STREET JUSTICE
A History of Police Violence in New York City
by Marilynn S. Johnson
Beacon Press
365 pages
WHEN the City Council last year investigated accusations that the Police Department had been unduly aggressive in containing antiwar protesters, the force 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 conflict has been going on since the first professional New York Police Department was created, as Marilynn S. Johnson makes clear in her important book, ”Street Justice.” Johnson, who teaches history at Boston College, has taken on a formidable and sensitive subject and has largely conquered it, thanks to indefatigable research and a rigorous, unblinking analysis.
Compiling any accurate record of police brutality has always been difficult, both because of false complaints filed by criminals and — more significant — because of the enormous pressure the police have applied to squelch complaints. Additionally, as Johnson points out, 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.” But she 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.
What is most striking is how the same cycles of brutality and protest seem to keep repeating themselves. Over and over again, city and police officials eager to crack down on street crime or social protest or both — or, just as likely, perceived street crime and social disorder — encourage officers to get tough. This always leads to protests by individual victims, then to wider public outcries, committees and commissions, and finally to reforms of varying effectiveness. Then complaints 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 ethnic minorities, especially blacks and Hispanics; against strikers, student radicals and the poor. Incidents of police violence have even tended to revisit the same location. There were ”outrages,” for instance, by the police against demonstrators of various stripes in Tompkins Square Park in 1873, again in 1967 and yet again in 1988.
However, as Johnson also makes clear, police violence is neither inevitable nor irremediable. She 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 data to back up such arguments. Although the dramatic drop in crime in New York since the early 1990’s 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.
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 newspapers and politicians — to force public investigations of police violence.
She is particularly strong in detailing how a broad coalition of civil libertarians, riding the reformist wave of the New Deal, managed to curb greatly 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 1920’s; the reformers were able to curtail its use in good part by pointing out that the 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.
Johnson is at her best in recalling the ”hardhat riots” of 1970, when the police allowed construction workers to attack 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-staff 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, 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, from which Johnson does not shy away, is that far from being impartial enforcers of the law, New York police officers 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 teenage girls striking outside sweatshops.
Johnson’s study is not without 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 the police have indeed been most violent when they were at their least professional.
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 both of New York and of American law enforcement in general.