undermining of America’s Mortgage Market. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Jackson, James S., Katherine M. Knight, and Jane A. Rafferty. “Race and Unhealthy Behaviors: Chronic Stress, the Hpa Axis, and Physical and Mental Health Disparities over the Life Course.” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 5 (2010): 933–39. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Jones, Camara P. “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale.” American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 8 (August 1, 2000 2000): 1212–15. Kerrison, Erin M., and Alyasah A. Sewell. “Negative Illness Feedbacks: High-Frisk Policing Reduces Civilian Reliance on Ed Services.” Health Services Research 55, no. S2 (2020/10/01 2020): 787–96. Krieger, Nancy. “Epidemiology and the Web of Causation: Has Anyone Seen the Spider?”. Social Science & Medicine 39, no. 7 (10// 1994): 887–903. Krieger, Nancy, Jarvis T. Chen, Pamela D. Waterman, Mathew V. Kiang, and Justin Feldman. “Police Killings and Police Deaths Are Public Health Data and Can Be Counted.” PLOS Medicine 12, no. 12 (2015): e1001915. Kwate, Naa Oyo A. “Fried Chicken and Fresh Apples: Racial Segregation as a Fundamental Cause of Fast Food Density in Black Neighborhoods.” Health & Place 14, no. 1 (3// 2008): 32–44. LaVeist, Thomas A. “Segregation, Poverty, and Empowerment: Health Consequences for African Americans.” The Milbank Quarterly 71, no. 1 (1993): 41–64. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Mehra, Renee, Amy Alspaugh, Linda S. Franck, Monica R. McLemore, Trace S. Kershaw, Jeannette R. Ickovics, Danya E. Keene, and Alyasah A. Sewell. ““Police Shootings, Now That Seems to Be the Main Issue” – Black Pregnant Women’s Anticipation of Police Brutality Towards Their Children.” BMC Public Health 22, no. 1 (2022/01/20 2022): 146. Mendez, Dara D., Vijaya K. Hogan, and Jennifer F. Culhane. “Institutional Racism and Pregnancy Health: Using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data to Develop an Index for Mortgage Discrimination at the Community Level.” Public Health Reports 126 Suppl 3 (/ 2011): 102–14. Pescosolido, Bernice A, Carol Brooks Gardner, and Keri M Lubell. “How People Get into Mental Health Services: Stories of Choice, Coercion and “Muddling through” from “FirstTimers”.” Social science & medicine 46, no. 2 (1998): 275–86. Ross, Stephen L., and John Yinger. The Color of Credit: Mortgage Discrimination, Research Methodology, and Fair-Lending Enforcement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Saegert, Susan, Desiree Fields, and Kimberly Libman. “Mortgage Foreclosure and Health Disparities: Serial Displacement as Asset Extraction in African American Populations.” Journal of Urban Health 88, no. 3 (2011): 390–402. Schnittker, Jason, Michael Massoglia, and Christopher Uggen. “Incarceration and the Health of the African American Community.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 8, no. 1 (2011): 133–41. Sewell, Abigail A. “The Racism-Race Reification Process a Mesolevel Political Economic Framework for Understanding Racial Health Disparities.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2, no. 4 (2016): 402–32. Sewell, Abigail A. “The Illness Associations of Police Violence: Differential Relationships by Ethnoracial Composition.” Sociological Forum 32, no. S1 (2017): 975–97. 522

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Sewell, Alyasah Ali. “Policing the Block: Pandemics, Systemic Racism, and the Blood of America.” City & Community 19, no. 3 (2020/09/01 2020): 496–505. –––. “Political Economies of Acute Childhood Illnesses: Measuring Structural Racism as Mesolevel Mortgage Market Risks.” [In eng]. Ethnicity & disease 31, no. Suppl 1 (2021): 319–32. Sewell, Alyasah Ali, Justin M. Feldman, Rashawn Ray, Keon L. Gilbert, Kevin A. Jefferson, and Hedwig Lee. “Illness Spillovers of Lethal Police Violence: The Significance of Gendered Marginalization.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 7 (2021/05/28 2021): 1089–114. Sewell, Abigail A., and Kevin A. Jefferson. “Collateral Damage: The Health Effects of Invasive Police Encounters in New York City.” Journal of Urban Health 93, no. 1 (Apr 2016): 42–67. Sewell, Abigail A., Kevin A. Jefferson, and Hedwig Lee. “Living under Surveillance: Gender, Psychological Distress, and Stop-Question-and-Frisk Policing in New York City.” Social Science & Medicine 159 (6// 2016): 1–13. Sugie, Naomi F, and Kristin Turney. “Beyond Incarceration: Criminal Justice Contact and Mental Health.” American Sociological Review 82, no. 4 (2017): 719–43. Waitzkin, Howard. The Politics of Medical Encounters: How Patients and Doctors Deal with Social Problems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Williams, David R., Yan Yu, James S. Jackson, and Norman B. Anderson. “Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Socio-Economic Status, Stress and Discrimination.” Journal of Health Psychology 2, no. 3 (July 1, 1997 1997): 335–51. Zenk, Shannon N., Amy J. Schulz, Teretha Hollis-Neely, Richard T. Campbell, Nellie Holmes, Gloria Watkins, Robin Nwankwo, and Angela Odoms-Young. “Fruit and Vegetable Intake in African Americans: Income and Store Characteristics.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 29, no. 1 (2005): 1–9.

Note 1 Excerpted transcription from public lecture, “All It Takes Is One Block: The Legacy of Redlining in Lethally Surveilled Neighborhoods,” Keynote Address, Georgia Sociologist of the Year, Annual Meetings of the Sociologists of Minnesota, 15 October 2021.

523

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes; and page numbers in Bold refer to tables; and page numbers in italics refer to figures Abdulrahim, S. 184 Abelmann, N. 378, 386n21 Achilles, N.B. 361n1 Ackerman, S. 484n44 Adler, J. 4, 61–69, 70n27, 70n29 Adorno, T. 379, 386n33, 386n34 Afary, K. 376–386, 386n13 African American Policy Forum (AAPF) 423 Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL) 88 Agawu, E.A. 341n2 Agee, C. 364–373 Agyepong, T. 94n19 Ahlerich, M. 312n31 Aiello, T. 1–8, 239–259 Ajilore, O. 288, 296n59 Alba, R.D. 36n57 Albeck-Ripka, L. 457n54 Aldebron, J. 260–276, 277n19 Alexander, M. 36n60, 502, 511n35 Alford, N.S. 181n134 Ali, M. 190 Allender, D. 423–434 Allen, R. 489, 495n20 Allen, T.W. 277n5 Allison, W.T. 22, 22n3, 22n5, 22n8, 24n39 Alpert, G.P. 36n78 Altman v. City of High Point 243, 248n30 Alvarez, L. 10n24, 177n66 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 450, 464 American labor movement 75–85 Amnesty International 460 anarchism and syndicalism 196–197 Anders, E. 176n29 The Andy Griffith Show 338 Anger, K. 354

Angwin, J. 469n40 Anspach, R. 434n1 anti-black racism 105 anti-brutality activism 364–375; in courts 370–372 Anti-Drug Abuse Act 502 anti-police brutality activism at Ballot Box 369–370 anti-police brutality movement 366–367 anti-police protest 135–137 Antoine, M. 477 Aragon, M. 5, 97–105 Arastu, N. 193n19 Archbold, C.A. 456n2 Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself 328 Arnesen, E. 35n24, 36n53 Aschraft, E.E. 253 Ashcraft v. Tennessee 253, 258n11, 258n12 Auchincloss, L. 84n44 Aucoin, J. 38, 40 Austin, C.J. 10n23 Ayres, E.D. 167 Ayres, I. 279n78 Baez, A. 393–394 Bagby, J. 13 Bagby, T. 13, 18 Baillou, C 311n26 Baker, A. 44, 46n2, 47n3m, 47n24, 47n6–n8, 47n39, 47n45, 48n46, 48n55 Balderrama, F. 177n61 Baldwin, J. 2, 9n5, 106n37, 106n38, 107n44, 124, 132, 135, 141n2, 143n19, 246, 249n43, 324, 329 Balko, R. 511n46 Baltimore, C. 54 Balto, S. 6, 112, 115n2, 143n18 Bandes, S. 333–341, 342n22

524

Index Banville, J. 48n62 Baraka, A. 328, 329, 332n4 Barker, D. 42 Barrett, J. 93n6 Barrows, R.G. 35n18 Barry, E. 157 Bartlett, D. 227 Bathurst, C. 247n3 Battalion, A.L. 202 Bausch, K. 7, 314–321 Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) 481 behind the billy club: convention eve 213–214; convention week begins 24–216; shoot to kill 212–213; world is watching 216–220; Yippies are coming 213 Behnken, B. 178n92 Bejan, V. 297n66 Bell and Swain v. State 258n1 Bell v. State 251, 258n2, 258n3, 258n4 Bennett, J. 240, 247n6 Bérubé, A. 349, 357, 361n11, 361n27 Bethell, B. 342n31 Bevel, J. 6 Bhatt, A. 193n21–n25 Bickel, K. 507, 512n55 Bingham, C. 313n65 Biondi, M. 230 BIPOC 460 Bittner, E. 35n10 Black agitation 2 Black Arts activists 326 Black Arts Movement 324, 325, 331 Blackburn, D. 309, 313n57 Black civic rights: civil rights 110; national rights 111; natural rights 110; policing 111–114; schools 113–114; war on 108–109 Black, D.J. 413, 419n50 Black Identity Extremists (BIE) 187–188 #BLACKLIVESMATTER: #ArrestAll4 444; Black Feminist Foundations 439–442; #IfTheyGunnedMeDown 445; impacts of decentralized structure 442–444; political philosophies of 444; on social media 438; #8toabolition’s proposal 444; US Civil Rights movement 438 Black Panther Party 120, 423 Black rebellion 463 Black sharecroppers 4 Blackstone, W. 16, 22n13 Blair, P. 287 Blaxploitation 315, 319, 320, 330 Blessett, B. 402n33 Blindspotting 341 Blocha, S. 239, 240 bluecoated terror 61–71 Bogel-Burroughs, N. 175n2 Boisseron, B. 248n8 Bonet, M. 366

Bone, W. 13 Borowsky, J. 279n78 The Boston Police Strike (1919) 500–501 Bove, V. 288, 296n38 Boyce-Davies, C. 387n49 Boyd, T. 322n20 Boyz N the Hood 320, 321 Bracey, J. 331n2 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act 284 Brando, M. 123 Brandt, N. 106n40, 107n45, 107n47, 107n50 Bratton, W. 267 The “Breathe Act ” 444 Brecher, J. 83n10, 83n18, 83n19, 84n30, 84n31, 84n34 Brenner, M. 402n45 Bronfenbrenner, K. 177n51 The Bronx Is Next 326 Brown, M. 282, 284, 286, 290, 456n18 Brownrigg, C.P. 176n23 Brown v. Board of Education 369 Brown v. Mississippi 258n6, 258n7 Brown v. Muhlenberg Township 243, 248n28 Bruder, T. 395 Brunelle-Raja, B. 175n1 Bundy, M. 490 Burgess, J. 456n32 Burns, T. 512n53 Burruss, G.W. 296n61 Bush, G.W. 192n10 Butler, J. 402n28 Byers, E.H. 36n78 Cainkar, L. 193n28 California Public Records Act 268 Campbell, B.A. 36n78 Campbell, J.M. 23n34 Campney, B.M.S. 178n97 Camus, R. 190 Canaday, M. 363n75 Canales, J.T. 161, 167 Candler, A. 41 Cannon, L. 386n1, 457n40 Capdevielle, P. 39 Capeci, D.J., Jr. 10n17, 60n58 Capers, I.B. 344n78 Capozzola, C. 53, 59n6, 59n30, 59n32 Carlson, W.B. 35n17 Carnegie, A. 80 Caro, R.A. 234n36 Carrigan, W.D. 176n12 Carroll v. County of Monroe 246, 249n37 Carr, R.K. 258n13 Carter, J. 371 Cave, D. 457n54 Cazanave, N.A. 157n3 Chafee, Z, Jr. 199 Chambers v. Florida 252, 258n10

525

Index Chambliss, W.J. 34n7 Chandler, D. 326 Chang, C. 280n94 Chang, G.H. 158n12 Chan, L. 157n1 Charles, R. 38–46 Chauncey, G. 349–351, 362n69 Chauvin, D. 7, 8, 400, 473 Chavez, N. 435n27, 445n1 Chevigny, P. 342n34 Chinese Exclusion Act 154, 155 Chinese Restriction Act 154 Christgau, R. 312n53 Christian, G.L. 54, 60n41, 60n43 The Chronic 310 Ciavaglia, J. 469n37 citizen journalism 450 citizen journalists 450 Citizens Local Alliance for a Safer Philadelphia (CLASP) 367 City of Los Angeles v. Lyons 373, 375n67 City of Philadelphia v. United States 372 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles 379 Civil Rights Act 109, 254, 499 Clancy, D. 412 Clark, K. 5, 10n18, 245 Clark, M. 441 Cleary, D. 247n3 Cleaver, E. 122, 123 Cleaver, K. 123, 130n58 Cleveland, G. 82, 154 Clinton, B. 377, 509 Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) 265 Coalition for Police Accountability (CAPA) 370 Cohen, A. 423–434 Cohen, C. 446n8 Cohen, G.D. 185 Cohen, R. 234n30, 234n37 Cohn, N. 445n5 COINTELPRO 188 Coit, J.S. 57, 60n65 Cole, C.M. 279n77 Cole, L. 131n80 Coleman, K. 131n78 Collins, H. 446n29 Collins, T. 312n30 Comack, E. 407 Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) 394 Commonwealth v. Massini 248n25 community control 479 Community Oriented Policing Services (COPs): drug problem 501; force legal cases 503–504, 504; harsh criminalization 502; holding police accountable 505–506; juxtaposition of police v. civilian rights 505, 506; law enforcement officer bill of rights (LEOBR) 505; qualified immunity 502–503; Ronald Regan’s administration 501

Community Resources Against Hoodlums (CRASH) intelligence unit 265 The Condemnation of Blackness 49 Conducted Energy Device (CED) 465 Cone, J.H. 128n16 Congressional Black Caucus 307, 373 Connolly, A. 419n70 Connor’s intransigence 5 consent decree and beyond: changes in arrest levels 273; complainants by race/ethnicity 270; complaint process 273; complaints 268, 269; data 268; demographic changes 271; high-tech surveillance 275; implication of findings 274; officer-involved shootings (OIS) 270, 272; policy and practice changes 274–275; serious disciplinary allegations 270, 271; vulnerability of arrestees 273–274 construction and transmission of law enforcement norms 334–335 Conyers, J. 307 Coolidge, C. 500 Cooper, T. 23n21 Copenhaver v. Borough of Bernville 248n29 Correia, D. 494n2 Cortez, G. 160 counterinsurgency 488, 489 counterinsurgency and limitations: non-accounting as infrastructure 486–487; in police brutality 485–486; from police brutality to police terror 487–488; reformism 488–491; UCOP Community Safety Plan 491–493 counterintelligence program 489 Crank, J.P. 37n83 Crenshaw, K. 386n2, 434n1 criminal legal system 520 crisis response teams 417 critical amplification: black women and trauma in media 426–427; conceptualization 424; criminalization of black women 425–426; critical discourse analysis 427; digital ethnography 427; Google Trends 428, 429; police accountability 430; significance 432; theoretical framework/ perspectives 424–425; in tweeted articles 433–434; Twitter Data 430, 431; YouTube Video Data 429, 432 Cronon, W. 10n16 Crosby, A. 417n4, 418n43 Croyle, J. 313n62 Cummings, H.S. 202, 206n48 Cunneen, C. 414 Curtis, E.E. 194n44 Curvin, R. 136 Daley, R. 212, 219 Daley, R.M. 219 Dansky, K. 295n3 Darsey, R. 252 Daulatzai, S. 190, 195n56

526

Index Davis, A. 70n17, 144n87, 184, 362n47 Davis, M. 278n45, 351, 361n26, 362n38, 379, 386n26 Dawley, A. 76, 83n5 Dawsey, J. 10n28 Day, J. 38 Death Certificate 308, 309 decade of the neighborhood 364 DeDino, N. 115n11 deep responsibility as Liberation War 493–494 Deflem, M. 467n6 defund campaigns 481 defunding police 417 de León, A. 176n11 Delise, K. 247n3 Delisle, L.N. 44 Dellinger, D. 219 D’Emilio, J. 348, 352 demographic instability 4 Denis, N.A. 176n34 Denny, R. 377 Denton, N.A. 36n62, 36n64 Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report 340 Derrida, J. 248n20 DeSantis, R. 477 Detroit River 5 Deutsch, L. 312n40 De Zúñiga, H.G. 456n33 Dezzani, R.J. 296n41 Diallo, K. 398–400, 399 Dietz, J.L. 176n33 Dikotte, F. 93n5 DiLorenzo, T. 151, 158n14 Dirty Harry syndrome 337 DiSalvo, D. 510n1 disempower the police: defund campaigns 481; police-free zones 480–481; transformative justice 481 Ditter, J.W., Jr. 373 Dixon, A. 130n51 Doherty, J.B. 295n12 Dollard, J. 69n9, 71n78 Donald, H. 87 Dong, C. 117–127 Donner, F. 177n55, 233n16 Douglas, E. 121, 129n40 Douglas, W.O. 253 Dowell, D. 121 Dragnet 333 Drake, M. 491 Drug Enforcement Administration 501 Dubofsky, M. 80, 83n4, 83n7, 83n20, 84n27 Du Bois, W.E.B. 59n14, 425, 475 Dulles, F.R. 83n4, 83n7, 83n20, 84n27 Dundon v. Kirchmeier, 419n47 Dziekan v. Gaynor 248n32 Eagles, C.W. 234n38 Eckholm, E. 280n95

Economic Opportunity Act 500 Edley, C.F. 495n26 Edwards, E. 491 Eligon, J. 175n2 Elkins, A. 142n9 Ellis, H. 349 Ellis, M. 98, 105n6 Ellsworth, S. 9n11, 58, 60n71 Elsinbawi, M. 423–434 Enforcement Agencies Act 285 England’s Metropolitan Police Act 497 Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act 448, 452 Ericson, R.V. 457n37 Erwin v. County of Manitowoc 248n21 Escobar, E. 232, 235n74 Eskridge, W. 363n101 Esmail, A.M. 467n1 Evelyn, K. 458n61 Evers, M. 123 evolution of reform: civilian review boards (CRBs) 262–263; community policing 262–263; federal interest in reform 261–262; federal intervention in policing 263; police unions 262–263 Fairclough, A. 71n75 Faler, P.G. 83n8 Fandos, N. 458n67 Farson, W.J. 218 Faucette, B. 342n31 Favors, J. 234n47 Fegley, T. 94n26 Felber, G. 144n59 Feldman, A. 401n13, 403n54 Felker-Kantor, M. 5, 132–141, 172 Felker, M. 304 Fernández, J. 178n79, 178n81, 178n88, 178n89 Fernández, L. 178n87 Fernandez, M. 180n125 Ferrell, D. 313n63 Fichter, J.H. 71n50 fight against communism: end of police brutality 204–205; FBI raids in detroit 202–203; “the new type of aggressiveness” 197–198; Palmer raids 197; police unleashed 201–202; “these splendid men, real Americans” 199–201; violence toward any aliens should be scrupulously avoided 198–199; whitewashing the FBI 203–204 Fink, L. 10n15 Finkle, L. 105n10 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act 284 Fischer, A.G. 143n20 Fishback, W. 81 Fiske, J. 386n9 Fitzhugh, G. 16, 23n16 flashbang grenades 466 Fleetwood, N.R. 445n2 Floyd, G. 7, 8, 315, 406, 431, 448, 452–453, 452–454, 460, 519

527

Index Floyd v. City of New York 344n66 Flynn, K. 403n62 Fogelson, R.M. 35n38, 36n68, 142n6 Foglesong, T. 279n77 Forman, J. 123, 373n4 Fortenbery, J. 295n1 Fos, P. 68 Fox, B. 296n33, 296n35, 296n61 Frankfurter, F. 199, 254 Franklin, S. 311n21 Frasch, P.D. 248n22 Frazier, E.F. 87 Freeborn, T. 214 Freedom Square 480 Freelon, D. 441, 446n26 Freeman, D. 387n42–n44 Frick, H. 197 Friedkin, W. 301 Fritsch, J. 403n67 Fruitvale Station 341 “Fuck Tha Police” 301–303, 308, 310, 331 Fudge, E. 248n9 Fuel Air Distraction Device (FADD) 466 Fuller v. Vines, 242, 248n23 Furr, W. 137 Fyfe, J. 336, 342n36 Gabrielle, B 332n7 Gaffney, G. 247n1 Gage, B. 201 Gang-Related Active Trafficker Suppression (GRATS) 266 Gang Reporting and Tracking (GREAT) systems 266 gang truce movement 380–381 Gantman, H. 312n44 Garbarino, A. 505 Gardner, B.B. 70n17 Gardner, M. 70n17 Gard, W. 176n14 Garner, E. 448, 451–452 Gates, D. 265 Gavrilova, E. 288, 296n38 gay bar 347, 348 gay community 360 Gaynor, T.S. 402n33 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act 448 Gibson, C. 36n61 Gilbert, B. 280n96 Gilded Age urban hubs: antebellum period 26; Catholic Irish 27; establishment of big-city police departments 27–30; immigrants 27; industrialization and urbanization 26; policing in the modern era 30–33; social class and ethnic group 25 Gillespie, N. 69n12 Gill, H. 79 Gillham, P.F. 295n27 Gilmer, R. 434n1

Gilmore, R.W. 187, 475, 483n21 Gitlin, T. 218, 220n20 Giuliani, R. 388 Golden R.W. 193n29 Gold, J. 311n8 Goldman, A. 468n17 Goldsmith, A. 456n3 Goldstein, R.J. 205n4 Gompers, S. 82, 91 Gonzalez, G.G. 175n5 Goodell, W. 17, 23n18 Goode v. Rizzo 369 Goodman, J.D. 277n20 Gordon, L. 176n13 Govern, K.H. 295n4 Graham v. Connor 257 Graham v. Connor 33, 36n79, 259n30, 341n4, 504, 511n43 Grandin, G. 157n5 Grant, W.R. 316 Greenberg, D. 22n4, 22n7, 22n11, 22n12, 23n25, 23n28, 24n38, 362n59 Greenberg, M.A. 22, 22n2 Green, J. 83n21, 277n24, 456n32 Green, R. 260–276 Greer, C. 458n81 Gregory, D. 405, 417n8 Grein, P. 312n55 Gruening, M. 54, 59n14, 59n16, 60n36, 60n40 Gubbay, M. 387n41, 387n42–n44 Guerra, F.J. 280n96 Gusfield, J.R. 35n23 Gutiérrez, D.G. 177n65 Haan, W. 56 Hadden, S.E. 23n20, 23n30, 176n6, 277n7 Hager, E. 510n3 Haggerty, K.D. 457n37 Hahn, H. 35n32, 35n33, 35n44 Hair, W.I. 46n1, 129n26 Haley, W. 457n56 Haller, M.H. 34n4, 35n13, 35n26, 35n27, 35n41, 35n43, 36n47, 36n48, 36n52, 36n55, 36n65 Hall, J.D. 128n15 Hall, M.K. 233n27 Hamilton, A.C. 406, 417n13 Hammond, J.H. 16, 19, 23n15, 23n29 Hannon, H. 43 Harlow v. Fitzgerald 247n4 Harmon, R. 94n29 Harring, S.L. 49, 59n3, 277n2, 399, 403n63, 417n6 Harrington, R. 312n52, 313n69 Harris, C.M. 129n25 Harris, L. 434n1 Harrison, L. 363n70 Hartman, S.V. 402n43 Haskins, Y. 371 Hayden, T. 378

528

Index Hayes, R.B. 77, 154 Hays, A.G. 103, 107n41, 107n46 Healy, J. 341n13 Heard, N. 32, 329 Heineman, K. 233n6 Heller v. District of Columbia 110, 115n12 Hendin, H. 127n2 Herbert, B. 401n20 Hersey, J. 138 Hesford, W.S. 446n24 Hickman, M.J. 279n68, 297n66 Hicks, W.E. 347–361 Higgins, C. 311n22 Hild, M. 4, 75–82, 83n16 Hill, E. 456n6, 457n56 Hilliard, D. 131n80 Hill, R.A. 105n7–n9, 106n13 Hilton, C. 216 Himes, C. 324 Hine, D.C. 129n24 Hinner, C. 185 Hinnershitz, S. 6, 147–157 Hinton, E. 108, 109, 113, 115n4, 115n7, 115n9, 133, 142n8, 144n72, 228, 234n31, 234n32, 467n10 Hip Sing 147 Hirschfeld-Davis, J. 482n2 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) 227 Hodges, A.J. 49–58 Hoerl, K. 426 Hoffman, A. 221n21 Hoffman, F.L. 70n30 Holcomb v. Van Zylen 248n25 Holder, E. 281 Holland, G. 386n10 Hollon, E. 151 Hollums, E.L. 2 Holmes, M. 3, 25–34, 34n6, 35n15, 36n75, 37n80, 37n81, 37n88, 37n89, 37n92 Holmes, W.F. 79, 83n25, 84n26 Homan Square 480 Home Invasion 310 “Homicide Files” 371 Hoosac, B. 281–295 Hoover, H. 262 Hoover, J.E. 98, 201, 206n55, 207n56, 207n57, 207n70, 207n71 Hope v. Pelzer 503, 511n37 Hopper, D. 301 Horel, K. 435n19 Horkheimer, M. 379, 386n33, 386n34 Horne, G. 10n19, 142n7 Horsman, R. 176n10 House Rules Committee 199 Houston, C.H. 99, 106n15 Howard, J. 13, 361n3, 362n48 Hsiao, A. 402n35 Hsu, M. 157n7

Hudlin, W. 322n20 Hughes, L. 137, 331n1 Hughey, M.W. 141n3 Humphrey, H. 214, 219 Humphrey, R.M. 79 Hurn, S. 241, 246, 248n17 Imani, P 128n17 Immigration Act 157, 197 “In Defense of Black Lives” 416 Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) 416 Indigenous Lives Matter (ILM) 416 indigenous people: BLM and ILM/NLM 416–417; enabling violence 413–416; police killing of 406–408; policing protests 410–413; policing the colonial project 404–406; violence against women and girls 408–410 Injury of Duty (IOD) action 505 Insurrection Act 282 International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) 462 Ioanide, P. 388–400 Islamophobia: anti-black racism 188–190; discourses and policies 183; equating Black Identity Extremists as muslim 187–188; racialization of Islam with anti-black racism 190–191; service of White Supremacy 184–185; social and community activism 188; and surveillance 185–187 Jackson, J. 88, 307 Jackson, L. 166 Jackson, M. 39 Jackson, R.H. 202, 206n50, 254 Jackson, S. 39, 40 Jackson, Z.I. 240 Jacobs, D. 35n9 Jah, Y. 386n17 Jamison, H. 312n28 Jefferson, T. 16, 17, 23n14 Jeffries, J.L. 35n32, 35n33, 35n44 Jenkins, H. 139, 424, 434n7 Jenkins, J. 175n4 Jenkins, W. 6 Johnson, B.H. 35n14, 36n50, 36n51, 110, 162 Johnson, C.S. 71n51, 87 Johnson, D. 362n43, 423 Johnson, J.W. 3, 55, 56, 60n56 Johnson, K. 9n9 Johnson, L. 6, 132, 140, 248n7, 284 Johnson, M.S. 34n5, 277n10 Johnson, R.D. 295n2 Johnson, S. 190, 195n57 Jones, J.M. 417n16 Jon, G. 147 Jordan, D. 456n6, 457n56 Journal of Civil and Human Rights 2 Judas and the Black Messiah 314, 423, 424, 427 Jung, K. 36n61

529

Index Kaba, M. 184, 403n69 Kahne, J. 111 Kalet, H. 280n99 Kaminski, R. 296n60 Kant, I. 248n15 Katz, C. 277n14, 277n17 Katz, J. 362n64, 387n40 Kaufhold, K. 456n33 Kelley, R.D.G. 2, 9n8 Kelling, G. 388 Kendi, I.X. 234n33 Kennedy, E.L. 351, 361n26, 362n38 Kennedy, G. 312n49 Kennedy, J.F. 283, 501 Kennedy, L. 362n47 Kennedy, R.F. 501 Kerner, O. 139 Kifner, J. 403n56, 403n59 Kim, J. 457n35 King, M.L. 5, 122, 123, 137, 212, 247, 324, 393, 501 King, P.H. 311n5 King, R. 7, 266–267, 307, 308, 377, 406, 450, 464 King, S. 442 Kingseed, W. 158n16 Kitossa, T. 417n3 Klein, P. 311n3 Knight, C. 311n19 Knox v. Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 248n25 Kohler-Hausmann, J. 115n6, 115n8, 116n32 Kohn, A.M. 70n44 Koper, C. 288 Kopkind, A. 144n74 Koslicki, W.M. 459n86 Kosseff, J. 458n76 Krasner, L. 92 Krause, P. 84n29 Krehbiel, R. 60n69 Krugler, D.F. 56, 60n52 Kumar, D. 192n12 Kusch, F. 6, 211–220 Kwanele, B. 435n26 LA4+ Committee meetings 383, 384 LaFourche, J.B. 71n47 La Guardia, M.F. 103, 104 Lait, M. 180n129 Lakoff, G. 434n3 Landry, E. 61 Lane, E. 363n70 Lankford, A. 287, 296n51 Lansing, M. 94n20, 94n21 Lasley, J.R. 457n39, 468n22 latinx populations and policing: conquest 160–164; labor 164–167; war 171–175; youth 167–171 La Tour, J. 177n54 Laurie, B. 76, 81, 84n28, 84n35, 84n46 Law enforcement officer bill of rights (LEOBR) 505

Lawson, E., Jr. 37n84 Leach, L.F. 106n36 Lee, F. 79 Lee, H.N. 61, 69n5, 69n7, 71n69 Leerhsen, C. 312n47 Lee, R.T. 69n6 LeFevour, J.J. 212 Leland, J. 311n14, 313n66 Lenahan, J. 213 Lentz-Smith, A. 53, 59n34, 59n35, 60n37, 129n27 Leonnig, C.D. 10n28 Leovy, J. 344n77 Lepore, J. 84n32 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) community 347, 361 Lesher v. Reed 242, 248n24 Levin, B. 94n28, 94n31, 94n32 Levine, M.J. 510n21 Levin, M. 91, 387n50 Levy, P. 373n3 Lewis, O. 178n82 Lewis, T. 121 The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 325 Lieblich, E. 295n5, 419n49 Lie, J. 378, 386n21 Limmerick, P.N. 157n8, 157n9 Liptak, A. 259n31, 259n32 Little, J. 125, 126 Litwack, L.F. 36n58 Li, W. 510n3 Locke, H.G. 35n12 Lock v. Falkenstine 248n25 Logan v. United States 258n5 Lomax, M. 307 Londoño, E. 446n16 London’s Metropolitan Police Act 15 Long, J. 41 López, H. 178n94 López, I.H. 178n90 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) reform: arrests per year 273; Board of Police Commissioners (BPC) 263–264; burgeoning surveillance 265–266; case study summed up 275–276; Christopher Commission 266–267; DOJ oversight 267–268; McCone Commission 265; oversight and racism 264; Rampart scandal 267–268; reform efforts intensify 265; Rodney King 266–267; Watts 264 Louima, A. 33, 395 Love v. State 258n4 Luder, J. 312n43 Lughod, A. 386n19 Lumpkins, C.L. 50, 59n12, 59n15, 59n18, 59n19, 59n23, 59n27, 59n29 Lundman, R.J. 35n39 Lyle, P.L. 467n1, 497–509 Lynch, L.M. 510n5 Lynn, J.A. 71n77

530

Index Lyon, E. 342n23 Mabry, H. 42 Macdonald, D. 106n11 Macdonald, N. 106n11 Madley, B. 157n4 Magra, I. 457n54 Maher, G. 184, 490 Mailer, N. 10n25 Maldonado v. Fontanes 249n35 Malka, A. 3, 38–46, 47n31, 70n15 Mallory, T. 442 Manes, H.R. 135, 143n26 Mapp v. Ohio 115n21, 116n21 Marable, M. 115n16 Maraj, L. 436–445, 445n4 Maraniss, D. 233n10 Marks, D. 68 Marquis, G. 419n62 Marriot, D. 192n5 Marshall, T. 106n25, 106n28, 106n32 Marsh, D. 311n20, 313n56 Martaindale, H. 287 Martínez, D.E. 240, 247n5 Martin, L. 105n2 Martin, T. 436 Marx, G.T. 295n27 Marx, K. 277n1 Mason, E. 51 Mason, J. 246, 249n41 Massey, D.S. 36n62, 36n64 Matthews, H. 76 Matzen, M. 249n46 Mbembe, A. 447n36 McAden, L.D. 296n41 McBride, B.R. 510n5 McBride, J.D. 176n27 McCarthy, E. 214 McCartin, J. 511n34 McCollum, J. 250 McConahay, J.B. 142n5 McCord, D.J. 23n26, 24n36 McCoy, C. 456n21 McDonald, L. 33 McDougal, D. 313n61 McDowell, M. 7, 473–482, 484n52 McEwen, T. 401n22 McGreevy, P. 278n65 McGuire, D. 144n66 McIlwain, C. 441 McKeeson, D. 442 McKinley, W. 197 McKinney v. Robbins 248n25 McLaughlin, M. 50, 52, 59n13, 59n22, 59n26, 59n28 McLaurin, M.A. 83n22, 83n23 McMahon, B. 206n46, 206n47

McNair, G. 3, 13–22 McNair, S. 329 McPherson, C.S. 434n2 McQuirk, A. 45 McWhirter, C. 56, 59n10, 60n51, 60n55 McWhorter, D. 10n21 Meeker, M. 361n2 Meili, P. 305 Melamed, J. 475 Menace II Society 320 Mendez v. Westminster 234n58 Messer-Kruse, T. 205n3 Metropolitan Police Act 21, 282 Metropolitan Police Act (MPA) 497 Michener, J. 10n26 Midgley, M. 246, 249n40 Milhorance, F. 446n16 militarization 462–463 Miller, J. 221n31 Miller, L. 132, 141n1 Miller, M. 375n66 Million, D. 419n56 Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) 89 Miranda v. Arizona 501, 511n27 Missouri, F. 286 Mobray, J. 67 mob violence 38–48 Moffitt, B. 227 Monaghan, J. 418n43 Monell v. Department of Social Services 371, 375n56 Monell v. Dept. of Social Svcs 341n5 Monkkonen, E.H. 34n3, 35n29, 35n30 Monroe v. Pape 368 Montejano, D. 178n95 Montgomery, D. 59n7, 84n33 Moore, A. 119 Moore, L.W. 2, 9n6, 9n7 Morey, T. 510n7 Morin, B. 418n19 Morning Fresh Farms, Inc. v. Weld County Board of 248n25 Morse, I. 484n46 Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (MROC) 378 Motsinger, C. 311n19 Moule, R. 289, 296n33, 296n61 Muhammad, E. 138 Muhammad, K. 49, 58n1, 129n23 Muhammed, K. 86, 93n2, 93n8–n14, 93n16, 94n18 Mummolo, J. 296n62 Muñoz, C., Jr. 234n57 Murakawa, N. 375n69 Murch, D.J. 128n21 Murphy, F. 254, 255 Murphy, P. 22, 36n45, 41, 417n15 Murray, H. 150 mutual pledge system 14

531

Index Myrdal, G. 70n16, 88, 93n17 Napolitano, J. 491 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 315 National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF) 478 National Conference of Police Associations (NCPA) 89, 90 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 184, 187, 285, 507 National Rifle Association (NRA) 508 National Security Act 185 Naturalization Act 150 Navarro, A. 234n56 Nehring, A. 469n40 neighborhood anti-crime activism 364–375 Neil, E. 123 Nelson, J. 456n1 Neocleaous, M. 184 New Black Realist films 315, 319 Newell, B.C. 458n75 Newman, W. 55 New Orleans police department (NOPD) 38 Newton, H. 6, 117, 119, 120, 125, 127n1, 127n6, 127n11, 131n86, 322n14 New York City’s policies and practices: Black Lives Matter mobilizations 393; Black women, LGBTQiA+ people of color and women of color 392–393; cases that shook the city 391–400; Giuliani time 388–391 Nicholson, P.Y. 82, 84n41, 84n42 Niedermeier, P.Y. 71n73, 71n74 Nix, J. 36n78, 296n60 Nixon, R. 284, 285, 501, 502 Njeri, A. 423–426, 430 Noel, P. 312n27 Noonan, C. 213 Norris, A. 203, 423–434, 434n6, 435n26 Norris, G.W. 202, 206n50 Nunnelley, W.A. 10n20 Nunn, L. 227 Nunn, W.G. 106n30 NWA Made Room 301–309 Obama, B. 109, 187, 281, 286, 290, 294, 436, 437, 477 O’Connor, K. 219 Office of Public Safety (OPS) 283 Ogbar, J. 128n20 Oldenburg, R. 348 O’Leary, J. 43 Oliver, W. 93n15, 510n11 Olutola, S. 69n11 Omnibus Crime Control Act 140 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act 463 Oropeza, L. 6, 159–175, 178n91, 232 Orozco, C. 176n29

Orrick, W.H. 234n49 Osman, S. 373n1 Osucha, E. 435n20 Paddyrollers 498 Painter, M.A. 37n80 Palmater, P. 418n30 Pal Singh, N. 48n51 Pan African Community Action (PACA) 478, 479 Papachristou v. Jacksonville 116n21 Papke, D.R. 81, 84n36 paramilitary policing 365–366 Paredes, A. 176n8, 176n9 Pareles, J. 311n9 Parker, A. 104, 107n51 Parker, C. 123 Parkin, W.S. 297n66 Parks, R. 118 Parry, M.M. 296n33, 296n61 Patriot Act 184, 185, 187 Patterson, B. 79 Pattison, R. 80 Pearson, C. 82, 84n45 Pearson, H. 129n38 Pearson v. Callahan 504, 511n44 Peel, R. 15, 21, 22, 28, 282, 497 Peel’s principles 497–498 Peller, G. 386n2 People v. Baniqued 248n25 People v. Bugaiski 248n25 Perez, A.D. 234n50 Perez v. City of Placerville 249n34 Perkins, G. 150 Perry, B. 404–417, 417n10 Pfaff, J. 477 Pharr, W. 122 Phillips, L. 4, 85–93 Pihos, P. 373n5 Platt, T. 115n3 Plessy v. Ferguson 31, 36n59 Plowden, A. 284 police and enforcing racial order, Post-War Cities 133–135 police brutality 336–337; anarchism and syndicalism 196–197; depiction of 330; efforts to address the problem 34; historiography of 2; history of 40; issue of 324; in labor relations 4; leading scholars 7; legitimization of 8; and the nonhuman 239–249; normalizing and erasing 337–339; number of killings 8; race-related attacks 3; racial violence 62; slave patrols 3; slavery and transformation 13–24; student movements 224–235; targeted terror 494; unions and violence 85–95 police brutality in public health: block as ecology 517–518; block as evidence 516–517; block as extraction 518–520; policing systems 514–516; systemic roots 520–521 police legitimacy 498

532

Index police militarization: challenging police legitimacy 461; flashbang grenades 466; militarization 462–463; pepper spray 464–465; professionalization 461–462; Tasers 465–466 police officer bill of rights vs. ordinary civilian rights 506 police reform 260 police reform coalition 372–373 police riot and retaliatory violence 137–139 police unions: community policing era 501–506; homeland security era 507–508; impressive influence 508; political era 498–499; racial profiling 508; reform era 499–501; and violence 85–95 Police v. Civilian Rights 505 police violence 42, 336–337 policing black civic engagement: parks and recreation 113; schools 113–114; the streets 112 policing, origins of 261 policing, the bar, and resistance: homosexual collectivity 354; homosexual intercourse 357; sadomasochism (S&M) clubs 354; sensational headlines 359; sexual activity in 358; SLA investigators 356 policing the black communities 50–53 Pollack, P. 311n20 Pollock, D. 312n41 Porter, G. 35n16 Posse Comitatus Act 283 Pound, R. 199 Powderly, T.V. 78, 79 Prattis, P.L. 101, 106n17, 106n18, 106n29 The Predator 310 president’s task force: assessment of the report 293–294; National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and 1033 program 285; 1900s 283; 1960s to the present 283–284; police militarization 281; policy and practice recommendations 294–295; problem/issue 282; progression toward police militarization 284–285; 1700s to mid-1800s in America 282–283; twenty-first century policing report 290–293 Price, D.M. 311n24, 311n25 Prince, K.S. 45, 46n1 Prince, O.H. 23n22, 23n33, 47n25, 47n27, 47n28, 47n30, 48n50 professionalization 260 professional journalists 455 progressive era 87, 88 public outcry 460 public reckoning 314 Puente, M. 280n94 Purnell, D. 94n33 qualified immunity 502–503 Quealy, K. 445n5 Rabideau v. City of Racine 243, 248n27 Race-based police brutality 2

Racializing policing 6 Ragland, R. 368 Raids, P. 199 Raimondo, G. 505 Ramirez, C.S. 177n67 Ransby, B. 439, 446n15 Raymond, P. B 177n52 Reagan, R. 372, 501, 502 Rebuild Los Angeles (RLA) 377 Reddin, T. 140, 284 Red Scare (1919-1920) 196 Red Summer 55–59 reformism as counterinsurgency 488–491 Regan, R. 501, 502 Regan, T. 241, 248n16 Reichel, P.L. 277n4, 510n8 Reicher, M. 279n74 Reich, M. 277n3 relationship between smartphones and police accountability 453–455 Reyer, G. 69n5 Rhines, J. 316, 322n13 Ribeiro, A. 140 Rice, A. 9n10 Rice, C. 386n12 Rice, S. 443 Richardson, D. 368 Richardson, J.F. 22n9 Riggs, M. 512n49 Riordan, J. 212 Ripston, R. 312n45 The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy 189 Ritchie, A. 402n29, 434n1 Ritchie, E.H. 79 Rizzo, F. 365 Rizzo v. Goode 369, 371, 373 Robert Haas, R. 224 Roberts, L. 179n115 Roberts, O. 254 Robins, M. 313n60 Robinson, C. 487, 488, 495n12, 495n26 Robinson, C.K. 363n89 Robinson, E. 40 Robinson, L.O. 297n92 Robinson, R. 337 Rochford, J. 216 “Rodney King Riots” 309 Rodríguez, D. 233n4, 485–494, 494n1, 496n34 Rodriguez, N.A.F. 423–434, 434n6 Roediger, D. 93n6 Rojek, J. 296n60 Roosevelt, E. 105 Roosevelt, F. 6, 102, 202, 204 Roosevelt, F.D. 164, 204, 252 Roosevelt, T. 55, 82, 85, 151 Rosales, F.A. 164, 176n24 Rosario, A. 393–394 Rousey, D. 20

533

Index Rousey, D.C. 70n14 Rowden, M. 219 Rowland, D. 3 Royko, M. 219 Rubin, J. 278n66 Rubio, P.F. 510n26 Rudin, J. 417n5 Rushing, P. 247n3 Russell, D. 312n36 Russell, T. 437 Rustin, B. 137 Ryan v. Roy 249n32 Ryder, R. 240 Safe Streets Act 228 Salman, J. 469n37 Samuels, G. 178n83 Sandburg, C. 57, 60n57, 60n62 Sandhu, A. 448–455 San Jose Charter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club v. City of San Jose 248n31 Scarborough, R. 313n59 Schaich, W. 105n1 Scheiber, N. 277n20 Schmidt, R. 196–205 Schroedel, J.R. 417n2 Schulyer, G.S. 106n27 Schumacher, K. 7 Schumaker, K. 224–233 Schwarz, C. 395 Schweinhaut, H. 203, 207n58 Screws v. United States 251, 253, 258n15, 258n21 Seale, B. 6, 119, 123 Sears, D.O. 142n5, 386n3 Seelye, K.Q. 468n27 Seigel, M. 295n8 self-defense: origins of 118–120; Panther image and approach 120–122; Panther politics through death 122–125; redefining victimhood 125–127 Self, R.O. 9n9 Seper, J. 312n46 Sewell, A.A. 513–521 Sexton, J. 482n15 Shabazz, B. 123 Shackel, P.A. 81, 84n40 Shadrock, C. 68 Shaft, J. 316–318 Shah, N. 158n18 Shakur, A. 439 Shamas, D. 193n19 Shames, S. 120, 130n52 Sharara, F. 494n8 Sheehi, S. 182–191 Sheuer, J. 342n16 Shriver, S. 110 Silva v. City of San Leandro 249n36 Silver, A. 35n8 Silver, J. 287, 296n51

Simon, J. 6, 108–115 Sims, C. 61, 62, 69n1 Sim, Y.D. 321 Sinclair, C.M. 406, 417n13 Singer, P. 248n11 Singleton, J. 320, 322n21 Sipowitz, A. 333 Sitkoff, H. 100, 104, 105n3, 106n21, 107n52, 107n54, 107n56 Skolnick, J. 233n5, 336, 342n36, 456n21 Skrzypiec, L. 297n93 slave patrols 19–22 smartphones: and police accountability 453–455; on police brutality 448; technologies of accountability 449–453 Smethurst, J. 7, 331n2 Smethurst, J.E. 324–331 Smith, A.D. 384–385, 386n18, 387n50 Smith, B.W. 34n6, 37n80, 37n88, 37n89, 37n92 Smith, C.C. 54, 60n42 Smith, J. 61 Smith, M.P. 280n93 Smith, N. 401n1–n3 Smith, P.H. 322n22 Smith, R. 230 Smith, S.M. 77, 83n13 Soja, E. 378 Solis, B. 280n96 “Sound of da Police” 331 Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) 113, 172, 232, 281, 284, 285, 287–289, 309, 366, 462, 463, 466, 507 speciesism 240–242 Speidel, L. 342n31 Spencer, R.C. 130n54, 483n35 Speri, A. 194n42 Spofford, T. 10n27 Stack, L. 193n31 state and municipal law enforcement agencies 347 State ex rel. Miller v. Claiborne 248n25 State v. Buford 248n25 State v. Cleve 248n25 State v. Jacob 22n1 State v. Nelson 248n25 Stein, R. 456n6 Stephen S 192n8 Stephnick, E. 56 Stockley, G. 58, 60n67 Stockman, F. 277n20 Stokes, D. 303 Stone, H. 253 Storch, R.D. 467n2 Straight Outta Compton 306 Strange, D.A. 205n1 Stuart, J. 21, 24n37 student movements: antiwar movement 225–227; Black Student movement 228–230; Chicano Student movement 230–232; pepper-spraying 224

534

Index Subramanian, R. 297n93 Suddler, C. 104, 107n49 Sullivan, B. 482n3 Sumartojo, R. 418n20 Super Fly 316, 318 supreme court and police misconduct 250–258 Swan, B. 194n34 Swann, B. 106n31 Sweetback 316, 317 systematic police brutality 1 systemic dysfunction 493

Twain, M. 34n2 Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 384, 385 Tyson, T. 8n4 Tyson, T.B. 128n18

Taiwo, O.O. 483n39 Tang, T. 193n26 Tan, R. 10n28 TASERs 465–466 task force on twenty-first century policing report: building trust and legitimacy 291; community policing & crime reduction 292; officer wellness & safety 293; police and oversight 291–292; technology & social media 292; training & education 292–293 Tate, J. 175n4 The Tattooed Soldier 378 Taylor, B. 8, 423–426, 431 Taylor, C. 401n4 Taylor, D. 387n45, 387n46 Taylor, K. 439 Taylor v. Riojas 503, 511n38 technologies of accountability 449–453 Tennenbaum, A.N. 36n77 Tennessee v. Garner 33, 36n76, 256, 259n28, 504, 511n42 Terrebone, L. 68 Terry v. Ohio 116n22, 256, 259n25 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” 379 Theoharis, J. 128n12 Thibault, E.A. 510n5 Thomas, D. 115n10 Thomas, M. 94n27 Thorsen, E. 456n29 Tiefenthäler, A. 456n6, 457n56 Till, E. 123 Tobar, H. 386n30 to end police brutality: campaigns to “defund the police” 476–478; disempower the police 479–481; police abolition praxis 475–476; radical practicality 478–479; task force 473; theorizing police power 474–475 Traynor, M. 157n11 Triebert, C. 456n6, 457n56 Truman, H. 204, 255, 262 Trump, D. 8, 114, 179n112, 263, 294 Tunney, C. 419n71 Tuohy, M. 84n43 Turner, F.W. 281–295, 296n35 Tuttle, W.M. 3, 9n12, 57, 60n59, 60n63

UCOP Community Safety Plan 491–493 United States v. City of Los Angeles 278n63 United States v. City of Philadelphia 372 United States v. Park 248n25 United States v. Sutherland 252, 258n9 United States v. the City of Philadelphia 372 urban police and black soldiers 53–55 urban underclass 389 urban uprising as anti-police protest 135–137 Urquijo-Ruiz, R.E. 179n110 Valle, V.M. 386n22 valorizing law enforcement 335–336 van Deburg, W. 319 Vanderbilt, W.H. 77 VanKavage, L. 247n3 Vardaman, J.K. 53 Vega, H. 393 Viator, F.A. 301–310 victimization and expanded authority 139–141 vigilante policing in Asian American communities 147–158 Vigil, E. 235n71 Viilo v. Eyre 249n33 Village Voice 308 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act 373 vital registration systems 486 Volpe, J. 395 Voogd, J. 60n68 Voting Rights Act 5, 109 Wadman, R.C. 22, 22n3, 22n5, 22n8, 24n39 Wagman, B.A. 248n22 Walker, K. 424 Walker, S. 34n1, 35n40, 277n12, 277n14, 277n16, 456n2 Wallace, A. 313n64 Wall, T. 494n2 Walsh, G. 510n5 Walsh, J.P. 457n34 Ware, N.J. 83n9 Warner, C.D. 34n2 warrior mentality 507 Waskow, A. 98, 105n5 Watson, W. 1, 7, 8 Webb, C. 176n12 Wedell, K. 469n37 Wehrwein, A.C. 249n44 Weiss, J. 41 Wells-Barnett, I.B. 40, 42, 47n10, 47n29, 48n64, 58, 59n17, 60n66

535

Index West, N.P. 311n23 Whalen, G.A. 201 Whitaker, R. 10n14 White, D.G. 129n24 White-on-Black racism 385 white supremacy policing 318 White, W. 60n64, 107n42 Whitman, D. 313n64 Wiese, T. 395 Wilentz, S. 75 Wilkerson, M. 10n17 Willey, N.B. 81 Williams, B.L. 158n22 Williams, E. 4, 40, 41 Williams, F.I. 67 Williams, G. 384, 387n48 Williams, H. 36n45, 417n15, 519 Williams, L.E. 9n13 Williams, M. 490 Williamson, J.A. 233n17 Williams, R. 119, 490 Willis, H. 456n6 Wilson, J.Q. 388 Wilson, M. 457n35 Wilson, P. 309

Winship, B. 164 Wintersmith, R.F. 35n34 Winton, R. 279n89 The Wire 340, 341 Witherspoon, J. 102 Wolfe, C. 240, 248n10 women’s grassroots activism 381–384 Wood, A.L. 71n76 Wood, L.J. 460–467, 468n21 Woodard, S. 418n17 Wool, E.E. 494n8 Work, M.N. 70n23 World War II: Alexandria 99–100; Detroit 101–102; at summer end 104–105; surveilling resistance 98–99 Wright, D. 473 Wright, L. 312n47 Wynter, S. 447n38 Zapata, J. 178n98 Zapotosky, M. 10n28 Zawada, Z. 402n51 zero-tolerance policing methods 394 Zinzun, M. 387n39 Zirin, D. 341, 344n76

536