When, this past spring, Vincent L. Broderick took over command of New York City's Finest from Michael J. Murphy, he found on his new desk a copy of a special report of a City Council subcommittee recommending that the Council set up its own committee to review findings of the Police Department's Civilian Complaint Review Board. What happens to that report depends on pressures generated by the mayoralty contest. Civil-rights groups have demanded a review board completely independent of the Police Department to hear and investigate citizen complaints about police behavior. The Democrats, with a few exceptions, would like to stand pat but lean toward the Council subcommittee recommendations. Republican candidate John V. Lindsay has offered a compromise, proposing that the present review board of high-level civilian employees of the Police Department be enlarged by four non-police civilian members appointed by the Mayor from a panel selected by outstanding citizens.
The whole notion of a civilian review of police behavior is distasteful to the police themselves. But dissatisfaction with the conduct of New York's Finest has been simmering for several years now and—mainly because of a series of recent scandals—they will undoubtedly have to swallow some form of public review before too long. The most recent of these scandals involved Mrs. Gloria Sideratos, wrongfully arrested for possession of narcotics and forced to spend twenty days in the House of Detention for Women. Before that there was the highly publicized case of George Whit-more, Jr., who was allegedly beaten and forced to confess to the sex-slayings of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie. Last summer, police lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan fatally shot a fifteen-year-old Negro schoolboy, James Powell—an act that triggered riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. During those riots, policemen fired thousands of rounds of ammunition into the air to quiet the crowds, which brought accusations of “excessive use of force” from civil-rights and Negro organizations. And indeed, one Negro was shot to death and many others wounded in the course of the riots. Then, in the fall, detective John C. Devlin, on a hunt for a murder suspect, shot a twenty-three-year-old Puerto Rican named Gregory Cruz three times; he turned out to be the wrong man.
In response to mounting criticism of the Police Department after last summer's riots, Commissioner Murphy put a Negro, Captain Lloyd Sealy, in charge of Harlem's 28th Precinct. (Commissioner Broderick's first major appointment was the naming of a Negro, Captain Eldridge Waith, to command Harlem's 32nd Precinct.) But whatever good this gesture did was undercut by the subsequent clearings in Police Department trials of both Gilligan and Devlin. Minority and liberal groups in New York City consequently still feel that the Police Department is either unresponsive to their needs, or is at best moving far too slowly to meet them. On the other hand, there are large numbers of citizens, perhaps larger than the numbers of the liberal bloc, who clearly feel that the Department has not been tough enough with criminals, hoodlums, and delinquents. “We're damned if we do,” say the police, “and damned if we don't.”
These conflicting pressures on the police make things difficult enough, but the difficulty is aggravated further by the changing mores of the city, including new—at least to the ordinary policeman—standards of authority, morality, and justice. As a lieutenant lecturing at the Police Academy on “probable cause” in making arrests put if. “Courts today have no tendency to accept our word for anything.” Many of the changes taking place offend the lower-middle-class morality which generally prevails among policemen and which is of the same order as the morality Mr. Doolittle vainly inveighed against. Cops are conventional people. Only recently a patrolman was dismissed from the force because his wife won an annulment on the grounds that he refused to have relations with her; another (unmarried) was fired because he had been having sexual relations with “a woman not his wife” (also unmarried), which “tended to cause criticism detrimental to the department.” Tolerance is not a police virtue: all a cop can swing in a milieu of marijuana smokers, interracial dates, and homosexuals is the night stick. A policeman who passed a Lower East Side art gallery filled with paintings of what appeared to be female genitalia could think of doing only one thing—step in and make an arrest. And as if all this were not confusing enough, the police must also cope with changing crime styles. “The professional second-story man,” an old veteran of the force told me, “is no problem. When he's collared, he knows when to fold. But the hop-head is unpredictable. They may come along as docile as you please or they may suddenly turn on you with a knife, and you never can be sure which it is going to be.”
“The nature of police work in a modern society,” former Commissioner Murphy once pointed out, “has changed dramatically. It is no longer a matter of cops and robbers alone. It has become more a question of people and police, and the police have found themselves drawn into many problems, many grievances, for which they are not responsible and which they, as police, cannot solve. The police departments in all cities in this nation have found themselves confronted with and drawn into the battle for equal rights. They have found themselves in the no-man's land of the battle and the recipients of the fire of both sides. Yet, if they are to do their job properly, they must continue to remain in that position in order to carry out their sworn duties to protect the peace.” Nonetheless, on that battleground, the police are plainly uncomfortable. “The only people that defend us are the Birchers,” a policeman I interviewed remarked bitterly. In fairness, he might have added the Daily News and Mayor Wagner, who recently told a group of new recruits: “You are not really supposed to be human nor to have fears or frailties of your own. This is part of the responsibilities you will bear.”
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Shortly before he resigned, Commissioner Murphy gave voice to the basic complaint that all policemen are making these days. “Why,” Murphy asked, “are the police regarded in some quarters as enemies and aggressors rather than friends and protectors? Why does the wave of sympathy automatically engulf the criminal rather than the policeman? . . . Why, for example, in a demonstration aimed at protesting slum conditions, does the attack suddenly switch from the slumlord to the policeman? . . . Why are we equated with some other police forces in the civil-rights struggle [sic!], when our methods and successful handling of such problems has been in such healthy contrast? . . . Why must we be exposed to sneers, insults and abuse when we're merely doing our duty?” At a luncheon session of the New York Chapter of the American Jewish Committee, Murphy again complained of “unfair abuse and undeserved criticism. . . . The police officer, too, belongs to a minority group—a highly visible minority group—and is also subject to stereotyping and mass attack. Yet he, like every member of every minority, is entitled to be judged as an individual and on the basis of his individual acts, and not as a group. . . . We as police object to being second-class citizens.”
The police, of course, are not second-class citizens, though most New Yorkers do persist in thinking of them as uniformed Irishmen. The New York police force is the largest one in the country, numbering 25,929 (as compared with 19,000 in 1954 when Wagner began expanding it; he is now promising to add another 1,500 for the “war against crime”); or roughly one policeman for every 330 citizens. Of these, 18,100—split up among three duty tours and spread out among 80 precincts—patrol on foot or by car some 40,000 city blocks covering 6,000 street miles; 3,300 are assigned to detective units, 2,300 to traffic safety, 663 to emergency service, 546 to vice and gambling squads, 481 to the Youth Division, and 499 to communication units. The policeman works a forty-hour week (sometimes) and makes $6,647 his first year on the force and $8,098 a year after three years as a top-grade patrolman. He is young: the average age today is twenty-nine.
The force is not only changing numerically; it is also changing ethnically. The Department today, as even the greenest of recruits will tell you, is “half Irish, half Italian.” Nevertheless, the Irish image persists. Richard Dougherty, who spent some time as the Deputy Commissioner in charge of public relations for the Department, explains in his perceptive novel, The Commissioner, that “it was a phenomenon of the strange process which constituted the making of a New York police officer that, no matter what his origins, he should, at the end of his indoctrination, become Irish.”
One can get a fairly good idea of the ethnic and religious affiliations of the current force from the various police associations and societies. The Holy Name Society (Catholic) has a membership of 15,500; the St. George Society (Protestant), a membership of 4,500; the Shomrim (Jewish), 2,270; and St. Paul's Society (Eastern Orthodox), 300. Thus, over 85 per cent of the police belong to religious societies. Over two-thirds also belong to the various ethnically based societies. The Irish Emerald Society is the largest, with 8,500 members. The Italian-American Columbia Society is next, with 5,000 members. Then, in descending order, come the 1,500-member Polish Pulaski Association, the 1,320-member Negro Guardian Society, the German Steuben Society with about 1,000 members, and the 300-member Spanish-speaking Hispanic Association. Some policemen belong to more than one ethnic society. “Technically,” Lieutenant James W. Wade, a Steuben Society delegate, explained, “you are supposed to have some Germanic background to belong.” But Wade, who is “all West Sligo Irish” and is also a member of the Emerald Society, belongs to the Steuben Society because he was born and brought up in Yorkville and has an interest in the German language.
However, while the ethnic mix of the police force is changing, it is doing so slowly and lags behind changes in the city's over-all population mix. I recently spent a week at the Police Academy and I would guess that the ethnic composition of the current lot of recruits—some 750 men—is roughly proportionate to that already existing within the Police Department. There were, for example, very few Puerto Ricans and out of a gym class of some 160 men I counted only seven or eight Negroes. Such change as is taking place seems to be running in favor of Italian-Americans.
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Whatever the ethnic background, the job of being a policeman attracts a certain type. In general, the New York policeman belongs to the striving lower-middle classes who turn to city employment to better themselves and for the security offered. Policemen tend to have a civil-service mentality with a military cast that can be traced partly to the quasi-military organization of the Department and partly to the fact that a high percentage of the force today are veterans of World War II and Korea. Without special skills or an aptitude for the academic, these men left the services looking for a job with security and found it on the force. If the recruit is a Negro or Puerto Rican, he will probably have had more military service than a white recruit, just as he is likely to have been born of parents on a somewhat lower economic level (the mother still at work in the needle trades and the father an odd-job-man or semi-skilled factory hand). A white recruit's parents are likely to be somewhat higher on the social scale—fathers, say, who are butchers and mothers who may be office workers, librarians, or just housewives. A recruit must be twenty-one, a high-school graduate possessing 20-30 vision, and be at least 5′8″ tall. He must also pass a qualifying exam (the average recruit IQ is about 104-108) and survive a fairly extensive character investigation. As is the case with the American young, the recruit will have held a fair number of jobs—generally of a low order of skill and a high order of insecurity—before settling down as a policeman. Since he is likely to be married and already a father, the job security offered by police work is doubly attractive.
Police work is not intrinsically pleasant, although it can be fascinating. H. L. Mencken caught the flavor many years ago, and this much of police work has never really changed: “I knew cops,” Mencken wrote in Newspaper Days, “who were really first-rate policemen, and loved their trade as tenderly as so many artists or movie actors. They were badly paid, but they carried on their dismal work with unflagging diligence, and loved a long, hard chase almost as much as they loved a quick, brisk clubbing. Their one salient failing, taking them as a class, was their belief that any person who had been arrested, even on mere suspicion, was unquestionably and ipso facto guilty.” But, as Mencken went on to acknowledge, “this theory was grounded, after all, on nothing worse than professional pride and esprit de corps.” Still, police work does not attract the imaginative or the sensitive, and any sensibilities a rookie may have are quickly rasped off by the coarseness that surrounds him on the beat. “We don't get the happy drunks,” a patrolman told me, “or the quiet ones, just the mean ones.” Drug addiction may be romantic to some, but for the cop it is a sour smell, watery eyes, a vacant stare, the writhing agony of withdrawal, or even a corpse with the needle and syringe still dangling from an ulcerated arm.
Police work, perhaps because much of it is also routine, frustrating, and possibly boring, makes for quick tempers. This may be one explanation for the outbursts of senseless brutality that do occur. Another is what might be called cross-cultural conflict. A Negro drifter not long ago was arrested for breaking into a liquor store and swiping a bottle. He smashed the neck, took a swig, and was caught with the goods, so to speak, inside him. Two policemen carted him off to the station house for booking. He was a moderately difficult prisoner, swaying around as they tried to fingerprint him. But he had joshed them into a good mood and all three were making something of a joke about the fingerprinting. The Negro then shoved a bit, saying “C'mon you m—r f—ers.” The cops immediately turned upon him and beat him up. The word he had used is not a word to which lower-middle-class Irishmen or Italians take kindly—even in jest, and especially from a Negro (although that particular epithet is a commonplace of lower-class Negro speech).
Apart from that, the Negro was a drifter and therefore doubly vulnerable. And because the people involved are almost always similarly vulnerable in one way or another, brutality cases are hard to come by. A Negro lad was caught in a sidewalk crap game and roughed up. “The others ran and got away; I stayed and didn't, so the cops got sore,” he said later. When he is feeling tall and civil-rights conscious, he talks of pressing charges. But then he has second thoughts. There is his living to consider: he makes it selling marijuana. He considers neither gambling nor selling marijuana morally wrong, but he knows the law can be tough on both counts. The upshot is that he does not press charges.
So far as the police are concerned, drug addicts, homosexuals, derelicts, and (occasionally) off-beat citizens are fair game. So, too, are the poor, who suffer not so much from police attention as they do from a lack of polite protection. Our streets are patrolled in the interests of the middle and upper classes who do not wish to be annoyed by panhandlers, pimps, or prostitutes (the rich make these latter arrangements by phone), or robbed by pickpockets or hold-up men. And just as the well-dressed drunk is an object of police consideration while the poorly dressed one—black or white—is merely an object, the better-dressed neighborhood gets better police protection than the slum. In the slums, the police follow a policy of containment: crime is to be confined to the slum so as not to spill over into adjacent neighborhoods, but it must also be prevented from touching the outsider who comes to the slum for color and/or excitement.
In fairness, however, it must be said that there seems to be a rough understanding between the police and the derelict population. I happened to be in court one morning when a round-up of derelicts came up on charges of loitering and disorderly conduct. It was the nightly take of the drifters who had wandered off the reservation centered on the Bowery—a kind of invited arrest, as it turned out. The judge quickly asked who wanted in. A goodly number raised their hands; he gave them thirty-day workhouse sentences, and the rest got suspended sentences. The decision was up to them and apparently was made on the basis of whether a particular individual wanted to clean up and recuperate or would rather return immediately to the flophouses. On the other hand, the bum who strays too far away from mutually acceptable territory does so at his own risk. For example, the panhandler who invades the theater district as the crowds spill out into the streets is inviting trouble. He will probably be banged up against the side of a squad car, pushed into the backseat, taken over to Ninth Avenue, and dumped.
The police have developed an ideology about drugs. “Addicts are about the dirtiest people going; sellers are scum.” The policeman who roughs up an addict-pusher and tells him to “stay off my beat” is unlikely to have a complaint lodged against him; even if the addict did complain, no one would believe him. Homosexuals and prostitutes are also easy marks. The bane of homosexual existence, as of the whore's, is the “decoy,” the plainclothesman pretending to be on the prowl for sex.1 For the streetwalker, a “pros” charge may mean no more than a quick trip to night court, a guilty plea, and a sixty-day suspended sentence (or perhaps—occupational hazard—a turn in the Women's House of Detention). But homosexuals frequently run the risk of a beating as well as a jail sentence. In one instance, a homosexual was solicited by a man who invited him up to his hotel room. As it turned out, the room was maintained by the vice squad for staging arrests. Once there, the homosexual was thoroughly beaten by the soliciting plainclothesman and his partner. They had not been intending to arrest him, but “they beat him so bad,” the man's lawyer said, “that they had to arrest him.” He was carried out of the hotel in a stretcher down the back stairs and booked for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and felonious assault. The charges were lodged to justify the use of “necessary force” in making the arrest.
“Necessary force” covers a wide range of police sins; “resisting arrest” provides the excuse for indulgence. But since criminals do resist arrest and carry weapons, it is impossible to measure “necessary force” in advance. “The law,” a police officer who knows what it is to shoot a man explained to me, “neither commands nor commends the shooting of a felon but declares that it will hold such killing a justifiable homicide.” The best training policemen get is in the use of firearms, and like all men who live with guns, they develop an attachment, a mystique. Commissioner Murphy, the evening he resigned from the force, was quoted by Jimmy Breslin in the Herald Tribune as saying, “I'll keep this [his gun], I'd feel undressed without the thing. When you get up in the morning it's like putting on your tie.” (The new commissioner, according to the papers, will not carry a gun.)
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Policemen are “on duty” twenty-four hours a day and are required to carry their guns at all times. Both notions seem good examples of cultural lag. As a perceptive police captain said to me, “The men now get time-and-a-half for overtime which kind of destroys the idea that a cop is on duty all the time, doesn't it?” We were walking along Third Avenue where cars were illegally parked. “Besides, you don't see me ticketing those cars, do you?” Moreover, the Police Department's legal staff is not at all sure about the legal standing of an off-duty policeman who lives outside the city, as more and more members of the force now do. Is he on duty when he sees a crime being committed in Nassau county or not? All citizens, of course, have the right to make an arrest when they see a crime being committed, but a policeman enjoys certain immunities. Unlike the private citizen, for example, he cannot be sued for false arrest should he be in error, so long as he has probable cause. And this is not the only anomaly in the off-duty-on-duty life of the policeman. On duty, the policeman is not allowed to drink; even a lunchtime beer could mean disciplinary action. Yet if he has been drinking when off duty and is then called to active duty a little the worse for relaxing, he faces summary dismissal from the force. In addition, if a brawl should start in the bar, he is automatically back on duty even though his judgment may be slightly impaired. Off-duty policemen cutting loose with a gun at such moments are not unknown.
Every policeman lives with the thought that some day he may have to use his gun, though cops on the beat use them far less frequently than one would think from reading the papers. One patrolman said when interviewed that he had drawn his gun “maybe five times” in ten years on the force and had never fired it except on the range. Should the moment come, however, he, like every other policeman, prays he will be in the right; and should he make a mistake, he wants to be backed up. This feeling runs deep, and explains why the Department consistently clears men brought up on charges in shooting cases. Policemen know that outsiders would not excuse them in shootings that are clearly errors of judgment, if not exercises in brutality, and therefore they are unalterably opposed to any kind of civilian, non-departmental review board. “Civilians don't understand.”
Another one of the things “civilians don't understand” is arrests. There are some 200,000 arrests a year, but the police are constantly asked why, with all the crime on the streets—drug addicts, pickpockets, prostitutes—and with all the armed robbery, mugging, and murder that go on, more arrests are not made. One answer is coverage. “We're a vertical city, don't forget, and the cop is down on the street.” The average radio car covers a seven-mile sector; the average patrolman walks a five-block beat, both sides of the street. In twenty-five “high-hazard” precincts, foot patrolmen may operate in pairs. (For historical perspective consider: in Hell's Kitchen during the 1860's, police patrolled in sixes.) But the fact is that the cop pounding the pavement—eight hours a day with an hour off for lunch—is not expected “so much to make arrests as he is to inform, unless of course he sees a crime being committed.” Thus a Department spokesman. The patrolman essentially is a keeper of the peace: “It's strictly a case of being available.” Each day before he goes on tour—be it on the 8 to 4, 4 to 12, 12 to 8—he checks a bulletin board in the station house for “post conditions,” the active spots on his beat where he may find anything from kids bent on “malicious mischief” to their elders in pursuit of a bet, drugs, or a woman. Any sign of suspicious activity is reported back to precinct headquarters and either vice-squad plainclothesmen or detectives are dispatched to pursue the matter.
“In the old days,” I was told, “if you shot and killed a man, automatically you made detective. But nowadays we require a consistently good record and intelligence.” Still, the old ways die hard and the detective is generally a patrolman who once made “an outstanding arrest” or who has developed special skills. Being a detective is the “glamor work” of the force and pays anywhere from $8,431 to $10,801 a year.
Detectives are a shrewd, tough lot, though now a somewhat disgruntled one. “Every time we make an arrest and get a confession,” one complained to me, “someone hollers that his civil rights are being violated. I couldn't care less if I never made another arrest.” The first time I visited a squad room—a big, open place on the second floor of the precinct station house with a half-dozen desks and a scattering of chairs—the walls struck me as rather grimy. The station house was new and the rest of it was spotless. At first I thought the “broom”—a patrolman with seniority who wants to get away from the rigors of street patrol—had not yet managed to get upstairs to do his work. But the walls of the squad room were grimy in another brand-new precinct house too, and I realized that the dirt came from prisoners being shoved up against the wall in the process of interrogation. Detectives are as eager for confessions as judges are for guilty pleas: like guilty pleas, confessions are a way of clearing the docket quickly with the fewest complications. Prosecutors estimate that 75-80 per cent of convictions in major cases like murder and rape are based on confessions or other inculpatory statements. To be admitted in evidence, confessions must be voluntary, but since judges tend to overlook claims that confessions were coerced, the temptation to use a little pressure is virtually irresistible, especially if the newspapers or head-quarters are pushing for results. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg may condemn, in Escobedo v. Illinois, such a system “as less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skilful investigation.” But the police are not impressed.
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The law states that a person must be arraigned at the earliest possible moment. Until recently, however, it was a widespread practice not to book a suspect until the detectives were through with him. Emmanuel H. Lavine, in his 1930's exposé of police brutality, The Third Degree, reports one instance where a strangling suspect was quizzed for ninety-six hours without interruption. George Whitmore, Jr. was questioned for twenty-six, a little over a year ago. While immediate arraignment is required and generally obtained nowadays, a prisoner cannot be arraigned in a felony case at night court (from arraignment on, a prisoner is almost guaranteed a lawyer). Consequently, a clever detective will not pick his man up until late afternoon: “That way, we get him overnight at least.”
Lavine gives many examples of how detectives in his day got a suspect “to come clean.” “Taps,” for example, called for tying up the prisoner in an armchair so that he wouldn't fall off while being struck repeatedly at 30-second intervals with a piece of rubber hose or rubber tire. The red welts thus raised would fade quickly, leaving no outward signs of beating, though the affected area would remain sore for some time. Few suspects could hold out against such treatment. But detectives, like the rest of the world, have by now caught up with Freud; the third degree today is more likely to be psychological than physical. “My buddy's pretty tough,” one detective will say, pointing to the biggest bruiser in the squad room, “and he's short tempered. So why not be reasonable? We wouldn't want to upset him, would we?” And so it goes. Whitmore says that he was given the “light-heavy” treatment. After his alleged beating, a second detective took over, detective Joseph Di Prima, a fatherly man who testified at court hearings to determine whether Whitmore's confession had been voluntary. “The boy told me that I was nicer to him than his father ever was.” The other detective in the case did not make the same claim.
Some policemen deny that they use brutality or contend that they use it only in isolated cases. Others, however, are truculent: “Whaddya expect? Kid gloves for these punks?” No policeman, however, will admit to administering a beating, for to do so would mean automatic dismissal from the force. Former Commissioner Murphy has pointed out that, with a quarter of a million arrests last year, less than 200 complaints of police misbehavior were made—and this despite the fact that it is now easier for people to lodge complaints (which may be made in person, by telephone, or by letter, to a newspaper or community group as well as to headquarters). The New York Civil Liberties Union, which recently began a program offering aid to citizens with complaints against the police, so far has only a bare handful of cases. Each complaint received, according to Murphy, is investigated and reviewed by the members of the Department's Civilian Complaint Board, which consists of three civilian deputy commissioners: Leonard E. Reisman (in charge of legal matters), Edward J. McCabe (in charge of licenses), and Joseph Martin (in charge of community relations) . The Board determines whether the police officer involved should be brought up on departmental charges and tried or not. “Disciplinary action,” says a Department spokesman, “is taken in about 10 per cent of the cases we receive.”
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Actually, even when a citizen has a good case against the police, it is extraordinarily difficult to get satisfaction. For one thing, for a complaining citizen to find and then penetrate Police Head-quarters at 240 Centre Street is a somewhat discouraging business. Headquarters—a great Gothic pile located amidst a host of small machine and power tool wholesale outlets somewhere south of 14th Street and north of Canal—must be one of the least known public buildings in the city. The citizen fortunate enough to locate the building then must brave forbidding signs—“All Visitors Stop and State Business”; “Show Identification by Authority of Police Commissioner”—and a gruff uniformed desk man who blocks the way into a wildly rococo marbled and wrought-ironed lobby and stairwell. If this much can be survived, the complaint may be on its way. But the complainant had better be ready to follow up. Rochelle Horowitz, executive secretary of the Workers Defense League, warns that “a Complaint Board investigation can take up to five or six weeks and you've got to press the charges to get results.” All this, of course, takes time, or a lawyer—neither of which is readily available to those who need them most.
Last February, Charles Allen, a soft-spoken, thin actor who wears his hair long for his part in a successful children's play, started across Broadway at 47th Street on his way to Actors Equity. He was hobbling a little from a recent ski accident. As he stepped off the curb, a car cutting the corner sharply brushed against his good leg. Allen drew back, and one of the men in the car hollered, “. . . you dirty c—r.” Allen cried out, “What did you say?” The driver slammed on his brakes, repeated himself, and jumped out. He shoved Allen, calling him a “f—ing cripple” in the process. Allen pushed the open door of the car against the driver as he stepped back in the automobile. At the urging of various members of the crowd that had gathered, Allen took out a notebook and jotted down the number of the car license plate. The car stopped again. This time when the driver got out, he identified himself as a police officer, saying, “Come along with us.” At the insistence of several people in the crowd, Allen was allowed to take down the names and addresses of witnesses before being hauled to the police station. According to Allen, the detective told him on the way in, “I had to arrest you once you took down my number.” Several of the curbside wit nesses followed Allen and the detectives over to the station, where everyone was allowed to make a statement.
The police side of the case is summed up in the charges lodged against Allen: simple assault for putting his fist through the car window and punching the officer in the face, causing a crowd to collect while resisting arrest, and using loud, boisterous, and obscene language after arrest. Allen's trial was set for March 10, nearly a month later. It was postponed to April 28, then to May 18, then to May 19. Each delay made it more difficult for Allen to round up his witnesses, some of whom had already dropped away because every court appearance meant the loss of at least half a day. Finally, the assistant district attorney dropped the case on his own motion, in return for Allen's commitment “to hold harmless the people and the police officer.” Ron Gould of the New York Civil Liberties Union and Allen's attorney, says that Allen would have been convicted of disorderly conduct if two of his witnesses had not stuck to the end. All in all, it is not surprising to find that the number of complaints of police malpractice in New York is low, whether filed with the Police Department or with other agencies.
No one really knows, not even the police themselves, how prevalent police brutality actually is, just as no one knows how extensive corruption is. Payoffs for all sorts of “services” do take place, as in the case of a contractor who slips a “few bucks” to the local police to avoid being snowed under by parking and littering summonses. But such payoffs have become so traditional that the “victims” have a hard time recalling when the precise “shakedown” occurred. Brutality, of course, is something else again. Harold Rothwax, a very able Legal Aid Society attorney, has the impression, based on at least a passing familiarity with many of the 72,000 cases handled by Legal Aid last year, that “the actual use of physical force [by the police] is less frequent now than five years ago, and, according to the old-timers around the office, even less so than twenty years ago.” Patrolmen on the beat are less quick to use the stick than in the past. Nor is it as easy as it once was for the patrolman on the beat to take someone into a dark doorway and rough him up. In areas like Harlem, the police are hesitant to do so for fear of starting a riot and of being jumped in turn. (It is apparently also the custom in Harlem for persons being arrested to kick up enough fuss to draw public attention, yet not enough to provoke the cops into retaliation.) Patrol car policemen, because of their mobility, perhaps enjoy more opportunity to administer a drubbing. But even so, in these days of civil-rights consciousness, it is not unusual for a passing citizen, on seeing a man picked up by a patrol car, to drop around to the station house to make sure that nothing has happened en route.
Moreover, under pressure from civil-rights organizations, the Police Department has cracked down. New York's Finest are under orders to behave themselves. Immediately after last summer's riots, the Department set out on a special effort to teach officers restraint and to inform them about the civil-rights struggle through a weekly training program. Every time James Farmer of CORE or Roy Wilkins of the NAACP went on television, all members of the force were told to try and catch the program. The Commissioner also made a special broadcast to his men, telling them that “We must strive NOT to instill fear, but to continue to earn respect and confidence. . . . There are some who believe that a rough manner is a sign of strength which brings swift obedience. They are wrong. . . . There is no need for such behavior by any policeman. . . . Those who have this incorrect attitude must change it and change it now.”
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It is doubtful that the hammering away at the need for “courtesy, tact, sympathy, understanding, dignity, and a temperate attitude” worked any overnight miracles. There is considerable underlying resentment in the force against Negroes and Puerto Ricans. I sat through an hour free-for-all discussion at the Police Academy between a recruit class and Joseph Maniscalco of the city's Human Rights Commission. The recruits made no bones about their feeling that Maniscalco said what he did because “it's in his book” and because “he's getting paid to say that.” The recruits believed all the stereotypes common to their class and background. “Property depreciates when the colored move in.” “We have this supposed great welfare state, we give 'em, Puerto Ricans and Negroes, money, this an' that, but it doesn't seem to do any good.” “It seems like a waste of money, we're building new slums for them, that's all.” “How can a place get filthy, unless you put filth in it?” And so on and on and on. A four-hour course on race relations for the recruits and periodic refreshers through unit training for all the men on the force cannot cope with this sort of thing.
What, then, can? Orders, for one thing. Sometimes, of course, like all soldiers, the police take pleasure in ignoring orders, but on balance discipline does prevail. The experience of the 24th Precinct (which embraces over 135,000 people, 50,000 of whom speak Spanish, and which is bounded by 86th and 110th Streets and Central Park and the Hudson River on Manhattan's Upper West Side) over the past year illustrates what can happen when the proper orders are handed out and enforced. Two years ago, two Puerto Ricans were shot by a policeman in the precinct. Reacting to neighborhood bitterness, the 24th Precinct, in conjunction with the Goddard Riverside Community Center and the Board of Education, launched “Operation Friend.” A community-relations board was set up to meet regularly with the Spanish-speaking people in the area and special programs were started, aimed at recruiting Puerto Rican youths for the force. Most of the 250 men assigned to the precinct attended off-time classes in the Spanish language and Puerto Rican culture, and eleven of them were sent to Puerto Rico last March. Fifteen children from Puerto Rico were then brought here this summer to live for two weeks with policemen and their families. The Department also assigned Captain Stephan J. Valle, who is of Spanish descent, to command the district. The results of all this have apparently been good enough for Gilberto Gerena Valentin, who is president of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights and a bitter critic of the police, to comment: “If all precincts with heavy Puerto Rican populations adopted the program of the 24th, there would be a big improvement in the situation.”
Obviously, much can be done by the Department to improve relations with the city's minority groups, but just as obviously little will be done unless enough political pressure for improved police policies is built up. It is the need to generate this sort of political pressure that perhaps explains the drive for an independent civilian public review board. As a practical matter, however, it is doubtful that the city will get a review board that would work, nor is it at all certain that such a board would answer the needs of the poor requiring redress from police abuse. For a review board to function really effectively, it must be impartial; it must possess the power to influence police policy either through punishment meted out to individual offending officers or through exposure of malpractices; it must be able to advance policy suggestions that will be taken seriously; and it must open neighborhood offices throughout the city where citizens may file complaints and be heard with sympathy. But to get a board that meets all these criteria would take more political power than the civil-rights groups can at the moment command within the city.
Councilman Paul O'Dwyer has introduced a bill in the City Council to create a New York City Director of Citizen Redress. This idea seems more to the point than a civilian review board of police behavior, yet O'Dwyer's bill, which has the backing of the New York Civil Liberties Union, otherwise languishes for lack of support. Patterned after Sweden's Ombudsman, the bill would empower the Director of Citizen Redress to “receive complaints by any person in regard to the conduct of any agency or any officer or employee thereof” and “to investigate the conduct and affairs of any agency and the official conduct of any officer or employee thereof.” The Director would have power to examine papers of any agency and to subpoena witnesses to appear before him. His principal weapon in curbing oppressive or unreasonable conduct by city agencies would be publicity or the threat of public exposure. He would be selected by the Mayor from a list of five names submitted by the chancellors and the presidents of all the universities in the city of New York, would hold office for six years, and could not be removed except upon proof of official misconduct. He would, therefore, be truly impartial. Since he would hear complaints about all city agencies, the poor—and, for that matter, all citizens—would have someone to turn to with grievances against officials who affect their lives as much if not more than the police.
Still, the police have much to answer for in the clearing of officers who, if nothing else, demonstrated serious lack of judgment in their handling of such suspects as Gregory Cruz and George Whitmore, Jr. As A. Philip Randolph has pointed out, police opposition to proposals for a civilian review board is based on a dangerous notion indeed—that the police are above civilian review altogether. “They are not—and, in a democracy, never can be—an autonomous, self-enclosed and self-regulating agency,” Randolph said. For this reason we need, I believe, a review by an independent body of representative citizens of all police practices, including the “war on crime.” After all, the very statistics the police use to frighten us into making larger budget appropriations for fighting crime—$267 million in 1964 (90 per cent for salaries and pensions)—are suspect in the eyes of some sociologists. There has been no intensive civilian examination of police conduct since the Seabury investigations of city government in the 1930's. The time has clearly come for another look.
1 Every policeman puts in about a year as a plainclothesman shortly after his probationary period of nine months on the force. The usual plainclothes assignment is the vice squad, and the reason the assignment is made so early in a cop's career is that a new man has not yet set into that peculiar mold which makes policemen easy to recognize.