Quotes about Police Riots

I didn’t give the arrests any publicity last night because … that didn’t look right to me…: All the Negroes beat up—and the only people we arrest are the people who beat up the FBI agents. There ought to be some more arrests and that ought to help the situation.

One problem the Attorney General and the President faced was with the FBI. Director J. Edgar Hoover. He was a racist himself and he detested Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights demonstrators. He didn’t want his agents protecting the demonstrators who he regarded as Communists and rabble rousers . Further, his agents in the South were in tight with the local law enforcement officers who were allowing the white crowds to beat the demonstrators, and they didn’t want to upset their “colleagues” by arresting people who the local authorities didn’t want arrested. Only when one of them attacked an FBI agent observing the demonstration did the FBI make an arrest. That produced the dilemma the Attorney General described.

James Gardner Clark Jr.

Get those goddamned niggers! And get those goddamned white niggers.

The law enforcement officers were the ones who broke the law when they beat and brutalized the peaceful civil rights marchers. The “white niggers” refer to the white marchers including clergy.

Richard J. Daley

As long as I am mayor there will be law and order in Chicago.

Ironically, it was the Chicago police who started the Chicago 1968 riots. The National Commission set up to investigate called it a “Police Riot.”

New York Times

Hundreds of policemen and detectives, swinging nightsticks, blackjacks, and bare fists, rushed into the crowd, hitting out at all with whom they came into contract, chasing many across the street and into adjacent thoroughfares and pushing hundreds off their feet. From all parts of the scene of battle came the screams of women and cries of men with bloody heads and faces.

The Police Commissioner had earlier given the green light to the police to use their clubs brutally and indiscriminately {626665} and afterwards made a statement that has been quoted ever since as he justified violating the Constitution because of their political views—see {626664}.

Ray Stannard Baker

The police seemed to lose their head completely as they dashed into the crowds on their horses and slashed out with their clubs.

Philip Henry Sheridan

the Mayor of the city [John T. Monroe], during my absence, suppressed the Convention by the use of their police force, and in so doing attacked the members of the Convention and a party of two hundred negroes, and with fire-arms, clubs, and knives, in a manner so unnecessary and atrocious as to compel me to say that it was murder. About forty whites and blacks were thus killed, and about one hundred and sixty wounded. Everything is now quiet, but I deem it best to maintain a military supremacy in the city for a few days until the affair is fully investigated, IT WAS NOT RIOT. IT WAS AN ABSOLUTE MASSACRE BY THE POLICE, WHICH WAS NOT EXCELLED IN MURDEROUS CRUELTY BY THAT OF FORT PILLOW. IT WAS A MURDER WHICH THE MAYOR AND POLICE OF THE CITY PERPETRATED WITHOUT THE SHADOW OF NECESSITY.

Local Mayors have on several occasions in history used their police powers to influence the course of political events. While Mayor Daley’s police riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 Chicago was thought to be a unique experience, the New Orleans police—100 years earlier—had perpetrated an even more deadly riot. In this case General Sheridan was forced to impose martial law. In this case, as in Chicago, not only did the local police and politicians get away unscathed by the law, but they used the local law to actually arrest and indict the victims.

Abraham A. Ribicoff

How hard it is to accept the truth. How hard it is

See {622826} for the viscious Daley statement to which this was a response.

Grover Aloysius Whalen

These enemies of society were to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.

See {626663} for a description of the police illegal violence and {626665} for an earlier statement by the commissioner green lighting brutality with nightsticks. His resignation was forced shortly after. As remarkable as it seems to us today, there was a time where constitutional rights and the law was were commonly abused and broken by the police and the politicians. This occurred in New York which was actually more liberal than most of the country. The Police Commissioner had to resign. In other parts of the country, there were similar police law-breaking but there was little public concern and no one had to resign.

Police Riots Quotes