July 20, 1964 - The NYPD today defended its use of gunfire in putting down the weekend riots in Harlem.
Deputy Commissioner Walter Arm said patrolmen had been ordered to shoot over the heads of crowds that refused to disperse and of individual Negroes who were hurling bottles and bricks from tenement roofs.
“We felt this means of control would be more effective and less harmful than the alternatives available to us,” he explained, “and we have been proven right.”
Mr. Arm indicated that the decision to open fire had been taken at the highest level of the department. Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy is known to have been in constant touch with the situation as it developed Saturday night.
Several prominent Negro leaders complained bitterly yesterday about the tactics employed by the police. They charged that many patrolmen had lost their heads and had fired wildly whenever they encountered the slightest provocation.
James Farmer, the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, said it was “the responsibility of the police to arrest the culprits [who were throwing bottles], not indiscriminately shoot into hotel windows and tenement houses.”
Mr. Arm denied there had been any firing into the windows of buildings and accused Mr. Farmer of inflaming a precarious situation when he should be trying to calm it.
He cited the casualty figures as evidence that the police had not panicked. Approximately 15 civilians were wounded by gunfire, according to the most recent count, and 26 policemen were bruised, cut, or burned.
“If our men had been firing recklessly,” Mr. Arm said, “the people hit by bullets would certainly far outnumber the injured policemen.”
Never before had gunfire been used on such a large scale to quell a racial riot in New York City. Two previous outbursts in Harlem, on March 19, 1935, and Aug. 1, 1943, were put down largely with the use of nightsticks.
During recent racial disturbances in the South, tear gas has been the principal police weapon. In some instances, where the situation seemed to be getting out of control, high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs have been employed.
The use of dogs and hoses in Birmingham, Ala., in the spring of 1963 evoked protests from civil rights leaders and from the Northern press. This may have prompted the New York police to avoid their use.
In almost all cases, Southern policemen have avoided using gunfire. They have often remarked that they were afraid it would serve only to further enrage the rioters.
Officials attending the annual conference of the New York State Chiefs of Police at the Manhattan Hotel today defended the actions of the police in Harlem.
Several speculated that Commissioner Murphy had avoided using tear gas because the riot was composed of small bands of marauders and not one large group and because gas tended to injure the innocent as well as lawbreakers.
In any event, one police chief remarked, gas would have been ineffective against the bottle-throwers on the roofs. To combat them, the police aimed their fire just above the roofline.
The bullets, except for a tiny fraction that were badly aimed and ricocheted off the walls of buildings, fell harmlessly after their muzzle velocity had been spent, according to a police source.
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