In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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      Twenty years later, however, many white officers remained leery of inciting trouble in black communities. David Durk was an unusual recruit, an Amherst graduate from the Upper West Side whose father had a medical practice on Park Avenue. After a year at Columbia Law School, he decided to join the NYPD in fall 1963 and was assigned to the 28th Precinct in Central Harlem. At roll call a veteran sergeant offered clear instructions to the rookie patrolman: “Don’t lose sight of your partner, don’t go down any block alone, don’t go into any buildings, and no arrests unless you’re personally assaulted.” In other words, be careful, avoid trouble, and leave the residents to fend for themselves.¹²

      Not surprisingly, a survey conducted on the eve of the riot in 1964 revealed that although 51 percent of African Americans in New York credited the police with doing a “pretty good job,” 39 percent disagreed and an equal number named “crime and criminals” as the “biggest problem” facing the city. The fear cut across gender, class, and generational lines in the black community. “There’s just too many junkies and drunks around here,” said a teenage woman who lived in a rundown apartment on West 146th Street and had a scar on her arm from a slashing by a wino. “It’s hard for decent people to live right. I feel like I’m smothering.”¹³

      Ten blocks north, in a cool and spacious apartment, a middle-aged city official offered his view from a comfortable sofa. “You don’t know how much it tears me up to say this,” he admitted, “but the most hellish problem Negroes up here have to worry about, next to bad schools and bad housing, is personal safety from muggers and thugs. I don’t let my wife go out, even to the grocery store, at night unless she is escorted or takes a cab.” In Queens, a subway motorman argued that blacks could not depend on the police. “The only solution to all this mugging and stealing is to organize block associations or civilian patrols,” he said, bemoaning police indifference. “It’s time we did something to protect our own.”¹⁴

      Police corruption was another source of hostility between many residents of Harlem and the officers who patrolled it. A housewife interviewed in 1964 was blunt: “The real criminal in Harlem is the cops. They permit dope, numbers, whores, gangsters to operate here, and all the time they get money under the table—and I ain’t talkin’ about $2 neither.” A college-educated Brooklyn resident was equally direct: “A ghetto police force is a force in league with all of the underworld, a bribed force. If this is not so, why is it that anyone can buy narcotics, alcohol, women or homosexuals freely on Harlem’s streets—even on Sunday?”¹⁵ Other socially conservative African Americans held similar views.

      Congressman Powell spoke for these residents when he gave a series of speeches on police corruption in 1960 on the floor of the U.S. House, where he had immunity from charges of libel or slander. In his remarks, he offered what a historian has described as a “phone directory of the Harlem underworld” and a detailed description of the regular police protection pad. With names and dates, facts and figures, the congressman outlined how the bribes were distributed in the NYPD chain of command. Noting that all 212 captains and 59 of 60 inspectors were white, Powell charged that organized crime and police graft were “pauperizing Harlem” by siphoning funds from poor blacks to white mobsters and officers.¹⁶

      Few paid attention, with the important exception of the New York Post, which assigned a team of investigative reporters led by Ted Poston, who had moved from Kentucky to Harlem in the 1920s and become the first black journalist at a major white newspaper. He confirmed the substance of Powell’s allegations. But then the congressman appeared on local television, where he had no immunity, and named a black woman, Esther James, as a courier of money from gamblers to the police. She decided to sue him for libel. When Powell arrogantly chose not to attend his own trial, the jury reacted negatively and found him guilty. In 1963, the court imposed $211,500 in damages. He in turn refused to pay, which led to a self-imposed exile from Harlem for five years. Powell could visit only on Sundays because, by state law, no one could serve civil contempt warrants on that day. As a result, he was unable to play a major role in restoring peace in 1964, even after he returned to Washington from his latest European excursion.¹⁷

      The full extent of police corruption became public knowledge in 1970, when the Knapp Commission held hearings and heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, many of whom vividly described decades of bribes and payoffs in Harlem. Inspector Paul Delise, a decorated twenty-seven-year veteran with six kids and retirement on the horizon, told how, as a mounted cop in Harlem in the 1950s, he had arrested a drug dealer outside a pool room on 116th Street. The dealer offered him a wad of cash. When a squad car arrived, he reported the bribe. The officers suggested he take it. “You son of a bitch. How can you suggest something like that?” replied Delise heatedly. “We’re all doing it,” the officer responded. “We kick these guys in the ass, we take their works from them, we put ’em on a subway train, and whatever they have in their pockets is what we take.”¹⁸

      Other policemen offered similar accounts. Jim O’Neil recalled how in 1964 he and his partner always gave the duty officer a half share of the “hat”—a tradition where “illegal gamblers, wanting to show their gratitude, would walk up to a detective and stuff a twenty in his shirt pocket and say, ‘Why don’t you take this and buy yourself a hat?’” It was, according to O’Neil, “more of a thank you than a bribe.”¹⁹ But according to Robert Leuci, who joined the force in 1961 and also appeared before the Knapp Commission, a captain told him that Harlem alone contained forty numbers operations that paid $100 a day, 365 days a year, to remain open. “The money was major, the backbone and heart of corruption in New York City,” testified Leuci, who became a pariah in the department and was the subject of the film Prince of the City starring Treat Williams and directed by Sidney Lumet. “The pad went all the way up, right through police headquarters into the mayor’s office.”²⁰

      The verdict of the Knapp Commission was blunt: “We find corruption to be widespread.” The “nut” (the monthly share per officer) ranged from $400 in Midtown to $1,500 in Harlem, which was known as the “Gold Coast” because it offered so many opportunities for bribes and payoffs. The “meat-eaters” were those who actively sought them; the “grass-eaters” were those who passively accepted what came to them. “You can’t work numbers in Harlem unless you pay,” testified a runner. “You go to jail on a frame if you don’t pay.” Police corruption weakened “public faith in the law and police,” concluded the commission. “Youngsters raised in New York ghettos, where gambling abounds, regard the law as a joke when all their lives they have seen police officers coming and going from gambling establishments and taking payments from gamblers.”²¹

      No joke to many blacks was the ever-present possibility of police brutality, a constant source of conflict in Harlem, where black citizens often viewed white officers with hatred and suspicion. James Baldwin perhaps put it best. “It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it,” he wrote in The Fire Next Time. “They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.”²² Sometimes the police would not even bother with an arrest. According to the NAACP, which took an active role in investigating police brutality, forty-six unarmed blacks were shot and killed by officers in New York between 1947 and 1952—only two unarmed whites met similar fates.²³

      Two incidents in particular generated outrage. The first came in 1950, when two white officers shot and killed a black Korean War veteran discharged from the Army twelve hours earlier. John Derrick was in uniform and missing $3,000 in discharge pay when his body was identified on 119th Street at Eighth Avenue. “John never even had a gun,” a witness told a crowd of three thousand at a rally the next day. “He was murdered.” The Amsterdam News pledged that “while there is an ounce of ink in our presses, we will pursue this case until justice is done.” But Republican Mayor Vincent Impellitteri refused to express remorse, offer condolences, or take action СКАЧАТЬ