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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Arrests for breaking windows (20)

Police made arrests at nineteen of the sixty-nine locations reported to have had windows broken. For five arrests there is no information on the location whose windows were broken (although one of those cases involved windows allegedly broken "along Lenox Ave.") Few of those arrests occurred on West 125th Street, or on the avenues immediately surrounding that street, where windows were broken early in the disorder when police struggled to control those on the street and lacked the numbers to make arrests. Instead, police made most of these arrests at locations scattered throughout the area of the disorder, with the exception of the West 116th Street and the blocks of Lenox Avenue around it. There are eight reported businesses with broken windows in those blocks, as well as two looted stores, suggesting a possible lack of police presence in that area for at least some of the disorder. The twenty of those arrested who allegedly only broke windows are categorized as having been arrested for that activity. An additional seven of those arrested for allegedly inciting crowds, and categorized as such, also broke windows.

Details of the circumstances in which police made arrests for breaking windows can be found for only for those seven people categorized as inciting crowds, Leroy Brown, William Ford, Claude Jones, John Kennedy Jones, Leon Mauraine, Bernard Smith, and David Smith. Those are cases where those arrested allegedly incited crowds and were also charged with riot, a felony, meaning those cases have District Attorney's case files. All seven arrests were made by police officers close enough to both allegedly see objects being thrown at windows and to hear what was being shouted by individuals, but not close enough to arrest more than one or two members of groups attacking stores. Some of those officers were likely stationed nearby. Detectives are identified as the arresting officer in seven additional arrests for breaking windows for which there are no detail, those of Arthur Bennett, James Bright, David Bragg, Louise Brown, Warren Johnson, Rose Murrell, William Norris, Henry Stewart and Charles Wright. In plainclothes not uniforms, so perhaps not recognized as police by those allegedly breaking windows, detectives may also have been close to windows that were broken.

Where those arrested for looting stores often allegedly had items in their possession that provided a basis for police officers to make arrests, that is not the case in those arrests recorded in the District Attorney's case files, or in the one published photograph of an arrest. Captioned "Suspected Rock-Tosser In Custody of Police" when published in the New York Evening Journal, that image showed a Black man wearing a hat being walking between a white man in a hat and jacket, likely a police detective, and a uniformed patrolman. Without the caption there is nothing to indicate the charge against him. The theater visible in the background, across a wide street, makes it likely that this photograph was taken on 125th Street. If that was the case, the man may be Claude Jones or William Ford.

Arrests (128)

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