Law Enforcement–Perpetrated Homicides. Tom Barker

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 For example, the outdated common law use of deadly force to apprehend any “fleeing felon” is no longer applicable in modern societies such as the United States—1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner (Blumberg, 1991).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,