Mar. 6, 1962 - New York Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm told an institute on police and community relations today that there had been 2,525 attacks on policemen in 1961, most of them of “the common garden variety of the individual being arrested and resisting arrest.” He said such attacks were “something which police everywhere contend with and which they generally regard as ‘part of the job.’” “However,” he continued, “there were 223 cases of attacks on police by groups. In one case in Rockaway, 30 persons were arrested after a mass attack. In one case in the lower Bronx, 16 persons were arrested after a crowd attacked a policeman. It is my feeling that the group attacks are those with which we should be most concerned, because such attacks bring a feeling to police that the public, for unknown reasons, will not support them when they are carrying out their sworn duties.” Mr. Arm said the attacks were not confined to so-called “depressed areas” of the city, nor did they originate as a result of racial conflicts. It was emphasized at the meeting, which was sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, that there was no easy solution to the attacks and that the police had perhaps become “scapegoats” for “moral and social bankruptcy.”
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