Police and the Empire City
Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This scrupulous debut from historian and policy analyst Guariglia traces "how race shaped modern policing and how, in turn, modern policing helped to define and redefine racial boundaries in New York." Focusing on the period between the New York City Police Department's founding in 1845 and WWII, Guariglia contends that the NYPD drew on "colonial methods" from abroad to police the city's growing immigrant population. For example, he details how NYPD commissioners Francis Vinton Greene and William McAdoo, both veterans of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, deployed tactics developed on the archipelago, most notably "ethnic squads" that enlisted members of the policed communities to join official patrols. (The NYPD's early 20th-century German and Italian squads were particularly helpful when it came to surveilling those communities.) Guariglia excels at teasing out the numerous ways the NYPD helped enforce racial boundaries, including by shutting down interracial "Black-and-Tan" nightclubs (which served Black and white patrons) and offering Irish and Italian officers opportunities to "consolidate their ‘whiteness' " by meting out violence against Black New Yorkers. He also draws parallels with more recent eras of NYC policing (the post-9/11 Demographics Unit, which spied on Muslims, is reminiscent of Progressive-era ethnic squads, according to Guariglia). The result is a damning investigation of the NYPD's past.
