Emily Brooks, Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City
Reviewed By Douglas J. Flowe
Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City
by Emily Brooks
University of North Carolina Press
October 2023, 258 pp.
Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani is often credited with transforming the city from the gritty, dystopian, urban jungle, popularized in films such as The Warriors (1979) and Escape from the Bronx (1983), into one of the safest cities in the country in the 1990s. A successful prosecutor, famous for going after organized crime and the prosecution of corrupt officers, Giuliani paired with Police Commissioner William Bratton to implement tough-on-crime policies that drew from popular conservative criminological thought; namely, the Broken Windows Theory. The theory proposed that a zero-tolerance policy against visible indications of “disorder” would alleviate issues of petty crime, like vagrancy, loitering, and vandalism, which in turn would make public space feel safe to common community members. An orderly environment and the presence of the community would signal to more serious offenders that they should commit their crimes elsewhere. Scholars have disputed whether Giuliani’s increased policing of petty offenders and policies like Stop and Frisk were responsible for the mid-1990s decrease in New York’s crime rate, or if those changes were already on the way as the city’s economy improved across the decade. Likewise, there are questions about the constitutionality of such crime-fighting tactics that target individuals for minor infractions in ways that disregard their freedoms; essentially overreacting to behaviors that are arguably harmless or defined by class or race.
In Gotham’s War Within a War, Emily Brooks reminds us that this has happened before. The players were different, but New York City leadership had previously vowed to clean up the city and attempted to do so by wielding the city’s police department in a hammer-like fashion. And they did so with some of the same logic in mind. From 1934 until 1946 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his Commissioner Lewis Valentine sought to realign the city’s criminal justice system and cleanse the police department of any association with the disgraced Tammany Hall Democratic political machine, which sat at the center of police corruption allegations. They planned to rip out the rotten core of the apple and replace it with a “new model of liberal law-and-order policing” that rejected political partisanship and pledged to purge the department of racial discrimination; within its ranks and on the streets. (2) However, the quickly changing racial demography of the city figured into La Guardia’s plans, as many have argued it did for Giuliani. And, as was true of Giuliani and Bratton’s thinking, La Guardia and Valentine targeted “disorderly persons,” sex workers, delinquents, loiterers, and petty criminals who used public space. Amid the war on drugs, a conflict fought nationally and internationally, Giuliani often treated minor offenders like flies in the ointment; dangerous threats to the national effort. Likewise, the same was true of La Guardia, a mayor during World War II, who understood petty crimes as “threats to national security.” (3) Brooks very skillfully brings this aspect of her study to life with the use of examples, such as La Guardia’s conviction that gambling was treasonous to the war effort, or the decree that officers go easy on and “protect those thousands of our boys on their way through” the city. (133) To do so, streets had to be swept of subversives in the form of streetwalkers, hoodlums, and gamblers, and police should beat a path through the bush for servicemen to safely, and morally, make their way into and out of the city’s ports. La Guardia and Valentine reinforced this effort with a 7,000-officer-strong auxiliary police force, a vice squad, youth-monitoring community groups, and policies meant to build the numbers in the police department and keep long-timers from retiring. Thus, they leveraged a sense of patriotism in service to bolster morale and numbers on the force and clamp down on the city’s crime. As during Giuliani’s time in office, communities most affected by increased patrolling protested brutality and harassment, but “the space for criticism of NYPD policies narrowed in the wartime political landscape,” and little changed. Politicians the country over “adopted a framework of coercive patriotism” that made political protest seem “selfish, dangerous, and anti-American.” (6)
Brooks ultimately depicts La Guardia’s turn at running New York City as the “origin story for the nonpartisan, deeply discriminatory form of policing we know so well today.” (9) Therein, she sees a “fiction,” that says, “unbiased police power can craft an orderly and equitable city in a deeply unequal society.” (174) Such logic scaffolded Giuliani’s crime policies half a century later; albeit in a conservative criminological framing. Despite years of protesting police brutality in the twenty-first century and public scholarship and media revealing the issues associated with mass incarceration, big budgetary increases in policing still follow conversations about crime until the time of publication, in 2023.
This work is not only timely but reflective of growing scholarship on law enforcement that places New York City front and center; rightfully so considering how influential Gotham is in terms of law enforcement and penology. With resources like the La Guardia papers, court record books, oral histories, and NAACP papers from the Library of Congress, Brooks has crafted a major contribution to the history of the often overlooked mid-twentieth century development of America’s criminal justice system; a story that will be relevant to all students of law, urban history, criminality, and twentieth-century politics.
Douglas J. Flowe is an Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis.