Police Power: Police Abuses in New York City
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Description
This is not a book about sensational police scandals, either of corruption or of the third degree. It does not deal, and is not intended to deal, with the macabre excesses of the police as they are occasionally recorded in the newspapers, but rather with more routine denials of due process of law by false arrest, by unlawful search, and by “summary punishment”—police brutality. Most of the policemen in these cases are not detectives but patrolmen, involved in street-corner incidents. What I hope to tell is the genesis of these abuses and the reasons why so little is done to stop them. On the other hand, this study is not a general survey of police work. It does not recount the many brilliant investigations by detective, the acts of heroism of plainclothesmen in trying to decoy muggers, that were contemporary with the abuses recorded in this book. If it is not a “balanced” account, it was never intended to be one. This book is directed to finding out what is wrong, and the reasons for what is wrong, with law enforcement, chiefly in the streets. It concentrates upon police abuses in New York City during the two-year period of 1966 and 1967. The restriction to New York immediately raises a question about the general applicability in other communities of the patterns and conclusions described here. On the one hand, New York is the largest urban complex in the country, and it presents the most severe problems; on the other, the New York City Police Department has long had a reputation as one of the best departments in the country. I think it is clear from other, more general studies than this, which will be cited in succeeding chapters, that the problems explored here are more pronounced in other cities. New York may not be typical, but its police problems are typical of the police problems of the nation. I first became concerned with police abuses in 1965 while I was working in a neighborhood law office in Harlem. Although I had listened to a number of gruesome stories about the police, I could not really begin to grasp what the problem was until I had tried some criminal cases from the ghetto. The saddest of these cases concerned a Harlem window washer and his wife, a barmaid. On the wife’s night off, they were having drinks in a bar where she worked, and at the end of the evening, she went out into the street to hail a cab. A policeman, mistaking her flashy clothes for those of a prostitute, ordered her to move on. A vituperative argument ensued, and the wife was knocked down with a punch in the eye. When the husband ran out of the bar with a friend to protest, he was also knocked down. The wife was charged with assault and the husband with disorderly conduct (breach of the peace). A law student working in my office sat in that bar one night for six hours, hoping to find witnesses, and finally succeeded in giving subpoenas to three. But on the day of the barmaid’s trial, not one of them came to court—not on that day nor on any of the three days to which the trial was subsequently adjourned. At her husband’s trial, the friend who had run out into the street with him testified in his defense that there had been no breach of the peace. The friend’s credibility was poor, not only because he was a friend but because he had a criminal record; the magistrate found the husband guilty and gave him a suspended sentence. After his trial, the husband said, “You know, I’m pretty good with my hands. I bet I could have taken that cop. But when he punched me, I just lay there and thought, “Hell, I’ll go downtown and tell it to the judge.’ Well, I did tell it, but that cop lied, and the judge didn’t believe me. Next time anyone punches my wife, and, I’m going to take him.” The window washer probably would not have done what he threatened; he was too respectable and civilized a man. But the important thing was that he had learned to believe there was no way to get justice except with his hands. Similar criminal cases which I handled in 1965—of disorderly conduct, of assault, and often of resisting arrest—were just as discouraging; I lost four within the space of a few weeks. The result was that when I first heard about a plan for the New York Civil Liberties Union to study police abuses, I wanted nothing to do with it. I could imagine nothing more depressing than more of the same, over a period of two years. I had to see other lawyers win a few of these cases, and win a few myself, before I became convinced that such a project was useful; that it was sometimes possible to get witnesses to come to court to persuade judges to acquit.
Publication Date
1969
Recommended Citation
Chevigny, Paul G., "Police Power: Police Abuses in New York City" (1969). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 101.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/101
