AMERICAN NOTES: Praising the Police

Attorney General John Mitchell claimed that his speech last week to the California Peace Officers’ Association amounted to a plea for restraint by lawmen in their confrontations with political dissenters, and to be sure much of the speech was exactly that. But what Mitchell had to say in San Francisco contained a couple of unhappy postscripts to the mass arrests during Washington’s Mayday protest. More than 12,000 people were rounded up, often indiscriminately, herded into makeshift compounds and held as long as 36 hours with neither arraignment nor the chance to raise bail. To clear the Washington streets, Police Chief Jerry Wilson had his men abandon their own established arrest procedures.

“Nothing else could have been done unless the police were to let the mob rule our capital,” Mitchell proclaimed. Possibly true, but he seemed to make a triumph of what was at best an unfortunate bending of the law to meet necessity. He upheld it as a model to be followed in similar situations by other cities, and he also likened the Mayday protesters to Hitler’s Brown Shirts. However troublesome Rennie Davis’ legions were, for Mitchell to damn them as Nazis was hardly more precise than for them to label him, as they habitually do, a fascist pig.