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 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.