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

the McCartby reportas a "crude and unsatisfying" document, the City CounciYs ReviewCommittee reached almost entirely opposing conclusions. I I Rather than pressingfor a more forceful response, the city council's committee suggested that in manycases the police would have done better to have done nothing at all. "Members ofthe public, including demonstrators, were victims of ill-conceived and sometimespointless police actions to 'clear the streets."'12 Aside from its brutality, such anapproach is often self-defeating. For example, 'The unintended consequence ofpolice actions on Capitol Hill was to bring sleepy residents out of their homes andmobilize them as 'resistors."'13Despite the objections to the McCarthy report, its recommended tacticsare by now familiar in the setting of any large anti-globalization event. We 'veseen this pattern repeated time and again in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia,and Los Angeles (as well as in Prague, Quebec City, Gothenburg, andGenoa) 14-and, with variations, in more recent anti-war protests. I)EARLY STRATEGIESThere is more at stake in this debate than the blame for the wro debacle. Eachof these reports represents one side in an ongoing dispute over the principlesof crowd control. Spanning slightly more than 100 years, this controversy hasbeen shaped by a series of similar crises-instances in which the police orthodoxyproved disastrous.Prior to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, civil disturbances were essentiallyhandled like any other military engagement, with the possible exception thatcrowds would be ordered to disperse before the police or militia charged withclubs or opened fire. During the Draft Riots of 1863, for example, New YorkPolice Commissioner Thomas Acton ordered those under his command to"Take no prisoners." George Walling, the commander of the twelfth prp("in("t,was even more specific in his instructions: "Kill every man who has a club."1" Iwill term this the strategy of "Maximum Force."Such an approach may have had a certain efficacy against localized revolts,unplaImed riots, or drunken mobs, but it met with greater difficulty in 1877when more than 100,000 railroad workers, enraged by cuts to their alreadymeager wages, went on strike and prevented the companies from movingtheir freightY The turmoil was too vast for local police to control, and themilitia proved unreliable."In Pittsburgh, the city where strike-related violence climaxed, militiadisplayed opposite extremes of indiscipline: fraternization and panic."1S Thecommander of the Pittsburgh militia later testified:Meeting on the field of battle you go there to kill ... but here you had menwith fathers and mothers and brothers and relatives mingled in the crowdof rioters. The sympathy was with the strikers. We all felt that these menwere not receiving enough wages. 19The Philadelphia militia, which was also sent to Pittsburgh, displayed no suchsympathy. The New York Times reported that they "fired indiscriminately intothe crowd, among whom were many women and children."2o Rather thanfleeing, the crowd was enraged; the militia was forced to retreat. Ukewise, in180