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

at Rockefeller Center. Jeff Jones, an SDS organizer, described the event as"very militant, it turned into a street fight. I think there were eight felony andfourteen misdemeanour [sic] arrests. 1nere were beatings on both sides."o4 Aweek later, on April 29, 1968, New York City police used clubs to clear some of thesame students from occupied buildings at Columbia University. Police emptiedthe occupied buildings and then moved through the campus, beating any studentsthey could find, whether or not they had been involved in the occupation.osOne hundred thirty-two students and four faculty were injured.O(, Also in NewYork, that fall, 150 off-duty cops filled a Brooklyn courthouse and beat severalBlack Panthers who were there to observe a trial. 57A week before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr., led 15,000 peopleon a march through Memphis, expressing solidarity with the city's strikinggarbage collectors. The police and National Guard used clubs and tear gas tobreak up the march, killing one person in the process. oS In April, followingKing's murder, 202 riots occurred in 175 cities across the country, with 3,500people injured and forty-three killed, mostly at the hands of police. 19Also in April, a peace march of 8,000 moved slowly through downtown Chicago.Having been refused a parade permit marchers stayed on sidewalks and obeyed thetraffic signals. Nevertheless, in an incident foreshadowing the Democratic NationalConvention later that year, a line of police pushed the crowd into the streets; almost atonce, another line of cops pushed them back to the sidewalks. The situation quicklydegenerated. Ignoring the orders of their superiors, police broke ranks, chasing andbeating members of the crowd. A panel convened to study the incident lay the blamewith Mayor Richard Daley and other city officials, who set the tone for the action bydenying the required permits.60In June, cops attacked a crowd of Berkeley students listening to speechesabout the Paris uprising, setting off several days of fighting/" In July, policeresponded forcefully to racial unrest in Patpfsnn, New Jersey. A grand jury latercondemned the police for engaging in "terrorism" and "goon squad" tactics.The jury reported that teams of cops intentionally vandalized Black-ownedbusinesses and severely beat individual Black and Puerto Rican people as anexample io others.62 In August, Los Angeles exploded after police attacked acrowd at the Watts Festival. 1llree people were killed and thirty-five injured.63That winter, when students at San Francisco State College went on strike todemand a Black Studies program, college president S. I. Hayakawa declared astate of emergency, ordered classes to resume, and called in police to make surethat they did.64 (Hayakawa is perhaps best remembered for his assertion, 'Thereare no innocent bystanders.")6S Skirmishes followed throughout December,during which individual officers broke from their units and charged into crowdsof students. News photos showed police holding protesters while other copsmaced them.66 The strike was finally defeated in January when police startedmaking mass arrests, resulting in several felony convictions.67This chronology is undoubtedly incomplete, but it makes the point police violence against crowds, sometimes perfectly innocuous gatherings, was utterly common.68 It was as frequent as it was extreme. Nevertheless, one event stands out as theparadigmatic police riot-the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.186