Exclusion law that barred Chinese immigrants—the despised Mongolians and this country’s first illegal immigrants—from becoming U.S. citizens (Campbell, 2014). Mexicans in the Southwest, particularly the border states of Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, became the dangerous class when the United States seized half of Mexico following the 1848 U.S. Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Juan Crow laws—Jim Crow in the Southern states—in the Southwestern states prohibited Latinos and American Indians designated as non-whites from participating without restrictions in the public sphere (Campbell, 2014). American Indians residing in Arizona would not have the right to vote until 1948.
Radicalized miners, steelworkers, and other industrial workers joined the dangerous classes when they challenged the elite owner/worker status quo and had the temerity to join unions. The possibility of members of the dangerous classes combining and engaging in strikes and insurrections in the manufacturing districts was recognized in the early 1800s (Silver, October 7, 1965). For example, the second mission of the 1829 London Metropolitan Police Force against the dangerous classes was to suppress political agitation in the form of mobs and riots—social protest (Silver, October 7, 1965). The key to this control of the dangerous classes is the legal use of deadly force.
Police Legal Use of Deadly Force
Every community in history has used physical force as a means to secure the effective observance of laws and achieve justice (Reith, 1952). Deadly force has always been allowed if there is credible evidence to believe that the suspect(s) presents a threat of serious physical injury to the officer(s) or the public. However, there are long-standing limitations on the discretionary decisions to use deadly force. The typical restrictions include the following: (1) Deadly force may not be used if the offense is a misdemeanor crime, not a felony; (2) police officers can only use deadly force, in the performance of professional duties and not to advance their own personal reasons or the personal reasons of others; and, (3) police officers may not use deadly force maliciously, frivolously, negligently, or recklessly (Bittner, 1990).
As communities and modern societies evolved, they attempted to remove unnecessary and wanton deadly violence from the use of force in the administration of justice (Bittner, 1990). For example, the outdated common law use of deadly force to apprehend any “fleeing felon” is no longer applicable in modern societies such as the United States—1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner (Blumberg, 1991).
Fleeing Felon Doctrine
The “fleeing felony doctrine” as the legal use of deadly force developed in eleventh-century England and was transported to colonial United States and used against the defined dangerous classes. The English common law fleeing felon doctrine was necessary for early societies where (1) there were no weapons available that could kill at a distance—guns and rifles; (2) felonies were punishable by death; and (3) there was little, if any communication among law enforcement agencies in different communities—felons who escaped were lost forever (Sherman, 1980).
Although various states had removed the “fleeing felon” rule from their statutes, the first national action against police violence was the 1985 U.S. Supreme Court decision—Tennessee v. Garner. This ruling declared that the use of deadly force to stop all fleeing felons was unconstitutional. If the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer or others, the use of deadly force was not justified. In the decision, the court pointed out that the officer who shot Garner was “reasonably sure” that he was an unarmed teenager running away from him. This decision had a profound effect on police homicides. The “fleeing felon doctrine” is gone; however, it was an accepted American police technique until 1985. At the time, it was difficult to get some police chiefs to accept that “the fleeing felon” laws were illegal, especially when it was legal in state statute—personal experience. However, an in-depth examination of the U.S. police use of deadly force when it was in effect provides empirical evidence that American dangerous classes groups, however defined, have been disproportionally the victims of civil rights violations and legal and extralegal police homicides
Law Enforcement Violence against American Dangerous Classes
Historical antecedents of Law enforcement violence and homicides against the dangerous classes mentioned earlier are essential to an understanding of the political and social context of this complex social justice issue. Race, economic, and political issues have always impacted the American system of justice. Members of the labeled dangerous classes are traditionally the victims of physical abuse, including legal and illegal violence. After the violent expulsion of Native Americans from their lands, the new white European immigrants and their police forces engaged in mass homicides against the unwilling immigrants—African slaves.
The Southern Slave Patrols
The first police agencies based on the London Metropolitan Police Model of a paid public police force developed in the northeastern cities in the mid to late 1840s. However, some argue that the Southern Slave Patrols were the first state-sponsored U.S. police agencies (Williams & Murphy, 1990; Ritchie & Mogul, 2008). This is subject to debate; however, it is true that rural white police agencies were in existence in the Colonial States of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia to control the American dangerous class—slaves—in the early to mid-1700s (Reichel, 1988). The slaves were dangerous because they ran away, committed criminal acts, including poisoning their masters, and engaged in revolts and insurrections. The most massive slave uprising in American history took place in 1739 in the South Carolina colony (Reichel, 1988). Fifty Negroes and thirty-five whites were killed. In the developing Southern cities of this early period, black slaves were the majority race, increasing the perceived and real threat to the white majority.
The slave patrols, at first voluntary and then compulsory by law, were formed to visit any plantation having slaves to look for arms, to find and punish runaway slaves, or to identify slaves off their plantation without permission (Hadden, 2001). The punishment included whippings and execution. After the demise of the slave patrols and the Civil War, the legacy behind the identification of freed blacks as a dangerous class continued. The early laws restricting the civil rights of black slaves and their freedom of movement segued into the “Black Codes.” The codes were imposed on freedmen and freedwomen until they were dismantled by Reconstruction (Cooper, 2015). Then the codes morphed into the Jim Crow laws in the South and Juan Crow laws in the Southwest that formally separated the whites and people of color into unequal worlds. However, the division of American society into color and ethnic categories was not confined to any one region of the United States. LEO-caused homicides and violence were the norms against designated dangerous classes in the northeast United States before and after the establishment of police agencies modeled after the London Metropolitan Police Model.
Nineteenth-Century Police-Perpetrated Homicides and Violence in New York City
1834 Race Riot aka Anti-abolition Riots
Manumitted slaves were persecuted outside the Southern states and in supposedly free states. According to Kerber (1967), a freed female slave was stoned to death in Philadelphia in 1819. In 1829, 1,000 freed slaves were forced to leave Cincinnati, and manumitted slaves were not allowed to settle in Ohio. Controversy over the slavery decision and the amalgamation of the races was a hotly debated issue. This was especially true in nineteenth-century New York City.
Segregation laws were alive and functioning in New York City before a three-day Race Riot occurred in the summer of 1834 (Kerber, 1967). At the time, free Negroes were segregated by law and custom. Negroes had separate seating in churches, courtrooms, and theatres. They were denied the vote. Negroes could not attend public schools or sit in the horse-drawn streetcars, but they could ride on the exposed decks of steamers. The white residents of NYC believed that “God himself separated the white from the black” (Kerber, 1967: 28). The burgeoning abolitionist movement
