Changes

[[File: New_York_Exposed.jpeg|thumbnail|left|200px|<i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190864346/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0190864346&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=6de0ce6a58b14f7521b491ef3f3d13b8 New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era]</i>]]

by Daniel Czitrom author of <i>[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190864346/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0190864346&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=6de0ce6a58b14f7521b491ef3f3d13b8 New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era]</i> (Oxford University Press, 2016)

One might date the racialized police brutality so familiar today to August 1900 and one of the worst race riots in New York City history. On an Eighth Avenue corner in midtown an African-American man challenged a plainclothes cop over the arrest of his girlfriend for “soliciting.” A fight resulted in the stabbing and death of the policeman, triggering a wild night of rioting, as thousands of whites poured onto Eighth Avenue, chasing and beating blacks wherever they found them. Scores of policemen joined the street mobs, clubbing blacks and refusing to go after their attackers. It was a long way from the Draft Riots of 1863, when police stations offered refuge for the victims of racist violence. Prominent African Americans organized a Citizens’ Protective League to gather evidence and press claims against the NYPD.

Yet despite a massive amount of eyewitness testimony, an official investigation by the Police Department itself whitewashed the entire affair. Not a single policeman faced any riot-related charges. The racial dynamic is of course different than in the 1890s—although the Lexow inquiry revealed an ethnic/racial component in the regular police abuse of Jews, Italians, and other poor immigrants. And police repression of labor unions and political radicals, though occasionally still with us, is no longer understood as central to the “police power.”

====Conclusion====

Yet one underlying dynamic connects Gilded Age era police abuses to those of the present: the extreme reluctance of prosecutors and grand juries to punish cops found guilty of abusing their authority. After the Lexow revelations, some forty police officers, including an inspector and fourteen captains (nearly half of the department’s total) faced indictments on charges of bribery, extortion, and neglect of duty. Many of these cases had dragged on for years. But by 1897 not a single New York police official was in jail and all the men dismissed from the force had won reinstatement with back pay. The courts consistently held that evidence supplied by persons of “disorderly character” was insufficient for conviction of bribery or extortion. The use of body cameras, the creation of civilian complaint review boards, and the evidence provided by witness cell phones—none of these will improve the current situation without a new commitment to apply the law firmly and consistently to rank and file cops and police officials.

[[Category:United States History]][[Category:Gilded Age]][[Category:African American History]][[Category:Wikis]]