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ОглавлениеPolicework Occupation and Police-Perpetrated Homicides
Introduction: Police LEO Homicides
The term “police homicides” is used in the popular and academic literature to describe two views of police homicides. The first view presents law enforcement officers (LEOs) as victims who die at the hands of a felon. A second view sees LEOs as the perpetrators of homicides. The latter police homicides result from accidents, justified legal interventions, or criminal action by LEOs on-duty or off-duty when facilitated and related to their official position as defined by law. These homicides with LEOs as perpetrators are the focus of this inquiry.
LEOs Defined
LEOs aka police officers are paid public officials with the extraordinary powers of arrest who perform public safety functions of patrol, traffic control, investigation and detention at the local, county, state, federal, or special district levels. The operation of the U.S. policing system is historically defined by its foundation in our English heritage and the current definition of the dangerous classes by the elites. Our English heritage served as a model for a policing system that resulted in limited authority circumscribed by law. The fragmented system would be largely local. The inherent fragmentation allowed “police” or law enforcement agencies to expand by legislative definition at the local, state, federal, and special district (Walker, 1983; Barker, 2011).
Police violence by these LEOs includes a variety of violent behaviors against others, including police-perpetrated homicides—a subset of the larger category of police violence. To identify police-perpetrated homicides as a part of police violence we first define homicide.
Homicide
Homicide is the killing of a human being by another human being, and depending on the circumstances, the act may be accidental, justified, or criminal. The definitions of accidental, justified, and criminal homicides are important for the classification of police homicides (Harmon, 2008). Police accidental homicides not the result of reckless or negligent actions are generally ruled excusable and not subject to criminal sanctions, depending on the circumstances. Accidental—no criminal intent by the slayer—homicides that involve reckless or negligent actions by the slayer are prosecuted as criminal homicides. Justifiable homicides are commanded—executions after trail—or authorized by law such as the legal use of deadly force by LEOs. Homicides in the necessary act of self-defense to protect oneself from death or serious bodily injury or death may be deemed justified or excusable depending on the circumstances. Any police homicide that is not excusable or justified is a criminal homicide—manslaughter or murder. The killing of a human with malice aforethought—intent—is the most serious type of criminal homicide and is prosecuted as murder. Although LEOs homicides are rare events; their rarity provides little comfort or solace to the victims and their survivors. There are other terms used that need explication.
Policework Occupation
Policework—one word—is an occupation performed by paid public LEOs at all levels of government. These paid public employees have general or limited arrest powers, depending on state and federal statutes, and case law. The workers—LEOs—in the policework occupation perform one or more of the public safety services of traffic, patrol, investigation, and detention/custody. These public officials have the power to detain, arrest, search, and use deadly force—the ultimate force granted by any society. The LEO definition includes publicly paid LEOs in local, county, state, federal, and special district agencies such as campus police agencies, park police, Indian police, and airport police. Detention/custody officials in lockups and jails are included; however, private security personnel are not (Barker, 2019, see Barker, Hunter & Rush, 1994 for an earlier definition).
Unequal Power Relationship
Police-citizen contacts—individually and in groups—are touchstone examples of unequal power settings between parties. LEOs have the legal authority to force compliance with their legal duties. Detention and correctional officers are granted the legal authority to use force in self-defense and the enforcement of rules, regulations, and laws against those remanded into their custody (Bittner, 1990). The legal use of force in these settings includes a wide range of force techniques and can result in police abuse of power.
Police violence against citizens, especially minority and marginalized groups without political power, is a perennial problem in a society with a formal system of social control based on public LEOs. This is especially true for paid public police forces based on the 1829 London Metropolitan Model and democratic policing. The United States exacerbated the police violence problem with the establishment of an alphabet soup creation of law enforcement agencies at all levels of government—ABC, ATF, BART, DEA, DIA, DART, FBI, ICE, IRS, ISDP, MARTA, TSA, USMP, USSS, ad infinitum (Barker, 2020). The legal use of force by these agencies includes a wide range of force techniques from verbal commands to the use of deadly force in individual or collective protest settings. The most severe use of deadly force is police homicides.
LEO-Perpetrated Homicides
LEOs-Perpetrated Homicides are deaths resulting from acts or omissions by LEOs acting in or related to their official position. Police-perpetrated homicides result from law enforcement actions-direct or proximate—and range from accidents to murder. In defining police-caused homicides, a modified version of law enforcement homicides suggested by Barber and her colleagues was used (Barber, 2016). The Barber study used three criteria in their definition. The first criterion was the manner of death that they defined as homicide, not suicide, accident, or natural. Their criterion was modified to include accidental LEO homicides that are the result of reckless or negligent acts regardless of intent. There is a long history of these accidental homicides in U.S. law enforcement activities. The modified definition included suicide by a cop where a person wishing to die provokes a cop into killing them. Murder-suicides were included when a LEO murders a domestic partner and then commits suicide. Their second criterion was that the suspect must be a LEO in some level of government—local, state, tribal, special district, or federal. This definition includes correction officers because correction officers like all LEOs are sworn public officers with authority to use lethal force. Last, Barber and her colleagues said police homicides had to occur in the line of duty. That is not true in LEO police homicide cases such as murders committed by LEOs for personal reasons while using their police position to facilitate or conceal their criminal acts. Therefore, police homicides occur on- and off-duty.
Historical empirical evidence reveals that a disproportionate number of police homicides result from police interactions with members and groups labeled the dangerous classes by the political or economic elite. The current debate over police homicides suggests that the majority to the victims are minority and marginalized victims of the dangerous classes. This is not the whole story. However, America’s history provides evidence that members of the dangerous classes have been singular and multiple victims of police violence, including homicide, during protests and demonstrations. The definition of who is or is not a member of the dangerous classes is constantly in flux.
The Dangerous Classes
Public police work evolved in England from a need by the political and economic elites to control the lives of the dangerous classes—the poor and the disorderly working class who migrated to the crowded cities because of the disruptions resulting from the Industrial Revolution. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 created the modern occupation of policing, but the poor and working class thought the New Police as public order police would enforce a moral code that would destroy or disrupt their recreations and lifestyles (Rawlings, 2002).
Their fears were accurate. The newly created paid public police occupation was a means for the “elite” to constrain the activities of the dangerous/marginalized classes in England because “Crime, illegitimacy, idleness, irreligion, poaching, dancing, drinking, the playing of games and so forth were believed to be linked” (Rawlings, 2002). The proactive policing model of the time is what is known as “quality of life” policing today. That is arrests for petty offenses in the streets (drunkenness, gaming, and other social-order offenses), and other acts that are not inherently evil. The new policework occupation was transported to the United States, where the dangerous classes were defined by race and ethnicity through the actions of the politically and economic elite.
America’s Dangerous Classes in Brief
The treatment of the dangerous classes in American history have had tragic civil rights results on the disenfranchised and marginalized groups and stimulated what some consider the current racial based police agencies and a biased American criminal and civil justice system (Williams & Murphy, 1990, Davis, 2017, Slaughter-Johnson, April 13, 2019). The American dangerous class groups at various points in our history have included indigenous populations (American Indians), slaves (African, American Indians), and a variety of ethnic and nonwhite racial groups ranging from the Irish, Italians, Chinese, African Americans, Mexicans, to today’s illegal immigrants.
Following the bloody removal of the American Indians from their lands, blacks were labeled the dangerous class during slavery when the large slave population at the bottom of America’s caste system threatened the elite white minority (Reichel, 2013). However, other racial and ethnic groups were viewed as dangerous. The first federal law excluding immigrants based on race was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion law that barred Chinese immigrants—the despised Mongolians and this country’s first illegal immigrants—from becoming U.S. citizens (Campbell, 2014). Mexicans in the Southwest, particularly the border states of Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, became the dangerous class when the United States seized half of Mexico following the 1848 U.S. Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Juan Crow laws—Jim Crow in the Southern states—in the Southwestern states prohibited Latinos and American Indians designated as non-whites from participating without restrictions in the public sphere (Campbell, 2014). American Indians residing in Arizona would not have the right to vote until 1948.
Radicalized miners, steelworkers, and other industrial workers joined the dangerous classes when they challenged the elite owner/worker status quo and had the temerity to join unions. The possibility of members of the dangerous classes combining and engaging in strikes and insurrections in the manufacturing districts was recognized in the early 1800s (Silver, October 7, 1965). For example, the second mission of the 1829 London Metropolitan Police Force against the dangerous classes was to suppress political agitation in the form of mobs and riots—social protest (Silver, October 7, 1965). The key to this control of the dangerous classes is the legal use of deadly force.
Police Legal Use of Deadly Force
Every community in history has used physical force as a means to secure the effective observance of laws and achieve justice (Reith, 1952). Deadly force has always been allowed if there is credible evidence to believe that the suspect(s) presents a threat of serious physical injury to the officer(s) or the public. However, there are long-standing limitations on the discretionary decisions to use deadly force. The typical restrictions include the following: (1) Deadly force may not be used if the offense is a misdemeanor crime, not a felony; (2) police officers can only use deadly force, in the performance of professional duties and not to advance their own personal reasons or the personal reasons of others; and, (3) police officers may not use deadly force maliciously, frivolously, negligently, or recklessly (Bittner, 1990).
As communities and modern societies evolved, they attempted to remove unnecessary and wanton deadly violence from the use of force in the administration of justice (Bittner, 1990). For example, the outdated common law use of deadly force to apprehend any “fleeing felon” is no longer applicable in modern societies such as the United States—1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner (Blumberg, 1991).
Fleeing Felon Doctrine
The “fleeing felony doctrine” as the legal use of deadly force developed in eleventh-century England and was transported to colonial United States and used against the defined dangerous classes. The English common law fleeing felon doctrine was necessary for early societies where (1) there were no weapons available that could kill at a distance—guns and rifles; (2) felonies were punishable by death; and (3) there was little, if any communication among law enforcement agencies in different communities—felons who escaped were lost forever (Sherman, 1980).
Although various states had removed the “fleeing felon” rule from their statutes, the first national action against police violence was the 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision—Tennessee v. Garner. This ruling declared that the use of deadly force to stop all fleeing felons was unconstitutional. If the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer or others, the use of deadly force was not justified. In the decision, the court pointed out that the officer who shot Garner was “reasonably sure” that he was an unarmed teenager running away from him. This decision had a profound effect on police homicides. The “fleeing felon doctrine” is gone; however, it was an accepted American police technique until 1985. At the time, it was difficult to get some police chiefs to accept that “the fleeing felon” laws were illegal, especially when it was legal in state statute—personal experience. However, an in-depth examination of the U.S. police use of deadly force when it was in effect provides empirical evidence that American dangerous classes groups, however defined, have been disproportionally the victims of civil rights violations and legal and extralegal police homicides
Law Enforcement Violence against American Dangerous Classes
Historical antecedents of Law enforcement violence and homicides against the dangerous classes mentioned earlier are essential to an understanding of the political and social context of this complex social justice issue. Race, economic, and political issues have always impacted the American system of justice. Members of the labeled dangerous classes are traditionally the victims of physical abuse, including legal and illegal violence. After the violent expulsion of Native Americans from their lands, the new white European immigrants and their police forces engaged in mass homicides against the unwilling immigrants—African slaves.
The Southern Slave Patrols
The first police agencies based on the London Metropolitan Police Model of a paid public police force developed in the northeastern cities in the mid to late 1840s. However, some argue that the Southern Slave Patrols were the first state-sponsored U.S. police agencies (Williams & Murphy, 1990; Ritchie & Mogul, 2008). This is subject to debate; however, it is true that rural white police agencies were in existence in the Colonial States of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia to control the American dangerous class—slaves—in the early to mid-1700s (Reichel, 1988). The slaves were dangerous because they ran away, committed criminal acts, including poisoning their masters, and engaged in revolts and insurrections. The most massive slave uprising in American history took place in 1739 in the South Carolina colony (Reichel, 1988). Fifty Negroes and thirty-five whites were killed. In the developing Southern cities of this early period, black slaves were the majority race, increasing the perceived and real threat to the white majority.
The slave patrols, at first voluntary and then compulsory by law, were formed to visit any plantation having slaves to look for arms, to find and punish runaway slaves, or to identify slaves off their plantation without permission (Hadden, 2001). The punishment included whippings and execution. After the demise of the slave patrols and the Civil War, the legacy behind the identification of freed blacks as a dangerous class continued. The early laws restricting the civil rights of black slaves and their freedom of movement segued into the “Black Codes.” The codes were imposed on freedmen and freedwomen until they were dismantled by Reconstruction (Cooper, 2015). Then the codes morphed into the Jim Crow laws in the South and Juan Crow laws in the Southwest that formally separated the whites and people of color into unequal worlds. However, the division of American society into color and ethnic categories was not confined to any one region of the United States. LEO-caused homicides and violence were the norms against designated dangerous classes in the northeast United States before and after the establishment of police agencies modeled after the London Metropolitan Police Model.
Nineteenth-Century Police-Perpetrated Homicides and Violence in New York City
1834 Race Riot aka Anti-abolition Riots
Manumitted slaves were persecuted outside the Southern states and in supposedly free states. According to Kerber (1967), a freed female slave was stoned to death in Philadelphia in 1819. In 1829, 1,000 freed slaves were forced to leave Cincinnati, and manumitted slaves were not allowed to settle in Ohio. Controversy over the slavery decision and the amalgamation of the races was a hotly debated issue. This was especially true in nineteenth-century New York City.
Segregation laws were alive and functioning in New York City before a three-day Race Riot occurred in the summer of 1834 (Kerber, 1967). At the time, free Negroes were segregated by law and custom. Negroes had separate seating in churches, courtrooms, and theatres. They were denied the vote. Negroes could not attend public schools or sit in the horse-drawn streetcars, but they could ride on the exposed decks of steamers. The white residents of NYC believed that “God himself separated the white from the black” (Kerber, 1967: 28). The burgeoning abolitionist movement and their fiery speakers reminded the NYC residents that they had a race problem and called for reform, setting up an open conflict between Abolitionists and Amalgamators. This conflict resonated in fiery debates and violence for decades.
The integrationist ideas of the Amalgamators created a real fear of unfair competition between the white labor forces and the free blacks that competed with each other for the lowest-wage jobs. The competition was exacerbated by Irish immigration. In 1827 the British ended the legislation restricting Irish immigration and 30,000 Irish immigrants arrived in New York annually. These conditions created a series of riots between the whites and the blacks that had to be put down by the police—watchmen—and the militia. During the riots, the homes, businesses, and other buildings belonging to abolitionists and Negroes were burned. The militia was called out to support the police watch, and the riots ceased. The 1834 Riot and the 1849 Astor Place Riot foreshadowed the bloody 1863 New York Draft Riot.
1849 Astor Place Riot
The 1849 Astor Place Riot demonstrates how supposedly trivial events have violent outcomes when social classes conflict. The riot shows the distinct class divisions in play in nineteenth-century America. The hatred between two actors—William Macready, an English thespian who represented the New York upper class, and Edwin Forrest, who was the hero of the lower-class and recent immigrants—erupted into a full-scale riot that led to the police and the militia firing into an angry crowd killing twenty-two persons and injuring forty-eight others (McNamara, February 17, 2019). Forrest supporters interrupted Macready’s performance at the upscale Astor Opera House triggering the riot.
The violence between distinct groups continued. Six years later, twelve New Yorkers were killed in July 1857 in a battle between Catholic and Protestant gangs (Vodrey, 2010).
1863 New York City Draft Riots
Although the Draft Riots were initially intended as a protest against the newly created Civil War draft laws, the riots had a more sinister racial objective. The consensus is that the NYC 1963 Draft riot that resulted in from 1,000 to 1,500 white deaths and an unknown number of Negro deaths had its origin in the fear that the city’s Irish workers would lose their jobs to an influx of freed Southern black slaves (Albon, 1951).
The Emancipation Proclamation and the fear of an influx of Southern freemen threatened the social status and economic position of the white Irish immigrants. Taking advantage of this proclamation, slavery supporters pressed the rumors that emancipation would create the business of importing freed blacks to the North to supply cheap labor. The Irish immigrant’s fears were buttressed by the common practice of employers hiring free Southern blacks when the labor supply was low, or when workers complained about employment conditions or wages (Olzak, 1989).
When the riots first started the New York Metropolitan Police Department was the only “official” force available to stop it. The New York State Militia was at Gettysburg assisting Union troops. Until federal troops could be sent to the city, blacks were lynched, and homes were destroyed as the Metro Police beat the mobs with nightsticks and fired into the crowds in futile attempts to stop the violence (Vodrey, 2010; Johnson, 2003). The 1870–1871 religious riots followed these riots.
Orange Riots of 1870–1871
Irish Catholics protested parades held by Irish Protestants—Orange Men—commemorating the Battle of the Boyne—the battle between Catholic and Protestants in Ireland. The brutal NYPD suppressed this riot that killed over sixty people, including women and children, and left over a hundred injured. Once again, the police fired into the mobs (Johnson, 2003).
State Violence in Labor Disputes: The New Dangerous Classes, Radicalized Workers, and Unions
Taft (1966) opines that U.S. labor/management disagreements have turned violent when unorganized strikes occur or when labor union recognition is disputed. In these incidents, the dangerous classes are radicalized workers of no particular racial or ethnic group. The only common factor in these disputes is that one group—radicalized workers or union members—have tried to change the terms of employment and that has been resisted by the other groups—management and owners. These disputes resulted in state-sponsored violence by the police, the militia and federal troops. The police of that time were conventional in their thinking and were antagonist to labor unions, radical groups, and racial minorities (Fogelson, 1977). The worst-case scenario of their contempt is the Great Strike of 1877.
The Great Strike of 1877
The Great Strike of 1877 is considered the most extensive, most destructive, and most frightening use of state power against citizens since the New York City 1863 Draft Riots (Stowell, 2008). What began as a nationwide strike in July 1877 against railroads pay cuts lasted several weeks. The strike spread to sympathetic wageworkers throughout the country as working-class consciousness recognized its struggle against the capitalist classes (Harring, 1983). The elite owners used the police as a weapon against working-class wage earners to break strikes and end protests (DeMichele, 2008). Although the Great Strike took place throughout the country, police violence against peaceful crowds was most evident in Chicago and Pittsburg. In Chicago, the police fired into crowds of protesters until they ran out of ammunition (Schneiroy, 2008). Thirty-five men and boys were killed, and several hundreds were wounded. In Pittsburg, combined police and militia killed an estimated one hundred protesters.
Police violence against citizens was justified by a new definition of the enemy—no class socialist immigrants. The new immigrant working-class wageworkers flocking into the industrialized cities were defined by the Chicago Tribune as “governed by their passions; they are coarse in tastes and vicious in habits; they are ignorant and revengeful; they are readily influenced by liquor” (Schneiroy, 2008: 95). Allen Pinkerton of Pinkerton Detective Agency fame and a supplier of strikebreakers proclaimed that the strikers and protesters were communists, tramps, and misguided unionists (Salvatory, 1976). Compounding their dangerous disposition was that many of the Chicago strikers were socialists and members of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States. The dangerous classes now included immigrants and socialists. In the twenty-first century, immigrants and socialists would return to the popular American definition of dangerous classes. Illegal immigrants were threatened with deportation if they did not cooperate with the authorities in these early riots as it is alleged they are today.
1897: Lattimer Massacre of Immigrant Protesters
An 8-feet rough-cut shale boulder is located in the small coal town of Lattimer, Pennsylvania. It commemorates the killing of nineteen immigrants from southern and eastern Europe on Sunday, September 10, 1897, by local police authorities. The immigrants had migrated to rural Lattimer to work in the deep, dangerous anthracite coalmines. At the time, immigrants from these areas of Europe were considered inferior with strange customs and a threat to native-born American whites—a dangerous class (Shackel, 2019). On the fateful Sunday day, about 400 miners rallied to march to the mine and peacefully protest for improved working conditions. Eighty-six armed deputy sheriffs and company police opened fire on the protesters as they marched. Nineteen of the peaceful marchers died that day and five more died later in the week. The sheriff and his deputies were tried for killing one miner in February 1898. They were acquitted after the defense attorney described the dead miners as “invaders from them steppes of Hungary” who came to America to destroy peace and liberty (Shackel, 2019).
1909 Pressed Steel Car Strike
The Pressed Steel Car Company located in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, was the largest railroad car producer in America. The company manufactured the cars on an assembly line. The work was dangerous, with an average of one person a day being killed from moving cranes (Pitz, 2009). The company was also well known for its low pay and peonage of its workers. The workers—unskilled immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—had to live in quarters rented from the company and buy their food from a “company store” at inflated prices or be fired.
The workers went on strike on payday Saturday, July 10, 1909, after their starvation wages were cut further without explanation. The company hired 550 scabs-strike breakers— setting off a series of conflicts between the strikers and armed deputy sheriffs. The Pennsylvania State Police was called in to support the local law enforcement authorities. The conflict climaxed on August 22, 1909—Bloody Sunday—with the death of eleven to twenty-six strikers and a deputy sheriff.
1937 Memorial Day Massacre: Police Out of Control
On Memorial Day, May 30, 1937, 200 plus Chicago police officers fired multiple shots into peaceful labor demonstrators, approaching the Republic Steel Plant in South Chicago (Leab, 1967; Dennis, 2010). The marchers included women and children. Ten demonstrators were killed, and ninety were injured and several permanently disabled. Dennis (2010) describes the eyewitness account of a woman shot in the leg and a wounded ten-year-old boy being helped into a private car to be taken to the hospital (Dennis, 2010: 143). One woman claimed that she was lucky to be alive, because a cop chased her as she ran away, “shooting all the time, and he just hit my hand” (Dennis, 2010: 146). The police claimed they fired into the unruly mob because the crowd charged them while throwing bricks and sticks. However, the coroner’s report revealed that 65.5 percent of those injured by gunshots were shot in the back. Existing photos and a 1937 Paramount News camera film shows uniformed Chicago PD officers chasing, shooting, and clubbing men and women as they ran from the police.
The photos and the film show multiple police officers clubbing wounded persons on the ground. Several injured persons “bled out” as they waited for help that was never summoned. One wounded person pleaded with a policeman for help. The officer’s response was, “Shut up you son of a bitch; you got what was coming to you” (Dennis, 2010: 147). Thirty-five police officers were injured that day, and three were hospitalized. The police injuries were mostly cuts and bruises from falling. None had gunshots. The film created national outrage; however, none of the out-of-control police officers was ever charged for these atrocities. The police actions in Chicago are best described as a Police Riot—an example of out-of-control police officers exacting extralegal violence on a perceived dangerous class. There have been other examples of Police Riots.
Police Riots against Peaceful Protesters
The extralegal violence, including examples of homicides committed by LEOs during the 1960s civil rights struggle, are too massive to summarize. One source documents 239 incidents of collective racial violence from January 1, 1963, to May 31, 1968 (Downs, 1979). It is during this period that the “escalated force” model of protest policing was in vogue. The “escalated force” force model predicts that the police will be most repressive against dangerous counter culture groups that present the most threat to political elites (Earl, Soule, and McCarthy, August 2003).
The “escalated force” model is evident in “police riots,” where the police instigate, escalate, or sustain violent confrontations (Walker Report, 1968). Stark, in his seminal work on police riots, offers the following definition “‘hostile outbursts’ in which the major participants are police officers” (Stark, 1972: 11). During a Police Riot, the LEOs engage in unrestrained and widespread police brutality against citizens for political repression. The term was first used to describe the actions of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. However, a “police riot” occurred in Selma, Alabama, three years earlier in 1965.
Bloody Sunday—Selma, Alabama, May 7, 1965
What became known as Bloody Sunday occurred during the 1960s civil rights struggle. Bloody Sunday has its genesis with police homicide and violence in the small rural town of Marion, Alabama, in Dallas County on February 18, 1965. The murder of a young black man—the precipitating event—would be unresolved for four decades until May 10, 2007, when a retired Alabama State Trooper charged with murder pleaded guilty to manslaughter and apologized for the killing (Bernstein, July 8, 2015). He received six months in jail.
On the fateful night in 1965, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnam veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson joined with a group of Negroes in a local Methodist church to protest the recent jailing of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) official for participating in voter registration activities. The protesters made a dangerous nighttime march to the jail one block from the church. Local police and Alabama State Troopers met the marchers, and they were brutally beaten. The club-wielding lawmen chased a group of marchers including Jackson into Mack’s Café, a local black restaurant. An unidentified state trooper shot Jackson in the stomach under suspicious circumstances inside the cafe. The police custom at the time was to remove nametags and cover badge numbers when engaging in protest incidents (personal knowledge—I did the same thing at several protests in the 1960s). The trooper’s identity remained hidden until 2005 when he came forward of his own volition even though he had killed another unarmed black man in May 1966 (Fleming, March 5, 2005). Jackson died several days later. No official authorities ever questioned the officer until 2007; however, Jackson was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer while he lay dying in the hospital (Springer, 2011).
In response to Jackson’s death, the SCLC planned a massive protest march on May 7, 1965, from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery—the state capital 54 miles away. Just outside Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named after a Civil War general and a U.S. Senator—local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama State Troopers met the peaceful marchers that included future U.S. Congressmen, John Lewis.
The 600 marchers were tear-gassed and brutally beaten all the way back to Selma. The whole incident was televised. The national exposure enraged many Americans and embarrassed most Alabamians and many LEOs (personal experience and interviews with working police officers). President Johnson went on TV to praise the marchers and condemn the police actions. Martin Luther King asked for civil rights activist and religious leaders to come to Alabama to support the voting rights cause. The exposed level of state violence exceeded the public’s tolerance as was common for the brutal reaction of Southern law enforcement officials during the early 1960s—witness the national response to Birmingham, Alabama’s Police Commissioner and the use of dogs and firehouses in 1963 against black school children. Even some Birmingham police officers refused to participate in the extralegal violence against school children and peaceful demonstrators (personal knowledge and interviews with working officers).
Earl, Soule, and McCarthy (2003) opine that external watchdogs—national politicians, the Department of Justice, civil rights groups—and the public tend to overlook moderate repressive police actions, but the indiscriminate use of violence by Southern police officers on Bloody Sunday provoked external reactions.
Civil rights activists poured into the state and were a big part of the civil rights movement that ended the Alabama Jim Crow segregation laws. No one died on the Edmund Pettus Bridge beat-down, but white supremacists murdered two of those coming to support the movement—James Reeb, a white Boston minister, was beaten to death by white segregationists, and Viola Liuzzo was shot to death by an FBI informant as she traveled to Alabama from Michigan in a car driven by a black activist (Jeffries, June 17, 2008).
The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago
Significant collective events where protesters seek radical goals that threaten the political elites are most likely to receive the most severe police action—the “All Hands on Deck” approach where police use physical force, make arrests and use their weapons, including tear gas (Earl, Soule, & McCarthy, August 2003). During the four days and nights of the 1968 Chicago convention 10,000 protesters from diverse groups and ideologies—hippies, yippies, youngsters working for political candidates, professional people with dissenting political views, anarchists, revolutionaries, motorcycle gangs, black activists, and young thugs—united under one cause—Opposition to the Vietnam War. The motley group of protesters screamed obscene epithets and threw rocks, bathroom tiles, urine and feces at 23,000 Chicago police officers and National Guard troops who responded with unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on anyone who came in contact with them.
The rioting police clubbed and hit journalists, peaceful protesters, and innocent bystanders with no consideration of age or gender. According to the Walker National Commission that examined the police riot, the victims included “persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat” (Walker Report, 1968). The innocent victims were peaceful protesters, onlookers, residents passing through, or living in the area. Six hundred and sixty-eight people were arrested; 425 were treated at temporary medical facilities; 200 were treated on the scene; 400 hundred were given first aid for tear gas exposure; and 110 had to go to the hospital. Unbelievably, no one died. The Chicago police did not fire into the crowd as they did at the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre.
Police Violence and Homicides against Mexicans
The academic and popular discussion of U.S. LEO homicides has primarily focused on police violence against the various dangerous classes in the Southern states and the Northeast, particularly African Americans. Equally disturbing but primarily ignored is the Anglo-American treatment of Mexicans (Romero, 2001). Carrigan and Webb (2013) in their seminal study of Mexican lynchings refer to lynched Mexicana as the forgotten dead.
They use the term “Mexican” to refer to persons born in Mexico and living in the United States and those of Mexican descent born in the United States. They do not use the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” because those terms were not in use at the time examined (Carrigan & Webb, 2013). In the western and southwestern states, racial discrimination and state violence against Mexicans has a long history (Urquito-Ruiz, 2004).
Following the end of the Mexican-American War and the 1848 Treaty of Hidalgo, Mexico lost half its geographic size with this treaty. The Mexicans already living in the conquered areas that would become Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California were guaranteed their property and civil rights by the treaty, but that is not what happened (Knowlton, 1970). The invading Anglos did not treat Mexican nationals who were in the seized territory as citizens. The Anglos dispossessed them of their homes and took their lands.
The Mexican hatred stirred up by the U.S.-Mexican war was deeply ingrained in the early Anglo settlers. The “Remember the Alamo” battle cry was a significant part of early Texas culture for decades and embodied in the racist and brutal policing practices of the Texas Rangers prior to August 10,1935—the establishment of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Prior to that date, Mexican nationals in the occupied lands were subjected to extralegal violence—lynchings, murders of men and boys, and rape of the women and girls (Romero, 2001).
Mexican immigrants that came looking for work, starting with the influx of Mexican workers during the 1849 California Gold rush, were subjected to extralegal violence and murder. Mexicans were discriminated against by an established system of Juan Crow laws enforced by violent police actions up until the 1950s in Texas. Mexicans were segregated from Anglos in schools, churches, and restaurants (Martinez, 2018). They were discouraged from voting or serving on juries. Mexicans—legal and illegal immigrants—were and still are treated by some as impoverished brown-skinned criminals—the dangerous classes, and a threat to the “American way of life” (Gonzales, 2000).
Although the Texas Rangers, an investigative branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety, is a well-respected law enforcement agency today, this was not always true. In the early nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers were an instrument of racial oppression and terror. Some historians view the early Texas Rangers in the same light as the earlier colonial slave patrols—the first Western vigilante group to be invested with enforcement powers (Martinez, 2018). The fledgling Texas Rangers performed slave patrols objectives after Texas independence in 1836 (Prassel, 1972). Rangers brutally policed the African slaves and prevented slaves from escaping into Mexico. Rangers, at times, crossed into Mexico to bring back runaway slaves.
The Texas Ranger’s Dark History—Anti-Mexican Homicides
The Texas Ranger’s “dark history” reveals their murderous efforts at ethnic cleansing in the early settlement of Texas. From August 1915 to June 1920, an unknown number of Mexicans—estimates run from several hundred to several thousand—were killed by the Texas Rangers and vigilante groups during a race war between Anglos and Mexicans—the dangerous class (Carrigan & Webb, 2013; Onion, May 5, 2016; Martinez, 2018). A 1919 report of the Texas legislature investigation into the actions of the Texas Rangers that was sealed until 2000 has the following passage: “During the course of these events [1910 to 1919], the regular Texas Rangers along with hundreds of special rangers appointed by Texas governors killed an estimated 5,000 Hispanics along the border between 1914 and 1919” (http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/50062/tsl-50062.html). The actions of the Rangers and their collusion with vigilante groups was an ethnic cleansing effort to remove all Mexicans from Texas—Mexican American citizens and Mexican nationals (Martinez, 2018). The Texas Rangers during that period used homicide as racially motivated violence.
Knowlton (1970) gives the example of a Mexican American from Texas whose grandfather was hung by the Texas Rangers as his family watched. Anglo-American ranchers drove branded cattle on his land and accused him of stealing them. The Anglos got his grandfather’s property after the hanging. Between 1848 and 1929 there were 597 documented lynchings of Mexicans in the United States—Texas (282), California (188), Arizona (59), and New Mexico (49) (Carrigan & Webb, 2003). Based on the relative size of the population, the risk of lynching was nearly as high or greater for Mexicans in the southwest as it was for blacks in the South (Carrigan & West, 2003: 414). One of the largest lynchings in U.S. history occurred in Nueces County, Texas. Forty Mexicans were randomly lynched for the murder of a white man in 1877 (Carrigan & West, 2003). The Texas Rangers were directly or indirectly involved in many of these lynching’s.
In 1881, Texas Rangers crossed into Mexico to bring back a wanted Mexican national. The Rangers illegally extradited the wanted man, and once back in Texas, they turned him over to a mob that lynched him (Carrigan & Webb, 2003). Following a train robbery in Texas in 1915, Texas Rangers killed two Mexican train passengers suspected of aiding the robbers. The Rangers then took eight Mexican suspects to the banks of the Rio Grande River and executed them (Carrigan & Webb, 2003). The bodies were left on the border river as an example of Texas Ranger swift justice. The 1919 Porvenir Massacre is a tragic example of the brutal tactics of the Texas Rangers as they engaged in the removal of Mexicans from Texas.
Porvenir Massacre
Porvenir, Texas, is in a rural, rugged, isolated area of mountains, desert and the Rio Grande River just across the Texas-Mexico border and the city of Chihuahua, Mexico. In 1918, Anglo ranchers in the area complained that Mexican bandits were raiding their property. It was rumored that the Mexican residents in Porvenir were providing safe passage and support for the Marauders (Harris & Sadler, 2004; Martinez, 2018). The ranchers claimed that men from Porvenir joined the gangs on raids. At the time, only one Anglo—a schoolteacher—lived in the small community. The area was under the jurisdiction of Texas Ranger Company B at Marfa, Texas commanded by Captain J. M. Fox. Captain Fox was ordered by the commander of the Big Bend District to “clean out the nest” of bandits in Porvenir. He did that with a vengeance.
Captain Fox and Company B composed of eight rangers, four local ranchers accompanied by members of the U.S. Eighth Calvary who had been ordered to assist the Texas Rangers in searching for weapons rode into Porvenir at 2:00 a.m. The soldiers woke the residents and had them stand outside their residences. The soldiers who regularly patrolled the area were known and trusted by the residents. The soldiers assured the frightened residents that the hated and feared Texas Rangers would not harm them. Captain Fox dismissed the soldiers, and the Texas Rangers took control of the terrified residents and moved them to a nearby bluff.
According to later eyewitness testimony, the Rangers tied all the men and boys together and began shooting them (Harris & Sadler, 2004; Martinez, 2018). Soldiers heard the shots and the screaming women and rushed to the massacre scene. The soldiers found fifteen bodies, each with multiple wounds and a coup de grace headshot. One of the soldiers said the massacre scene reminded him of a slaughterhouse (Martinez, 2018: 123). He added, “A hospital corpsman who was with us went over to the bodies, but not a breath was left in a single one. The professionals had done their work well.” The resulting investigation concluded that the fifteen Mexicans killed by the Rangers and the ranchers had been disarmed and were helpless prisoners when they were executed (Harris & Sadler, 2004: 354).
The Texas Governor was told that the men and boys killed were innocent farmers and not bandits. No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre, but Texas Governor Hobby disbanded Texas Ranger Company B, fired all the Rangers involved, and forced Captain Fox to resign. Within the last two years, Texas has finally acknowledged that the Porvenir Massacre and the other atrocities of the Texas Rangers occurred (Casares, February 3, 2018; Martinez, 2018).
Police Violence against Individuals and Groups in Early American History
Police violence and homicides against individuals and groups have a long history in the United States in addition to the multiple homicides committed against the dangerous classes during protests, demonstrations, and dissent outlined previously. In their history, New York police have used their official position to commit and cover up crimes from burglary to election fraud and murder (Sherman, 1978). The same could be said for most U.S. urban police departments. The best narrative of the early 1900s police violence in New York City is contained in the 1931 autobiography of NYPD Captain Cornelius W. Williams (Williams, 1931, see also Reppetto, 1978). His descriptions of police violence events are too numerous to present here. Police-perpetrated homicide was a common outcome of police-citizen interactions, regardless of race or ethnicity. The first-known U.S. LEO to be convicted and executed for a murder committed on duty was NYPD Lt. Charles Becker in 1912. Then, and now, police officers worked hand and glove with local criminal gangs, including acting as “muscle” for criminal gangs (see Haller (1976) for the working relationship between the Chicago police and criminals 1890–1925). Seven years earlier—1905—an NYPD Patrolman had been convicted of murdering a black night watchman (Johnson, 2003: 81). The NYPD officer claimed he shot in self-defense. That did not convince the jury because the black man was shot in the back and several witnesses testified that the officer had fired several additional shots as the man lay helpless on his back. In 1926 another NYPD officer was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death after murdering a shopkeeper who identified him in a line-up in a police station house as an attempted extortionist (Johnson, 2003: 117 & 118). The officer shouted, “You won’t squeal against anyone again.” These killer cops who commit intentional murder are not a new phenomenon in American policing and will be discussed more fully later. The 1929 Wickersham Commission—the first National Commission on Police Violence—in a volume entitled Our Lawless Police—documented the use of the third-degree and other forms of police violence throughout the United States. The same report found that the American police of the 1920s and 1930s engaged in “institutionalized malpractice”—violations of constitutional rights or the human dignity of civilians (Richardson, 1974).
Police violence was an accepted part of early urban policing in Chicago. For example, in Chicago, there were three justifications for police violence: First, to mete out punishment to wrongdoers, “That’s my motto, scare ‘em to death and knock the hell out of them, and let them go” (Haller, 1976: 318). Second, the third degree was an accepted part of investigative work. This was still in use in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s. A Chicago police commander, Jon Burge, and his team of white detectives known as the “midnight crew” used electric shocks, waterboarding, and mock executions, accompanied by racial epithets, and attacks to the genitals to coerce false confessions from 200 predominately African American criminal suspects (Taylor, 2016). This was a part of the third reason for police violence, which was to uphold the dignity of the policeman. This is what is known as arrests for COP (Contempt of Cop) or POP(Pissing off the Police) in today’s police culture. During the 1960s many police supervisors would not accept a “resisting arrest” charge unless the suspect was sent to the hospital or the morgue. The rationale was that if he was a “cop fighter,” he might kill the next cop (personal experience). The “get tough on criminals” philosophy still exist in many police agencies as they conduct the War on Crime.
War on Crime and Resulting Violence
Theodore Roosevelt in 1894 was the first NYPD Police Commissioner to recognize the police as a military organization when he declared “war” against crime and corruption. He increased the officer’s weaponry and gave them the license to use it against criminals (Johnson, 2003: 88). Other police CEO’s have urged the police on in their “no quarter” for suspected criminals. The American police have always had hostility toward criminals, the courts, politicians, and civilians who do not share the police view of the genesis of crime, disorder, and its control (Richardson, 1974; Walker, 1977). This ideology was the standard for the NYPD since Clubber Williams declared, “There is more law in the end of nightstick than un a decision of the Supreme Court” (Johnson, 2003: 41). Frank Rizzo, when he was the Philadelphia Police Commissioner in the 1970s, reportedly told a newsperson, “The way to treat criminals is spacco il capa—to bust their heads” (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993: 139). I hear the same philosophy from working police today.
Previous Information on Police-Perpetrated Homicides
Popular Sources for Police-Perpetrated Homicides
The majority of information on homicides by LEOs, before the mid to late 1960s, is not the result of scholarly research; however, there is anecdotal evidence, some from popular sources. The 1977 publication Killer Cops: An Encyclopedia of Lawless Lawmen by Michael Newton is an excellent source to begin an examination of LEOs who murder in U.S. history. The fascinating book on sixty-seven American killer cops includes early nineteen-century cops and Western lawmen killer cops such as Bass Outlaw, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp. The popular market book was used as a reference source for research purposes, although I disagreed with many of his selections.
Stark (1972) in a footnote describes a 1968 “friendly fire” incident between three trigger happy off-duty NYPD officers on a crowded expressway unaware that they were officers that left one dead and one seriously injured. A second 1968 “friendly fire” incident by an NYPD plainclothes officer and another Housing Authority plainclothes officer left NYPD officer dead. Friendly fire police homicides still occur in the NYPD and other police departments. Although multiple police-caused deaths are rare in modern police work, the Philadelphia police did drop an incendiary bomb on a row house occupied by a militant black cult (Skolnick, May 21, 1985). The fires spread to sixty more homes and lead to eleven deaths including five children ranging from age seven to thirteen. It could happen again in the present rise of police militarization with surplus military equipment.
Early Scholarly Research on LEO-Perpetrated Homicides
Professor Gerald Robin (1963) published one of the first empirical studies of justified police homicides—intentional killings commanded or authorized by law. He reported that from 1952 to 1955, the reported rate of justifiable police homicides (JPH) was 3.2 percent of the total number of homicides in the United States. Furthermore, Robin opined that the victim-offender relationship in police justified homicides is an example of victim-precipitated homicide because the victim was killed as a consequence of his criminal actions—an interesting but biased conclusion.
Robin examined the thirty-two known police killing of criminals in Philadelphia from 1950 to 1960 according to official police records. Thirty of the cases were disposed by the medical examiner’s inquest, and two officers were indicted and cleared by a jury at trial. All the deaths were the result of gunshot wounds. Twenty-five victims of the police-caused homicide victims resisted during the attempted arrest. Seven of the thirty-two victims were fleeing when shot and killed. Robin also presented JPH reported for ten U.S. urban cities from 1950 to 1960—Boston 3; Buffalo 7; Milwaukee 10; Philadelphia 32; Washington, D.C., 26; Cincinnati 23; Kansas City MO. 23; Chicago 191; and Miami 21. He reported that the national statistics show that the U.S. police were six times more likely to kill than to be killed in the line of duty. He used this statistic to opine that the dangerousness of police work may be exaggerated. The study concluded that the JPH in the sample revealed that Negro’s deaths were disproportionate to whites at 7 to 1, female JPH’s deaths were negligible, JPH victims were relatively young, victims were generally unskilled workers, 70 percent of the shootings occurred between 9:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m., and two-thirds of the victims had criminal records. The author reported that six of the men killed had “strong indications of psychotic consequences” (Robin, 1963).
Conclusion
Complaints of police violence and LEO-perpetrated homicides are a part of American police history. The allegations are not confined to big cities or particular regions, any specific racial or ethnic group, or labeled dangerous class, or any type/pattern. For example, in August 1900 in Akron, Ohio, a shootout between police in a city building and civilians outside left two children killed by police gunfire (Richardson, 1974: 188). Johnson (2003) in her seminal study of NTPD police brutality complaints opined that the use of police violence progressed through several periods. In the nineteenth century, the major citizen complaint was “clubbing” where brutal police bludgeoned poor, working-class citizens, and immigrants with nightsticks and blackjacks. Severe injuries and deaths occurred during the “clubbings.”
During the Prohibition era, NYPD police collusion with criminals increased police violence and the use of the third degree to elicit confessions. The victims were predominately the immigrant poor, African Americans, and other marginalized individuals and groups. Injuries and deaths occurred during these extracted false confessions. In the 1870s, the 1930s, and the 1960s mass police violence was directed at the dangerous classes such as Communists, labor, African American activists, strikers, and demonstrators. Johnson said that the significant police brutality complaints resulted in police brutality in the form of street justice—punishment given to criminals, wrongdoers, and disrespecters.
The historical discussion of law enforcement violence and homicides against members and groups of the dangerous classes is a part of American history. However, the risk to the physical security and civil rights of those labeled as members of the dangerous classes still exists in this country. The use of the dangerous class label has utility for politically charged criminal justice professionals because of its flexibility. For example, a Texas District Attorney (DA) running for reelection arrested 177 bikers at a biker/police shoot out in Waco, Texas, as members or supporters of outlaw motorcycle gangs—criminal street gang according to Texas law (Barker, 2017). Police snipers killed four of the nine persons during the shootout. All charges against those arrested have been dropped and the DA was voted out of office. The Texas criminal street gang definition—dangerous class—was used as a hammer to force plea bargains and it backfired on him. The Texas DA was not the first to do so.
However, a myopic approach centered on dangerous classes masks the complex nature of homicides by LEOs. The patterns/types of law enforcement homicides makes LEO-perpetrated homicide a potential risk factor for all persons living in the United States regardless of age, race, gender, ethnicity, social status, or label. However, the majority of public and academic attention belies the true nature of police-perpetrated homicides. This is slowly changing.
The August 9, 2014, shooting death of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African American male, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, made a national issue of LEO homicides. The lack of reliable official data on “killings by the police enraged the public and lead to riots and demonstrations erupted nationwide” (Swaine & McCarthy, December 15, 2016). This book provides a much needed examination of the types and patterns of police homicides. It is the first step toward needed reform.
We will demystify police homicides and expose its variety and range though the development of a heuristic typology of police homicides. Then we will examine and provide examples of each type or pattern.
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