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The Boston Police Strike
In 1919, there was a general agreement that the Boston policemen had a great deal to complain about. They disliked their hours, working conditions and most importantly, their salary. After getting a raise in 1913, the policemen had asked for another raise in 1917 to compensate for the high wartime inflation. By the time the officers had finally received that raise, the buying power of that extra money had gone down so low that the policemen were still having problems making ends meet. Another point of struggle was the long hours the officers were forced to work, including a night in the station house each week and the special details. Lastly, the police force objected to the conditions that they were forced to work in. Men had to sleep in beds infested with all sorts of bugs and on the soiled sheets that were left over from the previous occupants. To voice their complaints, the policemen turned to the Boston Social Club, a fraternal organization founded by Police Commissioner Stephen O'Meara in 1906.
On the other end of the negotiating table sat Police Commissioner Edwin U. Curtis. Although Curtis considered himself to be sympathetic to the policemen's demands, he refused to deal with the union. As the days went on, the situation grew tenser. On August 26 and 29, Curtis fired 19 workers for their union activity.
This caused massive outrage among the workers and on Tuesday, September 9, the strike began with three-fourths of the force walking out. Realizing that the police force was gone, some of Boston's residents began to commit small crimes. This eventually escalated into massive riots that continued until 1:30 in the morning. The following day, the small fraction of the police force had much difficulty maintaining the order but by that night the National Guard was deployed and the violence slowly came to a stop over the following couple of days.
The events of March 5, 1770 should and have been remembered as momentous and predictable. Perhaps not the night or city specifically, but the state of affairs in Boston, if not throughout The English Colonies, had declined to the point that British troops found themselves frequently assaulted with stones, dirt, and human feces. The opinions and sentiments of either side were certainly not clandestine. Even though two spectators express clear culpability for the opposing side, they do so only in alteration of detail. The particulars of the event unfold the same nonetheless. The happening at the Custom House off King Street was a catastrophic inevitability. Documents from the Boston Massacre trial, which aid us in observing from totally different perceptions. The depositions of witnesses of the event prove to be useful; an English officer Captain Preston and a colonial Robert Goddard give relatively dissimilar details. In spite of these differences, they still both describe the same state of affairs.
The population grew and ‘breakdown in law and order marched in step with the industrial revolution’ (Critchley, 1978: 21). The industrial revolution meant technological progression, better education and an increase in capital stock. As a result, the population grew, with more new people moving into the area, meaning there was less informal social control. Due to these factors, 1829 saw the introduction of the ‘New Police’ to London, the Metropolitan Police were brought in to solve the issue of crime and disorder. The poor initially feared that the introduction of the Metropolitan police would mean that they would be controlled and oppressed by the powerful to a much larger extent. By the same token, the orthodox view is that the old system was failing and that this was an effective step that had to be taken in order to respond to the diversity of this more cultured society. The working class were content as the New Police looked out for their welfare Melville Lee (1901: xxx) claimed that the New Police were ‘guardians of the weak against the strong […] designed to stand between the powerful and the weak, to prevent oppression, danger and crime’. In contrast, the revisionist view is that the New Police were necessary to cope with the needs of the modern capital class. Although, at first the New Police were treated with great hostility by everyone within society, somewhat
However the police force gradually improved due to one reason, men wanting to join the force was increasing. The increase was many because unemployment was high and the desire for financial security. Furthermore men were eager to join the force as it recognised as a respectable career, something that cannot have been easy to earn in East End of London.
The Pullman Strike of 1894 was the first national strike in American history and it came about during a period of unrest with labor unions and controversy regarding the role of government in business.5 The strike officially started when employees organized and went to their supervisors to ask for a lowered rent and were refused.5 The strike had many different causes. For example, workers wanted higher wages and fewer working hours, but the companies would not give it to them; and the workers wanted better, more affordable living quarters, but the companies would not offer that to them either. These different causes created an interesting and controversial end to the Pullman strike. Because of this, questions were raised about the strike that are still important today. Was striking a proper means of getting what the workers wanted? Were there better means of petitioning their grievances? Was government intervention constitutional? All these questions were raised by the Pullman Strike.
The unions resorted to many forms of tactics such as boycotts, picketing, and the less prominent “closed shop”. The most prevalent of these methods, however, was the formation of riots. During the late 19th century riots included: the Haymarket Square Riots (1886), the Homestead Lockout, and the Pullman Car Company strike. The Haymarket Square Riots of 1886 took place at the McCormick plant in Chicago, Illinois in response to the worker’s need for an eight hour workday. The first two days were innate, but the third day was where the the situation actually instigated the cause. The owner of the plant, McCormick, attempted to bring strikebreakers (scabs), and a battle had begun between the scabs and the strikers. The riot, wistfully, ended the lives of four men when the police began to attempt to impede and halter the situation. These four deaths initiated a chain reaction resulting in the calling for the revenge of the four men by German radical Johann Most. Despite Johann’s reaction, 200 more Chicago policemen ordered the remaining strikers to leave the area. In the crowd, in the moment, a homemade bomb was hurled leading in the death of one policeman; acting as a predecessor of events, this event lead to a shooting between the policemen and the strikers concluding with the death of four workers and seven more policemen; entirely approximately one hundred people were injured. The Haymarket Riots caused public opinion to turn against labor. The Homestead Lockout took place in Homestead, Pennsylvania at Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant and was instigated by Henry Clay Frick’s wage cut. In this riot workers walked out of the company and then Frick ordered company doors to be locked and trapped the workers inside. Employees rebelled and caused about 200 Pinkerton detectives to come up the river to protect company property and created a battle.
Even though many of the protesters were severely beaten, they still stood their stance and got the message out. What is a Riot? According to Encyclopedia.gov a riot “is a social occasion involving relatively spontaneous collective violence directed at property, persons, or authority.” There are five main
The Boston Massacre is considered by many historians to be the first battle of the Revolutionary War. The fatal incident happened on March 5 of 1770. The massacre resulted in the death of five colonists. British troops in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were there to stop demonstrations against the Townshend Acts and keep order, but instead they provoked outrage. The British soldiers and citizens brawled in streets and fought in bars. “The citizens viewed the British soldiers as potential oppressors, competitors for jobs, and a treat to social mores'; (Mahin 1). A defiant anti-British fever was lingering among the townspeople.
On March 5, 1770 a fight broke out in the streets of Boston, Massachusetts between a patriot mob and British soldiers. Citizens attacked a squad of soldiers by throwing snowballs, stones and sticks. British Army soldiers in turn killed five civilians and injured six others. The presence of British troops had been stationed in Boston, the capital of Province of Massachusetts Bay since 17681. The British existence was increasingly unwelcome. The British troops were sent to Boston in order to protect and support the crown-appointed colonial officials attempting to enforce unpopular Parliamentary legislation.
The Boston Massacre was and is still a debatable Massacre. The event occurred on March 5, 1776. It involved the rope workers of the colonial Boston and two British regiments, the twenty-ninth and the fourteenth regiments. Eleven people were shot in the incident; five people were killed and the other six were merely wounded. The soldiers and the captain, Thomas Preston, were all put on trial. All were acquitted of charges of murder, however the two soldiers who fired first, Private Mathew Killroy, and Private William Montgomery, the two soldiers were guilty of manslaughter. The causes were numerous for this event. There had been a nation wide long-term dislike towards the British, and a growing hatred towards them by the people of Boston. Even before the two regiments were sent in to monitor Boston there was a growing feud before the two sides.
The Baltimore City police have faced a myriad of problems in the last year. The riots following the Freddie Gray arrest were reported around the country and created a situation where the Governor was forced to call in the National Guard to protect the city. Community leaders report that African American’s are stopped, searched and arrested at a far greater number than Caucasian’s. The Baltimore city police are at an impasse with the community at this time, it is up to the city leaders and the police officials to come up with some real solutions to the issues that can no longer be ignored.
In major cities across the country, officers are abusing their authority in the most flagrant ways. Human Rights Watch makes the following sensible recommendations Progressive era reform efforts to professionalize crime control paradoxically distanced local police from the communities they served, thus eroding important social checks on abuse. Local officers, for example, beat hundreds at a 1930 labor rally in New York City, while Chicago police killed ten strikers in the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. Less dramatic, but equally revealing, Dallas police formally charged less than five percent of the 8,526 people they arrested "on suspicion" in 1930.
Before the Boston Massacre even occurred, tensions were high in the city of Boston between the Bostonians and the British. At this time people were just getting over the Stamp Act and were now angered by the new taxes also known as the Townshend Duties. This new tax caused Bostonians to become more aggressive causing the British to send more soldiers to impose the laws of Parliament and to restore order among the people. The arrival of more soldiers only caused more of an uproar between the people of Boston and the red coats. Bostonians went out of their way to harass British soldiers whenever they got the chance, but on March 5, 1770 both sides acted unacceptably resulting in the Boston Massacre (84-85).
The Winnipeg General Strike The year of 1919 has been one of the most influential years of strikes
The first police department in America developed in New York and began the first era of policing which spanned from the 1830s to 1900 and is known as the political era (Walker & Katz, 2012). As emphasized by Walker (1999) not only did the political era of policing revolve around politics but provided officers with little to no training, education or recruitment standards (as cited in Police: History, 2014). The era also forced shaky job security for law enforcement and officers could be fired and hired at any point with little to no reason. Even men with criminal records were foot patrolling and women were only seen as “matrons” for the jail; they did not carry weapons and often times had very little arrest discretion (Walker & Katz, 2012). According to Walker and Katz (2012), “a $300 payment to the Tammany Hall poli...
There were several causes which led to this riot and the immediate cause was racial tension. Racism tends to persist most readily when there are obvious physical differences among groups e.g. “Black” and “white” differences. This no doubt results in attempts to limit economic opportunities, to preserve status, to deny equal protection under law and to maintain cheap labor. Discrimination was represented ...