“What Did Rockefeller Do about the Crooked Cop Who Sell You Drugs?” Black Protest and the Politics of Safety in the Early 1970s

In the spring 1971, as Harlemites complained about widespread drug abuse and drug-related crimes, Congressman Charles Rangel pointed out that the police were involved in the community’s narcotics traffic. Black Harlemites agreed and wrote the congressman and shared their own encounters with as well as the locations of police misconduct. Rangel’s criticism of the New York Police Department overlapped with public hearings of the Knapp Commission on police corruption, as well as Reverend Oberia D. Dempsey’s campaign movement against drug dealers and for anticrime legislation. In late April 1973, a week or so before New York State’s legislature voted for Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s controversial drug law, Clifford Glover, a ten-year old was shot in the back by a Thomas Shea, a White police officer in Jamaica, Queens. Thus, even as African Americans mobilized against crime, they had a compromising, distrustful relationship with the NYPD.

This paper historicizes these tensions, foregrounding Black efforts against drug-related crime, police corruption, and police brutality in Gotham City during the early 1970s. Recent scholarship on mass incarceration in New York City and State politics has mainly focused on prisons, battles around Rockefeller Drug law in 1973, and more broadly anti-crime efforts in the political arena. Recently, historians of policing and the Black freedom struggle, have written about police power in large cities, such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This essay builds on both strands, centering the ways conflicts around anti-crime politics intersected with community politics and policing. By doing so, this paper places how Black New Yorkers were policed and it places their thoughts about and battles against police brutality at the center of debate around Rockefeller narcotics law.