Some of the evidence taken as to the action of the police supplied the Committee with very sensational episodes. One witness, for instance, a truckman, of the name of Lucas, appeared before them with his head in a frightful state of disfigurement. The man had been drunk, and gone to sleep on a doorstep, when he was robbed of four dollars. On waking up, finding that he had lost the money, he asked a policeman if he could find out anything as to who had robbed him. This seemed to offend the officer, for he struck Lucas in the face, knocked him down in the gutter, and then standing over him, belaboured him unmercifully with his club on his face and head. “For God’s sake!” cried the man, “do not kill me altogether.” A young man, a stranger, coming past, seeing the outrageous nature of the assault, asked the policeman to stop. Thereupon another policeman in citizen’s clothes ran up, knocked him down, jumped on him, and then marched Lucas and the stranger off to the police-station. The blood running down Lucas’s neck, drenched his shirt, and one of the picturesque incidents of the inquiry was the production of the bloody shirt before the senators. The man was bleeding so freely that the sergeant of the police-station had to sew up the top of his head. It took twenty-seven stitches to sew up the wound opened by the policeman’s club. When he got into the police-station he was again assaulted, and had he not run for the sergeant, he was of the opinion that he would have been killed altogether. The next morning he was brought before the judge, and discharged. Nothing seems to have been done to the officer.
The Committee summed up the whole case in the following sentences:—
It was proven by a stream of witnesses who poured continuously into the sessions of the committee, that many of the members of the force, and even superior officers, have abused the resources of physical power which have been provided for them and their use only in cases of necessity in the making of arrests and the restraint of disorder, to gratify personal spite and brutal instincts, and to reduce their victims to a condition of servility....
Besides this exhibit of convicted clubbers, still wearing the uniform of the force, there was a stream of victims of police brutality who testified before your committee. The eye of one man, pushed out by a patrolman’s club, hung on his cheek. Others were brought before the committee, fresh from their punishment, covered with blood and bruises, and in some cases battered out of recognition. Witnesses testified to severe assaults upon them while under arrest in the station-houses. The line of testimony might have been endlessly pursued by your committee.... We emphasise this finding of brutality because it affects every citizen whatever his condition, because it shows an invasion of constitutional liberty by one of the departments of government whose supreme duty it is to enforce the law, and because it establishes a condition of affairs gravely imperilling the safety and the welfare of the people in their daily avocations.—Vol. i., p. 31.
INSPECTOR WILLIAMS, CHIEF CLUBBER OF THE FORCE.
AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY’S DEPÔT.
(New York is a city whose Buildings are as colossal as the Corruption of its Police.)