Crime and Punishment, but Hold the Justice, Please
Early in August, 1932, some prominent citizens of Hicksville got together with friends who lived elsewhere in the Town of Oyster Bay, and they established a local chapter of an organization called the Nassau County Police Protective Association. Per its name, no ambiguity seems possible: a group with that name must have been created so that its non-police members could band together to protect the police who were protecting them. What in the world was going on?
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 7, 1932
I can't pretend to know the precise agenda the group was pursuing, but the article above contains a couple of clues about why it was formed. Some policemen were going to be put on trial, and the Nassau County Police Department's morale was allegedly suffering.
Before getting into the gist of the matter, I'll comment about the latter point. The nation was struggling to emerge from the worst point of the Depression, and about 20,000,000 desperate people were still unemployed. If I had been one of them, and someone had asked me to do something for, or donate money for, people who were employed but had a morale problem, my reaction would have been blunt, vehement, and definitely unprintable. What about my morale, Bud?
All right, back to the facts.... What was the Hyman Stark story, and why did it matter?
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In mid-July, four men drove to an address in Roslyn, knocked on the door, and rushed inside to rob the homeowner. She was alone, and - contrary to their expectations - she had no hoard of jewels and cash profits from speakeasies for them to take. Intimidation did no good; the old (64) woman had nothing. They left the home, and she reported the robbery attempt.
The next day, the press were told by the police that she lay in Nassau Hospital, dying from having been pistol-whipped insensible. Nassau Police had arrested the men, and had begun interrogating Stark, their leader. Later in the day, there was a second and hurried announcement: Hyman Stark had confessed, and almost immediately afterwards, he had died without warning.
It should be added that the hospitalized woman was the mother of a County Police Detective.
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New York Daily News, July 16, 1932
The following day, the police said little. The District Attorney announced that he was investigating the police involved in the interrogation, and he hinted that he already had incriminating evidence against some of them.
Meanwhile, the press had investigated further, and it had found discrepancies between fact and the police statements. According to physicians at the hospital, the woman had never been pistol-whipped, had never been insensible, and - with no evidence of injury - would have been released from the hospital had the police not intervened. Hyman Stark, on the other hand - having arrived at Mineola headquarters a healthy man in his early 20s - had been brought to the hospital with fresh bruises all over his body, a severely bulging eye, and a newly fractured larynx. He had died from a cerebral hemorrhage of "terrible" proportions, caused by his having been beaten about the head.
The press also learned that Stark's interrogation had lasted for eight solid hours, and that for part of the time, Stark lay on the floor, while Deputy Chief Tappen (shown above), who weighed 300 pounds, had rested his foot on Stark's throat.
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All these facts were known by the public when the District Attorney levied manslaughter charges against Tanner and seven policemen, and assault charges against five more. And yet, the article about the new Protective Association refers to Stark's death as accidental. It also implies that the District Attorney's action, rather than an unmerited and vicious beating by rogue policemen, is the cause of the Department's declining morale.
Looking back almost a century, I don't know what to make of this situation. With the facts widely known, I don't understand why prominent and mostly well-educated men would want to hinder the prosecution of renegade policemen, who with forethought had perpetrated an unlawful killing - but then, I've seen comparable things at other points in history.
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