In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
Читать онлайн книгу.
of a rash of crimes in the streets and on the subways.8
On Friday afternoon, two white men were assaulted and robbed in the Bronx by roving bands of black teens who were not part of the CORE demonstration. On a southbound train, an elderly actor named Julian Zalewski was attacked by a gang of youths, who threw him to the floor and took his wallet and watch. “I got my Polish up and began to fight,” he said. “I yelled in my best theatrical voice, so loudly that the whole gang took off.” But not before he was punched and kicked. Elsewhere, a white pharmacist from Yonkers was accosted on a downtown express by two dozen black teenagers, six of whom punched and kicked him while their friends watched. None of the fifteen other adult passengers in the car came to his assistance, which the victim found disappointing though understandable. He would, he admitted, have done the same. Neither incident was unusual—according to the Transit Authority, subway crime had increased 30 percent in the past year.9
In early 1964, the subways were not the only unsafe place in New York, where police neglect, corruption, and brutality as well as disrespect had caused tensions between black residents and white officers for decades. According to the NYPD, every category of violent crime experienced a double-digit surge between June 1963 and June 1964. Rapes and robberies soared by 28 and 26 percent, respectively. Assaults rose by 18 percent and murders—usually a statistic beyond dispute because of the presence of a body—increased by 17 percent. Not since 1953 had the crime rate swelled so dramatically across the board. It was not surprising, then, that fear and anxiety over violence in the streets had reached a crescendo by mid-July, especially since New York historically experienced more homicides in the summer, when temperatures climbed and tempers flared, than in any other season.10
Many liberals, black and white, refused to accept the statistics at face value. Some contended that they were the product of new data systems or the public’s growing willingness to report certain crimes, such as rape or burglary (for insurance purposes). Others argued that the police had a vested interest in either minimizing crime (to demonstrate effectiveness) or exaggerating it (to justify more funding). Even the FBI at times expressed doubts about the NYPD’s numbers. Selective enforcement (lax or strict) of certain laws could also affect the statistics, as could the biased actions of prosecutors, judges, and juries. Black leaders such as Congressman Powell regularly asserted that the disproportionately high arrest rate of African Americans was proof of police racism.
Beyond dispute were the racial tensions created by police neglect of minority neighborhoods, which was a long-standing issue. In the aftermath of the Harlem Riot of 1943, the Amsterdam News had insisted that the NYPD had a duty and an obligation to provide black residents with the same degree of protection as white citizens elsewhere in the city. “While unalterably opposed to police brutality, we are equally strong and all-out for police efficiency,” it editorialized. “[W]e cannot agree that the interest of Harlem or New York—its welfare, its health, its morals, its safety—is being served by allowing a criminal element, however small, to overrun any special community.”11
Twenty years later, however, many white officers remained leery of inciting trouble in black communities. David Durk was an unusual recruit, an Amherst graduate from the Upper West Side whose father had a medical practice on Park Avenue. After a year at Columbia Law School, he decided to join the NYPD in fall 1963 and was assigned to the 28th Precinct in Central Harlem. At roll call a veteran sergeant offered clear instructions to the rookie patrolman: “Don’t lose sight of your partner, don’t go down any block alone, don’t go into any buildings, and no arrests unless you’re personally assaulted.” In other words, be careful, avoid trouble, and leave the residents to fend for themselves.12
Not surprisingly, a survey conducted on the eve of the riot in 1964 revealed that although 51 percent of African Americans in New York credited the police with doing a “pretty good job,” 39 percent disagreed and an equal number named “crime and criminals” as the “biggest problem” facing the city. The fear cut across gender, class, and generational lines in the black community. “There’s just too many junkies and drunks around here,” said a teenage woman who lived in a rundown apartment on West 146th Street and had a scar on her arm from a slashing by a wino. “It’s hard for decent people to live right. I feel like I’m smothering.”13
Ten blocks north, in a cool and spacious apartment, a middle-aged city official offered his view from a comfortable sofa. “You don’t know how much it tears me up to say this,” he admitted, “but the most hellish problem Negroes up here have to worry about, next to bad schools and bad housing, is personal safety from muggers and thugs. I don’t let my wife go out, even to the grocery store, at night unless she is escorted or takes a cab.” In Queens, a subway motorman argued that blacks could not depend on the police. “The only solution to all this mugging and stealing is to organize block associations or civilian patrols,” he said, bemoaning police indifference. “It’s time we did something to protect our own.”14
Police corruption was another source of hostility between many residents of Harlem and the officers who patrolled it. A housewife interviewed in 1964 was blunt: “The real criminal in Harlem is the cops. They permit dope, numbers, whores, gangsters to operate here, and all the time they get money under the table—and I ain’t talkin’ about $2 neither.” A college-educated Brooklyn resident was equally direct: “A ghetto police force is a force in league with all of the underworld, a bribed force. If this is not so, why is it that anyone can buy narcotics, alcohol, women or homosexuals freely on Harlem’s streets—even on Sunday?”15 Other socially conservative African Americans held similar views.
Congressman Powell spoke for these residents when he gave a series of speeches on police corruption in 1960 on the floor of the U.S. House, where he had immunity from charges of libel or slander. In his remarks, he offered what a historian has described as a “phone directory of the Harlem underworld” and a detailed description of the regular police protection pad. With names and dates, facts and figures, the congressman outlined how the bribes were distributed in the NYPD chain of command. Noting that all 212 captains and 59 of 60 inspectors were white, Powell charged that organized crime and police graft were “pauperizing Harlem” by siphoning funds from poor blacks to white mobsters and officers.16
Few paid attention, with the important exception of the New York Post, which assigned a team of investigative reporters led by Ted Poston, who had moved from Kentucky to Harlem in the 1920s and become the first black journalist at a major white newspaper. He confirmed the substance of Powell’s allegations. But then the congressman appeared on local television, where he had no immunity, and named a black woman, Esther James, as a courier of money from gamblers to the police. She decided to sue him for libel. When Powell arrogantly chose not to attend his own trial, the jury reacted negatively and found him guilty. In 1963, the court imposed $211,500 in damages. He in turn refused to pay, which led to a self-imposed exile from Harlem for five years. Powell could visit only on Sundays because, by state law, no one could serve civil contempt warrants on that day. As a result, he was unable to play a major role in restoring peace in 1964, even after he returned to Washington from his latest European excursion.17
The full extent of police corruption became public knowledge in 1970, when the Knapp Commission held hearings and heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, many of whom vividly described decades of bribes and payoffs in Harlem. Inspector Paul Delise, a decorated twenty-seven-year veteran with six kids and retirement on the horizon, told how, as a mounted cop in Harlem in the 1950s, he had arrested a drug dealer outside a pool room on 116th Street. The dealer offered him a wad of cash. When a squad car arrived, he reported the bribe. The officers suggested he take it. “You son of a bitch. How can you suggest something like that?” replied Delise heatedly. “We’re all doing it,” the officer responded. “We kick these guys in the ass, we take their works from them, we put ’em on a subway train, and whatever they have in their pockets is what we take.”18
Other policemen offered similar accounts. Jim O’Neil recalled how in 1964 he and his partner always gave the duty officer a half share of the “hat”—a tradition where “illegal gamblers, wanting to show their gratitude, would walk up to a detective and stuff a twenty in his shirt pocket and say, ‘Why don’t