19th century Omaha had an early history as a "wide-open town" where prostitution, gambling, drugs and alcohol were accepted. There were no official law-enforcement officers until after the city was incorporated. On February 12, 1857, the city of Omaha was incorporated and in March
J.A. Miller was appointed the city marshall. In March 1866, the city council enlarged the police force to four men. Prostitution was a brisk trade in early Omaha, and
sex workers in the
Burnt District numbered 1,500 by the 1870s. In 1868, the city council created the position of "police judge" and appointed
John H. Sahler. Later that year, the city council directed members of the force to provide themselves with "dark blue, single breasted coats, shirts and pants of the same material". They were required to have caps with a brass plate in the front marked
City Police. Between 1869 and 1882 the size of the department fluctuated, reaching 14 officers in 1882. In 1884, Marshal
Roger T. Guthrie was convicted and imprisoned for accepting a
bribe. Early years of
land grabs by the
Omaha Claim Club were thwarted by the 1857 trial of
Baker v. Morton, where the
United States Supreme Court ruled that Omaha's land barons could not claim up large amounts of land in order to sell them at exorbitant costs. This stopped
homesteading in the area. While the common practice ended, early land grabs were fruitful. Lots in one of the early plots were subdivided to form
Scriptown, where territorial legislators were awarded with land for keeping the controversial capital in Omaha. Because of the lack of police force, in early years groups sometimes resorted to lynchings, as elements of the community enforced their own rough justice. Victims were likely to be outsiders, transient workers or laborers who did not live in the city, whom no one knew. In the west and south, victims were lynched for alleged crimes of property as well as of violence. In 1891 there was the first recorded
lynching in Omaha of an African American. A mob lynched
Joe Coe, also known as George Smith, a worker from
Council Bluffs across the river. He had allegedly raped a white woman. No one was tried for Coe's murder. At the start of the 20th century,
Anna Wilson ran a high-class brothel in the
Sporting District, the
vice district run by political boss Tom Dennison. During the
Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898,
Ada Everleigh and her sister ran a high-class bordello to make a profit from the many visitors to the city. They closed their operation soon after the expo and moved to the larger environs of
Chicago.
Notable 19th-century crimes in Omaha There were several notable crimes in Omaha during its first 50 years. They included the murder of a federal clerk on November 4, 1881. After receiving several anonymous letters and postcards threatening his life because of his enforcement of the
Slocumb Laws and state laws prohibiting Sunday liquor sales, Colonel W.B. Smith, Clerk of the United States Circuit and District Courts, was murdered in Omaha. On November 15, 1891, Nettie Birdler, a private in the
Salvation Army, murdered Captain Haddie Smith during an international exposition of the army's troops, with representatives from across the United States and France present. The motive of the murder went unknown, as Birdler committed suicide immediately after shooting Smith.
Joe Coe, also known as George Smith, was a 50-year-old African-American railroad porter who was lynched by a mob on October 8, 1891. He was accused of raping a 14-year-old. Coe had an alibi and witnesses attesting to his innocence. Because he had been convicted of rape several years before in neighboring
Council Bluffs, the mob decided he was guilty of this event. A crowd of 10,000 gathered for the lynching. Seven men were arrested for the crime, including the chief of police and a major businessman; however, after a mob gathered outside of the jail and threatened to destroy it in order to "liberate" the suspects, each of them were freed, and nobody was ever brought to trial for the lynching. On June 11, 1895, James Ish murdered a man named Chappele after finding him in an embrace and kissing his wife. After he initially corroborated his wife's story confessing she killed Chappele when he attempted to abduct her, Ish later recanted and admitted his own guilt, confident a jury would not find him guilty. In another affair of the heart, on November 18, 1888, Eliza Beechler, the wife of Harry W. King, Jr., a merchant from Chicago, followed him to Omaha's
Paxton Hotel where she suspected him of carrying on an affair. On her arrival he insisted she leave, and after escorting her to the hotel lobby she shot him several times, murdering him. It was later revealed that King had married three different women, including the one with whom he shared the room at the Paxton. The crime caused a sensation in Omaha, Chicago, where the King family was prominent at the time, and St. Louis, close to where the third wife was from. On November 5, 1895, three men were held in suspicion of their involvement in the abduction and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. On April 14, 1899, Anton Inda, an
Omaha policeman, was held for murder after an African American singer named J.A. Smith was murdered at the police station. Smith was killed when he was stabbed in the skull with a stilleto, and a witness was suspected to have been suppressed through intimidation. In 1900 the city and country closely followed the
kidnapping of 16-year-old
Edward Cudahy Jr. After the boy's father, a
meatpacking magnate, paid
ransom, Edward Cudahy, Jr. was safely returned. Police and officials in Omaha and other cities were concerned that the payment of ransom would set an unfortunate precedent for other cases. Although the kidnappers were caught several years later, both were acquitted, in part because Nebraska did not have a statute relating directly to kidnapping. One of the kidnappers,
Pat Crowe, became somewhat of a folk hero for this crime and robberies, even appearing as a speaker about them.
Tom Dennison's political machine Early in the 1890s
Tom Dennison, a gambler and saloon-owner from Colorado and Montana, arrived in Omaha and established a base of political power. He took control of most of the vice elements in the city. For more than 25 years, Dennison's power was so great that he controlled crime in the city, the police reported to him daily, and a mayor answered directly to him. The Dennison political machine ended in 1935 after he died. During his reign, Dennison kept an office at the Budweiser Saloon in the
Sporting District, where he looked after his interests.
20th-century changes On September 28, 1919, the Omaha Race Riot erupted, one of many race riots that occurred in cities that year, reflecting common postwar economic stress and social tensions. In Omaha, Tom Dennison fanned tensions through sensational news accounts to build his own political power. The immediate cause of the riot was the arrest of 41-year-old
Will Brown, an
African-American Omaha civilian, on charges that he had raped a young white woman. The newspaper had contended a rash of attacks had occurred. A mob of white men, led by volatile adolescents, gathered at the
Douglas County Courthouse, their numbers growing by the hour. They threatened grabbing Brown as vigilantes. They lynched Omaha Mayor Edward Smith as he tried to prevent the mob from taking Brown. The mayor was rescued by Omaha police, but they could not control the mob. The men set fire to the Courthouse while trying to flush out Brown and police officers trying to protect him and numerous other prisoners. They lynched Brown after he was turned over to them and then attacked other parts of the city. Utterly unable to control the situation, the city asked for help from the
United States Army. By September 29, the Army had declared martial law, enforcing it with 1,700 soldiers from nearby
Fort Omaha,
Camp Funston (part of present-day
Fort Riley,
Kansas) and
Camp Dodge,
Iowa. No further loss of life occurred after Brown was lynched. Historians attributed the
Omaha Race Riot of 1919 directly to Dennison's influence. After his candidate for mayor lost the election, Dennison worked to gain control by some other means. Acting in collusion with the
Omaha Bee, a tabloid newspaper, Dennison heightened tensions of the city's
World War I veterans and others by sensationalizing apparent increases in attacks on women by African American men. (Later investigations showed many attacks had been made by Dennison's white thugs dressed in
black face.) The riot brought an end to the mayorship of Dennison's opponent. No one was convicted of any crime in the lynching.
1920s and Prohibition In 1926
Frank Carter was sentenced to be executed after he was found guilty of murdering two Omahans and terrorizing the city as the "Phantom Sniper" for more than two weeks. During the 1920s and 30s,
Little Italy was the center of crimes associated with the manufacture, distribution, and competition over profits of
bootleg liquor during
Prohibition. Little Italy native
Tony Biase was the "leading Mafioso in Omaha" from the Prohibition through the 1970s.
Safety measures In 1923, the police created a separate motor force unit. "Pill boxes" were installed throughout the city. Some pill boxes were still in service in 2005. Theories of policing have alternated between the use of vehicle units and more community-based patrols. Also in 1923, the police department established the first
safety patrol in the United States, chiefly to ensure children negotiated increased vehicle traffic safely as they walked to and from school. ==Current==