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In the Courts
The alleged offenses of those individuals did not reflect the events of the previous night. The twenty-nine alleged assaults on white men and women resulted in at most seven arrests, with an additional six men arrested for alleged assaults on police. As a result, interracial violence formed a smaller part of the picture of the disorder presented in the legal system. So too did the attacks on stores that had dominated the early evening of the previous day. Only twenty of the arrests were for allegedly breaking windows. The bulk of those arrested, fifty-seven men and three women, had allegedly been looting, causing the theft of property that characterized the final hours of the disorder to overshadow its other elements. An additional fifteen men were arrested for inciting crowds and one man for possession of a weapon. There are no records of the reasons for the arrest of the final nineteen men.
The nature of the legal process further diminished the violence of the disorder. While the breadth of the violence, across the neighborhood and throughout the night, made the disorder greater than the sum of its parts, the courts fragmented it into the individual alleged acts of those being prosecuted. Isolated from the larger context, the offenses with which police and prosecutors charged individuals were relatively minor. Those offenses became even less serious as they moved through the legal process, with the charges made by police reduced by prosecutors, magistrates and the men serving on the grand jury and numbers of those arrested discharged. The outcomes of the prosecutions reduced the severity of the disorder still further. Just under half of the prosecutions were adjudicated in the magistrates courts, treated as the offense of disorderly conduct. Magistrates and the grand jury decided that the offenses of most of the others arrested allegedly committed only amounted to misdemeanors, sending defendants to the Court of Special Session for trial rather than charging them with the more serious felony offenses tried in the Court of General Sessions. Only a portion of those men and women were found guilty and magistrates and judges gave those who were convicted short sentences. At the same, the grand jury kept police violence during the disorder out of the courts, twice declining to indict Patrolman John McInerney for fatally shooting Lloyd Hobbs. The extended duration of the legal process also saw prosecutions drop from public view before those outcomes were delivered, as the press stopped reporting hearings as they were distributed across the courts and spread over a period of more than two months.
Only later, in cases brought in the civil courts, did legal proceedings reveal some of the scale of the violence against property and of the ineffectiveness of police. One hundred and six storeowners sued the city seeking compensation for the damage done to their businesses. Their claims described the total damage done rather than the result of a single attack or theft on which criminal prosecutions focused. The medium cost of the damage done to those businesses was $733; several storeowners reported well over $1000 in damages. By contrast, the value of the alleged damage and thefts for which individuals were prosecuted was rarely more than $100, and in some cases less than $1. However, as only a handful of those cases went to trial, the legal process provided only glimpses of that violence. And the press did not report the bigger picture, the total damages paid by the city.