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FREEDOMWAYS   FIRST QUARTER 1968

brutality. But after an experience like mine, you never know, do you?" she said.

This summer, countless middle-class Negroes of Newark and Detroit
discovered the same lesson that Miss Kennedy learned about police
mistreatment. 
Black students of Fisk and Texas Southern were sub-jected
to similar treatment.

Even off-duty policemen have been subject to misuse of police
power and harassment. Jesse Roy, who resigned from the Detroit
police force after thirteen years, testified before the 1960 U.S. Com-mission
on Civil Rights that he has twice been a victim of police
officer assault. In another example, the New York Times caught a Ne-gro
policeman in a moment of candor about his life within the ghetto
when he must deal with officers who do not know him as one of their
number.

"When he [referring to the Negro policeman] is off, he walks
through Harlem wearing usually sports, short-sleeved shirt, slacks and
loafers. He is a 24-year-old bachelor. He said that-sometimes he
would be standing on the corner with other Negro friends talking,
when a white policeman would walk up and say: 'Break it up.' I
could sense the bitter edge to the white cop's voice when he said
'break it up,' but don't say or do anything."

If women attorneys, middle-class Negroes and Negro policemen 
are not safe from capricious exercise of police power, who is safe?
While the well-to-do may be in a better position to articulate their
grievances, few non-whites can be sure that they will not be subject
to various forms of differential law enforcement-verbal abuse, stop
and search, harassment regardless of status or position.

Similar situations obtain throughout the nation. Some city police
departments have reputations for being "rough." Not coincidentally
these are the same cities which have lately been the scenes of urban
holocausts, Watts, Newark, and Detroit.

In the South, the system of differential law enforcement is gen-erally unmasked, without appeal or possibility of redress. Here the 
individual policemen may beat without cause as an outlet for his own
sadistic impulses as well as vengeance.  The Southern Regional Con-ference 
magazine, The New South, recently contained 18 different
affidavits documenting charges of wanton police misconduct in Ala-bama, 
Mississippi and other states of the South. In rural areas where
the reports of police misconduct do not even reach the press, the in-cidents
are unreported and uncounted.

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Transcription Notes:
Should I hit "enter" to indicate the end of the line to correspond with the original text? The New South, last paragraph, is italicized.