Community policing, protest and riots - 12 August 1994

Way back there, I had a friend, my closest friend at the university who lived in Dover and he told me that as a small boy when the wind was right, they could hear for days on end, a distant rumbling sort of thunder. It was the sound of the gunfire from the battlefields of France. Perhaps because of the coincidence of my talking last time about the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, I thought of this friend's memory when a strange baying jostling sound as of restless football crowd, say, drifted down on Sunday night from the north end of Central Park, which is only about a mile and a half from where I live.

The wind was just right, north-west that blows all the stewing smog out to sea and give us a sparkling fall weather, it was the first break in an infernal summer. This sound, which was at first so hard to identify was my doorman told me a battle going on in Harlem, a riot, which as is often true of really serious riots, starts with a simple single incident, usually a rumour.

Anyway, late Sunday night, a report came into a Harlem police precinct that there was gunfire on 125th Street, the great cross street concourse of Harlem Heights on Saturdays and Sundays. A small detachment of police went off there and were surprisingly met with a barrage of bottles, stones, bricks, so plentiful and ceaseless that reinforcements were called for and about 200 officers arrived, many from outside Manhattan, they cordoned off four blocks and it took about an hour for things to quieten down. By which time, 11 people were arrested and five or six officers were taken off to hospital with minor injuries. The streets were ankled deep in slithers of glass and rocks and paper and junk.

From the various accounts of witnesses, I gather there's no more chance of finding out truly what caused the riot in the first place than there is of sifting the truth from the wildly different bystanders' accounts of exactly what caused the Boston Massacre that sparked the American War of Independence.

But whoever shot first or threw first or swore first in Harlem, one complaint chronic among the residents was something quite new in the local history of law and order. You know, do you not, that there is a general agreement about the two national issues on which come the congressional elections in November the Clinton administration will survive or be badly wounded. The issues are the question of a national medical system and of what sort, the debate on which started in the Senate this week. The other which affects and troubles the country more than any other single problem of government is crime. There's an administration crime bill now under debate.

You have to remember first that there is no such thing as a national federal police force; the FBI is the enforcement arm of the federal department of justice and can only be called in to examine a possible criminal act done across state borders, so every state has its state police who function mainly as troopers patrolling the highways and every city, town has its own police force whose power is sovereign.

Remember, when President Kennedy was assassinated, it was the Dallas police department that took charge. So the, the suggested remedies for controlling or suppressing crime are many and are being tried out in many cities, but if there's one prescription for civilian safety that is agreed on more than another right across the country, it's what has come to be known as "community policing".

Politicians and public characters whose hair is already grey as well as bright young sparks in the Clinton department of justice are all hot for this wonderful new idea community policing, it's actually as old as the town crier, but two or three generations in this country anyway have barely known it. What they have known is the cruising police car, the rise and fall of the ominous siren and maybe the occasional sight of a policeman slurping a cup of coffee at the corner lunch counter. Community policing is what you and I call the copper on the beat. More policemen assigned on foot to patrolling the blocks, greeting the householders, kidding the children, doing all the friendly sauntering things we used to see Pat O'Brien or Frank McHugh doing in old Warner Brothers movies. Now one of the most active advocates of the cop on the beat, many cops on many beats, is the new mayor of New York City, Mr Giuliani.

The new complaint that came out of last weekend's riot was that there were in the beginning too many policemen on the streets. How many is enough? A politician who represents Harlem in the New York State Assembly put it simply and I must say and bafflingly, there are fears he said among many people in the community that with the mayor's emphasis on law and order, the community could become a police state. Some of the Harlem bystanders said that there was a summertime gathering on the street and the mere appearance of several policemen provoked an attack on them, others said it all reflected a new reaction to the mayor's declared stand for law and order. It may, said that Harlem politician, it may have increased tensions, so I suppose the fine question for every mayor in the country to answer is, "if two policemen on the block make people feel safer, how many will make them get tense and ready to throw bottles?"

Talking of riots, law and order, the other day very strange off pitch echo of the 1960s when the hippy was king came from not surprisingly the American capital of hippiedom then, the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. It strikes me suddenly that there must be people in their 30s who assume if the matters brought up that there have always been hippies, middle-class rebels against society who dressed down, so to speak, and tended to go in for drugs.

Of course, there have always been rebels in any society but never before I think in America had there been an identifiable class organised as a rebel movement on every other campus across the middle of the country from Columbia University in New York to Berkeley in Northern California they marched in their thousands day and night against America's participation in the Vietnam War and more than any other identifiable body spread the national disillusion with the war and brought down the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. What was new about this was having students as the leaders of the rebellion, until then we'd always thought of Central and South America as the places where the revolutionaries were college students.

In America, in times of protest from the Wobblies, the industrial workers riots at the turn of the century on the west coast and the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times to longshoremen strikes, rail road strikes, newspaper strikes in the East, it had always been the workers against the bosses them against us. Student rebellion was a Latin American oddity until the birth and rampaging of the American hippy in the '60s.

If Vietnam was a particular target of their wrath, there were many others that usually could be rounded up and claimed as violationists of the First Amendment, the sentence in the Bill of Rights that says no laws shall be made of bridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. What orgies of free expression were forced into that simple unsuspecting sentence?

I remember a famous case of a young woman who took her clothes off at a public beach to sun herself and waited for the police, they came they arrested her. She was disgusted with them because she said, the human body is decent and she was causing no harm. Her lawyer sure enough defended her on the ground that the first amendment gave her the constitutional right to express her freedom of speech in just that way. Pretty soon we had mimicked sexual intercourse on the stage again defended as freedom of speech, athletic nakedness being construed as a form of a speech. And by now, we have the thing itself the whole visible act on stages, on television, the courts have just about given up on finding anything obscene under the weight of that First Amendment. Quite useless to say at this time of day, that what the founding fathers had in mind was the right to air your own opinions and by way of social protest to march, assemble and make your opinions known in a peaceful way. The phrase "peaceably to assemble" somehow got lost in the student protest marches of the 1960s and '70s.

Berkeley, of all campuses, set the pattern of revolt. I was out there; I remember and saw a snake march round the campus one spring with the protesters chanting nothing but four letter words, they claimed they had a right under the constitution to do so. This turmoil went on every conceivable act being performed under the protective umbrella of the First Amendment, well I suppose until the Vietnam War eventually wound down.

The echo of those protesting days, the finest hour of the hippies came squawking back to us the other day when the city government of Berkeley decided to turn a rundown motel into a shelter for the homeless. Immediate protest from the middle-class neighbours on the well known Nimby grounds – not in my backyard. They didn't feel that the homeless had any right to express themselves as permanent residents of an abandoned or renovated motel. The constitutional argument for keeping the homeless out of that particular locality was a little shaky, a little embarrassing to the protesters because who were they? They were the middle-aged mellowed Berkeley hippies of the late 1960s, it recalled the old definition an American definition "what's a liberal?" A liberal is a socialist with a wife and two children.

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