During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse city. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police 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 import tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devise modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrate supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, or German police to form "ethnic squads," 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 "colorblind," technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.
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.
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
"A remarkable historical narrative that details the racial and ethnic projects at the center of the development of the institution of modern policing." - Alex S. Vitale, author of (The End of Policing) "Exhaustive, meticulous, and brilliant, Police and the Empire City is an indispensable addition to our understanding of race, empire, law enforcement, and the places where these elements intersect. Matthew Guariglia's work has provided us a genealogy of the problems that continue to beset modern policing and the thinking that produced them in the first place. A striking scholarly achievement." - Jelani Cobb, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Columbia University "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 result is a damning investigation of the NYPD's past." (Publishers Weekly) "By drawing out the material and ideological connections between the police and the policed, Guariglia crafts a persuasive and innovative accounting of modern policing as an instrument of racial and ethnic formation. . . . This book would be an excellent resource for scholars and students in several fields and disciplines, including the burgeoning interdisciplinary work on state violence and racial capitalism; historical analyses of whiteness and immigration; as well as scholarship on imperial and global regimes of policing and militarization. The book is thoughtfully organized and accessibly written, and, both explicitly and implicitly, stakes out clear connections to the strategies of contemporary urban police violence and racism." - Emily Holloway (The Gotham Center for New York City History) "Matthew Guariglia's ambitious first book substantially advances the project of integrating the history of the police into U.S. cultural history, particularly the history of ethnicity, race, and empire. . . . Guariglia's approach to policing history is refreshingly contemporary-his bibliography is excellent-and this book is a model of where I hope the history of policing is heading." - Elaine Frantz (Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era) "Recommended. General readers, graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - F. J. Augustyn Jr (Choice)
