One factor that helps explain the rise in police violence is an increase in violent crime. The city’s homicide rate almost doubled from the early 1890s to 1920. The type of violence changed too. In the 1870s and ‘80s, most homicides in the city were a result of drunken brawls. But, by 1900, killings were much more likely to be the result of robberies, and many victims were from the middle class.
In response, ministers and other respectable commentators demanded a more aggressive police force. Department leaders responded by explicitly training patrolmen and detectives to shoot to kill. Adler writes that one alderman proposed immediate promotions for police who killed criminals, since “some incentive is needed to quicken the trigger fingers of the police.” And, indeed, chiefs did promote patrolmen who killed robbers.
Another likely factor was immigration from southern and eastern Europe and African-American migration from the south. No records are available to determine how many shooting victims came from immigrant communities, but African-Americans made up three percent of the city’s population and 21 percent of police homicide victims from 1910 to 1920.
Adler notes that between the political pressure to use force against criminals and officers’ reactions to “a racially different and seemingly more alien, dangerous class of criminals,” police increasingly shot suspects simply to keep them from fleeing. This was the only reason police gave for shooting in 41 percent of police homicides between 1890 and 1920. Police killed purse-snatchers, petty thieves, and loiterers. They also killed innocent bystanders by firing into crowds or mistaking the identity of a suspect, a type of incident that accounted for one in ten police killings.
In 1910, an officer shot a child playing with his friends, mistaking him for a holdup man. Speaking to a receptive middle-class public, the police chief explained that “this boy probably was large for his age.” The explanations in those cases sound remarkably similar to ones we hear today.