This page was created by Anonymous.
“Witnesses who didn’t testify last week," undated, "Harlem, Mayor's Commission on Conditions in," Box 25, Folder 19, Arthur Garfield Hays Papers (Princeton University).
1 2022-10-31T01:51:23+00:00 Anonymous 1 4 plain 2024-02-03T19:32:38+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
-
1
2022-11-11T16:55:54+00:00
The public hearing of the MCCH's subcommittee on crime (March 30)
47
plain
1985
2024-05-31T19:07:15+00:00
At 10:00 AM on Saturday, March 30, the members of the Mayors Commission on Conditions in Harlem took their seats at the front of a courtroom in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on West 151st Street. While formally it was the subcommittee on crime that was holding the public hearing, with Arthur Garfield Hays serving as chairman, all twelve members chose to attend (Father McCann would not join the committee until the next week). An audience of around 400 people filled the courtroom, monitored by around thirty police officers. Among the crowd of Black residents were enough white men and women for observers to describe the audience as racially mixed. Most, if not all, of the white audience members were connected with the Communist Party (CP), present to place blame on the staff of Kress’ store and police, rather than the party. Thanks to Hays offering those in attendance the opportunity to question witnesses, the Communist International Legal Defense lawyers and others in the audience would be active participants in the hearing.
The event ran from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM, interrupted only by an hour-long break for lunch. During that time eleven people testified; all witnessed the events of the disorder other than an assistant district attorney, who briefly described the progress of the investigation District Attorney William Dodge was conducting in the grand jury. In addition to Lino Rivera, the MCCH heard the testimony of two Black witnesses who had been in Kress’ store, when Rivera was taken to the basement in the case of L. F. Cole, and after he had been released in the case of Louise Thompson. Four police officers testified: Patrolman Donahue, the white officer who arrested and released Rivera; two senior officers who were at the store after disorder broke out on 125th Street, Inspector Di Martini and Captain Rothengast; and the senior Black officer in the police department, Lieutenant Samuel Battle, who was not on Harlem’s streets until the final hours of the disorder. The hearing also heard from the leaders of the Young Liberators and the Harlem Communist Party, Joe Taylor and James Ford, about the activities of their organizations and their own experiences in the hours after the Kress store was closed. The briefest testimony was provided by Russell Hobbs, whose older brother Lloyd had been shot by police. Several of those on the list of eyewitnesses the MCCH staff prepared for Hays did not testify, apparently because there was not sufficient time. Hays planned to have at least five of those witnesses appear at the next hearing, scheduled for April 6, writing a list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week:” "Mrs Jackson, Mrs Ida Hengain, Mrs. Effie Diton, Mr Campbell, Mr Irving Kirshaw.”
Lino Rivera was the first of those witnesses to testify, taking a seat next to the members of the MCCH. Questioned by Hays, he described being grabbed by store staff after he put a pocketknife in his pocket but insisted that although they had threatened to beat him, he had not been hit. His testimony, which confirmed what newspapers had reported immediately after the disorder, unsurprisingly appeared in all the stories about the hearing. MCCH members and ILD lawyers asked Rivera series of questions about exactly how the store staff had taken hold of him, probing for evidence that he had been subject to any violence. Rivera continued to deny he had been injured in any way. He also rejected suggestions that police had told him what to say. When he left the stand, Rivera took a seat in the front of the audience, next to Alfred Eldridge, the Crime Prevention Officer who had been given responsibility for him. Over the course of the day, the pair was photographed several times listening and reacting to testimony. The MCCH heard from one other witnesses to Rivera being apprehended, L. F. Cole. He had seen the boy being taken to the front of the store, the ambulance arrive and later Rivera being taken to the basement. While he apparently remained in the area, he did not stay in the store.
Patrolman Donahue and Louise Thompson testified about subsequent events inside the store. The police officer described seeing staff struggling with a boy outside Kress’ store, who he found out had stolen a knife and bitten the men. He called an ambulance for the staff members. Asked why he then took Rivera back into the store, he explained that he wanted to avoid a crowd gathering on the street. Donahue gave the same explanation for releasing Rivera through the rear basement. That testimony was the most widely reported of the hearing. While the Home News, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, and New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Associated Negro Press reported Donahue had admitted that releasing the boy out of sight of shoppers was a mistake, the transcript did not record such a statement. Instead, it was Edward Kuntz, one of the ILD lawyers in the audience, who offered that assessment while questioning the patrolman. Rather than Donahue or Kuntz, it was unnamed “witnesses” to whom the New York Times and Afro-American attributed evidence that had there been “no mystery” about what happened to Rivera there would have been no rioting. (Both those stories, and the New York Amsterdam News, also attributed a similar statement to Inspector Di Martini, that “he would have released the boy where all could see,” that is not what the transcript recorded him as saying.)
The most extensive testimony about what happened in the store came from Louise Thompson, although she did not arrive until around an hour after Donahue had released Rivera and left. She described the groups of concerned Black women who remained in the store, the arrival of additional police, and their efforts to clear the store while refusing to answer questions about what had become of Rivera that resulted in a woman screaming and displays being knocked over. Thompson stood out among those who appeared at the hearing in offering extended narratives of what she had witnessed rather than having all that information drawn out by questions. Her delivery of that testimony “In a steady voice, as if she were reciting a poem or play” also stood out, at least to the journalist from the New York Age. The woman screaming was reported in the New York World-Telegram and Times Union, and as an ”outburst” in the New York Age, while the New York Amsterdam News referred more generally to “the first violence on the part of indignant women.” The later story blamed the failure of police to provide “proper explanations of the incident” for the women’s behavior. Those police efforts to mollify the women in the store were the testimony the New York Herald Tribune and Daily Worker chose to report. The Home News and Chicago Defender reported no details, only that Thompson had criticized police.
Thompson also testified about events on 125th Street after the Kress store closed and she and the other women inside were pushed out. She described crowds on the street and the corners at each end of the block, the arrests of Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon, and windows being broken. After leaving around 7:30 PM, she returned around thirty minutes later to find police violently keeping people at the corners of 125th Street away from the Kress store. It was only then, around 8:00 PM that she saw the leaflets distributed by the Young Liberators that much of the press had reported were responsible for inciting the disorder. The New York Herald Tribune made that testimony the headline of its story about the hearing: “Reds' Handbills Are Cleared As 'Chief Cause' of Harlem Riot - Came Out Two Hours After Peak of Fighting, Mayor's Board Learns at Outset.” The New York Times, New York Amsterdam News and, unsurprisingly, the Communist publication the Daily Worker also reported the testimony, with the New York Amsterdam News further highlighting its implications in an editorial: “Disappointing as this testimony must be to District Attorney William C. Dodge and Mr. Randolph Hearst, who have attempted to use the Harlem outbreak as an excuse for a citywide Red-baiting campaign, it is well that this issue was settled at the outset by the committee. Now, with the red herring out of the way, the investigating body can set out to probe the basic factors which really precipitated the riots - the discrimination, exploitation and oppression of 204,000 American citizens in the most liberal city in America.” None of those publications identified Thompson as the witness. The only other element of Thompson’s testimony that journalists reported was the arrest of Daniel Miller, in the New York Times, New York World-Telegram, and Times Union, together with the breaking of the store window, and the spread of rumors among the crowd, in the New York Age. Surprisingly, the Daily Worker was among the publications that made no mention of her descriptions of police violence on 125th Street.
Testimony about the source of the leaflets occupied more of the hearing than when they appeared. Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, testified that his organization produced the leaflet, while he was on the street seeking information about what had happened in the Kress store. The information on which it was based came from Black men who brought news to the organization’s offices. James Ford, the head of the Harlem branch of the CP, said his organization was responsible for a second leaflet. The Young Liberators (YL) had approached them for help as they worried that protests at the store would turn into a riot. The CP leaflet was not distributed until after 9:00PM. That the YL and CP produced the leaflets was reported without the evidence that they appeared too late have caused the violence as the press had claimed in the Daily News, New York American, Home News, New York Age, Afro-American, and Chicago Defender.
The MCCH also heard from senior police officers about what happened in the streets. Inspector Di Martini was at the Kress store after it closed, Captain Rothengast arrived on 125th Street around 8:30 PM, and Lieutenant Battle was in the neighborhood after 2:00 AM. Di Martini testified that he spoke to the store staff and heard that Rivera had not been assaulted. He tried without success to convince the people outside the store that the boy had not been harmed, both then and when he returned around 7:15 PM. Di Martini also described the crowds on streets as numbering only a few hundred, mostly young people, and looting of stores with broken windows, which led him to call for police reinforcements. Rothengast described the crowds as small in number, like Di Martini, but made up not simply of young people but “hoodlums,” and as targeting police with rocks more often than they did store windows. He also insisted that most of those on the street were not angry about the rumors that a boy had been beaten or killed, but “yelling and laughing.” MCCH members (and audience) also questioned him about deaths and shootings during the disorder, and what role police played in that violence. By the time Lieutenant Battle went on to Harlem’s streets, the disorder was largely over. He described finding “no excitement” on the streets, only some small groups and looted and damaged stores. Asked by Hays about whether the crowd had spared Black businesses, Battle insisted they had not. He also agreed with Hays that the disorder was “not a race riot.” This testimony about events proved to be of little interest to journalists. While Battle featured in most newspaper stories about the hearing, his testimony about what he saw on the streets was mentioned only in New York Age, with the New York Post, New York American, Home News, and Chicago Defender reporting his statement that there had not been a race riot. Similarly, only the Home News and Chicago Defender reported Di Martini’s testimony about his efforts to persuade people on the street, while the Daily Mirror and Daily Worker made fun of his statements that people in Harlem loved him, and for taking credit for Rivera being photographed, which was the only part of his testimony reported in the New York Herald Tribune and New York American. Rothengast’s testimony received even less attention. The New York Age reported it in detail, but the only other mentions were just of his description of participants as hoodlums in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, and in the New York American, which used “troublemakers” in place of hoodlums. Information about damage to stores and looting was not reported.
The MCCH heard testimony about one other event, the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs, from his younger brother Russell. His testimony, or at least as recorded by the stenographer, was a somewhat garbled version of what he had told his parents. He talked of stopping on 125th Street, not 7th Avenue, and the patrolmen running up on the pavement on a horse, not in a patrol car. Few white newspapers' stories about the hearing mentioned Russell's testimony, even as they reported Lloyd's death later that night. The New York Times, Daily News, and Daily Worker, together with the New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Afro-American reported that Russell’s testimony contradicted the police account.
More attention was given to police actions in the disorder during the hearing than in the MCCH’s planned program thanks to the intervention of the audience. At this hearing, it was those who questioned witnesses that shaped the information presented, with a lesser role played by the reactions of the audience to the testimony than would be the case in later hearings. James Tauber and Edward Kuntz, lawyers from the ILD, and Communist Party official Robert Minor took the lead and drew the attention of journalists, with Charles Romney playing a lesser role. Just how many of the questions posed to witnesses came from those men and other members of the audience was difficult to establish. Both the stenographer recording the transcript and the journalists in attendance appeared to have had difficulty determining who was speaking, causing some of the statements made by audience members to be attributed to MCCH members (as happened in regard to who stated that Patrolman Donahue’s decision about where to release Lino Rivera was a mistake).
At this hearing, MCCH members objected to the substance of the audience’s question to police. While Oscar Villard and Eunice Carter questioned Captain Rothengast about the shootings and deaths that had occurred during the disorder and what role police had played in them, Hays, chair of the hearing, objected when Robert Minor asked him further questions about police violence. “We are not here to investigate the police.” Many in the audience, however, were seeking to do just that, prompting several other objections from MCCH members to questions that they judged to be “police baiting” that would not be permitted. Those interventions were sufficient in number to be reported in general terms in the New York American. Robert Minor’s questioning of Lieutenant Battle seemed to prompt that objection from Hays, who the transcript recorded simply as interjecting. The Home News and Chicago Defender attributed a charge of police baiting to William J. Schieffelin in response to Charles Romney’s questioning of Battle (while the New York Herald Tribune had Schieffelin accusing Minor in the exchange where the transcript recorded Hays admonition). Hays labelled questioning of Patrolman Donahue as police baiting according to the New York Herald Tribune. Surprisingly, the Daily Mirror did not use the term police baiting, reporting more blandly that a highlight of the day was Schieffelin warning Tauber to "treat witnesses with politeness." Whatever the particular incidents, it was clear what the New York Herald Tribune characterized as “heated exchanges” amplified the issues raised by the questions from lawyers and others affiliated with the CP shaped the hearing, producing what the Daily News described as “a field day for Communist exponents and cop-baiting attorneys for the International Labor Defense.”
By the end of the day, audience reactions also played a role. "The undercurrent of the antagonism against the police, noticeable throughout the day in the audience," the New York Age reported, "surged to its height during Rothengast's stay on the stand, culminating in numerous audible taunts and cat-calls just before the hearing ended for the day." In the coming hearings, such reactions would succeed in directing the attention of the MCCH to the role of police in the events of the disorder, with MCCH members limiting their objections to the tone of their questions and reactions rather than their substance. -
1
2022-10-29T16:00:08+00:00
Preparation for the public hearing on March 30
43
plain
2024-02-13T14:15:30+00:00
The MCCH’s investigations in preparation for the public hearing on the events of the disorder are described in the “Report of the Secretary, March 26-March 29, 1935, inclusive," in correspondence in the MCCH files in the records of Mayor La Guardia and in documents in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays.
According to the report, two of the four investigators initially assigned to the MCCH started their work investigating the events of the disorder, focusing on the “immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19” and interviewing possible witnesses for the first hearing. That division of resources fit how the MCCH presented its plans in the statement to the press after its first meeting; the investigation of the immediate situation as one part and “a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem” as the other. Hays, who took over leadership of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder from Toney soon after the first meeting, asked that the investigators “examine such persons as claim to be eyewitnesses to the events of March 19 in order that time at the hearing might not be taken up by people, in actuality, who knew nothing of the events of that night.”
The result of that work was a “list of eyewitnesses” “expected to be at the hearings on March 30” that Carter gave to Hays on March 29. That list is likely the nine typewritten names on a section torn from a page in the Hays Papers. One of those on the list had been among the forty-nine individuals and organizations that Carter reported wrote to the MCCH in its first four days of existence (The New York Times made an unattributed claim that by March 29 more than 80 wanted to testify). Other witnesses were on a list likely provided to Hays by the Communist Party when he met with James Ford. It is not clear how the investigators identified the remaining people.
The first name in the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses was Louise Thompson, the sixth person to testify on March 30. Her name was also first on another list of twelve names in the Hays Papers headed “For Mr. Hays,” most of whom were identified as members of the Communist Party or groups affiliated with it. Thompson, however, was not identified as a member of an organization but by the information she had: “testimony to the issuing of the leaflet.” As establishing that the leaflet issued by the Young Liberators had not triggered the disorder was a major concern of the Communist Party, the list highlighting that part of Thompson’s evidence offers further confirmation that it likely came from Ford. Four other women appeared on the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses, three listed after Thompson, “Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative)” at the bottom of the page. None of those women testified on March 30. Those women were likely present in the Kress store at some point on March 19 after Rivera was grabbed by staff, part of a crowd widely reported to be almost entirely made up of women. Only one of those women could be identified. A photograph of Effie Diton, a forty-five-year-old Black woman, appeared in the New York Age in 1935, identifying her as the president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. Her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini Diton, had helped found that organization and served as its president in the 1920s. The New York Age had reported their marriage twenty years earlier, when they both worked at Paine College in Georgia. In 1930 they lived at 188 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 120th Street, close enough to 125th Street for Effie Diton to have shopped at the Kress store. “Mrs Jackson, Mrs Ida Hengain, Mrs. Effie Diton” are also on a handwritten list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. (The hearing on March 30 took the whole day, so Hays likely ran out of time to call those witnesses, although there is no evidence that they were present.) Hays called for those three women by name in the subcommittee’s second public hearing on April 6. None of them were present at that time, and they never testified in a public hearing.
The sixth name on the likely list of eyewitnesses was “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family.” Sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs had been shot by a police officer during the disorder. The New York Urban League provided the details of the shooting in a letter sent to the MCCH on March 26, which enclosed a statement by Hobbs’ father and asked for "cooperation” and “assistance.” (The statement appears to have been put in a different file in the MCCH records.) The letter is one of several sources that misidentified the boy’s father as also being named Lloyd; his first name was Lawyer. In listing Lloyd Hobbs as a witness, Carter may have meant Lawyer Hobbs or could have assumed that Lloyd would recover from his injury and be able to testify himself. As it happened, neither Lloyd nor Lawyer Hobbs testified on March 30. Instead, it was Lloyd’s younger brother Russell, who had been with him during the disorder and was thus an eyewitness unlike his father, who testified on March 30. Lloyd Hobbs died that evening. Hays would make the investigation of the boy’s shooting a focus of the subcommittee’s next hearing on April 6 and return to it in later hearings on April 20 and May 14.
“Mr Campbell,” the next name on the likely list of eyewitnesses, very likely Fred Campbell, whose statement is in the MCCH files. Although undated, it referred to him coming to the “Office of the Bi-Racial Commission,” a name used only until March 29, when the members voted to adopt the name MCCH. Campbell’s statement recorded he had been sent to the MCCH offices by Delany “as he had some information that he thought might be of value to us regarding the riot on Tuesday night March 19th.” “Mr Campbell" also appeared in the list of five "Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. Hays, however, did not call for him in the second public hearing and he never testified. As his evidence related to events away from the Kress store on which the hearings focused, Hays may have decided his testimony was not relevant.
The final name on the list is “Mr Irving Kirshaw.” That name is also the final name on the list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. On that list the name is followed by “garage owner” in parenthesis. The garage referred to is likely the one behind the Kress store at which a hearse parked, prompting a crowd to attack the rear of the store. Hays did not call for Kirshaw at the second hearing, and he never testified. Instead, Benjamin Todman, the driver of the hearse, testified at the public hearing on May 4.
In addition to the nine typewritten names, a tenth name was handwritten at the top of the likely list of eyewitnesses, “Cole,” with a check mark, both crossed out. In the Hays Papers is a letter L. F. Cole had written directly to Villard on March 23 saying “I was in Kress’ store when the boy was maltreated by three white clerks” and asking that Villard “invite me to one of your meetings of the Bi-Racial Commission.” Cole testified on March 30, the first eyewitness to give evidence, and again on May 14..
The names of two other men who testified on March 30 appeared with “X” marks next to them on the list "For Mr Hays" likely supplied by the Communist Party, James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators and James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem. Hays told the MCCH at their March 29 meeting that “he had held a conference with Mr. Ford of the Communist Party, and that he and several representatives of his organization would be present at the hearing on Saturday.” A story published in the Daily Worker on March 30 that named several “militant leaders who will demand to be heard” at the public hearing that day fitted the names on the list: Ford, A. W. Berry, Williana Burroughts and “representatives from the Harlem Unemployed Councils, the Harlem International Labor Defense, and the New York District I. L. D.. Of the others named on that list, only one, Frank Wells, likely had information on the events of the disorder. His name was second after Thompson on the list and was likewise annotated with a check mark, with “police brutality” after it. Wells was arrested for allegedly breaking windows on West 125th Street during the disorder. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH, he was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street," again at the police station and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20. The officer who arrested Wells, Patrolman Eppler, would testify at the second public hearing although not about that arrest, but Wells himself never did. ILD lawyer Edward Kuntz tried to ask Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the District Attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case. Handwritten notes related to one other name on the list, William Burroughs, suggest that Hays or an investigator interviewed him as a possible eyewitness. The notes indicated that they found he was not: “has only hearsay evidence of police brutality – was not in Harlem on Mar. 19.” (Three of the remaining names on the list have “Ernst” handwritten next to them, likely indicating that their evidence was relevant to housing, the subject of the subcommittee that Ernst led. Two others are identified as part of the International Labor Defense, which had written to the MCCH saying they had information on conditions in Harlem, rather than the events of the disorder. The final name, A. Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, has an “X” written next to it, as Taylor and Ford did, but he was not among those who testified in hearings chaired by Hays.
Carter’s Report indicated that the MCCH had been assured that police witnesses would be present at the hearing, likely either by Inspector Di Martini or by Lt. Samuel Battle, the city’s senior Black police officer. The assurance was reported directly after the information that an assignment of police to the hearing had been arranged through Di Martino and an “interview was also held with Police Lieutenant Jesse [sic] Battle.” The police witnesses mentioned are “Inspector of the Sixth Division [Di Martini] and officers in charge of the forces handling the crowds on Tuesday March 19 together with the crime Prevention officer who was called to the Kress store at the time of the youth’s apprehension.” On March 30, Di Martini, Donahue (the Crime Prevention Officer), Captain Rothengast (who took charge of police in front of the Kress store at 8:30 PM) and Battle testified. Additional police officers testified in the second hearing. Hays secured an additional law enforcement witness. He told the MCCH on March 29 that he had contacted the District Attorney’s office and they had agreed to send a representative to the March 30 hearing. ADA Alexander Kaminsky was the third witness to testify.
The final witness who testified was Lino Rivera. There is no mention of arrangements for him to appear at the public hearing in either the MCCH records or the Hays Papers. He was photographed at the hearing with Donahue, who likely brought him and ensured his attendance.
There is evidence that the MCCH had sought additional witnesses. A telegram sent to Carter on March 29 by Dorothy McConnell reported that she “Could not get names of eyewitnesses.” That the telegram went on to suggest Carter “Call on Mrs Imes and Louise Thompson at Hearing” suggests that McConnell had been searching for women who had been in the Kress store on March 19 in addition to those on the eyewitness list. Louise Thompson would later say she tried to get some of the women she had met in the store to testify "but they were scared." The name and address of one woman who had been in the store was known, but she would not testify at a public hearing. According to an undated note from Inspector Di Martini to Hays, Margaret Mitchell, described as “the woman who was arrested in the store at the time the boy was in the store,” “refused” the request of a detective to appear. Hays asked about Mitchell at the first hearing; Lt. Battle testfied that when he called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing, “she refused to come.” When Hays again asked Battle about her testimony three weeks later, he reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing." As the MCCH did not have subpoena power, they could not compel her attendance. Perhaps because they lacked that power, the MCCH appeared to have relied on police to bring at least some of the witnesses to its public hearings. The list of eyewitnesses in the Hays Papers is headed “Police Department.”
Police had also sought to bring at least one staff member from the Kress store to the hearing on March 30. A handwritten memo from Di Martini dated that day informed the MCCH of Steve Urban, “the man supposed to be treated by an ambulance has worked all night and left the store, present whereabout unknown.” A police officer had evidently called at the store for Urban as the memo attributed that information to “W. F. Woodman ass’t manager Kress Dept Store 256 W 125th St.” Urban never did testify before the MCCH. The other man involved in grabbing Rivera, Charles Hurley, did, on April 6. The MCCH also sought to have the store manager, Jackson Smith, testify; in the hearing on March 30, Di Martini told the MCCH, “I have spoken to Mr Smith, manager, who said that he was busy and he could not get away.”
Finally, Hays requested at the March 29 meeting of the MCCH that “an investigator be sent to Harlem Hospital to secure information relative to victims of the disturbance on March 19th.” It was unlikely that he expected those investigation to produce witnesses for the hearing on March 30. In the second public hearing, on April 6, staff from the hospital gave evidence about the injuries suffered by Lloyd Hobbs and Andrew Lyons, and by two other victims of alleged police brutality.