Negroes and the Police

Report Outline
Anti-Police Character of Negro Rioting
Roots of Negro Animosity
Action to Improve Police-Negro Relations

Anti-Police Character of Negro Rioting

A Striking Feature of the riots which occurred in Negro sections of a number of eastern cities during the latter part of the summer was their marked anti-police character. Many rioters took advantage of the disorders to loot neighborhood stores, but the main impetus behind the rioting appeared to be a desire to avenge real or imagined abuses suffered by Negroes at the hands of law enforcement officers. In this respect, the riots differed only in degree and duration from street disorders that have occurred in other cities with large Negro populations crowded into slum districts. Authorities have long realized that a considerable segment of Negro slum dwellers is so hostile to the police that even those among them who are normally law-abiding may side with miscreants of their own race rather than with an arresting officer.

What has been called “a gap in human relations” has persisted despite growing efforts over the past decade to broaden the policeman's outlook on minority problems and to encourage cooperation between police officers and members of minority groups. These measures have been widely praised as bulwarks against serious social disorder, and they were given credit for keeping the recent rioting from spreading more than it did. Nevertheless, the problem of police-community relations remains serious in many areas where the population is composed largely of the poorer members of a racial or ethnic minority. To some extent, this has been inevitable in view of the grave social problems which afflict the slums and in view of tensions engendered by the civil rights struggle.

Series of Summer Riots in Eastern Cities

The riots of the past summer were triggered in nearly every instance by an encounter—or a rumored encounter—between a white policeman and a Negro in which the policeman was believed to have used undue force against the Negro. And in each case the fury of the colored mob was directed primarily against the police rather than against a contending white mob, as in the race riots that took place in various cities during and after World Wars I and II. The riots in the Negro slums, moreover, bore little or no resemblance to clashes resulting from opposition by whites to school integration and to sit-ins and other civil rights actions.