Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider

      Introduction

      A riot is somebody talking. A riot is a man crying out “Listen to me mister. There’s something I’ve been trying to tell you and you are not listening.”

      —Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson (speaking after the 1968 riots in Washington, D.C.)¹

      On the night of July 18, 1964, three weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, New York City police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed James Powell, a fifteen-year-old black student, outside his high school in upper Manhattan. An altercation had ensued when Patrick Lynch, the white janitor of a nearby building, sprayed black high school students with a garden hose as they left the school. Lynch shouted racial epithets at the boys, and Powell and two other high school students chased him back to his building. Officer Gilligan arrived on the scene, pivoted, and shot Powell three times. The high school students screamed and cursed at the police, some throwing bottles and cans. “Come on,” they taunted Gilligan, “shoot another nigger.”² Dozens more police arrived on the scene.

      The following day hundreds of Harlem residents gathered in front of police stations but were met with walls of tactical police. Scuffles broke out as police wielded batons and shot into the crowds. Meanwhile residents threw bricks and bottles, pulled fire alarms, overturned cars, looted stores, and occasionally attacked white bystanders. After three days the disorder spread from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. More than six thousand officers were called in to quell the disturbances. By the sixth day of what would become the first major urban uprising of the 1960s, more than five hundred people had been injured, including thirty-five policemen, and another black man was dead, of gunshot wounds. Property damages were assessed at several million dollars.

      In the weeks that followed, similar outbreaks occurred in Rochester, Philadelphia, and several smaller northeastern cities. The following year violence in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles exploded, leaving thirty-four dead. Riots in Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Omaha erupted in 1966. In 1967 Puerto Rican riots broke out in New York, concentrating in East Harlem and South Bronx. Black neighborhoods in Boston, Nashville, Cincinnati, Newark, and Milwaukee followed suit. Detroit experienced the largest and most deadly disturbance; there police violence left forty-three dead: “By one count the 1964–1968 period produced 329 important riots in 257 cities, with 52,629 persons being arrested for riot-related offenses, 8,371 injured, and 220 killed—mostly black civilians.”³ Only twice in the next five decades (excluding local and relatively isolated, if significant, neighborhood skirmishes and confrontations between residents and police) would minority residents set a major American city aflame.

      On October 27, 2005, in Clichy-sous-Bois, outside Paris, police chased one black Mauritanian and two North African (Tunisian and Kurdish) teenage boys, Bouna Traoré, Zyad Benna, and Muhittan Altun, into an electrical substation outside Paris. The boys had tried to avoid an identity check and were pursued by officers carrying stun guns. Cornered, the boys scaled an eight-foot wall covered with barbed wire and skull and crossbones warning of the dangers of electricity. Seeing the boys inside the generator, the commanding officer notified headquarters that reinforcements would not be needed, the boys would not live long now.⁴ The police officers then abandoned the site. Inside the grid, the terrified boys clung to each other for eleven minutes, weaving back and forth and looking for a way out. When Bouna accidentally hit the generator, he and Zyad, who was holding his hand, died instantly. Muhittan, although holding Zyad’s hand, was saved by the power surge. Severely burned, he retraced his steps, rescaled the wall, and ran, crying hysterically, into the arms of Bouna’s stunned and unprepared older brother, Siyakha, who was on his way to buy food to end the family’s Ramadan fast.

      In the days that followed, young men from the town marched through the streets cursing and throwing garbage at the police. A massive nonviolent march was followed by more police actions including the shooting of tear gas into a mosque filled with women and children. Following the tear gas incident, then minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy, having unjustly accused the three teenagers of criminality two days before, gave an inflammatory radio address denying the responsibility of the police or the need for investigation. Hurt and angry, young people retaliated, setting cars and buildings aflame. Fires spread from one poor minority suburb (banlieue) to another, until 280 suburbs, cities, and towns across France were ablaze. For three weeks youths of predominantly North African and African descent set fire to an estimated 10,000 cars and attacked 255 schools, 233 other public buildings,