This page is referenced by:

• 1 2023-06-14T14:50:59+00:00 The police hearing (June 14) 41 plain 2024-02-15T18:42:33+00:00 Less than a week after a grand jury decided not to indict Patrolman John McInerney, on June 14, a police department hearing on the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs took place. Only three of the seven eyewitnesses were at the hearing, Howard Malloy, John Bennett, and Warren Wright. Why Moore, Pitts, Hughes, and Pfiffer were not present was not mentioned. Louis Eisenberg, the store owner, also did not testify, nor did the medical examiner. Russell Hobbs and his parents were heard, as were Patrolman Watterson and Detectives O'Brien and McCormick. None said anything different from their testimony in the grand jury hearings and in the MCCH hearings, according to James Tartar, who was in attendance, together with E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist who had recently started work leading the MCCH's investigation of Harlem.
  
  The tenth witness at the hearing was Patrolman McInerney, whose testimony had not been heard in either the legal proceedings or the MCCH hearings. For Tartar, the hearing provided his "first opportunity to hear Patrolman McInerney's version of the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs." He found it far from persuasive; in fact, he judged it "rehearsed" as it was "as if he were reading the testimony of Patrolman Watterson," his partner. McInerney's testimony that on the morning of March 20 he had taken the horn and socket set to Eisenberg for him to identify the items as coming from his store, and then kept them in his locker, Tartar saw as evidence he had obtained them after he learned that the shooting was being investigated. Seeing the arrest record in which O'Brien had testified the horn and socket set had been recorded only confirmed his opinion: he discovered that part of the record had been "changed to show the quantity and type of articles alleged to have been shown." Tartar claimed that when he made Inspector Di Martini aware of the changes, he agreed that the arrest record had been altered.
  
  Despite what Tartar found in the arrest record, the outcome of the hearing was only a reprimand for Patrolman McInerney for failing to turn in evidence at the proper time. Not only Tartar, but Arthur Garfield Hays and E. Franklin Frazier, drew different conclusions from the testimony. While Tartar could only express his belief that McInerney "had committed a crime" in reports for the MCCH, Hays and Frazier had the opportunity to condemn the police officer's killing of Lloyd Hobbs in reports that were eventually made public.
  
  In the report of the subcommittee Hays characterized the shooting as "inexcusable." "The record of Lloyd Hobbs and that of his family are presumptive evidence that he was not the kind of boy to engage in looting" and "it is the testimony of several reputable witnesses that McInerney did not call upon the boy to halt before firing and that his first and only shot hit the boy." Even had Hobbs done what the patrolmen claimed, the report argued that shooting him was not justified: "there was no public disorder at the time to call for violent action, a life should not have been taken for the offense, and the officer should certainly have fired into the air, if necessary, rather than shot to kill immediately. Better still would have been the continuation of the pursuit and at least a genuine effort to run the boy down."
  
  After the report of the subcommittee was made public, Hays wrote to Commissioner Valentine about its recommendations and what had been done regarding the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs and the other cases of police brutality it described. Valentine responded that each of the cases had "been thoroughly investigated by the appropriate officials of this Department and no cause for disciplinary action was found." In regards to Hobbs specifically, he simply stated that two grand juries had exonerated McInerney. Public censure by the MCCH clearly did not trouble the police department.
  
  Six months later, Frazier echoed the subcommittee report in describing the killing of Lloyd Hobbs as "inexcusable" in the final report of the MCCH, adding that it was "a brutal act on the part of the police." In dismissing McInerney's account of the shooting, Frazier argued that "besides the testimony of witnesses, there are several acts which cast serious doubts on the statement of the police," enumerating the questions about the items Hobbs was alleged to have stolen. He also invoked Lloyd's "good record in school and in the community" and the family's "good standing and character" as further evidence that the shooting was unjustified and "that the life of a Negro is of little value to the police."
  
  Police Commissioner Valentine's response to the final report effectively confirmed Frazier's conclusion. He devoted only six and a half lines of the six-page letter to Mayor La Guardia to the "Case of Lloyd Hobbs," significantly less than any of the other five cases of police brutality discussed in the report. The killing was simply "the outcome of Hobbs burglarizing premises 2150 7th Avenue," Valentine wrote, an assessment that the grand jury had confirmed when they "exonerated" McInerney. In perhaps a further indication of how little attention Valentine and his staff paid to the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, the letter mistakenly stated that McInerney had testified before the grand jury.