In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
Brothers” were fictitious, the fear that crime was causing in New York was all too real. In May, the Hasidic community in Brooklyn formed a civilian patrol quickly dubbed the Maccabees after the fierce Jewish tribe whose resistance to the Greek occupation of Judea is celebrated every Hanukkah. On the Sabbath, the patrol was augmented by Christian volunteers, both black and white. The decision to create the Maccabees came after a gang of fifty black teenagers attacked a group of Hasidic children and a rabbi’s wife was the victim of an attempted rape. The hope was that, if nothing else, the patrol might prevent another Genovese tragedy. “Yet no sooner do you rush reinforcements to Crown Heights than the terror leaps out in another part of the city or moves along underground,” commented National Review, a conservative magazine, “and the knife may be at anyone’s throat.”64
Tensions between the Police Department and many liberal New Yorkers had also risen to dangerous levels. In mid-May, Councilman Theodore Weiss introduced a bill with the support of CORE and the NAACP to create a new civilian review board composed of individuals without ties to the NYPD. The existing review board, created in 1955, consisted of three deputy police commissioners. As a result, observed Arnold Fein, chairman of the New York Committee of Democratic Voters, it lacked credibility. “In much of the public mind,” he wrote to Mayor Wagner, “such a board is engaged in the business of self-investigation and self-justification.” This perception was especially dangerous given the unrest and distrust in the city. “In the current period of racial tension, picketing, and demonstrations,” Fein added, “it is almost inevitable that there will be misunderstandings and clashes involving police, with recurrent charges of police brutality.” Even if most charges were false, which he believed was the case, a truly independent review board was needed to “clear the air, increase respect for legitimate police operations, restrain the lawless cop, and restrain those who make unfounded charges.”65
FIGURE 4. The Maccabees, a Jewish anticrime organization, patrol the streets of Brooklyn. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection (LC-U9-12191 frame 24).
Although the proposed review board would have limited authority—it could only make recommendations to the mayor and police commissioner—it met with fierce and immediate resistance from Commissioner Murphy. “In my opinion,” he stated at a city council public hearing, “this entire push for a citizens’ board is a tragedy of errors compounded by half-truths, innuendos, myths, and misconceptions.” The allegations of police brutality were “maliciously inspired,” he charged, and came from “self-aggrandizing, self-appointed leaders” whose “blind assertions” are “aimed at destroying respect for law and order and are, in effect, calculated mass libel of the police.”66
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represented the twenty-six thousand officers of the NYPD, was equally critical. In a letter to Mayor Wagner in May, President John Cassese called the new board a “deliberate slap in the face” to his rank and file, who were overwhelmingly committed to the fair and impartial enforcement of the law despite a few isolated and inevitable abuses of power. Moreover, the police already worked under careful and constant scrutiny from the existing board, the general public, and Commissioner Murphy, who “is tougher and more stringent than any group of civilians would dream of being.” Above all, the police labored in a city filled with watchful, if not hostile, eyes.67
“Nowhere is there greater awareness of, sensitivity to, and sympathy with, the cause of civil rights and civil liberties,” Cassese contended. “Nowhere are the courts more vigilant, the news media more pervasive and aggressive.” He also offered two predictions or warnings. The first was that civilian appointees to the new review board would no doubt be “members of pressure groups that cannot be impartial,” such as CORE. The second was that an independent board would “deal a devastating blow to police morale and lead policemen to ignore sensitive situations rather than take the chance of getting into trouble with a civilian board with a special axe to grind.”68 Civilian oversight would cause the police to handcuff themselves and a city on the brink of chaos would become even more dangerous.
In June, Commissioner Murphy attempted to reassure the public. “All of us together can turn the threat of a long, hot summer into a cool, calm, constructive period of progress,” he said at the seventh annual pre-summer conference of the Police Department and the Youth Board. Among the gangs discussed were the Tiny Tims, the Buccaneers, the Imperial Lords, and the Medallion Lords, with an estimated total of seven to eight hundred members. No new information about the supposed “Blood Brothers” was made available, although the NYPD continued to claim the gang existed. Murphy made no mention of subway crime, including the nine incidents reported since May 29 alone, but emphasized that he did not believe that “this city will explode into bloodshed in the coming months.”69
At a press conference, Whitney Young, Jr. also tried to calm the racial fear by providing some perspective and balance. The executive director of the Urban League emphasized that he had always deplored violence “whether inflicted by Negro youth in urban settings like Harlem or by those who dynamite Negro churches in Alabama.” But he observed that “crime of all sorts—murder, rape, robbery, burglary and assault—has been no stranger to Harlem. Its citizens have been victimized for years with amazing indifference on the part of the general public, which turned its eyes and thoughts elsewhere. The only new dimension to the current violence is that the frustrations of the ghetto are spilling out beyond its boundaries and directly affecting the public at large.”70
Young recited the facts for all to hear—if they were willing to listen. The crime rate in Harlem was significantly greater than in the rest of the city. The murder rate alone was six times higher. In the overwhelming majority of cases, which the white media almost always chose not to report, it was black-on-black, with African Americans both the victims and perpetrators. It was time, Young added, to eliminate racial identification in crime stories. Reporters should not assign false motives or promote racial bias. “Crime does not carry a racial label,” he asserted. “There has always been crime and rioting, particularly among the poor of all races and nations, and especially wherever full citizenship, liberty, and opportunity were denied.”71 It was a brave but ultimately futile effort to soothe the jangled nerves of white residents.
The subways in particular seemed to provide daily tales of terror even as Mayor Wagner ordered an extra shift for all city and transit police, who were also told to wear their uniforms to and from work as an added deterrent. On one train, reported Newsweek in mid-June, a group of four black teens threatened to cut off the head of a motorman; on another, a group of five black youths demanded $10 from a white teen and then stabbed him in the shoulder when he refused to pay. “They’re animals, vicious animals,” said a middle-aged white woman. “And they talk about civil rights.” But Rustin objected strongly to what he saw as a false equivalence. “When such acts of hooliganism are carried out by whites,” he noted, “it is then called ‘juvenile delinquency’ and not ‘Irish delinquency’ or ‘Italian delinquency.’”72
In Washington, President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert Kennedy met to discuss the summer’s likely hot spots. On the top of the agenda were New York and Mississippi, where CORE volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, part of the “Freedom Summer” voter registration campaign, disappeared in June after police officers and Klan members had beaten, tortured, and murdered them. “It is clear,” warned special assistant Richard Goodwin, “that the one domestic issue which could cause real trouble for the party this year is civil rights…. The chance of violence is high.” Rising expectations and temperatures might lead to a “series of explosions” in the South and the North that could have “serious political repercussions” and might require federal action. “We might well treat this as if we were waging a war,” he advised.73
In New York, two new anticrime measures went into effect in July. The “No-Knock” law enabled officers who had obtained warrants to search private residences without first notifying the occupants. The “Stop-and-Frisk” law allowed the police to question individuals