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

Prosecuting Police (March 20-June 14)

Despite evidence of police assaulting people on Harlem's streets with clubs and firing guns at crowds, killing two Black men, only one patrolman appeared in the legal system. Twice Assistant District Attorney Saul Price presented the case of Patrolman John McInerney shooting and killing Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black boy, to the Grand Jury. The other police officer who shot and killed a man did not face any charges. Detectives Nicholas Campo and Beckler shot and killed James Thompson as he fled after they had found him inside a grocery store looting. Thompson did not have close family in Harlem to pursue action against the detectives and no witnesses contradicted their account, allowing them to be exonerated by a police department investigation. The Police Department did not have the same free hand with Patrolman McInerney. Lloyd Hobbs brother had been with him at the time of the shooting and contradicted the officer's claim that the boy had been looting an automobile supply store. Seven different witnesses testified that McInerney did not call on Hobbs to halt before he shot him, as he claimed, and that the boy did not drop the car horn and socket set that the officer said he picked up next to him after he was shot. While the evidence against McInerney persuaded the MCCH and the Black press, they were not surprised that the grand jury did not indict the officer. The patrolman was a white man, his victim was a Black boy, and all seven witnesses were Black men. For a grand jury consisting entirely of white men to not see a crime in those circumstances was completely predictable.

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