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Assaults by police (?)
The police officers who responded to the disorder carried both nightsticks and pistols. Detectives did not typically carry nightsticks but were issued them to deal with the crowds. Officers in the Emergency Squads also carried rifles. All those weapons are evident in photographs of police taken during the disorder. Officers first resorted to nightsticks, and pistols used as clubs. The New York Daily News photograph of the arrest of Charles Alston shows one of the officers holding his pistol by the barrel so the butt could be function as a club, a detail to which the paper’s caption drew attention. The UP story on the riot noted that “Police night sticks accounted for almost as many minor injuries as the shower of stones thrown from rooftops, windows and hallways by rioters.” Officers used nightsticks when they sought to move or contain crowds. One can be seen in hand of the officer pushing into the crowd in a Daily News photograph; that one of the Black men to his right appears to be reaching for the officer’s arm confirms he is swinging into the people in front of him.
Other sources suggest more indiscriminate use of nightsticks. The “best joke” doing the rounds at the West 135th Street station after the disorder, according to the New York Herald Tribune, involved Detectives McCane and Teed chasing a group of Black residents into a hallway near 130th Street and Lenox Avenue. Although that area saw the most concentrated looting of the disorder, the officers were not seeking to make an arrest. Instead, after Teed went into the hallway, McCabe waited outside. As Teed caused each of the black individuals to flee back to the street, McCabe “hit them over the head with a nightstick” as they went by. It became a joke when his “zealousness” led him to hit his partner when he too exited the hallway. Similarly, police responded to a crowd attacking the car in which Betty Wilcox sat, she related, "with big clubs swinging,... and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air."
Another black man, James White suffered a “laceration of the scalp…during an altercation with an unknown white man” just a block away from that incident, at 129th Street and Lenox Ave. He reported that assault only to the hospital staff from whom he sought treatment. White did not identify his assailant as a police officer, perhaps indicating the man was not in uniform. But detectives like McCabe and Teed wore plainclothes, and officers like them would have made up a significant proportion of the white men present at the heart of the disorder.
Black men arrested during the disorder displayed further evidence of police violence. The New York Post reported that many of the prisoners who filled the West 123d and West 135th Street police stations after 10PM were “slightly injured.” The appearance of prisoners the next day in line-ups and being transported to court confirmed those reports, with many having bandaged heads and visible bruises. The NYS had no hesitation in attributing those injuries to the men’s “furious battles with the police.”
Three individuals arrested by police also appear in hospital records and lists of the injured. When James Smitten was arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz, the “lacerations to the scalp he received in some unknown manner” were severe enough that doctors were called to the 28th Precinct to treat him. Isaac Daniels had contusions on his arm and Hashi Mohammed internal injuries, with no description of the circumstances in which they were suffered. In addition, Louise Thompson reported to the MCCH the “severe beating” that she saw Patrolman Irwin Young and his colleagues administer to Harry Gordon when they arrested him in front of Kress’ store.
While few reports of the disorder showed any concern about the indiscriminate use of nightsticks by police, officers use of their guns was another matter. No one disputed that guns were fired, beginning almost as soon as police faced crowds. The officer in this photo has drawn his gun, ready to fire it not use it as a club. However, press reports emphasized that prior to midnight, officers fired those shots into the air not at any individuals. The New York Daily News reported very precisely that the detachment of police trying to clear crowds from 125th Street after someone broke the first window in Kress’ store fired five shots into the air. Some papers did also report incidents at odds with that claim: Lyman Quarterman was shot while part of a crowd police were attempting to disperse, although reports in the white press discounted the possibility he had been shot by police; and Patrolman George Conn fired at the crowd allegedly assaulting Timothy Murphy, hitting Paul Boyett.
After midnight, when looting and damage to property increased, whatever restraint police had shown in using their guns disappeared. It was during this period that officers shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, and that Patrolman William Clement shot at a crowd pursuing B. Z. Kondoul, allegedly in order to save him from attack. Four other black men suffered gunshot wounds from unidentified shooters in the same period, all but one in the area in which looting was concentrated. It is likely that at least some were shot by police. There is little evidence of black individuals firing guns: there was one arrest for gun possession and a Boston-bound bus was hit by eleven bullets.