Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [229]
Some of the reasons are hardly mysterious. There is a deep hunger for the illegal, and a lot of money chasing illegality—the most obvious case is drugs; and there are whole communities where support for official norms, and for what the police have to do, is shallow or downright negative. Under such conditions, a department of the pure and uncorrupt cannot exist.
Another issue is the norms of the police themselves. The police are a tight, beleaguered group. They develop their own subculture, and it is a subculture of tough, macho conservatism. There are few card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union among the police. The police do dirty, dangerous work, and they can hardly be expected to smother their “enemies” with empathy. They see human beings at their worst, and that certainly colors their philosophy of life.
They also believe in fighting fire with fire. Police brutality was part of a more general system of police power. It rested on a simple credo: the battalions of law and order had the right, if not the duty, to be tough as nails with criminals. Force was the only language the criminal understood. Force was also necessary in self-defense, when “dealing with thugs and gunmen,” as the mayor of New York put it in December 1914. How this worked out in practice is suggested by a minor incident that month: Patrolman McCloy, in Brooklyn, ran up against an eighteen-year old no-good, Peter Gaimano, who struck at him with a blackjack and ran. McCloy caught up with Gaimano and his cronies, and wielded his nightstick to “good advantage.” He “dragged Gaimano to the street, and was on his way to the station house when the gangsters seemed to swarm from all directions. He used his night stick so efficiently that the ruffians fled.” But all this time Gaimano was “unconscious” and had to be hospitalized.11 An outside observer might wonder whether McCloy hadn’t used a bit more force than was called for. The police also carried guns, and were not afraid to use them on “thugs.”
Police brutality has a long, dishonorable history, not only on the street, but also in the station house. Here was the domain of the “third degree”—various ways of getting information out of suspects by inflicting “suffering, physical or mental.”12 This rather bland phrase conceals a whole world of torture and abuse—beatings with nightsticks and rubber hoses, and sometimes worse. Perhaps one of the most gruesome examples, if the account can be trusted, comes from the twenties in New York City. The police had before them a burly man, a Polish-American, strongly suspected of beating another man to within an inch of his life. The rubber hoses were getting the police exactly nowhere. So they called in a dentist, a “police buff,” who “carefully selected an old dull drilling burr and began slowly drilling into the pulp chamber of a lower rear molar in the region of a nerve.” This technique did the trick; the ac cused began to sing.13
Commission followed commission, investigation followed investigation; but brutality always managed to survive. The Wickersham Commission devoted one of its reports (“Lawlessness in Law Enforcement”) to the problem of brutality and the third degree. The commission documented and exposed many horrible examples. But it was not easy to attack the police ethos, to puncture the subculture, or to convince the police that force was unnecessary. Moreover, the police enjoyed an enormous amount of discretion as far as the lower levels of society were concerned. Southern blacks were always fair game. And what the police did to drunks, hoboes, and the poor in general was largely invisible. It happened in the back alleys, in the station houses, on the streets, out of sight of the bright lights and boulevards of due process. In the realm that was theirs, the police were the law; they beat, they harassed, they hounded drunks, prostitutes, bums. And they arrested thousands of men and women every year for vagrancy,