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Assaults without arrests (47)
A combination of the nature of the violence and the police response contributed to the the failure to make arrests in cases of assault. Most assaults took the form of objects thrown from a distance or attacks by groups. In both cases, it was difficult to identify and apprehend the individuals responsible. Several of the arrests police did make in those circumstances ultimately proved to be of men not involved in the assault. The charge against Rivers Wright was reduced to disorderly conduct, likely indicating that he had been part of a crowd in the area but that police had no evidence that he was one of the group that assaulted a white man. Juries acquitted Paul Boyett and Isaac Daniels.
Many of the white men and women allegedly assaulted appear to have been pedestrians walking Harlem's streets, often away from areas where police concentrated their response. When officers were in the vicinity of violence, the crowds on the streets often outnumbered them, which limited them to acting to protect white individuals from attack and gave them no opportunity to make arrests. That situation likely happened more often than the handful of instances reported in the press. The sensationalized accounts of officers protecting B. Z. Kondoul and Betty Willcox from attacks by crowds published in the New York Evening Journal are likely less typical than the interventions reported by a white Columbia University student named Hector Donnelly. After a milk bottle struck him as he walked on West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, several members of the crowd on the street then moved toward him, and he knew he was "in for it." However, a policeman came running, however, and dragged Donnelly away. Although the officer told him, "You better stay out of here," the white student met a reporter he knew so decided to stay "to watch the excitement." He remained despite further warnings from police until he "got into more trouble." A group of four or five men bumped him as they passed him on the sidewalk and then stopped and continued to push him. Again, a police officer came and "broke up the trouble." After that encounter, Donnelly decided that he needed to leave the neighborhood.