In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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Knapp Commission, a captain told him that Harlem alone contained forty numbers operations that paid $100 a day, 365 days a year, to remain open. “The money was major, the backbone and heart of corruption in New York City,” testified Leuci, who became a pariah in the department and was the subject of the film Prince of the City starring Treat Williams and directed by Sidney Lumet. “The pad went all the way up, right through police headquarters into the mayor’s office.”20
The verdict of the Knapp Commission was blunt: “We find corruption to be widespread.” The “nut” (the monthly share per officer) ranged from $400 in Midtown to $1,500 in Harlem, which was known as the “Gold Coast” because it offered so many opportunities for bribes and payoffs. The “meat-eaters” were those who actively sought them; the “grass-eaters” were those who passively accepted what came to them. “You can’t work numbers in Harlem unless you pay,” testified a runner. “You go to jail on a frame if you don’t pay.” Police corruption weakened “public faith in the law and police,” concluded the commission. “Youngsters raised in New York ghettos, where gambling abounds, regard the law as a joke when all their lives they have seen police officers coming and going from gambling establishments and taking payments from gamblers.”21
No joke to many blacks was the ever-present possibility of police brutality, a constant source of conflict in Harlem, where black citizens often viewed white officers with hatred and suspicion. James Baldwin perhaps put it best. “It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time. “They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.”22 Sometimes the police would not even bother with an arrest. According to the NAACP, which took an active role in investigating police brutality, forty-six unarmed blacks were shot and killed by officers in New York between 1947 and 1952—only two unarmed whites met similar fates.23
Two incidents in particular generated outrage. The first came in 1950, when two white officers shot and killed a black Korean War veteran discharged from the Army twelve hours earlier. John Derrick was in uniform and missing $3,000 in discharge pay when his body was identified on 119th Street at Eighth Avenue. “John never even had a gun,” a witness told a crowd of three thousand at a rally the next day. “He was murdered.” The Amsterdam News pledged that “while there is an ounce of ink in our presses, we will pursue this case until justice is done.” But Republican Mayor Vincent Impellitteri refused to express remorse, offer condolences, or take action until Congressman Powell demanded that the commissioner transfer the officers out of Harlem within twenty-four hours. “We don’t call them that,” said Powell angrily, “but we do have lynchings right here in the North. If a lynch mob can be investigated in Georgia, the murder of a Negro by two police officers in New York should be investigated.” It was, but both local and federal grand juries failed to indict.24
The second incident came in 1951, when white officers beat William Delany unconscious outside his home. A polio victim with severe disabilities, Delany was the nephew of Justice Hubert Delany, a political powerbroker who had served officially as the tax commissioner in the La Guardia administration and unofficially as the mayor’s liaison to the black community. The justice was enraged by the attack on his relative. The “police in Harlem consider that they have the God-given right … to keep the peace with the nightstick and blackjack whenever a Negro attempts to question their right to restrict the individual’s freedom of movement,” he said. “Police brutality has been the mode in Harlem for years. The nurses and staff at Harlem Hospital see the bloody results daily. No policeman in Harlem has been convicted for police brutality or murder in over thirty years of many unnecessary killings, and hundreds of cases of brutality.”25 And none were in the Delany case.
Police brutality was a major cause of racial tension in Central Harlem. But it is difficult to determine how widespread or prevalent it was. On the eve of the riot in 1964, the New York Times had conducted a survey of blacks from all walks of life and all over the city. More agreed that there was no police brutality (20 percent) than “a lot” (12 percent). More than half of those surveyed believed that it was not common or routine; 85 percent had never witnessed a single act of police brutality, compared to only 9 percent who said they had. For most African Americans the main problems were jobs and housing, followed by crime and education.26
At times some black police may have used excessive force on the job. Jim O’Neil joined the NYPD in June 1963. One night, his first alone on post, he was stationed at the corner of 129th Street and Lenox Avenue when he heard a commotion from a nearby bar. Before he could take action, three large black officers in uniform—“at least a thousand pounds of cop on the hoof”—had exited a 1959 Chevy and entered the establishment. O’Neil watched as one of the policemen moved behind the man who was screaming at the bartender, “balled his hand into an enormous fist, and brought it down on top of the guy’s head in a pile driver-like motion.” With the man on the floor unconscious, the officer walked out and said to O’Neil, “If you want him, kid, take him, he’s your collar.” But O’Neil was afraid to take credit for what seemed like police brutality. He told his sergeant, who laughed at him. “You were just introduced to the King Cole Trio,” he said. “There isn’t a person in Harlem who doesn’t know them. They’re famous up here and probably do more to keep the peace than all the other cops in the precinct combined.”27
For Baldwin, however, white officers were primarily responsible for police brutality. “[T]he only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive,” he wrote of them. “Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.” In Harlem, the white policeman was simply hated. “There is no way for him not to know it: there are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people,” continued Baldwin. “He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.”28
But Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy refused to station more black officers in Harlem, ironically because of liberal pressure. “It seems to me this would be turning back the clock and you would be segregated in the department,” he said in a decision applauded by major civil rights organizations, now opposed to what they saw as the ghettoization of black patrolmen. Kennedy added that “an integrationist believes that a policeman is a policeman, regardless of color.” Whether he truly believed in the wisdom of dispersing the department’s relatively few black officers—African Americans were 16 percent of the city’s population but only 5 percent of the police force in 1964—is impossible to know. But not until after the unrest in Harlem was a black captain—Lloyd Sealy—placed in command of the 28th Precinct.29
Sensing trouble, Commissioner Kennedy created a special unit to handle urban unrest in 1959. The Tactical Patrol Force (TPF) was an elite squad of physically imposing young men (all under thirty years old and most over six feet tall) with special training in the martial arts and unit tactics. It attracted officers with a taste for adventure and the rough side of urban policing. For O’Neil, the son of a city fireman, the path to the TPF was circuitous. After leaving high school and serving in the Navy, he worked in retail management for five years before a friend asked him to take the Police Department’s entrance exam with him. They made a bet to see who would get the higher score.30
O’Neil won the bet—and his reward was a spot in the academy, where a veteran sergeant informed the cadets that they had to become proficient in the use of their weapons. “Just remember once you pull the trigger only the hand of God can take that bullet back,” he warned. Then he offered what O’Neil described as “unofficial department policy”: “Never shoot to wound, always shoot to kill.” Before graduation in 1963, O’Neil applied for an assignment to the TPF. At his interview, he met the commanding officer, Inspector Michael J. Codd, who was tall and fit “with a full head of neatly combed gray hair and blue eyes that cut the air like sharpened steel.”