Joan Walsh: "Almost every major urban riot of the 1960s ... was touched off by police misconduct" [View all]

[Hissyspit]

Almost every major urban riot of the 1960s – Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967 – was touched off by police misconduct.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/29/new_yorks_epic_white_backlash_how_a_horrid_1960s_relic_is_still_with_us_today/

JOAN WALSH

MONDAY, DEC 29, 2014 07:00 AM EST

New York’s epic white backlash: How a horrid 1960s relic is still with us today

O’Reilly, Hannity and a defiant NYPD are fighting battles of 50 years ago. The chaos ended but the backlash endures

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White New Yorkers fear a return to the bad old days of riots, escalating crime and attacks on police. In the 1970s, 46 officers were killed in the line of duty, according to the New York Times, and 41 more in the 1980s. Before these latest murders, the last police killing was in 2011.

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It wasn’t just race: the flight was driven by crime and arson and riots, and a sense that the world was unraveling. I tried to write about some of this sympathetically in my book: the transformation of New York in the 1960s and 70s was scary. Crime and arson rates spiked: the murder rate jumped 150 percent between 1965 and 1973; property crime jumped by a third. Some of my uncles and cousins were cops and firemen, including my mother’s two brothers. She worried about them every day, and so did I.

But for a whole lot of people, it was all about race. Conservatives made sure of that, with William F. Buckley running for mayor in 1965 mocking the liberal idea that social factors drove the rising crime rate – as if poverty and racism could “make Negro crime any less criminal.”

Significantly, that comment came in a debate over whether cops needed civilian review. Almost every major urban riot of the 1960s – Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967 – was touched off by police misconduct. When Mayor John Lindsay appointed a police review board, Pat Lynch’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association sponsored a ballot initiative to repeal it. To the shock of liberal Manhattan, a coalition of outer-borough Jews and “white ethnics” voted with the cops.

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Excessive force by police, and rampant racism, was never acceptable, not even in the years of crime and chaos. But what stuns me now is: crime is way down. Arson is almost non-existent. There are no more riots. Most protests against police abuse are peaceful. Sure, there are a few saboteurs smashing windows and punching cops, but you’ll also see a whole lot of protesters trying to stop them – and it seems most of the violent folks are white.

With one critical exception: Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the mentally ill Brooklyn native who shot his ex-girlfriend (an Air Force reservist) in Baltimore, then shot Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

Even before those murders, despite the overall calm, the defense of the cops had been just as shrill and unyielding and frankly anti-democratic as it was when crime was spiking in the 60s and 70s. It’s no accident Rudy Giuliani became the national spokesman for the cops’ point of view. Sean Hannity, the pride of Nassau’s Franklin Square, turned his show into a headquarters for the defense of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson officer who killed an unarmed Mike Brown in August.

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