Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

area: they would pull up in a squad car near a group of Black people; several officerswould then jump out, beat them, get back in the car, and drive away. 103Thatnight, a cop was shot in a vacant lot near Vernor Highway; he returned fire andthe assailant was killed. Nevertheless, the police retaliated against the entireneighborhood. They laid siege to an apartment building at 290 East Vernor,shining searchlights on the building and firing into it with revolvers, rifles, andmachine guns. They eventually forced the residents out with tear gas and beatthem as they fled. Then the apartments were ransacked, doors kicked in, locksbroken, furniture overturned. Money, jewelry, and liquor were stolen.l04In an article titled '''The Gestapo in Detroit," NAACP attorney and laterSupreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall reported, 'They used 'persuasion'rather than firm action with white rioters, while against Negroes they usedthe ultimate in force: night sticks, revolvers, riot guns, sub-machine guns,and deer guns."105 He concluded:This record of the Detroit police demonstrates once more what all Negroesknow only too well: that nearly all police departments limit their conceptionof checking racial disorders to surrounding, arresting, maltreating, andshooting Negroes. Little attempt is made to check the activities of whites. lOGOf the thirty-four people killed, twenty-five were Black and nine were White;the police killed seventeen Black people and none who were White. I 07 JudgeGeorge Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit,described the riot as "open warfare between the Detroit Negroes and theDetroit Police Department."108BIRMINGHAM: BULL CONNOR AND THE LAWShortly after World War II, resistance to White supremacy began to accumulatea critical mass. Nearly a century after the Civil War, Black people had had enoughmorethan enoughf empty promises and the thin simulacrum of freedom thathad been their lot since the end of slavery. Tired of being excluded and exploited,sick of segregation and second-class citizenship, they determined to-asJames Forman put it-either "sit at the table," or "knock the fuckin' legs off' ofit. 109 First in the South, but soon throughout the country, Black people weredemanding their due of White society. And White people, as ever, were seriousabout not giving it to them.The police occupied their traditional place, standing :firmly in the way of AfricanAmericans' efforts to win their rights. The situation demanded nothing new ofthe police, though in times of crisis their function may have been a bit clearerthan usual, as the rhetoric of legal impartiality slipped further and further awayfrom them. Birmingham's police chief, Bull Connor, put it plainly: 'We don't givea damn about the law. Down here we make our own law." I 10 It was a startlingadmission from a man sworn to uphold the law, but undoubtedly true. I I IConnor and his police department epitomized a type of law enforcement characteristicof the time, though sadly persisting to the present day. Most famously,in 1963, Birmingham became the shame of the nation when television footageshowed demonstrators with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference beingbeaten by Connor's officers, attacked with police dogs, and sprayed with fire hoses.93