Councilman Nicholas Hood’s recent “anti-crime” breakfast of Negro “leaders” may have been a lot more clever than one would think at first glance.
This writer’s first reaction was: What kind of crap is this—that, according to Hood, “Negroes should utilize the same energies devoted to the civil rights movement to the fight against crime.”
Hell, you say, crime is no more a Negro “problem” than (to touch another sore point) it is an Italian problem. Crime, accepting society’s present distorted values on the necessity for the protection of private property rights, is a total community problem.
Why should the Negro be especially responsible for its eradication?
But, perhaps, the eminent councilman had ulterior motives, for one of the unanimous conclusions of the breakfast was opposition to a “stop and frisk” law which is being tossed around again in the state legislature.
It just could be that Hood and his colleagues are feeding this “Negro responsibility” junk to Mr. Whitey in an effort to prevent official enactment of measures which would give legal sanction to many of the present unconstitutional practices of our local gendarmes. We certainly hope so!
Speaking of crime, whatever happened to that highly-publicized “crime conference” that Mayor Cavanagh was supposed to have last year? Cavanagh cooked up the idea hurriedly after he realized that he made a faux pas (fatal to him in the Negro community in last year’s Democratic Senate primary) of suggesting a “stop and frisk” law.
Cavanagh’s legal chamber maids in the Corporation Counsel’s office did their dirty work for their chief very nicely by ruling that a “crime review commission,” as suggested by Councilman Mary Beck, would be in violation of the City Charter.
No one, these judicial experts claim, can investigate the Police Dept. except themselves (and maybe a grand jury or two). However, a careful reading of the Charter will reveal that the Council is given supervisory power over ALL city agencies and has a specific duty to check into any alleged improprieties. Somehow, they “missed” the point.
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Just for your shit list: While all five white Michigan Democratic Congressmen voted to remove Adam Clayton Powell from his committee chairmanship, two of them, Martha Griffiths (17th C. D.) and John Dingell (16th C. D.) did it up a little better and voted to deny Powell his seat in Congress, pending investigation.
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As an ex-reporter, Police Comm. Ray Girardin should know when to stay out of print as well as in it . . like screaming against the use of bail bonds to allow criminal defendants to be free until convicted and sentenced. This is a basic constitutional right.
Maybe, he’s getting his miseducation from too many of U of D lawyers in the Corporation Counsel’s office.
Brilliant performance by attorney Ernest Goodman in his defense of the 15 accused of “trespassing” in the House on Hobart St. He laid out a beautiful picture of the inhumanity of the city in its urban renewal projects. But the DA pulled a clever play … in a successful effort to play up to the six Negroes on the 12-man jury, he compared the illegality of the trespass on Hobart St. to the use by police of force and brutality to extract confessions from prisoners … “If you don’t tolerate violation of the law in one situation, you can’t in another,” he proclaimed. And so they were found guilty.
But, looking at it in a very sophisticated manner, if property is owned by the public (as in the case here where the invaded house was the property of the Detroit Housing Commission), how can it be against the law for members of the public themselves to enter their own property? This argument probably wouldn’t get very far with the Supreme Court, but it could at least prove interesting on so-called “moral” grounds. Maybe, some day, an enlightened legislature might broaden the individual citizen’s right to “public property” which is really his own.