The Third Degree and Interwar Crime Fighting

Early twentieth-century Americans defined the third degree as the police “grilling” or “sweating” of a criminal suspect to secure “incriminating admissions.”Footnote ²³ Law enforcers adapted the phrase from the free masonry test to “attain the master rank” or the “third degree.”Footnote ²⁴ In police work, the third degree referred specifically to the final stage in the apprehension process. In 1910, for example, the president of the Association of Chiefs of Police defined it as the interrogation phase in the arrest of a suspect, noting that “the ‘first degree’ was the arrest, the ‘second degree’ the transportation to some place of confinement, and the ‘third degree’ the interrogation of the arrested man as to his guilt.”Footnote ²⁵

By the 1920s, third-degree tactics had become controversial but also more widely employed in American law enforcement, particularly as crime fighting became the core component of police work. A growing number of reformers associated the third degree with the “Star Chamber” of Early Modern England and denounced such coercive interrogation methods as illegal, violating the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.Footnote ²⁶ Critics also argued that municipal law enforcers sometimes beat suspects to dispense rough justice or to exact vengeance and then claimed that the violence had been part of the interrogation process.Footnote ²⁷ In 1922, the American Prison Association formally denounced the use of this interrogation method.Footnote ²⁸ Judges increasingly concurred, and state supreme courts overturned dozens of felony convictions that relied on coerced confessions. During the 1920s, many states also amended their constitutions specifically to outlaw the use of violent interrogation tactics.Footnote ²⁹

However, countervailing pressures proved to be more powerful and led municipal policemen and district attorneys to seize on the third degree as a crime-fighting tool. Most important, the United States experienced a terrifying crime wave during the early twentieth century. The nation's homicide rate jumped by 50% between 1900 and 1925, and lethal violence rose four times faster in American cities.Footnote ³⁰ During the early 1920s alone, the homicide rate doubled in many urban centers.Footnote ³¹ Reactions to the crime wave, however, disproportionately focused on robbery or “banditry,” even though this was a relatively unusual form of deadly violence.Footnote ³² Large-scale bank robberies seemed to symbolize the unsettling tenor of the times, as criminal gangs with Thompson submachine guns descended on downtown business districts, preyed on respectable citizens, particularly merchants and bank employees, slaughtered their defenseless victims, and rapidly disappeared, using fast getaway cars. Chicagoans, for example, expressed fascination and even bemusement with Prohibition-related violence and organized crime, though they recoiled in terror in response to robberies.Footnote ³³ In the wake of World War I and the Red Scare, a series of high-profile, predatory murders—the 1920 Sacco and Vanzetti robbery-homicide, the 1920 bombing of Wall Street, and the 1924 Leopold and Loeb thrill killing—captured national attention, adding to the hysteria, igniting a crime panic, and placing soaring pressure on the police to stop crime.Footnote ³⁴

Alarmed by the explosion of violence and horrified by the incompetence of law enforcers, social reformers, legislators, and legal scholars launched a series of crime surveys during the late 1920s. The results shocked Americans, revealing that the criminal justice system failed to protect the public.Footnote ³⁵ In most cities, according to the crime surveys, prosecutors secured convictions in barely a quarter of felony cases.Footnote ³⁶ The conviction rate for lethal violence was still lower; in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York, district attorneys won convictions in one fifth of homicide cases, whereas New Orleans prosecutors convicted one sixth of killers.Footnote ³⁷ Data on robbery underscored the vulnerability of respectable city dwellers. In St. Louis and Kansas City, 4% of robbers were punished, whereas the Buffalo police made arrests in only 3% percent of robberies.Footnote ³⁸

Both expert and popular commentators demanded immediate, far-reaching criminal justice reform. Legislators waged a “war on crime” and enacted a spate of law-and-order measures, such as New York's Baumes Laws, which mandated lengthy prison terms for recidivists.Footnote ³⁹ Criticism of the police was blistering during the 1920s; one observer, for example, insisted that “the chief factor in the increase in crime is unquestionably the lack of law enforcement.”Footnote ⁴⁰ According to reformers, the police needed to protect the public from criminals, rather than focusing its efforts on safeguarding the political machine.Footnote ⁴¹

Pressures to fortify the criminal justice system encouraged law enforcers to embrace more aggressive investigative and interrogation techniques.Footnote ⁴² The third degree, according to police chiefs, offered an indispensible crime-fighting weapon. Again and again, police officials stridently defended the use of third-degree interrogation tactics during this period, typically invoking the language of “war.” An investigator for the Wickersham Commission found that “all arguments openly stated in behalf of unlawful police work come down in the end to the phrase: ‘This is war.’” Summarizing the police perspective, Ernest Hopkins reported that “the criminal is the enemy; he to be defeated by being quelled. Being the enemy, he has no rights worthy of the name. He is to be met by the weapons of war. … The law of war is the law of necessity.”Footnote ⁴³

Local law enforcers also defended the use of violent interrogation methods on pragmatic grounds: as the lesser of evils. “Much crime in Chicago,” a Cook County official explained, “is committed by brutal ruffians; the public are less inclined to blame the police for beating up such men than for letting them get away scotfree.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, a New York City police captain crowed that “against a hardened criminal I never hesitated. I've forced confessions—with fist, black-jack, and hose—from men who would have continued to rob and to kill if I had not made them talk. The hardened criminal,” Captain Cornelius Willemse added, “knows only one language.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A California deputy sheriff offered the same explanation, arguing that “criminals are hard and you have to be hard with them to get anything out of them. Many a confession would never come out if they hadn't hit them.”Footnote ⁴⁶ “One hour of beating,” another New York policeman argued, “is better than ten days of hopeless sleuthing.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In short, law enforcers insisted that the crime wave necessitated unflinching interrogation methods, and the public approved, preferring rough justice from local cops to wanton violence from psychopaths.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, such fierce crime-fighting methods came to be regarded as “a central point in police skill.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The end—of combating crime and punishing violent offenders—justified the means—of beating confessions out of vicious predators, and “a good punch in the jaw was the most efficient means to that end,” a Los Angeles police captain added.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to a New York City police commissioner, “these enemies of society were to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.”Footnote ⁵¹

By the late 1920s, nearly all big-city police departments relied on third-degree interrogations. A 1930 report by the American Bar Association found such methods “in use almost everywhere if not everywhere in the United States.”Footnote ⁵² Other investigations reached identical conclusions.Footnote ⁵³ An early 1930s study, for example, characterized the third degree as “simply a part of the normal routine” of policing, whereas another examination of law enforcement methods revealed that “the third degree, in some form, exists everywhere.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The Wickersham Commission's report on the subject, published in 1931, especially alarmed Americans because it exposed the brutality and sadism regularly employed by detectives. Police officials routinely beat suspects with blackjacks and rubber hoses, often targeting their kidneys, throats, and testicles, and detectives encouraged suspects to confess by torturing them with electrical shocks and by pouring water in their noses and throats to simulate drowning.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Commission's lead investigator described interrogations in which women were “lifted [off the ground] by the hair,” and police detectives in one city, he noted, “lifted repeatedly [a suspect] by his organs of sex” to secure a confession.Footnote ⁵⁶ So commonplace were such methods that police departments developed their own argot to designate coercive tactics, such as “giving him the works” and feeding the suspect “ice cream and cake.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The criminal “gets his cake,” an expert explained, “in the shape of pounding of fists, lengths of rubber hose and kicks in the stomach.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Law enforcement officials in many cities dedicated specific rooms to violent interrogations, such as Chicago's infamous “goldfish room” and Dallas's and Los Angeles's “incommunicado cells.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Nor was such treatment reserved for murderers, kidnappers, and highwaymen. Municipal detectives also tortured petty thieves and burglars when they deemed it appropriate.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whereas local policemen typically relied on violent interrogations to secure confessions, they also brutalized especially insolent and reviled suspects, exacting vengeance in the guise of interrogations, for example, against cop killers and rapists.Footnote ⁶¹

Even though the national crime panic persisted, public opinion began to turn against “lawlessness in law enforcement” during the early 1930s. The Wickersham Commission report galvanized criticism, but other legal, political, and institutional pressures also contributed to the rejection of third-degree methods.Footnote ⁶² Prominent experts, such as Berkeley police chief August Vollmer, preached the virtues of law enforcement professionalization as well, urging municipalities to separate law enforcement from the political machine, to recruit educated patrolmen, and to teach their police officers to employ the latest crime-fighting methods.Footnote ⁶³ Federal crime fighting burst onto the scene during this period, led by J. Edgar Hoover and the young FBI. Hoover celebrated “scientific” crime fighting, such as the use of the polygraph, fingerprinting, and ballistics tests.Footnote ⁶⁴ Training manuals during this period implored law enforcers to abandon aggressive interrogation techniques and, instead, to adopt scientific methods.Footnote ⁶⁵ “Because we have a higher type of policeman today,” Arthur Miles wrote in his 1939 handbook, How Criminals are Caught, “the third degree is very nearly a thing of the past.” Furthermore, he explained, the “third degree is plainly poor police work, and is so regarded by all up-to-date police departments.”Footnote ⁶⁶ At least in major urban centers, where reformers exerted particular influence, police chiefs during the 1930s denounced the aggressive grilling of suspects.

Changes in legal culture reinforced the rejection of violent interrogation methods. More and more Americans embraced the rule of the law and notions of due process during this period, gradually shedding their long-time faith in aggressive self-help, mob justice, and lynch law.Footnote ⁶⁷ The courts followed suit. State courts overturned a growing number of convictions secured through coercion, and the United States Supreme Court, particularly in Brown et al. v. Mississippi in 1936, broadened its interpretation of the Due Process Clause to forbid coerced confessions.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Third Degree in New Orleans

At least until the late 1920s, New Orleans followed the national trend. Early twentieth-century police officers in the city operated as adjuncts of the local political machine more than as crime fighters. A 1925 critic, for example, described New Orleans law enforcers as a “political organization, devoted to blackjacking recalcitrant voters into line [rather] than a police force. It was an effective political club,” Stanley Ray noted, “but an ineffective police force.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The 1920s crime wave, however, hit New Orleans with hurricane force (see Figure 1). The city's homicide rate spiked 2.5-fold between 1920 and 1925. During the mid-1920s, New Orleans was twice as murderous as Al Capone's Chicago and suffered from a homicide rate five times that of New York City, six times that of Boston, and fifteen times that of Milwaukee.Footnote ⁷⁰ The crime wave was real and tangible, with a soaring body count providing unmistakable evidence of the explosion in lethal violence. Over the first 7 decades of the twentieth century, the 5 most murderous single years in the city were all clustered between 1923 and 1927. But New Orleanians, like city dwellers throughout the nation, expressed particular fear of the violence accompanying bank and payroll heists, even though robbers accounted for only 3.9% of local homicides during the 1920s. Although New Orleans had long endured a high rate of violent crime, bank robbers seemed more cold-blooded and menacing than earlier killers, at least in part because “big-time bank bandits” struck in broad daylight, committed their murders in busy downtown settings, and targeted respectable—white—residents of the city.Footnote ⁷¹

Source: Homicide Reports, 1900–1945; Coroner's Reports, 1920–1945.

Figure 1. New Orleans Homicide Rate (per 100,000 population) 1900–1945

Overmatched by well-organized, well-equipped, professional bandit-murderers, New Orleans's police force seemed incapable of protecting the public. Local newspapers, employing the methods and language of the crime surveys of the era, reported that the city's anemic criminal justice system rarely brought criminals to justice. In 1922, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 93% of local killers escaped conviction. In cases of “shooting, or stabbing, or striking with intent to kill,” 86% of offenders went unpunished.Footnote ⁷² “No city in America,” a prominent local attorney revealed to the state bar association in 1925, “has worse protection from the criminal classes. Something must be done.”Footnote ⁷³

Municipal officials, like their counterparts across the nation, declared war on criminals, focusing on bank robbers and other predators. The New Orleans Police Department procured high-powered automobiles to pursue fast getaway cars, purchased Thompson submachine guns to possess the same fire power as bank robbers, instructed patrolmen “how to kill bandits,” and pledged to employ more aggressive interrogation techniques, including the “modern, up-to-date ‘third-degree.’”Footnote ⁷⁴ Although still untrained political appointees, local policemen, appropriating the language of reformers, reinvented themselves as crime fighters and framed coercive interrogation methods as a part of their modernization and professionalization.

New Orleanians's first complaint for third-degree brutality “to force a prisoner to confess” to a crime had come in response to the beating of George Ritter on December 1, 1918.Footnote ⁷⁵ Detectives arrested the 22-year-old Ohioan on a charge of petty larceny, the theft of an overcoat from a store. Ritter claimed that a police captain, a detective, and two patrolmen beat him with “blackjacks while giving the ‘third degree’ to make him confess.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Enraged at such rough treatment, Ritter complained to his former employer, James Cox, the governor of Ohio, publisher of a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper, and 1920 Democratic candidate for president. Cox unleashed a firestorm of criticism at the New Orleans Police Department. Prison reformers joined the chorus, as did numerous Louisiana politicians, aghast that the New Orleans police had brutalized and degraded a respectable man.Footnote ⁷⁷ The criticism convinced Louisiana lawmakers to amend the state constitution in 1921, prohibiting “the use of the ‘third degree’ or ‘mental treatment’ to obtain confessions from persons charged with crime.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The Orleans Parish assistant district attorney, however, warned legislators that this amendment “would result in the turning loose of many bandits and murderers in Louisiana, especially in New Orleans.”Footnote ⁷⁹

As the postwar crime wave ignited a crime panic—both locally and nationally—New Orleans policemen faced intense pressures to “curb bandits.” Believing that they had a mandate to stop crime at nearly any cost, municipal law enforcers erred on the side of rough justice, increasingly employing aggressive methods, including deploying a motorcycle with a machine gun mounted on its sidecar for shooting bandits, encouraging patrolmen to employ deadly force against robbers, and using coercive interrogation tactics.Footnote ⁸⁰ During the 1920s, the number of suspects killed by local policemen rose by nearly two thirds.Footnote ⁸¹ Complaints of forced confessions also surged, but police officials remained undeterred and redoubled their campaign against the organized bandits, whose calculated, predatory violence terrified merchants, bank employees, and other white middle-class New Orleanians.

Because this new breed of well-organized criminals tended to be white and to target affluent white residents, local detectives focused their aggressive interrogations on white criminals. Although city law enforcers believed that African Americans were violent and emotionally unstable, they worried little about African American criminals, because their violence rarely crossed racial lines or left African American neighborhoods.Footnote ⁸² During the early 1920s conviction rates for homicide by African American residents were half those for crimes committed by white residents, a failure rate that elicited little comment from white New Orleanians.Footnote ⁸³ An African American newspaper editor in the city described the police attitude toward black-on-black crime as “‘just another Nigger gone’ when a colored man is killed.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Therefore, the New Orleans police, in their frantic response to criticism, focused their third-degree methods on white suspects.

Such a strategy produced the kind of cross-cutting pressures that dogged the use of the third degree in 1920s America. On the one hand, respectable citizens demanded protection from the criminals who terrorized middle-class city dwellers. On the other hand, particularly in a Southern city, a growing number of reformers and other observers bristled at the idea of white suspects being brutalized and humiliated in the bowels of police stations. The complaints presented to grand juries in New Orleans during the 1920s nearly all involved white suspects charged with robbery-homicide, robbery, or larceny.Footnote ⁸⁵

Police officials expressed little sympathy for such hardened criminals and typically ignored allegations that suspects had confessed after violent interrogation sessions. In 1927, for example, the Prison Reform Association of Louisiana lodged a complaint against Detective Sidney Lieber, charging that he had “very badly beaten” Arthur Dean, a white automobile thief. The organization investigated Dean's allegation, interviewing Lieber, Captain Edward Smith, the chief of detectives, and four other prisoners who claimed to have been beaten by Lieber. The detective insisted that he had not struck the prisoners. Smith, his supervisor, denied the allegations of brutality as well and threatened to sue the Association for libel.Footnote ⁸⁶ But Captain Smith “admitted that he had sent Dean to Charity hospital [sic] after Lieber had gotten through with him.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Hospital records confirmed that the suspect had been treated for broken ribs.Footnote ⁸⁸ The other prisoners provided additional corroboration. Police Superintendent Thomas Healy, however, dismissed the complaint, explaining that he “refused to take the word of Dean, who is serving his fourth [prison] term, against that of one of his men.” Moreover, the other prisoners, by virtue of being prisoners, “could not be considered altogether reliable.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Police officials argued that only complaints corroborated by police officers were credible.

In the cases in which defense attorneys successfully appealed convictions on the basis of coerced confessions, they framed the allegations of brutality in implicitly racial terms, focusing on the degradation—as much as the physical abuse—of white suspects. James Scarbrough, a white, 28-year-old murder suspect, for example, testified that detectives had threatened him and kicked him during interrogation sessions. But more important, New Orleans police detectives had humiliated him, forcing “him to take off his clothes and put on a pair of ragged trousers,” giving him “no drinking water except what he found in the reservoir above the toilet,” providing “no bedclothes except one blanket,” and confining him in a cold, rat-infested cell.Footnote ⁹⁰ In annulling Scarbrough's verdict and remanding the case for retrial, the court, apologetically, held that “we are constrained to find that some of the police officers, in this instance, were too zealous in the performance of what they conceived to be their duty.”Footnote ⁹¹ Commenting on another case, an African American journalist observed that “members of the opposite race … do not condone the beatings administered to white prisoners.”Footnote ⁹²

Race and the Third Degree in New Orleans

During the late 1920s, the demography of third-degree victims changed, and by the early 1930s, New Orleans policemen used third-degree methods mainly against African American suspects. Shifts in crime played only a minor role in the transformation of law-enforcement tactics. The local crime wave crested during the mid-1920s, and rates of lethal violence plummeted during the late 1920s, tumbling by 39%. The drop continued through the 1930s, despite the ravages of the Great Depression (see Figure 1). Between 1925 and 1940, New Orleans's homicide rate fell by nearly two thirds, mirroring the national trend. Perhaps more important, the most visible, alarming kinds of crime decreased as well. Bank heists, the signature crimes of the early 1920s, virtually disappeared by the early 1930s, and New Orleans's robbery-homicide rate contracted by almost two thirds between 1925 and 1940.Footnote ⁹³

With the drop in high-profile white banditry, New Orleans law enforcers increasingly argued that African American criminals posed the greatest threat to social order. Long content to ignore African American violence, local law enforcers suddenly identified African Americans with street crime and reoriented their arrest and prosecution strategies.Footnote ⁹⁴ Police officials began to apprehend and convict African American offenders, even those arrested for intraracial violence.Footnote ⁹⁵ Between the early 1920s and the early 1930s, the conviction rate for African American killers more than tripled, and the rate for black-on-black homicides nearly quadrupled, although the police remained selective in their investigations of intraracial violence. The conviction rate for white killers, by contrast, remained flat. For New Orleans law enforcers, who were overwhelmingly older, uneducated, and from working-class backgrounds, crime fighting and preserving the racial order blended, and the no-holds-barred approach to combating 1920s bandits increasingly applied to apprehending 1930s African American criminals, particularly as local policemen filled the perceived void in racial control created by the decrease in popular justice, such as lynching.Footnote ⁹⁶

Although local law enforcers insisted that they were responding to a new threat to social order, the racialization of the third degree largely reflected broader political, legal, and social changes in interwar New Orleans. White and African American violent crime fell by similar proportions during this period, with the white homicide rate dropping by 61% between 1925 and 1940, and the African American rate tumbling by 70% (see Figure 2). Nor did the proportion of violent crimes crossing racial lines shift significantly. Therefore, the new focus on policing African American New Orleans was not primarily a reaction to changes in local crime.

Source: Homicide Reports, 1920–1945; Coroner's Reports, 1920–1945.

Figure 2. Race-Based Homicide Rates (per 100,000 population), 1920–1945

Rather, white New Orleanians felt besieged by African American residents during the late 1920s and the 1930s, and looked to local law enforcers to preserve social stability and the racial order at its core. The Great Migration fueled white anxieties, as the city's African American population swelled at twice the rate of its white population during the 1920s. The 1927 United States Supreme Court decision in Harmon v. Tyler, which overturned the New Orleans's segregation ordinance, reinforced white fears of an African American invasion into the city and especially into its white neighborhoods.Footnote ⁹⁷

The political bulwarks of white supremacy seemed to be faltering as well. During the early 1930s, Huey Long's political machine declared its intention to register African American voters.Footnote ⁹⁸ In a series of newspaper advertisements, the Orleans Parish district attorney, Eugene Stanley, warned that “at no time in the history of our State has White Supremacy been in greater danger.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Challenges to white control over criminal justice institutions also surfaced, such as the second Scottsboro decision in 1935, which found the exclusion of African Americans from juries unconstitutional.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ With the racial purity of white neighborhoods, the ballot box, and the jury pool suddenly in jeopardy, the threat from African Americans loomed large, and local law enforcers focused new energy on their overlapping mandates of crime fighting and race control. Attacks on the racial purity of the jury system also encouraged police officials and the parish district attorney to secure confessions and guilty pleas, because trials garnered outside scrutiny and hence became more complicated than in the recent past.

Cynical political pragmatism added to detectives' zeal in extracting confessions from African American suspects. Interrogation methods that secured convictions and funneled African Americans into state penal institutions placated skittish white New Orleanians and answered critics of the police. Despite District Attorney Stanley's alarm, African American Louisianans remained disfranchised until the mid-1940s. During the early 1930s, these residents comprised more than one quarter of the New Orleans population but one seventieth of registered voters in the city, and in 1940 only 400 of the city's 149,752 African American residents were registered to vote.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Furthermore, the Democratic machine controlled local politics, and the all-white Democratic primary system, which survived until 1951, ensured that African American New Orleanians played virtually no role in interwar municipal elections.Footnote ¹⁰² Therefore, the use of third-degree methods against African American suspects came at scant political cost and simultaneously demonstrated police resolve to fight crime and to defend New Orleans's embattled Jim Crow system.Footnote ¹⁰³

As police departments across the nation gradually abandoned the third degree, New Orleans law enforcers increasingly relied on such methods against African American suspects, embracing nearly every practice that had been denounced in the Wickersham Commission's Lawlessness in Law Enforcement. For local police officers, the 1920s war on crime became a war on African American criminals by the early 1930s. New Orleans detectives, like their counterparts a decade earlier, mainly used third-degree methods to secure convictions, arguing that scientific crime fighting was largely a public relations stunt and that “ninety-eight per cent [sic] of crimes are solved by interview.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Local police officers punched, choked, beat, and kicked African American suspects, but they also borrowed terror tactics from earlier forms of popular justice, such as staging mock lynchings. According to his attorney, in 1930 Charles Johnson endured “every kind of torture mentionable.” After the African American suspect was “beaten unmercifully” but still refused to admit that he had assaulted a white woman, detectives placed a rope around his neck and “lifted him up for about ten minutes,” all the while urging him to sign the confession.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, to encourage Eddie Johnson to reveal incriminating evidence against a robbery suspect in 1937, detectives beat the 11-year-old African American boy and then “placed a belt around his neck and threatened to hang him if he did not say that [Willie] Williams, the accused, was the guilty man.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Police officials insisted that they only employed aggressive interrogations tactics against guilty suspects or individuals withholding crucial evidence; however, for detectives in a Southern city at the height of Jim Crow, blackness connoted criminality, and, therefore, New Orleans policemen assumed that African American suspects, particularly those with criminal records, were guilty. “The attitude in New Orleans and surrounding communities,” an African American journalist explained, “is that a Negro is guilty until proven innocent and that anything may be resorted to to make him ‘admit’ guilt.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Persistent denials of guilt from African American suspects only infuriated policemen, because they posed an obstacle to securing convictions, and because such intransigence constituted insolence, challenging the racial hierarchy. Although police officials openly endorsed third-degree methods as a crime-fighting tool, they typically denied using such interrogation techniques when suspects or their attorneys lodged complaints. Defending themselves against allegations of third-degree brutality, police officials frequently both insisted that suspects had not been “grilled” and introduced the suspects' arrest history to justify the forceful interrogation methods (that law enforcers stated had not occurred). Aaron Boyd, who was found beaten to death in his cell at the Seventh Precinct in 1938, was an “old offender,” according to the city officials, and had “been booked 21 times,” an explanation intended to deflect attention from the autopsy report, which revealed that the suspect had suffered a ruptured liver and widespread bruising while in police custody.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Similarly, a 15-year-old African American suspect, who was brutalized while in the Twelfth Precinct station, “appeared older than 15 years and has a criminal record.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Detectives responded to one African American woman's brutality complaint by denying the charge and immediately announcing that she was a “well known prostitute” and had been previously arrested for disturbing the peace, fighting, and loitering.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Some police officials went further and suggested that allegations of abuse constituted additional evidence that the suspects were guilty. Reacting to one such complaint, Chief of Detectives John J. Grosch stated “he yells ‘third degree’ like all other notorious thieves.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Police Superintendent George Reyer concurred. “Claims of beatings and other mistreatment,” he argued, “usually are the main defense in major murder and robbery trials.”Footnote ¹¹² Describing police justifications for coercive interrogation tactics, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that “only guilty criminals are brutalized.”Footnote ¹¹³

When New Orleans law enforcers discovered that their suspect, whom they had tortured, was innocent, they sometimes expressed shock and embarrassment. Policemen, for example, were certain that 25-year-old Vernon Guichard was the “Nigger” who had killed a white resident during a New Year's celebration in 1934. They arrested Guichard the next morning, based on an eyewitness account, and transported him to the Fifth Precinct station, a facility where detectives frequently took suspects who were to be violently interrogated. The policemen at the Fifth Precinct beat him with billy clubs. Then detectives drove Guichard to the First Precinct station and battered the handcuffed Guichard with broom sticks and kicked him repeatedly, each time screaming “you did kill that white man, where is the gun?” When the suspect maintained his innocence, the detectives, according to Guichard, “told me to shut up” and then took him “to some isolated place,” and “there one of them placed a pistol to my head and said that if I didn't tell them that I killed the white man, find or make [i.e., produce] the gun that was used, that they were going to blow my G----n brains out and throw me in the water.” Guichard, however, refused to confess. Irritated by Guichard's defiance, the detectives returned him to the First Precinct station, where the beating continued. A police clerk then interceded and informed the detectives that they had apprehended the wrong man. One of the detectives, Guichard reported, “patted me on the shoulder and made an attempt to apologize, by saying that they were sorry they had beaten me and had been so cruel to me, for they did not like to beat up innocent persons.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Nor was this an isolated incident.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such apologies underscored the certainty with which New Orleans detectives beat and extracted confessions from African American suspects during the 1930s and early 1940s. Their violence was not random or indiscriminate, policemen insisted, but rather was reserved for hardened, unquestionably guilty—African American—criminals.

Continuing the practices described in (and discredited by) the Wickersham Commission report, the New Orleans Police Department conducted violent interrogations in designated rooms and in specific precinct houses. Many beatings and forced confessions occurred in the line-up room at police headquarters, which detectives considered “one of the ‘safest’ places for [the] rough handling” of suspects. In this restricted-access setting, aggressive interrogators did not worry about unauthorized or civilian witnesses; a sign reading “For Police Only” hung on the door to this “semi-dark room.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Two precinct houses also served as “safe” settings for grilling suspects. Again and again, patrolmen transported African American suspects either to the Fifth or the Twelfth Precinct station houses, where old-school captains and detectives, who were “considered expert technicians in the application of brutality,” were “called upon to ‘go over’ prisoners who refused to cooperate.” Veteran patrolmen instructed young policemen “to follow the lead of the older men” in brutalizing African American prisoners or to turn these suspect over to specialists in securing confessions.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Three New Orleans police officers emerged as third-degree specialists during the 1930s, and their reputations were known not only to local patrolmen and prosecutors but also to African American New Orleanians. By the late 1920s, James “Buttercup” Burns, the captain and commander of the Twelfth Precinct, was a local celebrity. Born in New Orleans in 1878, Burns joined the police department in 1902 and slowly rose through the ranks, becoming a captain and precinct commander in 1928.Footnote ¹¹⁸ He also tipped the scales at 136 kilograms (300 pounds), making him the “heaviest man on the police force.” Burns's girth, in combination with his theatrical flare, gave him great notoriety in the city. Each year, at the police minstrel show, the captain donned a “short white dress” and a wig with “long curls” and “gamboled about the stage,” performing the “Buttercup dance.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Fellow policemen, district attorneys, and judges knew “Buttercup” Burns as a jovial friend and beloved colleague. African American residents knew the captain as a fiend.

From the time he became a commander until his retirement 3 years later, Burns supervised sadistic interrogations, and his station house, according to defense attorneys, came to be known as the “damnable 12th Precinct station.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Burns's preferred interrogation method involved a heated stove poker. The gentle giant repeatedly instructed policemen under his command to confine African American suspects, strip them, and sodomize them with the heated poker until they confessed. In 1929, for example, Burns ordered Patrolman John Mobray to remove the clothing of Gordon Nichols, an African American resident suspected of stealing a watch. Burns then told Mobray to “burn that nigger until he tells where he stole the watch.” Nichols lodged a complaint, charging that he “had been burned in a vital spot by a red-hot poker,” but the court immediately dismissed the case against the popular precinct commander, with the presiding judge noting “I have known Captain Burns for years and I know him as one of the kindest-hearted men I've ever met.”Footnote ¹²¹ Two years later Burns directed men under his command to use the same interrogation method on Eli Terrell, an African American suspected of killing a New Orleans patrolman.Footnote ¹²² Other complaints followed, although criminal justice officials, including local judges, insisted that their friend, the jolly, dancing captain, could not possibly have acted with such cruelty.Footnote ¹²³

No one described the Grosch brothers, John and William, as jolly, although these tough New Orleans policemen commanded respect from New Orleans law enforcers and attorneys and elicited fear from African American suspects, because their interrogations methods, like that of Burns, were well known. Born in the city during the mid-1890s, the brothers completed 6 years of schooling and entered the labor force by their early teens, working as laborers, sailors, and longshoremen and then serving in the Navy during World War I. John, the younger brother by 2 years, joined the police department in 1921 and became a detective in 1925. Five years later, and shortly after his long-time partner became police superintendent, Grosch was appointed captain and then chief of detectives, a position he held for the next 16 years.Footnote ¹²⁴

John Grosch was the public face of violent interrogation tactics in the city. By 1933, local attorneys described him, admiringly, as the “best third degree artist in the United States,” and Grosch boasted that “I have secured over 300 confessions.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Other New Orleanians dubbed him “Third Degree Grosch.”Footnote ¹²⁶ In 1939, long after law enforcers across the nation had repudiated third-degree methods, Chief of Detectives Grosch told the local Rotary Club “there is only one way to handle criminals, and I handle them that way.” Grosch bragged that “if it were not for the ‘third-degree’ methods by which I have forced legal admissions in cases where I had every reason to be sure of guilt, New Orleans would today be delivered over to organized gangsters and brutal crime, as New York, Chicago and other cities are.” The chief added that “the greatest thrill I get is when I hear a criminal say, ‘Yes, I did it.’” Grosch included a threat in his speech, vowing that “if ever the people of New Orleans want me to retire, all they have to do is to ask me to stop using the ‘third degree.’”Footnote ¹²⁷ This unabashed endorsement of illegal interrogations methods, however, generated intense criticism from local civil rights and civil liberties groups. The police superintendent immediately insisted that his chief of detectives had been “misquoted,” and Grosch himself snarled that he had “said nothing about third degree methods.” Instead, Grosch explained, he had told club members that he merely “fed tough prisoners ‘ice cream and cake’ to obtain legal admissions of crime.”Footnote ¹²⁸ While many observers viewed the latter quip as sarcasm, local law enforcers, journalists, civil liberties reformers, and African Americans knew that “feed them ice cream and cake” was “police slang for the third degree,” and hence the chief's denial was actually a brazen admission.Footnote ¹²⁹ Until he retired from the department (and then as Sheriff of Orleans Parish), Grosch routinely ordered the beating of prisoners, hid suspects from their attorneys and family members, and withheld medical care from prisoners tortured at his insistence.Footnote ¹³⁰ Equally important, John Grosch set the tone and standard for police interrogation methods in New Orleans during the 1930s and early 1940s. As chief of detectives, he assumed responsibility for determining whether allegations of police brutality were credible and should be investigated as violations of the law.Footnote ¹³¹

William Grosch, the elder brother by 2 years, relied on even more violent methods to extract confessions and to exact punishment on African American suspects. He joined the police department in 1928, serving first as a doorman and later working out of a motorcycle sidecar. Three years later William Grosch was appointed detective, 1 year after his brother became chief of detectives.Footnote ¹³² Within 2 weeks of his promotion, Grosch faced his first complaint for beating a suspect.Footnote ¹³³ Over the next decade, suspects filed at least eight brutality complaints against the detective, and Grosch killed six suspects, four of them African American. His long-time partner fatally shot two additional suspects. According to the city's leading African American newspaper, “whenever there is a questionable killing, the shooting of handcuffed prisoners, the use of the third degree, whenever there is brutality and murder by the New Orleans Police force, look for the ‘killer twins’ and there will be [William] Grosch and [Andrew] Arnold,” his partner.Footnote ¹³⁴

Detective Grosch relied on two interrogations methods. Often he beat suspects with a rubber hose, one of whom died from the torrent of blows in 1932.Footnote ¹³⁵ After bludgeoning suspects into submission and persuading suspects to confess, Grosch typically gave them “ice cream and cake,” a ritual that amused local cops.Footnote ¹³⁶ But Grosch's favorite interrogation method was “the ride.” Again and again, the detective pummeled suspects during interrogation sessions, and when they maintained their innocence, he handcuffed them and took them for a ride to a particular, isolated stretch of the Air-Line Highway, half a mile into neighboring Jefferson Parish, purportedly to search for evidence or locate witnesses. There Grosch and his partner staged mocked executions, intended to evoke images of lynchings. On one occasion, in 1941, Grosch “assassinated” his handcuffed, African American suspect, an alleged cop killer.Footnote ¹³⁷ Other New Orleans detectives also took (or threatened to take) suspects for “a one-way ride,” though William Grosch routinely threatened suspects with “the ride,” regularly employed the method of coercing confessions, and publicly bragged of this tactic.Footnote ¹³⁸

Particularly with John Grosch at the head of the detective department, the widespread use of third-degree interrogation methods was an open secret. At a time when many white residents believed that the federal government, the courts, and even state government were abandoning them and abandoning white supremacy, New Orleans policemen, such as the Grosch brothers, represented a last line of defense against racial change; William Grosch's unmistakable invocation of lynchings during third degree interrogations pandered to anxious white residents and terrorized African American New Orleanians.

Many white residents expressed support for the use of violent police methods against African American crime suspects. On rare occasions, the Orleans Parish district attorney pursued complaints lodged against local law enforcers, although the outcome mainly bolstered the authority of the police. In 1933, two New Orleans detectives faced trial for beating a 15-year-old African American theft suspect. The policemen took Sidney James Mims “to the ‘show-up room’ at police headquarters, stuffed paper into his mouth, tied a handkerchief over his face and then beat him with a wire cable.”Footnote ¹³⁹ During the detectives' trial, a courtroom observer announced that “it is an outrage to prosecute two white men for beating a ‘Nigger.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A representative of the Orleans Parish League of Women Voters termed the allegations against the policemen “much ado about nothing,” while an official with a local child-welfare group stated “I am opposed to third-degree methods but the Mims boy apparently got what he richly deserved.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Although the jury found the detectives guilty of “assaulting, beating, bruising, and wounding” James Mims, the judge imposed a modest fine, and the police superintendent immediately reinstated the policemen.Footnote ¹⁴²

Orleans Parish jurors, district attorneys, and judges typically deferred to local detectives and expressed little sympathy for African American suspects who either lodged complaints against detectives or argued at trial that their confessions had been coerced. At one hearing, for example, members of the grand jury complained “that this was a case of a policeman shooting a ‘nigger,’ and that was all right.” The district attorney conceded that “it was just a case of a white policeman's word against a Negro's word, and that they could not believe a Negro.”Footnote ¹⁴³ In another case, in which an African American suspect died shortly after an interrogation session, the district attorney dismissed the charge, explaining that “I base my decision on facts contained in the report of the investigation made by the police.” Thus, he dropped the case because the alleged offenders maintained their innocence, and the police investigators had submitted their report to John Grosch.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Even when criminal justice officials rejected police denials, they typically exonerated detectives. In a 1938 case, detectives fatally beat an African American robbery suspect, who was charged with taking $2.55 from a streetcar conductor. The autopsy report revealed clear signs of brutality, including a ruptured liver.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Although the police steadfastly denied battering Aaron Boyd, the district attorney ruled that the “beating was justified.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Nor did physical evidence persuade white jurors and judges that New Orleans policemen employed “torture” to extract confessions. One of the African American suspects sodomized by Buttercup Burns produced witnesses who stated that they saw the burns, and a physician testified that the “wounds had the characteristics of burns.” The judge, however, concluded that “there has been no evidence introduced to prove conclusively that the negro was even burned” and dismissed the charges.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

In other cases, judges rejected complaints or denied appeals because the brutality seemed implausibly excessive. An associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, writing the majority opinion denying a defendant's appeal, averred that the “statement that some twenty-eight officers beat him [the defendant] each day, from time to time, day and night, during a period of five or six days, is unbelievable.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ New Orleans detectives flaunted their influence over judges and jurors, making little effort to offer credible testimony. Typically, numerous officers, sometimes dozens, paraded to the witness stand and testified that they had observed no violent interactions between detectives and suspects, providing descriptions that were “identical in grammatical construction.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Not surprisingly, Chief of Detectives John Grosch proclaimed “I welcome a grand jury investigation.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Paradoxically, complaints, hearings, trials, and appeals revolving around forced confessions redounded to the benefit of local detectives. For most white residents, public exposure of brutality toward African American suspects affirmed policemen's crucial roles as defenders of white supremacy. White reformers especially learned about this curious backlash, in which sadistic detectives became local heroes and their critics became race traitors. Harold N. Lee, the president of the Louisiana League for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights, received hate mail, complete with references to third-degree interrogation methods, when he inquired about police mistreatment of African American suspects. In one such letter, the anonymous writer warned that “we better not hear another word from you, one way or another, in regard to (niggers) or we will take you out for a ride.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ On the rare occasions when courts threw out coerced confessions, the police emerged as martyrs. Furthermore, in the two instances in which policemen were convicted for mauling African American suspects, the judges imposed fines, and the police superintendent quickly restored the men to active duty.Footnote ¹⁵²

In short, New Orleans detectives beat prisoners and bludgeoned them into confessing with virtual impunity, and law enforcers trumpeted their power to brutalize suspects. The local African American newspaper insisted that “Negro prisoners are beaten not because they warrant it, but because their tormentors have the authority to do so.” Chief of Detectives John Grosch reveled in wielding such power. In 1936, when a defense attorney advised his client to refrain from answering any questions and instructed detectives to stop the interrogation, Grosch snapped “I'll question this man all I want to.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Similarly, in 1938, when the representative of a reform association inquired “why are these people [suspects] held in communicado [sic]?” Grosch replied “because I want to.” Bewildered by the response, the reformer asked Chief Grosch a follow-up question, “‘What is your Constitutional grounds for so holding them, and denying them the right to speak to their attorney?’ to which Chief Grosch replied, ‘Because I want to.’”Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Such public declarations of detectives' unbridled authority, however, represented more than mere bombast. They also served as a clear, unmistakable warning to African American New Orleanians, reminding them of their vulnerability when in police custody. On the streets of the city, African American residents found myriad ways to blunt police power. Following police shootings on the streets or in homes, African American New Orleanians, particularly women, frequently raced to the scene, pouring into the alleys and parlors where patrolmen had just killed their neighbors. Instead of fleeing from aggressive, volatile patrolmen and seeking refuge, the women purposefully crowded the policemen, exerting a form of control and unsettling the suddenly outnumbered law enforcers.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ But such informal methods of managing police behavior stopped at the precinct house door. Once a suspect entered the police station, detectives exercised nearly complete control and employed a variety of practices to underscore their authority and the African American suspects' vulnerability. Policemen routinely stripped suspects—both men and women—of their clothing prior to the start of the interrogations.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Thus, detectives demanded confessions, grasped billy clubs, rubber hoses, metal wires, and red-hot stove pokers and descended on naked prisoners. Eli Terrell, for example, confessed after nearly a week of beatings, just when Buttercup Burns's officers approached him, heated poker in hand; Terrell later testified that he remained “naked when he signed the confession.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The widely known use of the third-degree interrogation methods, particularly mock (and actual) executions, the ride, and the Burns's stove poker, made terror a crime-solving and race-control tool, one intended to produce confessions and secure convictions. Policemen such as William Grosch publicly boasted of their interrogation methods in the hopes of intimidating suspects and hastening their confessions. A critic of these tactics argued that confessing suspects “were smitten not by conscience, as the district attorney says, but with clubs of policemen. That is why they confessed.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ After Grosch executed one victim, using his “ride” tactic, “stories circulated in the Negro Sections that he [the suspect] had been beaten, then assassinated by the police.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Other detectives invoked Grosch's methods to encourage suspects to confess. During one interrogation session, a detective warned a larceny suspect “You black bitch, if you don't tell us where that $160 is, we're going to take to back-of-town and whip you and throw you in the lake.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Another detective threatened a suspect “that if he did not tell him what he did with the money that they would take him to Jefferson Parish, and put him out of the car and shoot him and say that he tried to escape,” while Detective George Vogt vowed to take Jules Simon for a “‘one-way ride to City Park,’ if he did not sign the confession.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ William Grosch's body count made such threats credible. Not surprisingly, African American New Orleanians recoiled in fear at the prospect of being taken into custody, particularly by detectives such as William Grosch. “Negroes are very, very scared and afraid,” one police official acknowledged.Footnote ¹⁶² Signing a confession and serving time at the Louisiana State Penal Farm at Angola could be preferable to Grosch's and Burns's third-degree interrogations.Footnote ¹⁶³

Police intimidation extended beyond suspects and insured that interrogations methods were widely known yet seldom questioned. Physicians often refused to examine residents who had been beaten by the police, and securing testimony from African American physicians proved to be nearly impossible, according to one reformer, “because they are all afraid of the police in a case like this.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Further constricting the flow of information about third-degree violence, in 1933 the parish coroner “made a rule that no doctor other than himself can examine men confined in the Parish Prison.” Therefore, suspects who were badly beaten but not charged remained in the parish prison until their bruises had healed, and upon release, even if they could find a physician willing to examine them and testify against the police, the forensic evidence became murky, enabling the chief of detectives, the district attorney, or judges to rule that they found no conclusive evidence of police mistreatment.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

“The ride” also shielded New Orleans detectives from scrutiny. Suspects taken the short distance into Jefferson Parish were sometimes executed but more often beaten severely and then stashed in the Jefferson Parish jail, where relatives and their attorneys could not easily find them.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Critics of third-degree brutality speculated that wounds would heal while prisoners languished in the Jefferson Parish jail, eliminating or at least muting forensic evidence of police beatings.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ When relatives and attorneys for the missing suspects approached New Orleans police officials, the superintendent or the district attorney insisted that Orleans Parish was not holding the prisoner.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The thin blue line in interwar New Orleans extended across parish lines, and police officials, coroners, district attorneys, jurors, and judges worked in unison, supporting third-degree methods to bolster law-enforcement authority and to buttress the racial order.

New Challenges to the Third Degree

By the early 1940s, the overlapping layers of support for third-degree interrogation practices began to crumble. A confluence of political, institutional, and legal forces made forced confessions, even as a crime-fighting tool, more controversial. The sharp fall in violence during the 1930s reduced public concern about street crime at the same time that events in Europe shifted attention to national security, decreasing both the pressure to produce convictions and the political traction associated with unfettered crime fighting. New Orleans's homicide conviction rate fell between the early 1930s and the early 1940s, a drop that garnered little attention from city officials or local journalists.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ No longer was crime a white-hot political issue, and hence the pressure on local detectives and prosecutors to secure confessions and convictions eased.

Moreover, during the late 1930s the Grosches overplayed their political hand when they extended their tactics to include white labor organizers. Viewing the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a Communist front and therefore a threat to public order, the Grosch brothers employed third-degree interrogation and intimidation methods against the organization's recruiters.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ William Grosch frequently transported labor officials to the Jefferson Parish line, held a gun to their heads, and urged them to leave the city. In the summer of 1938, for example, the detective took three CIO. organizers to the parish line and told them “if we ever see you within 50 miles of New Orleans, we'll kill you.”Footnote ¹⁷¹

CIO representatives, however, frequently lodged complaints with their unions and with state officials, sometimes requested support from the rival American Federation of Labor (AFL), and occasionally demanded Justice Department protection. Some even taunted detectives and dared them to use tactics hitherto reserved for African American suspects, in one instance responding to the threat of “the ride” by snapping “let's go.”Footnote ¹⁷² Furthermore, district attorneys recognized that complaints from white suspects could not be casually ignored, that testimony from white victims and white witnesses carried weight with juries, and that local newspapers were more likely to cover allegations of third-degree brutality against whites.Footnote ¹⁷³ The Grosches remained undeterred, although their defiance commanded less popular support when they battered white suspects, and their tactics slowly became a political and public relations liability for city and parish officials. After New Orleans detectives beat and threatened one CIO organizer, for example, he complained to the Justice Department, which expressed “increasing concern that New Orleans police are carrying on a program of ‘lawless brutality.’” John Grosch, the acting police superintendent at the time, responded with his usual bluster, reaffirming his intention to “run the CIO-Communists out of town.” Newspapers across the region carried this story but framed Grosch's tirade in unsympathetic terms.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Similarly, the Orleans Parish district attorney bristled at Chief Grosch's 1939 defense of third-degree methods, announcing “I was amazed that the chief of detectives should have made a statement of that sort.” Charles A. Byrne added that “only time will tell if Grosch's usefulness as a witness in the future has been destroyed.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Even third-degree brutality directed against African American New Orleanians began to trigger a backlash by the early 1940s. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been bitterly divided and ineffective during the 1930s, reflecting class, political, and generational fissures within the city's African American community. Older NAACP leaders often favored a cautious approach to racial issues, preferring to rely on their long-standing ties to white political and cultural leaders to ameliorate the worst aspects of Jim Crow. A younger, impatient group within the organization rejected this approach, arguing for more strident action.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ One of the core issues dividing the groups was police violence, and the latter faction grew so frustrated that it complained to the national office that the “Local Branch [sic] here is not fighting police brutality.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The increasingly flagrant use of third-degree tactics, and John Grosch's bald endorsement of such methods, helped the more militant faction to gain control over the New Orleans branch of the NAACP and then to wage aggressive campaigns against Jim Crow and against police violence in particular.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ By 1943, the local branch held weekly mass meetings to protest police actions. Thus, the defiant, unapologetic terror tactics heralded by “Third Degree Grosch” and his detectives ultimately helped to unify the city's African American community across class lines, radicalizing the local NAACP branch and forging a vibrant civil rights movement in New Orleans.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Other reform and civil liberties organizations, particularly the Louisiana League for the Preservation of Constitutional Rights, launched more active campaigns against third-degree brutality as well. By the late 1930s, these groups often coordinated their responses to coerced-confession complaints.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ In 1938, for example, the president of the Louisiana League sent a telegram to the AFL officials, warning that the “Nazification of New Orleans constitutes a threat to all labor irrespective of the faction to which men belong.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Furthermore, the organizations' legal teams demanded police investigations of third-degree charges, conducted their own investigations, searched for physicians and witnesses willing to testify, and encouraged victims to file civil suits against the detectives, alleging that the suspects had suffered damages as a consequence of false imprisonment and assault.Footnote ¹⁸² The Louisiana League, for example, secured the services of an attorney who filed a civil suit on behalf of Loyd D. T. Washington.Footnote ¹⁸³

The reformers adopted a new approach to combat third-degree complaints during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. They recognized that litigation would not succeed: police officials, especially Chief of Detectives Grosch, blocked investigations and recommended against grand jury inquiries; district attorneys abruptly dismissed cases; witnesses and physicians refused to testify; coroners insisted that forensic evidence was inconclusive; jurors exonerated and acquitted aggressive policemen; and local and state judges deferred to policemen and consistently ruled in their favor.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ But these cases, and the public attention that they garnered, exacted an increasing price from the police chief and the district attorney. “We are now in a position to make the police in New Orleans,” the president of the Louisiana League observed in 1939, “more or less acutely uncomfortable on the score of brutality and illegal arrests.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵

Political shifts unrelated to law enforcement made this strategy viable. “We have them on the run through two channels, the State Attorney and the federal authorities,” the Louisiana League's Harold N. Lee explained. “Both of these channels are easily available to us now because the political scandals have so greatly stirred everything up.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ As a consequence of festering tensions between the Orleans Parish Democratic machine and state party officials, particularly Earl Long, reformers eagerly reported third-degree violence to the attorney general and to the governor, intending to provide Baton Rouge officials with additional ammunition for their battle with local politicians.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Similarly, turf wars between New Deal officials and both local and state politicians flared during this period, disrupting the flow of federal dollars to Louisiana projects, such as public housing construction in New Orleans.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Reformers exploited this rift, reporting the “flagrant abuse of police power” by New Orleans detectives to Justice Department officials and imploring them to launch investigations of third degree violence “under Federal civil liberty statutes.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Even if New Deal bureaucrats responded cautiously (at best) to these demands, the complaints reinforced federal officials' reluctance to supply funds that provided patronage jobs for New Orleans and Baton Rouge politicians.

Changes in electoral politics also increased the cost of blatant third-degree coercion. The Supreme Court's 1944 decision, in Smith v. Allwright, struck down the all-white primary, opening the door to soaring African American political participation. In New Orleans, the number of African American registered voters, which had plunged by 80% during the 1930s, skyrocketed during the 1940s, rising by 3150% between 1940 and 1948.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ White Democrats continued to exercise disproportionate control over local and state politics, but a sea change had begun, and overt, defiant third-degree violence exacted, for the first time, a political price.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Shifts in the composition of the local police provided one measure of the new political clout of African American residents; in 1950 New Orleans appointed its first African American police officers since the end of Reconstruction.Footnote ¹⁹²

Generational dynamics chipped away at support for third-degree methods in two ways. First, the emergence of the younger civil rights leaders added to the chorus of public critics of police violence. And second, generational changes within New Orleans law enforcement gradually altered police culture in the city. The old-school leaders of the police department, such as the Grosch brothers, retired during the 1940s. Perhaps as a consequence, the New Orleans police finally modernized during the mid-1940s, establishing civil service procedures and formal training for patrolmen. Belatedly and haltingly, New Orleans law enforcers embraced the scientific crime-fighting methods that had swept the country a decade earlier and had supplanted third-degree interrogation practices elsewhere. During the mid-1940s, the police superintendent also established a centralized “lockup station,” intended in part “to eliminate the possibility of ‘third degree’ treatment.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Interwar legal reformers may have been correct in arguing that hiring better-educated, more professional police officers would reduce the use of third-degree methods.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Public perceptions of the third degree changed as well during the 1940s. Since the crime panic of the 1920s, white newspapers had typically portrayed third-degree interrogation methods as a bulwark against violent predators. During the late 1940s, however, Louisiana journalists increasingly associated the phrase “third degree” with “Communist strong-arm tactics,” such as the “third degree torture” employed by Romanian and Korean regimes.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

By the postwar era, New Orleans law enforcers began to conform to the national trend in the use of third-degree practices. Aggressive, violent police methods did not end, but coercive interrogations methods became less common, less public, and hence less effective as an instrument of racial control. Furthermore, police officials no longer publicly endorsed third-degree methods, and city leaders no longer defended such behavior. By the 1940s, deaths in police custody dropped nearly to 1920s levels (see Figure 3).Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Investigations of the city's police department in the postwar era acknowledged that police brutality continued, particularly toward African American suspects, yet concluded “that the New Orleans police are now not so brutal as they used to be.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The shift from rough justice to the rule of law in policing remained incomplete in New Orleans during the second half of the twentieth century, although third-degree methods gradually became a source of embarrassment and scandal.

Source: Coroner's Reports, 1920–1949.

Figure 3. Number of Suspects Who Died in Police Custody, 1920–1949