Abuses of Police Power

THE apparently irrational and sometimes provocative behavior of the police in street conflicts has often raised the question whether the police deliberately encourage violence or at least disorderly behavior from a troublemaker in order to show that he really is an offender and to provide grounds for removing him from the street by arrest. This is one of the unresolved questions about police behavior, and one that is central to an understanding of police abuses. If the police react in a rough manner to provocation front citizens, if they in fact themselves behave in a rude and hamhanded fashion, that is one problem, but it is quite another if the police deliberately provoke to violence people they believe to be troublemakers.

The consensus among the authorities who have studied the problem is that the police do sometimes try to provoke violence in order to make an arrest. It is logical to think that policemen will try such things with outcasts, whom they fear and dislike and would prefer to see in jail. One young Negro in a ghetto neighborhood in Brooklyn, who had the reputation of being a “cop fighter,” complained that the police would not let him alone. Whenever they saw him on the street they slowed down their cars and asked him if he wanted to fight. In New York City, however, I think that the challenge by a policeman to physical combat, or even to a public disturbance, is the exception. In most cases, even if a policeman wanted to use such crude tactics, they would not be necessary. The New York police are sophisticated enough in drawing charges and making them stick not to need an actual act of physical violence to arrest anyone. If they feel that a man is a troublemaker, they can, unfortunately, charge him with resisting arrest, without the necessity of risking injury to an officer.

The worst problem in street-corner incidents is not that of police quarreling with citizens. Most such quarrels, while never admirable, are at least understandable; they are much like quarrels between private citizens. The worst abuse is not even the police hitting people in such quarrels; pugnacious citizens hit others in private disputes every day. The root problem is the abuse of power, the fact that the police not only hit a man but arrest him. Once they have arrested him, of course, lying becomes an inevitable part of the procedure of making the quarrel look like a crime, and thus the lie is the chief abuse with which we must come to grips. If the police simply hit a man and let him go, there would be an abuse of the authority conferred by the uniform and the stick, but not the compound abuse of hitting a man and then dragging him to court on criminal charges, really a more serious injury than a blow. One’s head heals up, but a criminal record never goes away. There is no more embittering experience in the legal system than to be abused by the police and then be tried and convicted on false evidence.

Police abuse and consequent conviction on false evidence are a combination which feeds the impulse to riot; once respect for the legal process is gone, grievances can be expressed only by force. Despite these obvious repercussions upon community relations, it is rare that anyone is abused without being criminally charged, not only because of the rationale for such abuses (“he was guilty anyhow”) but because the policeman is likely to get into trouble if he lets an abused person go free. There is nothing to cover a later accusation of abuse if an arrest has not been made.

There can be no doubt that police lying is the most pervasive of all abuses. In most cases we studied, there was a lie whenever there was a criminal trial. If the charge was disorderly conduct, officers lied to create a breach of the peace where none existed. If the charge was assault or obstructing an officer, they supplied blows by the defendant when none had been struck. In the police canon of ethics, the lie is justified in the same way as the arrest: as a vindication of police authority, by proving that defiance of the police is a crime in fact if not in law. A member of a pariah group, or anyone who defies the police, being guilty at heart and sometimes potentially guilty in fact, deserves to be punished out of hand. Besides, the police dislike such people so much that they consider them unworthy of the protection of the law. By lying, the police enforce these folkways of their own, while preserving the shell of due process of law. Not surprisingly, police lying is a problem on which little reliable research has been done.

This is a fragment from a detailed discussion of false arrest and police cover-ups in Paul Chevigny’s Police Power, just published by Pantheon.