Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [98]
Walling’s instincts were probably sound. The respectable public, including the legal public, surely liked strong action, directness, force. Few members of the respectable middle class were arrested; hence few of them felt the blackjack or the fist of a patrolman—or suffered from police gunfire.21 And the opinion was abroad, that evil was strong and ubiquitous, that fire had to be fought with fire. To be sure, there were limits to public tolerance. But the public chose, in general, not to know. Police tactics also varied a good deal from place to place. In Detroit, incidents of brutality were (apparently) not very common; although in 1874, a ward collector and his sons claimed they were beaten by police. There were only fifty-two claims of physical abuse over a twenty-year period in Detroit. But drunks and hoboes, as John Schneider points out, do not usually complain about brutality; and if they do, nobody pays attention. 22
Many people, too, were willing to shut their eyes to a certain amount of police corruption. Again, only up to a point. In part, it depended on whose ox was goared. The party out of power was always more eager to expose corruption and brutality than the party in power. Politics was behind many police exposes, including the most famous, the so-called Lexow investigation (1894). The target here was the police department of New York City.
Whatever its motivations, the special committee of the New York legislature turned over a lot of stones and brought to light a lot of creeping, crawling creatures. Election fraud, for one thing: the police had committed “almost every conceivable crime against the elective franchise” for the sake of Tammany Hall, that is, the “dominant Democratic organization of the city of New York.” The police arrested and brutalized Republican voters; they stuffed ballot boxes, or let it happen; they wallowed in “oppression, fraud, trickery [and] crime.”23
The Lexow Committee found widespread corruption, too, in law enforcement. In “most precincts of the city, houses of ill-repute, gambling houses, policy shops, pool rooms, and unlawful resorts of a similar character” were “openly conducted” under the noses of the police. The reason, of course, was a massive pattern of payoffs. Even “legitimate business” had to pay its toll. An illegal business, like that of “Mrs. Herreman, who had kept a number of houses of ill-repute in the fifteenth precinct,” had to pay even more—some $30,000 over the years, which brought Mrs. Herreman “protection.” In general, brothels were subject to “blackmail”; indeed, there was a systematic scale of payments, including “initiation fees” for start-ups, and a monthly rate based on the number of rooms or inmates. The police also tolerated poolrooms and and policy shops; they permitted “professional abortionists ... to ply their awful trade”; they even collected from “boot-blacks, push-cart and fruit venders, as well as keepers of soda water stands, corner grocerymen, sailmakers with flag-poles extending a few feet beyond the place which they occupy,” merchants who were “compelled to use the sidewalk and street”—small business that might be violating some minor ordinance, or who needed help or protection. All of them had to “contribute ... to the vast amounts which flow into the station-houses, and which, after leaving something of the nature of a deposit, then flow on higher.”24
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