Do It Yourself
When a hyperimaginative CORE leader named Herbert Callender tried to arrest New York City's Mayor Robert F. Wagner a few weeks ago, he was operating on the correct assumption that everyone has a common-law right to perform a "citizen's arrest." As Callender saw it, His Honor was guilty of a felony--misappropriating public funds by allowing racial discrimination on city-sponsored construction projects. Callender was arrested for disorderly conduct and carted off to Bellevue Hospital for mental observation. Though he was soon released from the hospital (in time to face a court hearing this week), there are few better illustrations of the hazards of applying archaic laws in modern times.
Citizen's arrest goes back to medieval England, when the "hue and cry" raised by a criminal's victim obliged any bystander to join the chase and catch the felon. Forerunner of the Wild West posse, the hue and cry was then England's only reliable method of law enforcement. But ever since 1829, when Sir Robert Peel fathered London's bobbies, the existence of fulltime police forces has made citizen's arrest so rare and unnecessary that it now seems to bring more peril than protection.
No Plague on Policemen. The right is still honored in many countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Japan. With slight state variations, U.S. law holds that a citizen may arrest any person who has committed a felony in his presence or whom he knows to have committed a felony. But the citizen faces a disadvantage that does not plague a policeman, who may arrest anyone whom he reasonably believes to be a felon. If no felony has in fact been committed, the policeman can simply say, "Oops, sorry." In the same situation, a citizen is quite likely to be sued for false arrest, not to mention being arrested himself.
In 1954 the indefatigably litigious brothers Finn--Charles C. and George C. of Los Angeles--tried to gain possession of a war-surplus airplane that they claimed they had bought. Although a federal court had enjoined them from owning the plane, the Finns arrested a U.S. district attorney for "violating" their constitutional rights. Result: the Finns got a one-year rap for assaulting a federal officer and were blasted by a U.S. appellate court for having "taken the law into their own hands." Now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court is the case of Dr. Harvey K. Jackson, a Texan who in 1963 was informed by two Internal Revenue agents that his property was being attached for unpaid taxes. Incensed at this violation of what he claimed were his constitutional rights, Dr. Jackson pulled out a pistol and arrested the agents. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for forcibly impeding federal officers in their duties.
Dangerous Business. Certain citizens in certain circumstances still have relatively sound reasons to collar wrongdoers--the store detective who nabs a shoplifter, the bank clerk who chases a robber, the householder who captures a burglar. Moreover, they can usually depend on the police to show up and make the actual arrest. In the past 18 months, Chicago police have awarded framed citations to 24 such proxy policemen, whose arrestees ranged from alleged armed robbers to alleged rapists. But the prospect of being killed or wounded by a defiant felon, plus the legal perils of the act, makes for few pure citizen's arrests. It is, says Atlanta Police Chief Herbert T. Jenkins, "a very dangerous and hazardous business. We don't recommend that people go around grabbing other people."
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