University of Virginia Library

Rizzo Runs A Good, Clean City

—Frank Rizzo, Sept. 15, 1971

PHILADELPHIA (LNS)—
"I'm the best fucking cop in
America," Frank Rizzo has
been known to proclaim
modestly during his four year
term as Police Commissioner.

So now that he is elected
mayor of Philadelphia—the
country's fourth largest
city—many people expect him
to walk around with a billy club
tucked in his belt just like he
used to do—even when he was
wearing tuxedos.

Rizzo, who was on the
police force for 28 years, said
he was merely running on his
record, a record that was clear
enough to make Democrat
Rizzo lose in 23 out of 24
usually Democratic black
wards.

Rizzo's Republican
opponent was Thacher
Longstreth, a
Princeton-educated director of
the Philadelphia Chamber of
Commerce. Not many blacks
participated in the election,
but one black woman spoke
for some when she said to
Longstreth during a campaign
stop, "You ain't much baby,
but you're all we got."

During Rizzo's term as
Police Commissioner, the
number of cops has jumped
from 6,000 to 7,200 and
appropriations for the
department have increased
from $60 million to $92
million. At the same time
money for health, recreation,
welfare and sanitation has
either declined or remained the

same. The Police Department is
the largest single item on the
city budget.

Rizzo has often bragged of
his modern riot control
equipment:

"Riot buses with 200 police
can be on the scene in 15
minutes. There are seven
floating armories with 14
trained marksmen patrolling
the city every hour. The only
other thing we can do now is
to buy some tanks and start
mounting some machine guns."

Rizzo's record has been
pretty consistent. During the
first decade of his service on
the force, he ordered street
sweeps of gay people and
staged a series of raids on cafes
and coffee houses—to round up
folk singers, chess players and
inter-racial couples. He called
them all "sex perverts."

In 1955 some of his police
technique caught up with him
when he was charged with
assault and battery by five men
from the Philadelphia Naval
Hospital who he picked up for
"boisterous behavior." They
had been taken to police
headquarters, lined up against a
wall and beaten by then-Capt.
Rizzo. The charges against him
were later dismissed.

Two years after that he
blackjacked a man named
Alexander Castelli, fracturing
his jaw and blinding him in one
eye. Castelli had parked his car
illegally and refused to move it
when Rizzo ordered him to.
Rizzo points to this particular
case to prove how
non-discriminatory he
is—Castelli is white.

Rizzo's other exploits are
famous around Philadelphia.
He prevented a black disc
jockey from breaking up a
fight in the ghetto by holding a
gun at his head and saying,
"Make one false move, you
black son-of-a-bitch, and it'll
take 36 doctors to put you
back together again."

Nationally Rizzo is most
famous for his raid on the
Black Panther headquarters in
August 1970 right before the
time of the Panther
Convention. Television stations
and newspapers showed cops
ransacking the Panther office,
pulling out the plumbing,
chopping up and carting away
furniture and forcing Panthers
to strip naked at gunpoint in
the middle of the street in
front of cameras.

Rizzo was pretty clear on
his view of the Panthers:

"We're dealing with a group
of fanatics, yellow dogs, that
they are. We're dealing with
psychotics and we must be in a
position to take them on.
These creeps lurk in the dark.
They should be strung up—I
mean within the law."

Considering this and other
similarities between the two,
it's not surprising that Rizzo
should feel that Chicago's
Mayor Daley is "the greatest
mayor in the U.S.A."

Rizzo's war on heroin was
much less fierce. One
newspaper man watched a
policeman lounge against his
patrol car in full view of
pushers selling smack.

"If people want to make
these charges and they have
names and dates, we'll look
into it but if they have nothing
to back up their claims they're
going to hear from me. I will
lie in wait for them like a tiger
in the grass."

Rizzo's campaign slogan was
"Rizzo Means Business." For
blacks, for people like
Alexander Castelli, for the
1800 people in Rizzo's files
(who he considers enemies of
the city) his election means
business.