Police Power and Race Riots - Cathy Lisa Schneider

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it. People would say, “Those crazy Puerto Ricans, they’ll cut you. We would, ya know, ya had to do that—it wasn’t that we came here looking for trouble. We didn’t come from Puerto Rico in gangs. This was something that was introduced to us here. We didn’t know nothing about gangs—it was purely defensive action.

      Some whites embraced law-and-order candidates who promised more policing of black and Puerto Rican ghettos. Others took advantage of low-interest federally insured GI loans (which allowed them to buy suburban homes) and the massive expanse of highways (which simultaneously destroyed their neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn and made commuting possible) to flee the city. Blacks and Puerto Ricans were locked out of these mortgages and suburban communities. New York landlords “cut down on maintenance, rented to welfare and problem families, induced tenant turnover, failed to pay taxes and then either walked away or sold the building to the city for another round of slum clearance.”48 The Bronx had been a desirable location for working-class Jews, Irish, and Italians in the 1940s. By the time blacks and Puerto Ricans arrived, bulldozers had already razed the tight-knit neighborhoods to make way for highways and public housing towers. The destruction of the elevated train removed the last low-cost transit to downtown jobs.49

       Policing the Heroin Trade

      In the 1950s Italian and Jewish mobsters controlled the heroin trade. Blacks and Puerto Ricans found employment at the lowest rungs, the most poorly paying and riskiest end of the business. By the mid-1960s two organizations controlled heroin wholesales in the city: the Lucchese crime family and the NYPD.50 In one decade the special investigative unit of the NYPD put 180 million kilos or $32 million worth of heroin on the streets.51 The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was no better. The bureau already had an illustrious history, as the son-in-law of the FBN bureau chief helped heroin importer Arnold Rothstein evade income tax in the 1920s. Now in the 1960s FBN agents sold the names of informants to the major crime families, with the result that fifty to sixty informants a month were murdered.52 According to an internal affairs report filed in 1968, one-fifth of FBN officers were involved in the trade. According to Eric Schneider, “The conclusion is inescapable, that the flow of heroin into users’ veins would have been impossible without the assistance of the city’s police forces and the New York offices of the FBN.”53

      The sheer duplicity of the NYPD in arresting and harassing poor users and street sellers while profiting from the wholesale distribution of heroin in their neighborhoods increased the frustration, helplessness, and anger of ghetto youths. Corruption and venality went hand in hand, as young people were shot in the back by drunken on-duty officers or pummeled in patrol cars and precinct houses. According to Schneider, “ ‘You get a cop [who] wants to know something’ said one youth explaining the use of the third degree ‘maybe some information from a guy and they smack you around so you can find out.’ Other times police picked a youth up and drove him around the neighborhood beating him in the back of the car without ever taking him to the precinct. Order and safety depended on self-reliance, on one’s reputation for toughness, and on connections to others who might exact revenge on one’s behalf, and not on the system of police and courts.”54

      One Puerto Rican former gang leader in the Bronx told me (March 1996) how police brutality had shaped his racial identity and feeling about the law: “Most families were into thinking the right way was the white way. My family had me comb my hair with coconut milk to straighten it. They listed me as white on my birth certificate. Then, I saw my father, who was always king in my house, tremble in front of a white policeman. It robbed him of his dignity. I lost respect for my father. I compensated for him by becoming more bold and more bad.”

       Escalating Police Violence in Black and Puerto Rican Ghettos

      By 1963 residents of black northern ghettos were on edge. “Complaints about the police reached crisis proportions,” notes Sugrue; “[m]uch to the surprise of members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which conducted hearings in northern cities between 1959 and 1961, black complaints about police conduct were as frequent as or more than those about unemployment, housing and education.”55 Each incident of police violence added to racial tensions. On November 17, 1963, six hundred Puerto Ricans protested in front of a police station after a New York City police officer shot and killed two Puerto Rican youths. Leaders of the National Association for Puerto Rican Civil Rights charged the police with acting “like they were running a plantation.”56

      The situation grew increasingly dire in 1964, and by summer civil rights groups had put police brutality front and center. Yet despite ongoing protests and efforts by community groups to push the city to investigate incidents of police brutality or create a civilian review board, neither Mayor Wagner nor the city council budged. Daniel Monti observes that continued rebukes “spurred the NAACP, CORE, Puerto Rican Committee for Civil Rights and Workers Defense League to set up their own civilian review board in May of 1964. Relations between police and minority citizens had deteriorated to such an extent that any significant incident could have led to a serious outburst.”57

      On April 17, 1964, six boys were playing and pushing each other on the way home from school when one knocked over a fruit stand owned by Edward De Luca on the corner of 128th Street and Lenox. When a crate of grapefruit fell on the ground, the boys began playing ball with the fruit. De Luca blew a whistle to frighten the boys, but the local police heard the whistle and came charging after the boys with weapons drawn. Some had them aimed at the roofs, frightening residents, who withdrew from the windows. As the police caught the boys, they began beating them and then turned on two adult residents who tried to defend the children. The men were Frank Safford, a thirty-one-year-old black salesman, and Fecundo Acion, a forty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican man, both of whom the police cuffed, beat in the street, and continued beating in the precinct.

      Safford told James Baldwin that about thirty-five officers beat him while in custody: they “came into the room and started beating, punching us in the jaw, in the stomach, in the chest, beating us with a padded club. They beat us across the head bad, pulls us on the floor, spit on us, call us niggers, dogs, animals when I don’t see why we are the animals the way they are beating us. Like they beat the other kids and the elderly fellow [Fecundo Acion]. They throw him almost through one of the radiators. I thought he was dead over there.”58 Another witness told Baldwin, “Now here come an old man walking out a stoop and asked the cop ‘say, listen sir, what’s going on here?’ The cop turned around and smash him a couple of times in the head. He get that just for a question. No reason at all. Just for a question.”59 No one was charged with a crime, but Safford lost an eye as a result of the beatings.

      Several days later a white couple who owned a secondhand store in Harlem was attacked and stabbed several times. The woman died from her injuries. Within hours four of the six boys the police had identified at the fruit-stand “riot” were picked up and accused of the murder. The railroading of the Harlem six had a profound influence on James Baldwin, who wrote of the event in a scathing piece for the Nation. “This is why,” Baldwin notes, “those pious calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene…. They are dying there like flies: they are dying in the streets of all our Harlems far more hideously than flies…. Well they don’t need us for work no more. Where are they building the gas ovens?”60 In a later article Baldwin reflects, “The only way to police a ghetto is oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people: they swagger about in twos and threes patrolling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gum drops to children.”61

       The First Ghetto Riot of the 1960s

      On July 16, 1964, Officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen-year-old James Powell outside a schoolyard. The shooting followed an altercation between several black high school students and the white janitor of a neighboring building (as discussed in the Introduction). When the janitor turned his garden hose on the students, in a manner reminiscent of police attacks on protesters in Mississippi, as well as a barrage of racial insults, the youths responded

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