The NYPD and Policing's "Small Toolkit"
An exploration of early policing history with Dr. Matthew Guariglia
With New York Mayor Eric Adams deploying discriminatory police tactics — not to mention insisting that asylum seekers “will destroy New York City” — it felt like a good time to explore the early history of the NYPD. In his new book, Police and the Empire City, and in conversation, Dr. Matthew Guariglia reveals how biased perceptions of race and ethnicity shaped policing in New York (and beyond) from the outset.
Dr. Guariglia is an Affiliated Scholar at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and a Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His bylines have appeared in NBC News, The Washington Post, and Slate, among others.
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes further discussion of the vulnerability of immigrants to policing, the recycling of old police tactics after 9/11, the founding of the FBI, and more:
Ben: Dr. Guariglia, thank you so much for being here.
MG: Thank you for having me.
Ben: Today I’d like to explore how the NYPD’s tactics first took shape. To set the scene, could you please tell us when the NYPD was founded and who originally staffed it?
MG: In New York City, the official municipal police was founded in 1845. It was modeled after the London Police Department, which was in turn modeled on other systems in the UK, including the Royal Irish Constabulary (a colonial police force set up by English rule in Ireland).
In New York, appointments to the police department were given out by local politicians, or aldermen, in exchange for votes. Many Irish immigrants welcomed the stable, well-paying jobs, and policing offered them a real avenue to social, economic, and racial mobility.
Some of the earliest and biggest tasks of the police force were to put down moments of mass disorder that were pretty common in cities in the mid-19th century. Because stereotypes at the time associated Irishness with violence, brutality, and crime, quelling “Irish riots” was a way for Irish policemen to show that they were the “good” sort of Irish Catholic.
The other side of the coin is that a good portion of the country still had race-based, chattel slavery. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, when people from the South escaped slavery and went to a place like New York, law enforcement was obligated to return them to enslavers in the South. Irish policemen frequently worked directly with Southern slaveholders to find escapees in New York.
Ben: You synthesize that “policing allowed the Irish to declare superiority over the people they were capturing and returning to slavery.” It also allowed them to “take a stand against any competition African Americans might pose to the white working classes on the labor market.”
MG: That’s right, and remember, this is all happening within just five years of the department’s founding. From the outset, it was impossible to extricate policing from race and ethnicity.
Ben: How and why did the police force try to professionalize later in the 1800s?
MG: Well, New Yorkers grew increasingly concerned about corruption and brutality in the NYPD. No doubt both existed, though the concern was also rooted in persistent xenophobia toward Irish people.
To try and get more “respectable” people into the police force, the department introduced an entry exam. The test essentially prioritized the admission of American-born English-speaking officers into the police force.
When looking at city records from this period, it’s clear just how vulnerable the city’s immigrant population was to police power. I found stories of women arrested for supposedly soliciting prostitution because they smiled at a police officer — who smiled at them first. And when officers were in places like Chinatown, for instance, they had no idea what was going on.
The police department soon shifted tactics again.
Ben: — learning from the U.S. military’s misadventures abroad.
MG: Exactly. Starting in 1898, the U.S. went to war with Spain, which soon meant occupying Spain’s foreign colonies in Asia and the Caribbean — specifically Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines.
In the colonies, American officials borrowed tactics from European empires, including “native policing.” In native policing, you get people who understand the local language and customs, give them special positions of power, and redeploy them into the communities they supposedly know well. Naturally, native policing led to more surveillance, which often led to more violence, and that was certainly the case in places like the Philippines.
Fast forward a few years and many U.S. soldiers came home to work in police departments. In New York, they brought the idea of native policing home. The department formed a “German Squad” and an “Italian Squad,” staffed by police officers with German and Italian lineage who were then sent to German and Italian neighborhoods.
But this attempt at ethnic policing was short-lived, cut short by continued hostility toward immigrants and a growing legislative movement to expand immigration restrictions.
Editor’s note: learn more about the history of immigration restrictions below…
Ben: Attempting to reform itself again, the department turned to growing fields of expertise like criminal anthropology. What was criminal anthropology, and how did it change (or not change) police tactics in New York in the early 1900s?
MG: Criminal anthropology was an early academic and medical discipline coming out of Europe, led by scholars and doctors who thought there was a correlation between bodies and criminality. Doctors would study the physical attributes of people in prison and say, interesting — they all have heavy brows and small, beady eyes. People with those traits must be criminals.
Ben: Related, I learned that the police still yell “hands up!” — not because they want to make sure you’re unarmed, but because anthropologists once thought that criminality was determined by the shape of your armpits.
MG: ...that's interesting.
Ben: I thought so.
MG: Anyway, we can see how criminal anthropology was a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? The police would surveil people they thought were more likely to be criminals; then they’d arrest those people; and then scientists would ask, what's the common denominator among all these people? Oh, they’re Southern Italian, they’re Black, etc. In other words, academic disciplines began legitimizing and intellectualizing what began as just racism on the part of the police.
By the turn of the 20th century, there were a lot of experts who rejected the idea of bodily representations of crime — and yet, when the NYPD built its first library for police and detectives in 1915, they filled the shelves with the work of criminal anthropologists who believed they could predict criminal behavior in people based on their race and upbringing.
Ben: You discuss how the growing field of criminology influenced the department, too. How so? And what’s the difference between criminal anthropology and criminology?
MG: Criminal anthropology was about trying to find crime written on the body. Criminology, on the other hand, tries to consider the societal and environmental causes and roots of crime. It’s very statistics-based.
In the 1920s, the NYPD was trying to “professionalize” even further. The department no longer wanted to send Italians into Italian neighborhoods or Germans into German neighborhoods. They wanted to make a style of policing that could go anywhere and do anything, so they started leaning on data and statistics that any officer could use.
In theory, the crime data was impartial. In practice, the people collecting the data based it on what police on the street already did — and officers operated based on their prejudices. What ended up happening was the police racially profiled the city’s residents just as they had for decades, but now their tactics were cloaked with the veneer of objectivity.
Put another way, previously, police officers and administrators were incredibly explicit about how much they thought about race and ethnicity when policing. The rise of criminology allowed them to de-racialize and de-ethnicize the justification for their actions without really changing them.
Ben: To illustrate this dynamic, you say that “if an officer taught a roomful of cadets that immigrants, for instance, were socially predisposed to crime—many, especially those in immigrant communities, might object to that as xenophobic. But if a professor-officer taught the same thing from a lectern, the material carried an air of legitimacy.”
Are you suggesting that to get people to listen to me, all I need to do is carry around a lectern?
MG: Ha. Maybe.
Ben: How do you reflect on the early history of the NYPD when seeing the department’s discriminatory tactics today and Mayor Eric Adams, a longtime police officer, blaming many of the city’s problems on immigrants?
MG: It makes me think of what I call policing’s “small toolbox.”
Despite police officials’ claims of a century of innovation, they end up recycling a lot of the same justifications, tactics, and technologies. Sometimes their tactics have new names, and sometimes there are new academic and empirical backings behind them, but really they return to the same small toolbox.
Some of their tools are rhetorical, right? For example, the criminalization of immigrants; the idea that there’s some population deemed to be problematic or will lead the city to ruin. Other tools are seen and felt more on the ground, like “community policing,” where police departments recruit new police from the communities that seem most difficult to patrol and task them with walking the streets there. I’d argue community policing derives from native policing.
In essence, you see the same cycles repeating themselves over and over again.
Ben: This gets to one of your book’s central arguments.
“Policing is a machine,” you write. “Its product, the brutalization and subordination of working-class people and racial minorities, the protection of profits, and the enforcement of gender roles and sexual relations, have remained virtually unchanged for centuries... No matter how many changes one makes to the interior or exterior of the machine, if it is designed to create a single product indefinitely, it will continue to do so no matter how many alterations it undergoes.”
MG: Wow, are you sure I wrote that?
Ben: Well, it either came from your book or a manual for operating a Subaru.
MG: Ha, hard to tell.
Ben: Dr. Guariglia, thank you so much for your work and for speaking with me about it today.
MG: Thank you for having me on.