RICHARD J. ("SHOOT TO KILL") DALEY
Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York prefers the "soft cop" approach.
On April 16, Lindsay answered Daley at a press conference of his own. "We happen to think that protection of life, particularly innocent life," he said, "is more important than protecting property or anything else....We are not going to turn disorder into chaos through the unprincipled use of armed force. In short, we are not going to shoot children in New York City."
These carefully chosen words sound very fine. In fact they stand in considerable contrast to the record of violence compiled by New York's trigger-happy force in keeping ghetto dwellers "in their place." But then the mayor is one of the leading "noncandidates" for the presidential nomination in the Republican party and he has paid unusual attention to constructing the liberal image of a "man of the people."
As between Daley's "hard cop" position and Lindsay's "soft cop" stance, various nuances can be found and there has been some shifting of views.
Thus the powerful New York Times declared editorially April 7 during the upheaval that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "There can be no hesitation, no timidity in protecting endangered cities. Burners and looters must be repressed by a massive show of police force and arrests." Ten days later, the same paper shifted. "How hard it will be," said the editors, “to walk the razor's edge between too much force and too little in the police response to urban riots has been underscored by the ‘shoot to kill' orders against aronists just issued by Mayor Daley of Chicago." They declared that the Times shared "Mayor Lindsay's conviction that adoption of the Daley prescription here or anywhere else would 'turn disorder into chaos.'"
In face of the nationwide outcry over his infamous orders, Mayor Daley hinself said April 17 that he was "clarifying" what he had said. He had been "completely misunderstood," he complained. The order to his cops to shoot to kill applied, he specified emphatically, only to "obvious" arsonists.
There is more to the dispute, of course, than an exercise in semantics.
The ghetto explosions that swept the United States in protest over the assassination of Martin Luther King were so massive that the country's top ruling circles were afraid orf losing control. Until the. "dust settled," they felt that the wisest course was not to provoke the black communities any further.
Thus in many cities, the populace witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon -extraordinary for the United States -- of cops ignoring people walking out of stores with samples of American affluence.
"This was a change of strategy from the sometimes trigger-happy responses that turned Detroit, Newark and other communities into battlegrounds last summer," explained Fred P Graham, Washington correspondent of the New York Times, in an April 12 dispatch from America's capital.
He added that "probably the main reason for the decision by the police not
to use their guns to halt looting was that it might not have done any good and might have made things much worse."
In Trenton, the New Jersey National Guard was similarly restrained in contrast to the tactics the guardsmen were ordered to follow in Newark last summer. Maj. Gen. James F. Cantwell, the chief of staff of the New Jersey Department of Defense, told the press April 11: "One of the bitter lessons learned from Newark was that we can't treat our own citizens in the same military way you would operate against the Vietcong."
What "learned" the cops to decide on a tactic of restraint -- so against their entire past tradition and practice?
In a report from Washington in the April 14 New York Times, Ben A. Franklin indicated a strong reason in quoting an unidentified lawyer in the Justice Department on the policy change:
"'We say that this is a matter of effectiveness as well as saving lives. There really is no alternative, and the people who are saying, "Why didn't you shoot?" don't understand that yet.'
"He added, 'the other side has guns.'
"Most officials were reluctant to discuss the implication that the police restraint was dictated in part by a new tactical capability of some rioters to shoot back.
"But one Defense Department official was frank about it.
"'T would say,' he said, 'that it has taken a long time for some of us to recognize what the Black Power demonstrator means with his placard, "I Am a Man."'
"'(if you want to say that it took a lot of these people arming themselves to emphasize that they are human beings and cannot just be shot down even when they are terribly wrong, then you would be somewhere near the mark.'"
Another "informed official" in Washington told the Times reporter:
"'Mhat old stuff about "looters will be shot on sight" is for the history books and maybe the movies. It's for people who don't know how it is to be ina riot where, if you shoot, they shoot back and you've got a lot of dead cops and troops along with the dead citizens.
"'We have drawn back from all that the law allows because it is our duty to stop riots, not to kill rioters.'"
It is thus quite clear that such "restraint" as the police, national guard, and federal troops exercised in the days following the murder of Martin Luther King was dictated by purely tactical considerations. The forces of repression in the U.S. have more respect for the blacks since they began arming themselves.
But something else is happening in the United States that can only be judged as ominous. Layers of the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the small businessmen most directly affected by losses in the uprisings, are becoming frantic and even hysterical. As Fred P. Graham put it in the dispatch cited above, "Perhaps no aspect of the recent wave of riots has done as much to enrage and confuse the public as the picture of looters staggering under loads of booty past policemen.
"These scenes [on TV] have brought complaints from Congressmen, merchants, housewives, editorial writers and others that the big-city police forces have gone soft on criminals and Negroes."
The merchants in particular are screaming. They are also organizing. Two aims are uppermost at the moment in their efforts. They want the government to compensate them for their losses and to provide insurance against future losses. They want the police departments to "crack down" on the blacks and put them "back in their place."
Mayor Daley and types like him are responsive to this clamor, voice it, and seek to whip it up.
Other forces, too, have been given fresh vigor by the rising tension. A sector of big business stands to reap enticing new profits from it. The "law-enforcement market" is now around $2.5 billion a year and about 66 percent of the police forces in the United States are below the strength already authorized. The stocks of companies engaged in this field are running strong in Wall Street. The "crime protection" outfits, who furnish armed private guards, are also doing a boom business.
"Revenues of protection service companies alone," Leonard Sloane points out in the April 15 New York Times, “are said to be $1.2 billion a year..." The prospects point to even "better business” in the coming summer.
Many companies, shouting about the need to stiffen up the forces of "law and order" are hiring mercenary thugs to staff private forces of their own.
These developments must be weighed by the black liberation movement -~ and by the labor movement, too. The "soft cop -hard cop" game is directed against both.
DEMETRIO VALLEJO ENDS HUNGER STRIKE
Mexico City