Law Enforcement–Perpetrated Homicides. Tom Barker

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