Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City. By Clarence Taylor

Abstract

Police brutality against African American New Yorkers has a long history, as does the crusade to eliminate such behavior. Tracing the movement against police misconduct since the 1930s, the historian Clarence Taylor provides a moving account of the pitched, often unsuccessful struggle to hold the New York Police Department (NYPD) accountable for its use of violence against residents of color. Taylor argues that “media” examinations of police brutality have typically failed to acknowledge that such endemic brutality occurred before the 1960s (2). Written to correct the historical record, Fight the Power frames the crusade against police violence as “one of the longest civil rights struggles in American history” (6). Although anti-brutality reformers have made notable progress in recent years, they have faced fierce opposition during the last three-quarters of a century. Again and again, municipal leaders, fearful of incurring the wrath of local law enforcers and being depicted as soft on crime, have stymied reform efforts and blocked measures to hold the NYPD accountable for violent and even murderous behavior against African American residents, opposing attempts to create and empower civilian oversight review boards and expose police misconduct. Since the pre-World War II era, most mayors and police officials have refused to recognize that police brutality has been a serious problem or that it represents a core violation of civil rights. Instead, implicitly or explicitly, they have embraced the view that African American residents are often dangerous criminals and that any effort to limit the authority of the NYPD jeopardizes the safety of law-abiding—white—New Yorkers. According to Taylor, some city leaders, such as Rudolph Giuliani, openly expressed such beliefs and aggressively endorsed racially biased policies, such as stop, question, and frisk. But more often municipal officials have conveyed concern in response to the most egregious police violence against African American residents, though they cravenly capitulated to police commissioners, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, and law-and-order zealots, eventually qualifying or withdrawing their support for civilian oversight and public accountability. As a consequence, horrific, racist brutality has persisted and remained a part of a “police culture that tolerated, maybe even promoted, violent physical attacks on citizens” (204).