Dateline: BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, 1875. A white police officer kills an unarmed Black man while responding to a complaint of a noisy house party. The police officer claims self-defense. Seventeen witnesses call those claims lies.
In every other similar incident in Baltimore between 1867 and 1910, no case of unjustified use of force by a white police officer against a Black person ever got past a coroner’s jury, much less a court of law. Historian Gordon H. Shufelt writes that in cases where “the possibility of unjustified use of lethal force” suggested itself, “police administrators, coroners, and jurors showed a willingness to alter procedures and distort facts in order to reach a verdict of accident or self-defense.”
But Officer Patrick McDonald’s killing of Daniel Brown was different. The coroner’s jury sent McDonald to the grand jury; the grand jury sent him to trial on the charge of murder; the trial jury found him guilty of manslaughter. Each of these juries were made up entirely of white men, with eight of the trial jury voting for a murder conviction. Shufelt examines this richly detailed case to illuminate the social, cultural, and political factors that led to this atypical outcome.
Segregation by neighborhood had not yet become the dominant pattern of urban settlement in Baltimore. In the 1870s, workers and domestic servants were still living close to their employers in back alleys and compounds behind the homes of the better-off. Daniel Brown, a laborer at a sugar refinery, and his wife Keziah Brown, who supplemented the family income by taking in local washing, were far from wealthy, but they lived behind Park Avenue in Baltimore’s wealthiest ward.
Urban police departments were established in the United States by upper and middle classes who wanted shielding from “dangerous classes.” The Browns and their guests, however, were not “criminals, immigrants, vagrants, labor radicals, ruffians, or drunkards.” (Notably, with its high proportion of free Black residents, Baltimore never had a pre-Civil War slave patrol, the antecedent for police departments in more Southern cities.)
“The wealthy residents of Park Avenue did not perceive the Browns and their guests as dangerous strangers but rather as subordinate partners in personal relationships that echoed slavery’s paternalism,” writes Shufelt. The local police Captain was a former Confederate officer. The coroner was a former slaveholder. Both “probably understood the expectations of Park Avenue residents better than did Patrolman McDonald.”
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“Violence might be tolerated as a means of reasserting social control in the city’s rougher districts; but […] the resort to violence by an Irish immigrant policeman represented a breakdown in the social order […] within sight and hearing of the backdoors of the residents of Park Avenue,” Shufelt writes.
The long conflict over slavery—tens of thousands of white Marylanders fought on both sides of the Civil War—made many of Baltimore’s white residents fear and distrust the police. From the founding of the police department in 1853, the police were notoriously the tools of whatever party was in charge—Know-Nothing, Democrats, Unionist, Republican—in the often-violent partisan struggles over control of the city. The McDonald trial might have involved a Black man, but white disdain for the police—“blue-coated ruffians” who did “villainous work” according to the Baltimore American—peaked in the tumultuous 1875 elections, just as the trial began.
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Editorializing over the killing of Daniel Brown, the Baltimore Sun decried the “brutal and lawless use by the police of the powers with which they are clothed,” Shufelt notes. But the paper also took pains to deny that race had anything to do with the issue of police violence. Baltimore’s Black community, meanwhile, argued back that “police practices in the city amounted to racial oppression.” Shufelt shows that racially disparate sentencing was already manifesting itself: whites who assaulted Blacks were more likely to get bail or have their cases dismissed; Blacks who assaulted whites were more likely to be imprisoned.
The unusual case of Officer McDonald illuminates the social setting of the crime and the majority community’s ambivalent attitudes about the police. But it also represents white ambivalence about white-on-Black violence. The manslaughter conviction was a compromise. McDonald was sentenced to five years, when ten years was the statutory punishment. And, through legal machinations, he was free less than year after he had killed Daniel Brown.
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