and racial divisions in the city contributed to the tensions. In 1964, a race riot started in Harlem, Manhattan, after an Irish NYPD lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan shot and killed a black teenager named James Powell, who was only 15. The riot spread to Bedford–Stuyvesant, and resulted in the destruction and looting of many neighborhood businesses, many of which were Jewish-owned. Race relations between the NYPD and the city's black community strained as police were seen as an instrument of oppression and racially biased law enforcement. On top of this, few black officers were present on the force. In predominantly black New York neighborhoods, arrests and prosecutions for drug-related crimes were higher than anywhere else in the city, despite evidence that illegal drugs were being used at the same rate in white communities. This further contributed to the problems between the white dominated police force and the black community. Race riots followed in 1967 and 1968 as part of the political and racial tensions in the United States of the era, aggravated by high unemployment among blacks, de facto segregation in housing, and the failure to enforce civil rights laws. This contributed to the New York City teachers' strike of 1968, when Brownsville's majority white teacher population clashed with the majority black residential population. Conversely, the mostly white population of Canarsie protested efforts at racial school integration in the early 1970s, which largely led to white flight in Canarsie by the 1980s. Manhattan Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States became a magnet for immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their home countries. After arriving in New York, many new immigrants ended up living in squalor in the slums of the Five Points neighborhood. By the 1820s, the area was home to many gambling dens and brothels, and was known as a dangerous place to go. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the area and was appalled by the horrendous living conditions he saw there. The area was so notorious that it even caught the attention of Abraham Lincoln, who visited there in 1860 before his Cooper Union speech. The predominantly Irish Five Points Gang was one of the country's first major organized crime entities. As Italian immigration grew in the early 20th century, many joined ethnic gangs. A prominent example is Al Capone, who got his start in crime with the Five Points Gang. The Mafia (also known as Cosa