A History of Violence
On July 12, 1967, residents of Newark took to the streets to protest the police abuse of a Black cabdriver, John W. Smith. That night, Newark police officers had beaten him into paralysis and dragged him into the police station, simply because he drove his cab around their double-parked police car.
Violent encounters with the police catalyzed the Newark Rebellion, just as they did the protests in hundreds of other cities across America in 1967.
Over the decades law enforcement abuses in Newark have been so pervasive that in July 2014, the Department of Justice announced a pattern of widespread civil rights violations in the Newark Police Department. It found that Newark’s police officers had no legal basis for 75 percent of their pedestrian stops from 2009 to 2012, which were used disproportionately against Black people. In addition, the Newark police detained innocent people for “milling,” “loitering” or “wandering.”