workers went on strike on payday Saturday, July 10, 1909, after their starvation wages were cut further without explanation. The company hired 550 scabs-strike breakers— setting off a series of conflicts between the strikers and armed deputy sheriffs. The Pennsylvania State Police was called in to support the local law enforcement authorities. The conflict climaxed on August 22, 1909—Bloody Sunday—with the death of eleven to twenty-six strikers and a deputy sheriff.
1937 Memorial Day Massacre: Police Out of Control
On Memorial Day, May 30, 1937, 200 plus Chicago police officers fired multiple shots into peaceful labor demonstrators, approaching the Republic Steel Plant in South Chicago (Leab, 1967; Dennis, 2010). The marchers included women and children. Ten demonstrators were killed, and ninety were injured and several permanently disabled. Dennis (2010) describes the eyewitness account of a woman shot in the leg and a wounded ten-year-old boy being helped into a private car to be taken to the hospital (Dennis, 2010: 143). One woman claimed that she was lucky to be alive, because a cop chased her as she ran away, “shooting all the time, and he just hit my hand” (Dennis, 2010: 146). The police claimed they fired into the unruly mob because the crowd charged them while throwing bricks and sticks. However, the coroner’s report revealed that 65.5 percent of those injured by gunshots were shot in the back. Existing photos and a 1937 Paramount News camera film shows uniformed Chicago PD officers chasing, shooting, and clubbing men and women as they ran from the police.
The photos and the film show multiple police officers clubbing wounded persons on the ground. Several injured persons “bled out” as they waited for help that was never summoned. One wounded person pleaded with a policeman for help. The officer’s response was, “Shut up you son of a bitch; you got what was coming to you” (Dennis, 2010: 147). Thirty-five police officers were injured that day, and three were hospitalized. The police injuries were mostly cuts and bruises from falling. None had gunshots. The film created national outrage; however, none of the out-of-control police officers was ever charged for these atrocities. The police actions in Chicago are best described as a Police Riot—an example of out-of-control police officers exacting extralegal violence on a perceived dangerous class. There have been other examples of Police Riots.
Police Riots against Peaceful Protesters
The extralegal violence, including examples of homicides committed by LEOs during the 1960s civil rights struggle, are too massive to summarize. One source documents 239 incidents of collective racial violence from January 1, 1963, to May 31, 1968 (Downs, 1979). It is during this period that the “escalated force” model of protest policing was in vogue. The “escalated force” force model predicts that the police will be most repressive against dangerous counter culture groups that present the most threat to political elites (Earl, Soule, and McCarthy, August 2003).
The “escalated force” model is evident in “police riots,” where the police instigate, escalate, or sustain violent confrontations (Walker Report, 1968). Stark, in his seminal work on police riots, offers the following definition “‘hostile outbursts’ in which the major participants are police officers” (Stark, 1972: 11). During a Police Riot, the LEOs engage in unrestrained and widespread police brutality against citizens for political repression. The term was first used to describe the actions of the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. However, a “police riot” occurred in Selma, Alabama, three years earlier in 1965.
Bloody Sunday—Selma, Alabama, May 7, 1965
What became known as Bloody Sunday occurred during the 1960s civil rights struggle. Bloody Sunday has its genesis with police homicide and violence in the small rural town of Marion, Alabama, in Dallas County on February 18, 1965. The murder of a young black man—the precipitating event—would be unresolved for four decades until May 10, 2007, when a retired Alabama State Trooper charged with murder pleaded guilty to manslaughter and apologized for the killing (Bernstein, July 8, 2015). He received six months in jail.
On the fateful night in 1965, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnam veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson joined with a group of Negroes in a local Methodist church to protest the recent jailing of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) official for participating in voter registration activities. The protesters made a dangerous nighttime march to the jail one block from the church. Local police and Alabama State Troopers met the marchers, and they were brutally beaten. The club-wielding lawmen chased a group of marchers including Jackson into Mack’s Café, a local black restaurant. An unidentified state trooper shot Jackson in the stomach under suspicious circumstances inside the cafe. The police custom at the time was to remove nametags and cover badge numbers when engaging in protest incidents (personal knowledge—I did the same thing at several protests in the 1960s). The trooper’s identity remained hidden until 2005 when he came forward of his own volition even though he had killed another unarmed black man in May 1966 (Fleming, March 5, 2005). Jackson died several days later. No official authorities ever questioned the officer until 2007; however, Jackson was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer while he lay dying in the hospital (Springer, 2011).
In response to Jackson’s death, the SCLC planned a massive protest march on May 7, 1965, from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery—the state capital 54 miles away. Just outside Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named after a Civil War general and a U.S. Senator—local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama State Troopers met the peaceful marchers that included future U.S. Congressmen, John Lewis.
The 600 marchers were tear-gassed and brutally beaten all the way back to Selma. The whole incident was televised. The national exposure enraged many Americans and embarrassed most Alabamians and many LEOs (personal experience and interviews with working police officers). President Johnson went on TV to praise the marchers and condemn the police actions. Martin Luther King asked for civil rights activist and religious leaders to come to Alabama to support the voting rights cause. The exposed level of state violence exceeded the public’s tolerance as was common for the brutal reaction of Southern law enforcement officials during the early 1960s—witness the national response to Birmingham, Alabama’s Police Commissioner and the use of dogs and firehouses in 1963 against black school children. Even some Birmingham police officers refused to participate in the extralegal violence against school children and peaceful demonstrators (personal knowledge and interviews with working officers).
Earl, Soule, and McCarthy (2003) opine that external watchdogs—national politicians, the Department of Justice, civil rights groups—and the public tend to overlook moderate repressive police actions, but the indiscriminate use of violence by Southern police officers on Bloody Sunday provoked external reactions.
Civil rights activists poured into the state and were a big part of the civil rights movement that ended the Alabama Jim Crow segregation laws. No one died on the Edmund Pettus Bridge beat-down, but white supremacists murdered two of those coming to support the movement—James Reeb, a white Boston minister, was beaten to death by white segregationists, and Viola Liuzzo was shot to death by an FBI informant as she traveled to Alabama from Michigan in a car driven by a black activist (Jeffries, June 17, 2008).
The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago
Significant collective events where protesters seek radical goals that threaten the political elites are most likely to receive the most severe police action—the “All Hands on Deck” approach where police use physical force, make arrests and use their weapons, including tear gas (Earl, Soule, & McCarthy, August 2003). During the four days and nights of the 1968 Chicago convention 10,000 protesters from diverse groups and ideologies—hippies, yippies, youngsters working for political candidates, professional people with dissenting political views, anarchists, revolutionaries, motorcycle gangs, black activists, and young thugs—united under one cause—Opposition to the Vietnam War. The motley group of protesters screamed obscene epithets
