STREET
JUSTICE
A HISTORY OF POLICE VIOLENCE
IN NEW YORK CITY
By Marilynn S. Johnson
320 pages. Boston:
Beacon Press. $28.50
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novels Paradise Alley and
Dreamland.
When,
just a few months ago, New York’s City Council investigated
accusations that the city’s police force had been unduly
aggressive in containing anti-war protestors, the NYPD declined
to send a representative to appear before the council. The message
could not have been clearer: when it comes to policing the streets
of America’s greatest city, New York’s Finest know
better than any civilian authority.
This
same argument has been going on since the first, professional
New York police department was created, as Marilynn S. Johnson
makes clear in her important new work, Street Justice, A History
of Police Violence in New York City. Ms. Johnson, a native
New Yorker who is currently an associate professor of history
at Boston College and the author of an earlier study of the Oakland-East
Bay area during World War II, has taken on a formidable and sensitive
subject—and has largely conquered it, thanks to indefatigable
research and a rigorous, unblinking analysis.
This
was no easy task. As Johnson points out in her introduction, 19th-century
city police records were destroyed during World War I, many 20th-century
records have been closed to the public under privacy laws, and
before 1950, “the city kept no systematic records of excessive
force complaints” at all. Compiling any accurate record
of police brutality has always been innately difficult, due to
both false complaints filed by criminals and—more significantly—the
enormous pressures the police have applied to squelch complaints.
But Johnson is able to bring a sheaf of useful statistics to bear
on the issue, as well as many telling cases of police abuses over
the years.
“Any
study of police violence,” she rightly concludes, “…must
deal with public perceptions of the problem, paying particular
attention to periods when protests over brutality were most intense
and sustained.”
What
is most striking about Ms. Johnson’s survey is how the same,
basic cycles of brutality and protest seem to keep repeating themselves.
Over and over again, city and police officials eager to crack
down on burgeoning street crime and/or social protest—or,
just as likely, perceived street crime and social disorder—have
encouraged officers to “get tough.” This has always
led in turn to protests by individual victims, then wider public
outcries, committees and commissions, and finally reforms of varying
effectiveness. Then, complaints soon surface that the police are
being handcuffed by the new regulations, and crime is on the rise
again…
Not
very surprisingly, Johnson finds that police brutality has been
most often directed against the “other”—against
ethnic minorities, especially blacks and Hispanics; against strikers
and student radicals, and the poor. Incidents of police violence
have even tended to visit the same, physical ground over and over
again. There were “outrages,” for instance, by police
against demonstrators of various stripes in Tompkins Square Park
in 1873—and again in 1967, and again in 1988.
And
yet, as Johnson also makes clear, police violence is neither inevitable
nor irremediable. Her viewpoint is generally pragmatic, and liberal;
excessively violent policing not only violates the constitutional
rights of individuals, it also makes the streets more dangerous
for the rest of us. Johnson agrees with reformers who have argued
over the years that “the third degree, violent crowd-control
tactics, and certain uses of deadly force proved counterproductive
by undermining public confidence in the police and the court system,
generating public sympathy for protesters, and endangering police
officers themselves.”
She
summons a considerable array of facts to back up such arguments.
For all that the dramatic drop in crime in New York City since
the early 1990s has been attributed to the Giuliani administration’s
crackdown, over the longer term the rise in public safety has
coincided with a general decline in police violence. In 1971,
for instance, 93 suspects were shot dead by the police on the
streets of the city; 58 officers were killed or wounded by gunfire.
By 1985, those numbers had shrunk to 11 and 12, respectively.
Despite such horror stories as the Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima,
and Anthony Baez cases—all of which Johnson explores—there
can be little doubt that the current NYPD is a kinder, gentler,
more judicious, more effective force than your father’s
police department.
This
did not come about by accident, or through some general evolution
in human understanding. Johnson traces the heroic efforts of civic
leaders, ordinary citizens, and the occasional police commander
in bringing wayward police officers, and runaway police tactics,
to heel. Again and again, concerned men and women braved deeply
entrenched resistance from the police ranks —and, frequently,
demagogic denunciations from city newspaper editors and politicians—to
force public investigations of police violence. She is particularly
strong in a chapter detailing how a broad coalition of civil libertarians,
riding the reformist wave of the New Deal, managed to greatly
curb the use of “the third degree”—the application
of beatings and other low-grade tortures in order to extract confessions.
This had become almost a routine tactic in New York station houses
by the 1920s; the reformers were able to curtail its use in good
part by pointing out that the biggest, most notorious gangland
figures were able to avoid such treatment by way of bribery and
intimidation. Only the poor and unconnected got worked over—a
situation that did not sit well with the proletarian sympathies
of the Great Depression.
Such
triumphs are heartening lessons in democracy. Less heartening
is how often they have to be re-learned, seemingly at least every
twenty years or so. Downright frightening is how much power the
police—the military wing of the city government, after all—can
exert on their own when they put their mind to it. Johnson details
how police officers angry over the death of a colleague, stabbed
to death while apparently brutalizing an African-American couple
in the summer of 1900, aided and abetted the vicious, anti-black,
“Tenderloin Riot.” Dozens of innocent African-American
citizens were beaten by both the police and the mobs they encouraged,
and the end result would be the further alienation of the city’s
black population, and its retreat to a defensive enclave in Harlem.
The
Tenderloin Riot was the first civic disturbance in New York to
be dubbed a “police riot,” but it would not be the
last. Johnson is at her best in recalling the “Hardhat Riots”
of 1970, when police assisted construction workers in attacking
student demonstrators on Wall Street. Cops and hard-hats rampaged
through the streets of lower Manhattan, then marched on city hall
and forced the Lindsay administration to raise an American flag
that had been lowered to half-mast to mourn the dead at Kent State.
A similar show of force took place in 1992, when some 4,000 police
officers unhappy over proposals to create an independent, civilian
review board of brutality cases (and egged on by a furious, profane
harangue from then-mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani) besieged city
hall. The police mob blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, vandalized
passing cars, roughed up reporters, and hurled racial epithets
at city council members and Mayor David Dinkins.
In
these two, shameful incidents, civilian authorities came as close
to losing control over the city as they have at any time in the
past 140 years. Yet they were not really isolated events. The
sad fact, which Johnson does not shy away from, is that far from
being impartial enforcers of the law, New York’s men in
blue have historically taken sides against anyone threatening
their particular ideas of order and authority—even when
that has meant clubbing workingmen demanding an eight-hour day,
or teenaged girls striking outside of sweatshops.
Ms.
Johnson’s study is not without its flaws. The class perspective
that pervades her work is fascinating but occasionally overstated.
Johnson seems unduly surprised, for instance, that the public
has expressed little outrage when police violence has been targeted
at known gangsters and career criminals. She continually berates
“middle-class reformers” for supposedly being more
concerned with police corruption than with police violence—yet
it is hard to avoid the conclusion that New York’s police
have indeed been most violent when they were at their least professional.
One
wishes, as well, that she had commented more extensively on the
actions of the police during two of the more urgent crises in
the city’s history, the draft riots of 1863—perhaps
the finest days of the Finest, a week in which they probably saved
hundreds of black New Yorkers from lynching—and “The
Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” the great garment workers’
strike of 1910, when the police became absolutely befuddled by
cross-class, gender alliances between upper-class and working
women.
Perhaps
she felt that other writers have already covered these episodes
in sufficient detail. In any case, Johnson has given us a well-written,
intelligent, and at times even colorful examination of one of
the perennial problems of urban life. Street Justice
is an invaluable contribution to the histories of both New York
City and American law enforcement in general.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
