The Savage City (22 page)

 

WITH THE CAREER
Girls Murders trial over, and Robles found guilty, George Whitmore became a forgotten man. The press and the TV news no longer had any use for him. George remained in the system, within easy reach of local courts, but out of sight, out of mind.

In the county jail, he learned how to make cheap wine. He procured grapes and sugar while on kitchen duty, mixed them with grain alcohol smuggled in by another inmate, used cheesecloth to filter the mix, then let it ferment. It was rotgut wine, but it did the trick. As he waited for word from his lawyers that “a break in the case” was just around the corner, George Whitmore self-medicated with hooch to ease the pain. The habit he started would dog him for decades to come.

IN THE MIDDLE
of the Wylie-Hoffert murder trial, John Lindsay was elected as the 103rd mayor of New York City. It was a close election: Lindsay squeaked out a victory with just 43 percent of the vote, thanks in part to William F. Buckley, whose votes were mostly siphoned away from Abe Beame, the establishment Democrat. Lindsay and his supporters, however, considered the vote a mandate—a victory for the forces of reform.

Lindsay came into office with much fanfare. His face appeared on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
. The
New York Times,
which had endorsed and promoted him from early in the campaign, described his victory as “astounding…and at the same time a vindication for high principle.” Some saw Lindsay as an inheritor of the Kennedy legacy. He talked tough on crime but always made it clear that dealing with the crime problem meant improving civil rights for minorities. The theory was that opening up opportunities for blacks and Puerto Ricans—establishing fair treatment in the streets and the workplace—would lessen the level of tension in the city, and lower tension meant lower crime. It was a valid theory: in retrospect, focusing on fairness and civil rights for a group of people who had traditionally been segregated and sometimes treated like dogs was a necessary step forward in the civil rights era. What Lindsay did not fully anticipate was the level of resistance he would encounter—from other Republicans and white ethnic Democrats, but most of all from rank-and-file members of the NYPD.

The war between the Lindsay administration and the police department began almost immediately after Lindsay was sworn in on January 1, 1966. It revolved around the issue of a Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). Lindsay had campaigned for office on a fifteen-point crime program called Operation Safe City, and point number five of the program was the promise of a police review board to include both police officials and nonaffiliated citizens.

In New York City, the prospect of a board to review complaints against police had long been tied up with the issue of race. The first such board, an organization called the Permanent Coordination Committee on Police and Minority Groups, had met in October 1950 to consider the problem of police “misconduct in their relations with the public generally and police misconduct in their relations with Puerto Ricans and Negroes specifically.” But the police department was adamantly opposed to the board and would only agree to a compromise: the creation of a CCRB staffed exclusively with NYPD members and alumni.

In the years since, community groups and civil rights organizations had been advocating for a more democratic process, noting that the extant review board backed officers and dismissed complaints so routinely that few citizens recognized it as a legitimate entity.

One of Lindsay's first steps after taking office was to appoint a Law Enforcement Task Force to examine the operations of the NYPD. Within weeks, the task force issued a report that called for many “reforms” of the department, one of them being a CCRB that was acceptable and credible to people in the community.

Lindsay had not yet chosen a new police commissioner. The current commissioner, Vincent L. Broderick, was considered a possible candidate to continue on in the job. Though he was from the same Irish Catholic stock as so many of his predecessors, Broderick was thought to be more progressive than previous commissioners. At a promotion ceremony at the Police Academy in July 1964, the commissioner had delivered an unusually strong statement on the subject of bigotry and discrimination, telling a group of forty-seven high-ranking officers, “If you believe that a police officer is somehow superior to a citizen because a citizen is a Negro or speaks Spanish—get out right now. You don't belong in a command position, and you don't belong in the police department.”

Lindsay was amenable to Broderick; he called him a “good man.” But one of Lindsay's requirements was that his new commissioner must
agree with his position on a reconstituted CCRB. Broderick was not that man. In response to the Law Enforcement Task Force report, he wrote a haughty seven-page letter to Mayor Lindsay—which he first released to the press. “A police review process that includes non-police personnel,” argued Broderick, “would lower the morale of the police department” and “dilute the nature and the quality of protection which they will render to the public.”

The commissioner's position reflected that of the rank and file, the theory being that no civilian could possibly understand or pass judgment upon cops who are called on to make hair-trigger decisions in life-and-death situations. To allow citizens representing special interests—that is, minorities—to have influence over the inner workings of the department was anathema to the very nature of the institution.

Lindsay made his choice: he replaced Broderick with a new commissioner—Howard Leary, the police commissioner of Philadelphia. Leary was another Irish Catholic who had been a New York cop for more than twenty years—but he had already worked with an independent review board in Philadelphia. He was to be Lindsay's new man in the hot seat.

As a political appointee, the commissioner was a marionette; his loyalty was to the mayor who appointed him, not the rank and file. To the average cop of Irish, Italian, German, or other European stock, a far more reliable source of advocacy was the Policeman's Benevolent Association (PBA), the cops' powerful political lobbying organization.

The PBA made it abundantly clear where they stood. Said John Cassese, president of the organization: “I'm sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and their shouting…. I don't think we need a review board at all.” The battle lines were drawn.

Lindsay had been in office less than two months; the city's racial problems had been mounting for years. The anger bubbling below the surface was bigger than John Lindsay or any other public official. The daily indignities of police-community relations became part of a larger narrative, a catalog of grievances that had become a malignant tumor on the body politic. Even small encounters took on huge significance until it seemed as though the city, on any given night, could fracture into a million pieces.

One February evening, an incident occurred that added to the seismic uncertainty.

It was a Sunday night, around 7:30
P.M.
A police captain, a sergeant, and two patrolmen walked into Joe's Place, a tavern at the corner of 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. For months, local cops had been trying to shake down Joe's Place, citing it repeatedly for bogus “violations,” but the owner was resisting. The night before, two cops had come in and given the owner a summons for not having soap and towels in the restroom. Earlier in the month they had arrested several men allegedly dressed in women's clothing, a violation of morals laws.

On this particular night, a smattering of customers occupied Joe's Place. According to William Hawley, the manager, he was approached by the four policemen, who were all white. “Hello. Anything wrong?” he asked the sergeant.

The policeman told Hawley they were conducting a “routine inspection.”

“I told him, ‘You gave me a summons for no soap and towels in the bathroom yesterday. Is it necessary that you make a routine check every night and harass my customers?'”

One of the cops went into the restroom, then returned and nodded to the sergeant; that violation had been corrected. The sergeant then told the manager, “You need to tell your customers to stop dancing.” Dancing in an establishment without a cabaret license was a violation of the city's cabaret law.

“They're not dancing,” said Hawley. “They're just snapping their fingers and moving their heads to the music.”

Then another policeman—Hawley recognized his uniform as that of a captain—reminded the manager about the previous arrests of female impersonators on the premises. As the captain spoke, the manager noticed that a sergeant had rounded up a few female customers. One of those customers—Gertrude Williams, a thirty-year-old mother of two—was singled out by the sergeant. According to Hawley, “He took [Gertrude Williams] by the arm and led her about seven feet to the kitchen in the back. She came out of the kitchen looking straight ahead and dazed like she wanted to cry. The officer followed her smiling.”

In tears, Williams told her friends that the cop had forced her to raise her dress, lower her panties, and show him her vagina to “prove she was a woman.”

Gertrude Williams called her husband, who was at home nearby. Westley Williams, age fifty-five, left his two kids in the apartment
and rushed over to Joe's Place. Later, Williams would tell a newspaper reporter that he went to the sergeant and demanded, “Can't you look at her face and see she's a woman?” The policeman walked away without saying a word.

“I was hurting,” said Westley Williams. “I couldn't do nothing. I can't fight the law.”

The policemen left soon after the husband arrived, but not before they presented the manager with a summons for allowing “dancing.”

An hour after the cops left, one of the patrolmen returned to Joe's Place. “There's no sense in you people fighting this thing,” he told Hawley. “The heat is on.” Then he left the bar.

It took a few days for the full effect of the incident at Joe's Place to ripple through the community. Interaction between blacks and police in the city was so poisonous, the mistreatment so routine and deeply rooted, that incidents like this usually went unreported. The pain and humiliation was absorbed into the community. But the incident with Gertrude Williams involved a kind of sexual degradation that conjured up the worst of southern-style racism. During slavery and for many generations thereafter, the dynamic between police authorities and the Negro had revolved around the emasculation of black men. Black women were sexually humiliated and even raped by plantation owners, teenage white boys, so-called upstanding members of the white establishment—all with little threat of punishment by the law. Such systematic degradation was a crime against women, but it had the added effect of striking at the manhood of black men, who were humiliated by their inability to protect their women.

The web of injustice and feelings of helplessness were monolithic—part of the racial inheritance generations of southern migrants had brought north to cities like New York. The one difference now was that John Lindsay, the city's new mayor, had been elected on a promise to reform the city's widespread corruption, and to govern with greater sensitivity to civil rights. And Lindsay's vows had been seized upon by a new generation of activists.

Ten days after the incident at Joe's Place, nearly two dozen picketers gathered in front of the police precinct on West 126th Street chanting antipolice slogans and carrying signs that read:
PROTECT OUR WOMEN FROM VICIOUS ANIMALS IN UNIFORM
and
WE DEMAND A FAIR CIVILIAN REVIEW BOARD
. The protest was led by leaders of CORE.

The next day, Roy Innis, the firebrand chairman of CORE's Harlem chapter, held a news conference at the Harlem Labor Center on West 125th Street. Among those in attendance were CORE leaders from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, as well as Gertrude Williams and others. Chairman Innis informed TV and newspaper reporters that CORE intended to continue community pressure on the NYPD and Mayor Lindsay until “vicious racist acts by the police are ended in this city.”

Gertrude Williams, wearing the same dress and clothing she'd worn that night, recounted what took place. She'd gone into the tavern's kitchen with the sergeant “because I was scared,” she explained. “I think he was sick.”

Seated alongside Williams were other victims of the police. A fifty-year-old black man with polio, wearing a leg brace and walking with a cane, told the crowd how he'd been standing on a sidewalk in Brooklyn talking to a friend when a patrolman came up and said, “Break it up.” “At the same time,” the man told the gathering of reporters, “he pulled at my coat collar. Because of my stiff leg, I fell backwards. While lying on the ground, the policeman hit me across the head with his nightstick” and said “get up, you black bastard.” As he struggled to stand, the cop whacked the man repeatedly on the shins.

Another victim, a twenty-four-year-old black man, described an incident that took place just the night before. The man's face was still swollen, bruised, and cut after he was set upon by a group of twenty or so white youths while walking along First Avenue with a white woman. The white youths beat him until he was nearly unconscious. When the police arrived, they shoved
the victim
around and made no effort to go after the youths who had administered the beating. As the man spoke at the press conference in Harlem, blood from a still-fresh wound trickled from the corner of his mouth.

These were the walking wounded, men and women on the receiving end of police attitudes and actions that were not uncommon in the city.

Roy Innis, a stout, barrel-chested man, spoke with righteous indignation. “This type of brutality to our men and women must end and must end quickly,” he declared. Referring to the pickets, protests, and press conferences, he added, “We intend to escalate this war [against the police].”

The NYPD's response to the press conference was tepid at best. The policemen involved in the incident at Joe's Place were “temporarily transferred,” according to a police department spokesman, who
described the move as “a measure to reduce community tension.” There were no apologies, not even an acknowledgment of wrongdoing. No one was demoted, fired, or deprived of their pension. The department handled the matter as they always had—internally.

All of this added a sense of urgency to the demand for an independent police review board. Mayor Lindsay had agitated to bring the NYPD out of the Dark Ages and make it accountable to the will of the people, and the city's largest-circulation newspapers agreed—except for the
Daily News,
which opined in an editorial that “the civilian section of a [revamped CCRB] will be infested sooner or later with cop-haters, professional liberals, representatives of pressure groups and the like.”