The alternative is to let the outlaws enter the town and try to keep them under control, at least until they start something. . . but that might lead to a close-quarters struggle without warning: the enemy would have time to get doped up and drunk, time to unlimber his weaponry and choose his terrain. With an all-night effort, some fifty or seventy-five reinforcements might be rallied from neighboring towns and counties. . . but on a holiday weekend no police force has many men to spare, and even these would be subject to instant recall in case the outlaw pack suddenly veered off course and stopped for a beer break at some unexpected place. The whole battle plan would have to be changed on the spur of the moment.
The Angels have never fought a pitched battle with the forces of law and order, but they have attacked individual cops or as many as three and four so often that police in most towns either treat them gently or confront them with as much force as possible. The outlaws don’t share the middle-class respect for authority and have no reverence for the badge. They measure a cop’s authority by his power to enforce it. Some of the stories from the original Hollister fracas, in 1947, tell of local police being locked in their own jail by rampaging cyclists who then took over the town. But the only Hell’s Angel now riding who was actually present at Hollister discounts most of the tales that have grown up over the years. We were just there for a party, he explains. As far as punching on the citizens and stuff like that, we didn’t do it. Sure, we made a lot of noise, and we chased some people who started throwing rocks at us. When the cops got panicky we put a couple of them in garbage cans and stacked their bikes on top of them, that’s all.
In 1948, a year after Hollister, a thousand or so motorcyclists had a party in Riverside, near Los Angeles. They raced through the streets, hurled firecrackers at the cops and generally terrorized the citizenry. One grinning pack halted the car of an Air Force officer in the middle of town. When the airman honked his horn the cyclists jumped on the hood of his car and caved it in, smashed every window, slugged the driver and pawed his terror-stricken wife before letting them go with a warning not to honk at pedestrians. Sheriff Gary Rayburn cornered one bunch of invaders and ordered them out of town, but they contemptuously slapped him around, ripped off his badge and tore his uniform. When the sheriff called for reinforcements the outlaws fled.
Long before the era of mutual-assistance pacts between neighboring police forces, the embryo wild ones had better sense than to fight seriously with armed cops. Even now they will only challenge police if the situation obviously calls for restraint on the part of the law. . . a riot in the making, a roust in front of TV cameras, or any confrontation that draws a crowd and makes shooting out of the question.* Because of this, a pack of Hell’s Angels on a run to a resort area is a hellish thing for rural cops to deal with. The trick is to control them without any provocation, but outlaws are very easily provoked. Once a showdown gets out of control, there are bound to be injuries, bad publicity, and the chance of a career-tarnishing reprimand for any cop who loses his head and takes extreme measures, like shooting into a melee and hitting the wrong person.
* In August 1966 three Angels were jailed for attacking police who broke up a Hell’s Angel funeral wake in south San Francisco. Your conduct can’t be tolerated, said Judge W. Howard Hartley as he pronounced sentence. This business of ‘let’s get the cops’ cannot go unpunished. You have acted like parasites. You show no respect for the public or yourselves. Your hostility to the law is beyond comprehension. The three Angels had pleaded guilty to what was then a new law making it a felony to injure a law enforcement officer. . . so instead of copping a minor resisting-arrest plea, they laid themselves open to new and stiffer penalties. One — Lew Roseberry, twenty-two, of Hayward — got a year in jail and five years’ probation. Ray Hutchins III, also twenty-two, was granted mercy because of his honorable discharge from the Air Force; he received only six months in jail and three year’s probation. Twenty-two-year-old Ken Krake cited his record as a former Explorer Scout and got off with ninety days in jail.