Matthew Guariglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
Reviewed By Emily Holloway
Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
by Matthew Guariglia
Duke University Press
November 2023, 280 pp.
Matthew Guariglia’s history of the NYPD, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, approaches the institution through the imperial and colonial systems that originally shaped it. Set from the original founding of the NYPD in 1845 and concluding around the first World War, Guariglia’s book situates the NYPD as a medium of American imperial ambition and statecraft. Police and the Empire City is not merely a history of the country’s largest and most influential police department; it also positions the NYPD as a repository of scientific knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality that is mobilized and iterated to assert state authority and preserve order.
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. Although the book is broadly organized chronologically, that is a by-product of its focus on shifting trends of emigration to America. Indeed, as Guariglia makes clear, the primary objective of policing, particularly in a diverse city such as New York, is to make the state’s racially and ethnically heterogeneous subjects legible. This is the primary task of what Raymond Fosdick, a former NYPD administrator who figures prominently in Guariglia’s book, calls the “American Problem.” To address this “problem,” the NYPD, in collaboration with federal immigration authorities, military personnel, and the scientific and research community, form a loose cohort that the author groups under the category of “police intellectuals.” The book charts the shift in policing practices from brute force alone to brute force directed by the scientific method.
Police and the Empire City begins with its founding in 1845, a period in New York City’s political history that is frequently characterized by brazen political corruption among elected and appointed officials. Importantly to Guariglia’s story, however, are the trends of emigration from Ireland and Germany at that time. Immigrant men, particularly the English-speaking Irish, were recruited by Anglo-Dutch elite officials to enforce and preserve the arrangements of power and authority that governed New York’s rapidly expanding population. Immigrant officers were racialized and categorized as violent, corrupt, and intellectually inferior – characteristics that were encouraged by white elites who coordinated day-to-day enforcement. The ascent of ethnic policing also coincides, importantly, with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Immigrant officers understood that, by enforcing anti-Black policies such as this, or suppressing Irish-led disorder, they could “prove” their whiteness. The promise of white citizenship was the scaffolding for state-building in mid-century New York.
The problem of legibility becomes more acute for the NYPD as the nineteenth century progresses and new groups of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and China arrive, in addition to post-Emancipation Black Americans migrating from the American South. Guariglia takes great care to articulate the connections that drove and shaped immigration to the United States to the country’s increasing presence in geopolitical conflicts abroad. Chapter 3, “Colonial Methods: Francis Vinton Greene’s Journey from Empire to Policing the Empire City,” explores the policy transfer at work during the Spanish American War from Filipino and Cuban military operations to the NYPD. Commissioner Greene, who was appointed to lead the NYPD in 1903, was a general in the war and commanded 5,000 soldiers in an ambush of Manila. The American mandate of imperial occupation was a “benevolent assimilation” of Filipino subjects, one that promised the rights and privileges of citizenship in exchange for cultural assimilation and political obeisance. Greene played a crucial role in creating and developing institutions that could simultaneously quell rebellion and disorder and ensure comprehensive surveillance and legibility.
This section of the book marks a crucial point in Guariglia’s thesis. He convincingly demonstrates how imperial occupiers in the Philippines absorbed natives into the “machinery for maintaining order.” [1] Filipinos were developed into a security infrastructure for American occupation, working as translators, fixers, and local intelligence sources. Identifying and developing this native police force was necessarily accompanied by the creation and enforcement of ethnic and religious social differences among Filipinos – a tactic of internal division that would be replicated in rapidly diversifying American cities in the decades to come. In the decades between 1890 and 1915, at least 40% of American police departments had a chief or commissioner with military experience. [2] This transfer marked what scholars have called “imperial feedback,” or the global circuit of knowledge that relayed information throughout the empire. As soldiers and military officers returned home from campaigns in the Pacific and Caribbean, echoed the strategies of racialized identification with criminality and disobedience in their approaches to new immigrant communities. Greene’s focus on forming and deploying “ethnic squads” to police immigrant neighborhoods in New York has a clear resonance with his military experience. His tenure also coincides with a period of unprecedented immigration, the majority of which was filtered through New York City.
It is at this point in the book, nearly halfway through, that the chapter organization shifts from a relatively sequential, chronological order to tracing the effect of different ethnic immigrant communities on policing practices, scientific approaches, and ideas about national belonging and whiteness. The rapid increase of immigration from non-English speaking countries during this period introduced new challenges to police who sought to understand, contain, and successfully assimilate migrant communities. Guariglia structures the rise of “ethnic squads,” or multilingual immigrant police officers, around the 1904 Slocum ferry disaster, a fire that caused the death of nearly 1,000 passengers. NYPD Inspector Max Schmittberger organized a “German squad” of 100 German-speaking policemen to deal with the aftermath of the fire. In addition to developing an ethnic police squad that echoed the native policing tactics in the Philippines, Schmittberger’s cadre also worked to create a comprehensive accounting of the passengers on board the Slocum, further developing a scientific approach to governing and ordering an urban population.
The strategy of ethnic policing was also implemented across the growing Italian and Sicilian communities in New York at this time. The “Italian squad,” which was in operation between 1904 and 1909, eventually expanded to over one hundred officers under the leadership of Italian-born detective Joseph Petrosino. The squad created an entrée into the opaque and hostile Italian communities that white NYPD officials and city leaders associated with organized crime and political radicalism. Much like the Irish and German communities that preceded them, Italian immigrants held a precarious position in America’s racial hierarchy. Assimilating into the economic, social, and political privileges that define whiteness required Italians to “reaffirm their own anti-Blackness” and harden the color line that separated European from Chinese immigrants and African Americans.
The aspirations of whiteness that assimilated immigrant European communities further institutionalized racial hierarchies in turn of the century America. New York had been home to a small but growing community of enslaved and free African descended people since Dutch settlement. Black New Yorkers, regardless of their legal status, were subject to intensive surveillance, including through techniques such as the eighteenth century “lantern laws,” which required any Black person to carry a light after dark to make them more visible. Anti-Black violence and racism followed these communities across the city, driving many to leave New York entirely. By the end of World War I, however, intranational migration from the Jim Crow South and immigration from Caribbean countries more than doubled the Black population of New York. Moderate Black political and social leaders demanded greater representation on the NYPD to protect their large but vulnerable community, guided by the belief that the presence of Black officers would both quell the “lawlessness” among certain segments of their community and promote a respectable image to white observers and power brokers. But unlike the need created for ethnic police squads in German or Italian communities, whose foreignness was considered an asset to state intelligence, Black New Yorkers “did not seem to constitute a ‘police problem’ worthy of the intellectual labor dedicated to policing illegible immigrants.” [3] Guariglia excavates this knotty history through the story of Samuel Battle, the first Black NYPD officer, who was appointed in 1911.
Battle is a complicated figure for both the history of the NYPD as an institution and the Black civil rights movement. Guariglia intentionally situates this moment in the genealogy of the NYPD’s ethnic police squads, illustrating that Battle’s “deployment to Black majority neighborhoods, and his own understanding of himself as an interpreter and translator of Black life for the NYPD, came to mimic the regime of policing that became the department’s hallmark in immigrant neighborhoods.” [4] But unlike the social benefits accrued to European immigrant communities following the ascent of earlier ethnic police squads, Black communities remained at the mercy of both non-state white violence and state sanctioned, NYPD-facilitated violence. The chapter ends with a nod to sociological studies of Black urban communities authored by Black NYPD officers. The local intelligence that Black researchers/officers could access allowed them to surveil, police, and analyze their communities on the state’s behalf. This transition to scientific, data-driven systems is an excellent segue into the final third of the book, which examines the rise of technocratic police practices.
Guariglia recounts the implementation and expansion of NYPD training schools, which focused on everything from driving lessons and detective work to dietary and physical education. Expertise was rigorously tested and standardized by administrators. These initiatives emerged alongside the popular time-motion methods of Taylorism, even instructing trainees on the most efficient way to chew their food, stand, and walk.
The final chapter transitions back to the global landscape that helped shape the early NYPD. In concert with American military expertise and initiatives, metropolitan police departments around the world fostered what Guariglia calls a “disciplinary technocracy.” [5] Although “ethnic squads,” which derived from imperial policing efforts abroad, had already faded from NYPD best practices, the imperative for legibility honed by colonial occupation remained a paramount concern. New technologies of knowledge production and retention, including the file cabinet and the Bertillon system of criminal identification, emerged to smooth the frictions of policing and containing a heterogeneous city. The “American problem” that so disturbed the order of American life for police intellectuals could only be solved through a combination of detailed identification, diagnosis, and violence to preserve the boundaries of whiteness and thus American identity.
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 is a PhD candidate in Geography at Clark University. Her research focuses on the relationship between Caribbean slavery and the industrial built environment of the Brooklyn waterfront.
[1] Matthew Guariglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, 79.
[2] Ibid., 84.
[3] Ibid., 139.
[4] Ibid., 145.
[5] Ibid., 178.