Before President Trump tweeted the phrase “When the looting starts, the shooting starts" on early Friday, it was uttered by a Southern police chief during civil rights unrest in the 1960s. nbcnews.to/2Xfu9Ae (1/5) #NBCNewsThreads
Walter Headley, who was chief of police in Miami for 20 years, said that law enforcement was going after “young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. ... We don't mind being accused of police brutality." (2/5)
Miami hadn’t faced “racial disturbances and looting” Headley added because, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” (3/5)
The phrase was considered to have contributed to the city's race riots in the late 1960s, the Washington Post reports. (4/5)
Headley, who died only a few months later in 1968 and had been denounced by civil rights leaders, as the "architect of a crime crackdown that sent police dogs and shotgun-toting patrolmen into Miami's slums in force." (5/5)
