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. The book “excavate[s] the relationship between policing, racial formation, the state’s project of subjection and subordination, and the impact of this project on shaping our institutions.” (17). It focuses on the New York Police Department (NYPD), but since that force was an explicit model for so many other U.S. forces, much of what he says is broadly relevant to any history of U.S. policing.
While scholars have been influentially rethinking U.S. policing from the Prohibition Era through the present, they have rarely focused on the first half-century of modern policing’s growth, from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era. This may be because we have seen the Great Migration of the First World War era as the start of this story, reaching back to the antebellum period only to reveal its continuities with the institutions of slavery. Guariglia’s slim, efficient, and vividly written book traces the organic growth of the police’s approach to race and racial differences more broadly from the beginning of the modern force in 1845 to the beginning of Prohibition. In doing so, it brings together the early history of the policing of European and Asian immigrants with that of African Americans, and traces how the NYPD determined which groups to admit to the force itself.
In eight roughly chronological chapters, Guariglia traces the growth of the NYPD with a focus on its navigation of racial and ethnic difference. Chapter one traces the first two and a half decades of the department as an often-violent balance between city leaders’ desires to suppress Irish immigrants and (the much less numerous) African American residents of the city. The city hesitatingly integrated Irish New Yorkers, but decidedly not Black ones, into the force. Police administrators came to value what their bigotry understood as an ethnic capacity for violence and learned to their relief in the 1863 Draft Riots and 1871 Orange Riots that many Irish Catholic police were, in a crisis, willing to club the heads of their countrymen and coreligionists as well as Black New Yorkers.
The second chapter covers the period of the Lexow Committee corruption hearings and Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership, during which leaders, pressured by reform groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, influenced by scientific racism and valuing what they saw as inherent Anglo-Saxon discipline, introduced metrics like the Civil Service Exam and worked assiduously to keep most immigrants and certainly Black Americans off the force, though they tended to give Irish Americans a pass as sufficiently Americanized and, at any rate, already politically inevitable.
Chapter three traces the importation of imperial policing methods into the NYPD, especially integrating “natives” as police, allowing for better surveillance of, access to, and communication with policed immigrant populations. Chapters four and five describe the NYPD’s decision in the first decade of the twentieth century to hire immigrant police to penetrate dense and non-English-speaking German and Italian populations and, more guardedly, to hire Chinese speakers to police Chinese communities. The path to the first Black officer, Samuel Battle, in 1911, was significantly different. Colonial-influenced police administrators believed that controlling Irish, German, and perhaps Chinese populations would require understanding some elements of their cultures and social organizations, but they did not see Black Americans as a puzzle to be solved. To them, Black New Yorkers were a known quantity: policing them required force rather than interpretation. Chapter six, then, recounts the later and more fraught decision to hire Battle, after he excelled on the civil service exam, and the challenges he faced as the lone Black officer.
Meanwhile, a countervailing theory of policing was also at work: an effort to make police diversity unnecessary by making police themselves interchangeable through proper training and by centralizing police skill and knowledge. One of the book’s freshest chapters is Chapter seven, on the NYPD’s efforts to police the bodies of its own officers, to “rebuild each man from the ground up” by teaching them to chew their food more deliberately, to do calisthenics, to properly position their hands, arms, and shoulders, to walk in such a way as to promote foot heath, and to wear wrist watches (162–165, 167–170). This chapter exemplifies Guariglia’s insistence that the same repressive forces of the modern state operated, though unequally, on police and policed alike. Finally, Chapter eight describes the NYPD’s attempt to build an ambitious, international network of information on criminal behavior that would eliminate the need for officers’ special backgrounds or knowledge.
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. He insists on the significance of female-identified individuals in the story of policing, both as reformers applying pressure on the force and as a significant portion of the policed. He avoids the toxicity of American exceptionalism in his framing, understanding the construction of policing as a global project; appreciates the significance of decisions and strategies of non-elites (both regular police officers and those they policed) in shaping what police became; explores the limited capabilities police had to address the “problems” they were paid to address (he coins the useful phrase “policing’s shallow tool box”); and is sensitive to the unity of the projects of gathering information and exercising control.
Like many excellent books, Guariglia’s is also rich with asides that are not central to his arguments. For instance, he repeatedly notes how police have shaped our ability to tell their history. Police created what was likely the richest archive of the lives of the down-and-out through the lens of the state’s efforts to control them, yet, “since its creation, the NYPD has been a diligent destroyer of its own archive” (21). Historians of policing wrestle with the fact that they have been as officious in destroying, or blocking access to, their own archives as they were in collecting them. Police and the Empire City models how to forge ahead with the project of police history even in the face of such difficulties.
