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During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts imported tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devised modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrated supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, and German police to form "ethnic squads" to the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime-even the introduction of fingerprinting-were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly color-blind, technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.
List of contents
Introduction. Race, Legibility and Policing in the Unequal City
1. Becoming Blue: New York Police’s Earliest Encounters with Race and Ethnicity, 1845–1871 24
2. Racial Heirarchies of Crime and Policing: Bodies, Morals, and Gender in the NYPD, 1890–1897 44
3. Colonial Methods: Francis Vinton Greene’s Journey from Empire to Policing the Empire City 71
4. The Rise of Ethnic Policing: Warren Charles, Cornelius Willemse, and the German Squad 93
5. Policing the “Italian Problem”: Criminality, Racial Difference, and the NYPD Italian Squad, 1903–1909 107
6. “They Needed Me as Much as I Needed Them”: Black Patrolmen and Resistance to Police Brutality, 1900–1913 135
7. “Police are Raw Materials”: Training Bodies in the World War I Era 153
8. Global Knowledge/American Police: Information, International Collaboration, and the Rise of Technocratice “Color-Blind” Policing 176
Conclusion. Policing’s Small Toolbox and the Afterlives of Ethnic Policing 199
Acknowledgments 207
Notes 211
Bibliography 235
Index
About the author
Matthew Guariglia is Affiliated Scholar at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and coeditor of
The Essential Kerner Commission Report.
Summary
Matthew Guariglia traces the history the New York City Police Department between the 1840s and 1930s to show how race, immigration, and empire informed and explicitly shaped policing in New York.
