Francesco Landolfi on Matthew Guariglia’s *Police & the Empire City: Race & the Origins of Modern Policing in New York*

Through the extensive use of primary sources consulted at numerous archives and libraries, author Matthew Guariglia addresses the decades-long racialization theme of the New York Police Department (NYPD) from its origins to the late Progressive Era. In the history of the United States, the process of cultural assimilation by an ethnic community also passes through its social inclusion within the local authorities. The history of New York City, in particular, matches with its population growth, which throughout the nineteenth century increased enormously due to periodic Irish/German and later Italian/Jewish-Russian mass migration waves, thus creating the melting pot of ethnic communities to which even local enforcement had to adapt.

The NYPD was established as early as 1845 in order to counter increasingly frequent cases of petty crime resulting from the high demographic increase from the massive arrival of Irish and German immigrants, who were fleeing the Potato Famine and the monarchical repressions of the failed revolutions of 1848. It should be further noted that between the late 1840s and the early 1870s, the population of New York City became the protagonist of several urban riots that involved Irish immigrants and their representatives in the Tammany Hall political machine, close to the local Democratic Party. More specifically, the first episode concerning the improvement of the NYPD occurred between 1857 and 1863 with the resulting establishment of the Emigrant Squad (conceived by Captain George Walling) and its headquarters so as to counter a wide, mostly immigrant-based criminal phenomenon.

Around the second half of the nineteenth century, the NYPD uniformed force continued to consist exclusively of Irish-American police officers, who suffered from the prejudice of a “hypermasculine prizefighting aesthetic.”[1] However, as additional ethnic communities arrived, efforts were undertaken to enhance the local police force, particularly focusing on combating vice crimes in numerous disorderly gambling houses, and addressing persistent political corruption. In this instance, the initial revelation of a bribery ring involving neighborhood gangs, law enforcement, and local politics to state political authorities (later formalized in the 1894-1895 Lexow Commission) came from Chief Inspector Max Schmittberger, a German-American who acknowledged paying a bribe in order to secure a promotion. Theodore Roosevelt’s following years as Police Commissioner played a part in making the NYPD increasingly Americanized and impervious to further attempts of corruption through the principle of so-called “Rooseveltian meritocracy,”[2] which opposed the idea of patronage, now run for decades by Tammany Hall within the New York City public administration.

During the same period, in addition to the problem of Americanization of local enforcement, the issue of increased militarization of police officers also emerged. Police Commissioner Francis Vinton Greene addressed this topic. As a veteran of the Spanish-American War, he became one of the most important “contributors to the project of modern policing,”[3] recognizing that addressing ethnic crime was essentially a micro-conflict in the city between the US-born population (representing law enforcement) and the foreign-born population (associated with lawbreaking). The resolution to this decades-old social dispute involved a general Americanization or institutionalization of immigrants, along with a parallel process of the “professionalization of law enforcement.”[4]

Policing evolves based on the types of crimes being prosecuted, heavily influenced by public perception of social security. In the early 1900s, the mass arrival of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe prompted the NYPD, led by Dutch-American Cornelius Willemse, to enhance its capabilities by training officers in the German, Italian, Chinese, and Yiddish languages spoken in the urban areas of the Lower East Side. In fact, ethnic organized crime could more easily hide here due to support from its own ethnic community. It is no coincidence that in 1904 the NYPD began its professionalization process by establishing specialized units like the German Squad and by recruiting officers from insular ethnic communities, exemplified by the appointment of Chinese-American patrolman Warren Charles.

The fight against Italian organized crime, known as the Black Hand, was much more difficult during those years, as it involved numerous extortions and bombings targeting businesses run by honest Italian immigrants. The turning point in addressing this serious problem came with Italian-American Detective Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, who disproved all stereotypes about the “innate and biological inferiority and natural criminality”[5] of Italians. In fact, in 1904, he proposed the idea of establishing an Italian Squad, consisting of a few undercover detectives dedicated solely to prosecuting crimes committed by the Black Hand and the Sicilian Mafia. Petrosino’s efforts in the transatlantic fight against Italian organized crime were tragically cut short by his assassination in Palermo a few years later. This occurred while he was on a secret mission to gather evidence for the extradition of New York Black Hand members to Italy under the 1907 Immigration Act.

In 1910, despite New York City having an African-American minority of approximately 600,000 people in a total population exceeding 4.5 million, there was a pressing need for the NYPD to reflect the city’s diversity. This highlighted the importance of beginning to recruit African-American police officers, despite enduring stereotypes conflating “blackness and criminality.”[6] This prejudice was not definitively contradicted until 1911 when the first African American patrolman was recruited in New York: Samuel Jesse Battle. He and Petrosino perfectly represented the best example of two different ‘black’ and ‘non-white’ ethnic minorities who were actually “eager to embrace whiteness”[7] of Americanization. All of this was interpreted by Police Administrator Raymond Fosdick’s studies as a chance to solve the eternal “American Problem”[8] regarding the difficult relationship between ‘race’ and ‘policing,’ especially in a cosmopolitan city like New York.

Given that processes of Americanization, militarization, professionalization, and racialization had been ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century, these were eventually integrated during the Progressive Era with the concept of modernization in both technological and cognitive aspects of criminal justice. Thus, pioneering methodologies of criminal identification from European studies were developed. These encompassed the criminal anthropology, as articulated by Italian physician Cesare Lombroso (which viewed crime as an unfortunate genetic consequence), in contrast to contemporary sociological theories from the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (which posited crime as a result of precarious social and economic conditions). In addition to this, there were the pioneering identification methodologies developed by French Detective Alphonse Bertillon through his Bertillon system (along with Rogue’s Gallery). He proceeded to formalize the serial filing of criminals through “fingerprints, photographs, and a documented modus operandi,”[9] as well as the analysis of physical and psychic characteristics, for a complete and precise bureaucratization of law enforcement.

The first to carry out this modernization of the NYPD was Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, according to the idea that local enforcement should have behaved as a sort of company at the service of the citizenry, and following the entrepreneurial theories of Taylorism and Fordism to make police officers “as effective and efficient as possible.”[10] In addition to enhancing the cognitive abilities of the uniformed force through attendance at a “training school, library, and partnership with local universities,”[11] there was also a focus on providing better equipment, embodying the Latin proverb mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). Thus, “nutritional science,”[12] and the later establishment of the Diet Squad, was born in 1917 for the general improvement of police officers’ physical condition.

The onset of the Prohibition Era and the passage of the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the Immigration Restriction Act (1924) halted European mass immigration while simultaneously highlighting a serious issue: the rise of interstate crime linked to alcohol bootlegging and, notably, the emergence of the Italian-American Mafia. The spread of nationwide crime prompted the evolution of a federal police force, initially established in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation, which was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover in 1924, marking a significant step towards creating a modern national police force.

In conclusion, the history of the NYPD and its structural evolution vividly reflects the history of its city, which has grown and developed in both contrasting and complementary directions over the decades. In addition to the rise of ethnic crime phenomena, there were also episodes that exemplified a profound process of “benevolent assimilation,”[13] embodied by officers like Walling, Schmittberger, Roosevelt, Greene, Willemse, Charles, Petrosino, Battle, and Woods, who contributed to the greatness of the “growing city”[14] of New York.

[1] Guariglia, p. 46.

[2] Guariglia, p. 65.

[3] Guariglia, p. 74.

[4] Guariglia, p. 84.

[5] Guariglia, p. 112.

[6] Guariglia, p. 141.

[7] Guariglia, p. 132.

[8] Guariglia, p. 9.

[9] Guariglia, p. 179.

[10] Guariglia, p. 156.

[11] Guariglia, p. 156.

[12] Guariglia, p. 168.

[13] Guariglia, p. 76.

[14] Guariglia, p. 7.