Policing the World from New York City: Emily Brooks Interviews Matthew Guariglia on How Policing Changed from 1880 to 1920

By Emily Brooks

From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department. This is the second of two interviews—published in collaboration with Public Books—where Matthew Guariglia and Emily Brooks discuss this pivotal era, through their exciting new books on the NYPD. The first interview was published on Public Books. You can read it here.

Matthew Guariglia’s new book Police and the Empire City is an attempt to look at the effect race, immigration, and empire had on the emerging professionalized police force, especially around the turn of the 20th century. In addition to considering how police understood the diversity of the city of New York and how the policing of one group informed the policing of others, the book also considers social control and state violence as a shared global endeavor. Starting in the 19th century, police departments across the world were in communication with each other—both because suspect criminals were increasingly mobile, and in order to share innovations, tactics, and technologies often incubated in overseas (or internal) colonial projects.

This book acts in many ways as a prequel of sorts to Emily Brooks’s fantastic book, Gotham’s War Within a War, about how all of these trends calcified and combined with wartime gender and racial politics, questions of reform and vice, and the descent of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and wartime bureaucrats on New York City during the 1940s. It was fantastic and enlightening to be able to put these two books in conversation with one another.

Police & The Empire City: Race & The Origins of Modern Policing in New York
by Matthew Guariglia
Duke University Press
November 2023, 280 pp.

Emily Brooks (EB): What type of book did you set out to write and what type of book do you feel like you ended up writing? Were they the same, or did the project change for you? Mine changed, which is why I am curious!

Matthew Guariglia (MG): I started out thinking, rather narrowly, that I might write a history of how New York City policing changed, from 1880 to 1920, as a direct result of new residents arriving from the Great Migration and from international immigration. To some extent, that’s still what the book is.

But as I followed the sources, what I found was that the story, by necessity, had to be a more international one. That is, it had to look beyond the city limits, and even America’s borders. This was because I looked at the personal papers of police commissioners and notable detectives, which, in turn, led me to this unique group of people. These reformers, police, and politicians—between 1898 and 1917—were constantly going from police work, to the military, to industry, back to the US Empire, and back to policing again. When I started out, I just did not expect the story of New York City policing to be so international.

The other major thing I did not anticipate was where the book would end. I had already settled on the idea that the book should end before Prohibition enforcement entered policing. However, as I researched, what unexpectedly emerged for me was a new interest in police technologies, which emerged in relation to the information and bureaucratic revolutions around the turn of the century.

Now, this could be because my day job is currently in civil liberties and technology policy. Nevertheless, suddenly, I saw so clearly that the question of how police learned to patrol a multiracial and multilingual city was answered beginning in this era: they developed standardized and bureaucratized ways of policing that negated the need for officers with linguistic or cultural knowledge. These new methods included fingerprinting and other types of collected information that could find and identify suspects—but without needing the cooperation of witnesses or the ability to communicate effectively with people.

Emily Brooks

EB: Your international lens is a significant contribution to the historiography, and one of the elements that I loved most about the book. One incredible story is that of Francis Vinton Greene, who spent eight weeks in 1898 writing what was, essentially, only a book report about the Philippines. But then he presented it to President McKinley as advice about whether or not Filipino people deserved self-government. I loved the way you trace Greene’s influence on policing and how, as you noted, this emerged from the interplay of domestic and international arenas. That is, during the US occupation of the Philippines, he worked on the army orders on municipal control; then, back in the United States, he imported these colonial innovations, creating state police departments to combat labor uprisings.

But that also indicates that people sought to resist US state violence both in the Philippines and in the United States itself. What were some of the ways they connected these forms of state surveillance and imperialism?

MG: It was pretty incredible to get into the sources, because they show just how much people understood the might of the US state at home and abroad as being part of a shared struggle. I saw a few instances in which freedom fighters in the Philippines directly related their struggle to that of American Indians. And this is in part because, as a lot of scholarship has shown, there was a pretty clear lineage—in both the tactics and even the individual soldiers—deployed in those conflicts and then later in the Philippines.

Back in New York, especially after the Riot of 1900, at least one Black New Yorker speaking at a rally against racist violence likened their situation to living under colonial occupation. For Americans who had sympathy for Filipinos, she said, they also needed to have sympathy with oppressed people at home.

EB: I loved the thread about technology throughout your book. I learned so much reading through your tracing of the different experiments with how to extract information from resistant populations.

Part of what is really interesting about the history that you are tracing is that, at the same time that the NYPD is starting to standardize its modes of policing the city’s immigrant and Black populations through these new technologies, the positionality of some of these European immigrant groups are also changing.

By the 1930s, there is the symbolic consolidation of a Black/white color line when it comes to criminality through the breakdown of the federal Uniform Crime Reports, as Khalil Muhammad shows us.

In your book, you use the concept of “whiteness” to talk about the changing positions of these immigrant groups. How does this concept operate for you in the book? How does “whiteness” function in law, as well as in discourses of criminality? And did you see membership in the NYPD as a form of gaining access to the privileges of whiteness, even when that membership was still predicated on immigrant identities?

Matthew Guariglia

MG: Years ago, I really became fascinated with how Khalil Muhammad and a few others were able to connect the expansive landscape of scholarship that engaged with the “whiteness studies” boom in the 1990s and 2000s with the role that police played in consolidating the Black/white binary.

In Police and the Empire City, I conceptualize whiteness as the end result of European immigrant groups joining the police force. This is because: 1. European immigrants could model civic participation and belonging—within a decidedly white supremacist society—by directly participating in enforcing racial hierarchy in the city. And 2. European immigrants could forcibly Americanize their communities by using violence to teach the newly arrived the rules of the city, both official and unofficial.

In many immigrant communities, but also New York’s Black neighborhoods, middle-class and upwardly mobile political operators saw their representation on the police force as a useful tool of respectability politics. Moreover, someone from the neighborhood would theoretically have lived knowledge about who the “troublemakers” in the community were and could rid the community of those individuals, who were deemed a drag on collective uplift.

In addition, the police imagined European immigrants had sensational racial differences and sensational predispositions to commit crimes; yet they also viewed such concerns as contingent on circumstance. People who wrote about crime thought this criminality of European immigrants could be conditioned away by forcible assimilation.

Eventually, it ceased to be a priority for the police department to recruit European immigrants with language abilities. And this, in turn, signaled that the urgency and imagined difference of those immigrants had faded. Instead, to quote NYPD commissioner Enright in the 1920s when patrolmen got a decent pay raise, policing would finally be “a white man’s job.”

By the 1920s, and certainly by the 1940s, the racial, linguistic, and cultural differences which made European immigrants seem a disparate people from Anglo Americans slowly dissolved away. Importantly, this assimilation contrasted with the groups deemed unassimilable who were heavily policed by white officers: African Americans, and new generations of Latin Americans, and Asian and Caribbean immigrants.

EB: And at the same time that these shifts are happening, another change that I track in my book is underway: the changing political role of policing in a reform city government in the 1930s.

Under La Guardia and Valentine, the criminalization of Black New Yorkers continues. But, compared to the previous era governed by the political machine of Tammany Hall, there is in the 1930s now a more prolonged and robust commitment to the appearance of equity, professionalism, and honesty in city government and in policing. Even though discrimination persists within the NYPD and arrest rates and police violence are intensely racialized, city leaders do want to appear somewhat responsive to criminalized communities.

This tension produces a new discourse from Valentine and other police leaders. The criminalization of Black communities, they maintain, is a response to the safety needs of Black property owners; moreover, the NYPD, they argue, wants to hire more Black officers. This language is very familiar to us to today and is used to justify racialized policing and to recruit officers from heavily policed communities.

I bring all of this up to say that, while the emphasis on recruiting European immigrants faded with the history that you explore, police departments continued to rely on recruiting from heavily policed communities. And this is, partly, an attempt to weaken criticisms that police departments were insulated from any democratic accountability.

So, this tangent brings me to my next question for you, which is about resistance or the responses from immigrant communities to the NYPD presence in their neighborhoods. You explore in detail the response of members of these communities who joined the department. But can you discuss some of the other ways that people mapped concepts of state violence and repression from their home countries onto the NYPD? And what were the best sources for you for finding these stories?

MG: Memories of state violence that immigrants brought over from their own countries would have tinged their understanding over police in New York. Still, police power was also disbursed very differently. Depending on where individuals came from, they might have been used to state repression against radical and labor movements, which were put down with extreme violence. They might have known state-sanctioned torture as a legitimate form of interrogation. Yet even such violence would have often been interspersed by state abandonment and neglect of communities and often entire regions.

Therefore, the change immigrants in New York might have experienced was not the fact of state repression, but the amount: the steadier constant presence of police in their communities and on their street corners.

Resistance to this kind of policing happened with larger marches and protests against police violence, but also in many little ways. Here, I take a page from Robin D. G. Kelley’s articulation of James C. Scott’s “hidden transcripts,” in which marginalized groups engage in everyday acts of resistance.

For example, immigrants might lean into their foreignness, or fain a lesser knowledge of English in order to thwart police surveillance. Of course, police were also likely to do the opposite: claim that they had heard full confessions to crimes, but from people without the vocabulary to confess. The really incredible sources through which we can try to read against the grain and understand these everyday acts of linguistic resistance or criminalization are the surviving criminal court transcripts from New York City.

EB: I like your focus in your book on police leaders and officers as knowledge seekers and producers. You label this group “police intellectuals” and put police commissioners, criminologists, and sociologists, among others, into this category.

In my book, I looked a lot at how various police policies and practices connected to city politics. So I’m curious, how do you see the political leaders of the 1880s to the 1920s working with, or connected to, “police intellectuals” and the knowledge that they produced?

MG: Then, as now, there is a complicated relationship between, on the one hand, cultural panics and political expedience, and, on the other hand, knowledge about crime, which has been laundered and legitimized through academia and scientific discourses. New polls and crime data from the end of 2023, for example, show that violent crime is low, but perceptions of rampant violence are skyrocketing.

In the era I write about, politicians played an important role in choosing to act on all types of knowledge being fed into the criminalization machine. For example, sometimes they responded to academic studies that supported their beliefs; sometimes they rejected those studies in favor of policing tactics they thought the public wanted to see; and sometimes all of those things overlapped. You can go back into newspapers from the era and see, over and over again, mayors advocating that police operating with less violence would get better results; then, just a few months later, these same mayors would declare it was necessary for the “return of the club.”

EB: How did gender inform immigrant policing? How did women’s experiences intersect with the era’s technologies of policing?

MG: At that time, white immigrant women, and to a lesser extent Chinese women, occupied a kind of dual space: on the one hand, they were decidedly not white, and, therefore, perhaps more predisposed to criminality or sexual deviance; but, on the other hand, these same women could be rectified through coerced Americanization, surveillance, and social control. According to many white police intellectuals, they were deemed redeemable and worthy of protection from men’s sexual exploitation and coercion, in a way that Black women were not.

This meant that (mostly white) immigrant women, and especially immigrant girls, got wrapped into the emerging regime of women’s and children’s protective services and the coercive bureaucracy and surveillance that went with it.

EB: Did you have a favorite source or type of source that you discovered throughout your research?

MG: It’s hard to pick a “favorite” source in a book filled with a lot of violence. But there was one type of source that I was so excited to find that now I’m actively pursuing as my next big research project. This was the sheer amount of resistance people launched against mugshots, fingerprinting, and police files, during their slow roll out between the 1880s and 1920s. I found some fascinating examples of legal, legislative, and sometimes physical resistance to the regime of information collection and the physical hoarding of data.

All this really put into context for me how long people have been aware of the inherent harms of surveillance.

EB: Was there anything that you had to cut from the project?

MG: The one piece that I would have liked to include—if I had the time, resources, and travel budget—was to actually get into Prohibition policing and the Wickersham Commission’s investigations into the failures of that effort. In part, I’m fascinated because it seemed like an instance in which very overt considerations of race, ethnicity, and alcohol use—specifically around leisure activities in Black and Immigrant communities—momentarily paused the emergence of technocratic and “colorblind” rhetoric in policing that insulated racially biased policing.

EB: Last question: since so much of your book is about the history of police technology and I know that you write a lot about uses of technology in contemporary policing for your work, what are the abuses of technology by police departments today that most disturb and concern you?

MG: So, so many current issues in digital surveillance keep me up at night.

But if I take a holistic look at it, what most concerns me is the fact that all the companies we give our digital life to—from internet providers to social media companies to even smart home appliances—all effectively function as an extension of the police evidence locker.

In my research, I could even see evidence of its beginning. In 1916, there was an early scandal in which the NYPD were conducting illegal wiretapping, but with the help of a local telephone company.

Then and now, people trust companies to collect an incredibly invasive amount of data. And they do so thinking there is a strong division between them and the punitive state. And there isn’t.

Emily Brooks is a historian and curriculum writer at the New York Public Library. She is the author of Gotham's War within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City as well as articles in the Journal of Urban History, the Washington Post, the Journal of Policy History, and Labor History.

Matthew Guariglia is a visiting scholar of history at Emory University and a Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, and co-editor of The Essential Kerner Commission Report as well as a forthcoming volume The Church Committee Report.