In the late 1970s and early 1980s Baltimore area cops were known for using saps or blackjacks to beat men into submission. The basic technique was to check or grab the shoulder and beat the head. I know two fellows who fought cops armed with saps. The one fellow had one of his brothers killed by cops when he was being taken into custody using saps, and another beaten to death in prison by corrections officers using black jacks or radios [there were two conflicting accounts of the incident]. Both slain men were poor whites, so no one cared. By the mid 1980s certain groups of black criminals were imitating the cops by making their own handy clubs. This category of blunt weapon, the short metal or weighted hand club, is the most deadly per use, primarily because the people using them share the qualities of the knifer [ruthlessness, willingness to finish and proximity] and the qualities of the bat wielder [superior size and/or numbers].

Oral summary of various eyewitness and first-person accounts

“The Dawgz was a vicious crew. They three brutha’s from New York—ruthless, big, tall, thick dudes. DeeLo was the one ta watch fo. He’d hit ya first from the sneak en then things happened. They could fight, en they oways used a whipstick: a fishing weight attached to a clothes hanger en wound up with black plastic tape.

“There was DeeLo with the sneaky paw, Eli pack the twenty-two, en Tone—he have a black snake he feed white rats to. They’d fight ya first. The twenty-two was for when things got outta hand. DeeLo cap five dudes I knew of, one died. I knew ‘im to knockout three dudes by whipstickin’. They was a bad crew. They outta state now, en I heard that DeeLo is dead. He didn’t make many friends.”