Members of the Atlanta Ghetto Police pose for a photograph circa 1941.
Ghetto Police (officially known as the Ghetto Auxiliary Policing Service), called 'the Negro Police' by Black Confederates, were police auxiliaries organized by the local ghetto councils called 'Negro Councils or NegCouns for short*' within the myriad of Black Confederate ghettos found throughout the many of the major cities of the Freedomite Confederate States of America.
Members of the Negro Police wore black or dark blue police uniforms, an identifying armband (not worn in the picture above), a custodian helmet and a badge (though chiefs wore a kepi), they weren’t allowed to carry guns but did carried batons and large knotted sticks. Also a notable feature of the Negro Police was their lack of footwear, this was done on purpose by the Freedom Party to humiliate them and in the words of Freedom Party Attorney General Ferdinand Koenig:
“To drive home the point that they (the Negro Police) are deemed as sheep dogs looking over the flock of black sheep readying them for the slaughter.”
In ghettos where the NegroCouns was resistant to Freedomite orders, the Negro police were often used to control or outright replace the council. One of the largest Negro police units was to be found in the Montgomery Ghetto, where the police numbered about 2,500. The Atlanta Ghetto had about 1,200 with others having similar or smaller numbers to Atlanta’s.
A picture of the Atlanta Ghetto in 1940 (top). Harvey X. Duncan, chief of the Atlanta Ghetto Police circa 1943 (bottom).
The Negro Police was also heavily violent and corrupt with Harvey Xavier Duncan, the chief of the Atlanta Ghetto Auxiliary Policing Service, detailing in his memoirs the day-to-day work of the police i.e. protecting food depots, controlling employees at ghetto bakeries or other places of business, violently putting down riots, as well as patrolling the area and confiscating food from the ghetto residents. He recounts the involvement of Negro Policemen in swindling food rations and in forcing women to provide sexual services in exchange for bread.
The Americo-Jamaican historian and Ghetto archivist Elliot Hill has described the cruelty of the ghetto negro police as "at times greater than that of the Freedom Party Guards or the regular army." The ghetto police ultimately shared the same fate with all their fellow ghetto inmates. A ghetto’s liquidation they were either killed on–site or sent to extermination camps (usually after rounding up the ghetto residents and putting them on transports to the camps).
Elliot Hill pouring over research material for his most famous archival work “Ghettos: The Overlooked Centres of the Population Reduction” circa 1962.
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* = Though they were organised by the NegCouns, they received their orders from local Confederate military commanders, Freedom Guards leaders, or from local Freedom Party officials.