Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foot patrolmen did not have friendly contact with all citizens on their beats. Police-citizen relations were sometimes hostile or simply anonymous. Beats embraced large, socially divided populations, which did not always agree on police priorities. This article explores street-level police-citizen relations in New York City in the early twentieth century using disciplinary records, police-oriented newspapers, autobiographies, and other sources. Police-citizen contacts were selective. Merchants, shopkeepers, watchmen, and janitors shared common interests with police, which were strengthened by exchange of goods, services, the use of space, and sympathy and conversation. Police became especially attentive to their concerns about crime and disorder. Few other citizens could establish such links with beat patrolmen. Officers’ relationships on their beats were influential but had significant built-in biases, reinforcing the enforcement of law and control of disorder in ways congruent with the needs and views of neighborhood notables.
but see also Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M. Hartnett, Community Policing, Chicago Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), for a different approach.
2.
see also James F. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 116-120, for technology. The term citizen is used here to distinguish the officer from all who lived or worked on or passed through the officer’s post; it does not refer to citizenship status.
3.
David R. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800-1887 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979). Political systems play a large role in these accounts, but they show that because supervision of officers on patrol was difficult, the patrolman in fact exercised great discretion.
4.
Roger Lane, in William Dorsey’sPhiladelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 92-95, however, shows that African Americans were by no means at such odds with police in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
5.
he is cited by, among others, Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), 230-230.
6.
and Cincinnati Regional Crime Committee, The Cincinnati Police Beat Survey (Chicago: American Public Welfare Association, n.d.), 2-2, 5-5, for officers’ schedules and undermanning of beats. Post is the term used by New York police to refer to their assigned patrol areas.
7.
Christopher Thale, “Assigned to Patrol: Neighborhoods, Police, and Changing Deployment Practices in New York City Before 1930,”Journal of Social History37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 1037-1064.
8.
Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), chap. 1. Not only does the social network approach point to the “unbounded community” outside the neighborhood but also allows us to see the neighborhood itself as consisting of multiple social networks that may include nonlocal residents such as neighborhood workers (including police) and visitors.
9.
Von Hoffman documents a wide variety of resident and nonresident actors in Jamaica Plain in Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
10.
See John Collier and Edward M. Barrows, The City Where Crime Is Play (New York: The Peoples’ Institute, 1914), for age and gender patterns in street use.
11.
Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973). A basic assumption of much policy discussion and some history has been that the automobile reduced opportunities for contact, including casual contact, creating a social distance between police and citizens. Though this is certainly plausible, we cannot understand how it panned out without analyzing purposes and resources of police and citizens.
12.
See Sean Wilentz, “Document: Crime, Poverty and the Secrets of New York City: The Diary of William H. Bell 1850-1851,”History Workshop7 (1979): 126-155, for a detailed daily account of an officer engaged in nonpatrol work; many of the police autobiographies cited below are also relevant.
13.
and Robert McAllister with Floyd Miller, The Kind of Guy I Am (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 63-63, for an example of shooing.
14.
and George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (New York: Caxton Book Concern, 1888).
15.
Taylorist approaches to policing have been noted by Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows, 76-80, among others.
16.
Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 41-45, criticizes the reformist critics.
17.
Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, has many stories of eating, drinking, and talking on post. These officers portray themselves as engaged in work about which there was broad consensus, with only a minority of hardened tough guys in opposition. The neighborhood they celebrate was in a sense celebrating them too.
18.
McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 24-28, 60-62.
19.
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 119-120.
20.
Arthur Woods, Policeman and Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), 91-92.
21.
see also Scherzer, Unbounded Community, for a fine example.
22.
Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “The Neighborhood-City Relationship,” in Howard Gillette, Jr., and Zane L. Miller, eds., American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 258-270. This study focuses on the New York City patrol post—typically a few blocks long, though often doubled up—which provides the most basic frame of reference. The police precinct provides a second, less local level of analysis, one that incorporates the most basic level of the police command structure and that is of a size akin to the Chicago community area or to the neighborhood as conceived by von Hoffman in Local Attachments.
23.
and Harring, Policing a Class Society, especially chap. 2-3. Radio motor patrol with two-way radios was feasible by 1935, but because of technical difficulties and high costs, it was not used extensively until after World War II.
24.
and Nancy Joan Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858-1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1968), who argues that Tammany Hall responded to reformist pressure by, among others things, minimizing the grossest forms of police corruption and taking the police out of partisan politics.
25.
Christopher Thale, “Civilizing New York City Police Patrol, 1880-1935” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995), chap. 8, traces technology.
26.
See Fogelson, Big-City Police, 54-55, 60-61, for early reformist crime focus in New York City, and The Chief, March 20, April 3, May 1, May 22, July 10, 1909, and March 19, 1910, for police (including rank-and-file) use of extreme crime control rhetoric.
27.
and New York Police Department, Annual Report (hereafter NYPD AR), 1918, p. 12-12.
28.
The role of small shops in this period is vividly described in Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 4.
29.
One form of sociability was by definition absent in these figures: brief conversations with citizens violated no rules and so never resulted in a charge, while any entry into a boiler room or grocery was a rules violation unless specific police purposes could be demonstrated. Other evidence (below) points strongly to the importance of shopkeepers and selected neighborhood workers for the police; the brief conversations are discussed below.
30.
and Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 75-77, for his wife, and for a Greenwich Village mosaic shop that drew many officers (p. 135).
31.
and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Ladies: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
32.
see also New York Senate, Report and Proceedings of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1895; hereafter Lexow committee proceedings), p. 5313-5313, for “lively posts.”
33.
Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 73-75, tells of a birth in a restaurant, 78-79 had a wealthy man again, and 98-99 has him escaping “shooflies”—supervisors in plainclothes—disguised as waiter.
34.
Herman Mitchell testimony, LaGuardia Papers, MARC, box 3148 f. 1 (officers at Metropolitan Grille in Harlem know owner).
35.
For “petty graft,” see the poem by Patrick Hickey in The Chief, April 20, 1918. Many workers were paid less than patrolmen and might not have found this argument convincing. Perhaps some sense of power came from this, but Willemse (p. 121) noted he was happy to eat in a little cubbyhole without being stared at.
36.
see also Fuld, Police Administration, 262-263. Officers were allowed to leave their posts for reasons of personal necessity provided they recorded the time and place in their notebooks.
37.
Gene Radano, Walking the Beat: A New York Policeman Tells What It’s Like on His Side of the Law (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1968), chap. 1.
38.
See Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 135-137, for grocery, and 97-98 (funeral home). Some discipline cases involving officers coming from residential buildings probably involved cooping.
39.
Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 138-138, describes a barn used as a coop.
40.
Times, March 29, 1912 (Bronx mounted cops off post, not clearly sleeping).
41.
For the two officers, see Willemse, Beyond the Green Lights, 101-103. Presumably officers in stores and saloons were sometimes escaping the weather as well.
42.
See Jeff Kisselhof, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 588-588, for a later example.
43.
“An Honest Worker and Christian” to Mayor Abram Hewitt, September 6, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 34.
44.
See the appendix for details of this study. There were 188 cases of officers who were not on the job or were engaged in petty misconduct on the job: talking, smoking, and the like. In some of these cases, we cannot tell where the officers were, among other things, because their bosses never found them. But of 127 cases in which we do know where the erring officers were, only 12.6 percent were in saloons or in or next to any establishment selling liquor. The 17.2 percent in liquor establishments of any type includes officers at a side window and in adjacent hallways. It seems likely that this figure overrepresents saloons since it was harder to concoct a good excuse for being in a saloon than in, say, a grocery. Saloons were enforcement priorities for police supervisors as well.
45.
calculated from Levine, “Police, Parties, and Politics,”Appendix A.
46.
“R. O’C,”“Call the Cop,”The Chief, July 10, 1909 (“if a bum”).
47.
See Johnson, Street Justice, 42-42, for a dramatic earlier example.
48.
See Cahalane, Police Practice and Procedure, 12-12, for instruction.
49.
See Inspector John Daly to Police Commissioner, July 26, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 15, f. 6, for an example of a factory official who seeks police aid against disorderly people. Vandalism, crime (see below), and the personal feelings of owners and officials may have determined owners’ feelings in similar cases. Hoping for favorable police handling of labor disputes might have influenced some business owners as well, though at least by the early twentieth century, use of out-of-precinct officers minimized the potential for informal influence.
50.
see Behind the Green Lights, 135-135. Willemse’s grocer friend felt safe from a cheap liquor store a few doors away. These are rare references specifically to this.
51.
The New York Telephone Company routinely offered, and policemen collected, rewards, usually of $50, to officers who apprehended thieves (see The Chief, March 28, 1903, for an example), but few companies were large enough to do this. There is no evidence of personal relationships between post cops and bank officials. See note 55 for robbery concerns of saloon and gambling house proprietors.
52.
The propensity for burglars to be youthful local residents can be seen in Willie Sutton with Edward Linn, Where the Money Was (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 23-23.
53.
Times, January 15, 17, and 18, February 4, and August 24, 1894, for sidewalks and extortion involving captains. A business point of view on sidewalks can be seen in, for example, Thomas Scovill to Mayor Thomas F. Gilroy, January 5, 1894, Gilroy Papers, MARC, box GTF 14. For one account of saloon graft, John Martin to Mayor Abram Hewitt, October 13, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 27. See Times, February 6, 1901, for tribute demanded of merchants on the Lower East Side to stay open on Sundays.
54.
and for a favorable view, see Hickey, Our Police Guardians, 146-146.
55.
See Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 48-49, for the saloon keeper as “a social force in the community” and advocate of order.
56.
For evidence of this in the middle twentieth century, see Howard Aldrich and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., “Police Officers as Boundary Personnel: Attitude Congruence between Policemen and Small Businessmen in Urban Areas,” in Harlan Hahn, ed., Police in Urban Society (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1971), 193-208.
57.
See Valentine, Night Stick, 24-24, for politicians or business people as buffs.
58.
For another example, see W. P. Hamilton to Commissioner Richard E. Enright, July 15, 1918, Hylan Papers, MARC, box 27, f. 7.
59.
and “Names of Witnesses in Behalf of Officer James Mulvey,” June 22, 1882, attached to Chief Clerk William Kipp to Mayor William R. Grace, June 22, 1882, Early Mayors Papers, MARC, box 84, GWR 14 (local “constituents” as witnesses in a discipline case).
60.
Police-business people relations at midcentury are discussed in William A. Westley, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
61.
Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 101-101. Many no doubt resented the police as tax-eating loafers, as well as for other reasons. Locating the sympathizers was obviously a problem.
62.
“One Who Believes in You” to Gaynor, July 20, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 15, f. 6, and attached correspondence and report, for brewery. The conflicting accounts leave it uncertain whether the head brewer or the workers (or both) welcomed the officers.
63.
V. A. M. Mortensen to Mayor John P. Mitchel, March 4, 1914, Mitchel Papers, MARC, box MJP 129, f. 11 (Brooklyn man).
64.
The Chief, March 9, 1912 (fixed post).
65.
Some thirty-seven of fifty-three officers seen or presumably seen on the street were engaged in petty misconduct; eleven were off post (i.e., on some other post or in a streetcar on post), four were abusing citizens there, and one was not at work. Disciplinary figures underestimate total conversation on the street because much of it was very brief and because an officer there was in a good position to observe the approach of the supervisor.
66.
and Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 117-117, girl on post.
67.
For example, in 1910, 74.4 percent of arrestees for disorderly conduct, disorderly conduct and intoxication, and intoxication were male; males comprised 84 percent of all arrestees that year. NYPD AR, 1910, 10-14. The discipline study unfortunately gives inadequate information on gender. There are only 59 (of 315) cases in which we know whom the officer was; the officer was engaged in petty misconduct in only 28 of these. Roughly two-thirds of these are cop-cop cases. It seems likely that shooflies and sergeants picked on cop-cop cases: the patrolmen must have talked with a higher proportion of ordinary citizens, but only a few got singled out for special attention by supervisors and/or mention by The Chief.
68.
One would not enter a residence without a prior relationship and presumably an implicit or explicit invitation, which was not true of entering a shop. Being found in a residence is thus not strictly comparable with being found in a shop or boiler room. Still, the infrequency of being found in a residence is striking, all the more so because some of these cases probably represent officers going to basements and boiler rooms rather than homes as such.
69.
and “Average Cop,” for the Italian woman. In the era before widespread telephone use, police were rarely summoned to respond to crimes indoors.
70.
For hostility, see notes 5 and 27 above.
71.
See James V. Matesca, My Flag Is Down: The Diary of a New York City Taxi Driver (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948), for police as a constant presence in the cabbie’s life.
72.
and Captain John J. Farrell to Commissioner William McAdoo, June 1, 1905, McClellan Papers, MARC, box MGB 20, f. 3 (pushcart man helped by officer after boys upset cart).
73.
For another example, see The Chief, October 20, 1917, apparently involving a stranger to the officer.
74.
See also McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, 26-26, for helpers against supervisors.
75.
For Alexander, see Chief Inspector Max Schmittberger to Police Commissioner, September 17, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 16, f. 3. The crowd, of course, should not be ignored.
76.
and Al Smith, Up to Now: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1929), 25-27, a nostalgic account asserting police were known to “all the neighbors.”
77.
see her Horsecars and Cobblestones (1948; repr., New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1973), 148-149.
78.
Times, April 7, 1922.
79.
and Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1885, 366-366, for a similar view.
80.
Murphy and Plate, Commissioner, 36-39, describe the boredom of patrol and the problem of stranger policing. Murphy made friends on his Brooklyn beat in the 1940s, working hard to overcome the barriers between an Irish cop and Italian citizens. He exemplifies the growing sense (visible in the work of Valentine and other professionalizers) that police were remote from citizens and that individual officers needed to actively make contact with citizens.
81.
Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform, 80-81 (Roosevelt’s campaign against talking cops).
82.
and Irving Howe, with Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), chap. 6, 8.
83.
Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough, 29-32.
84.
For an example of smart cops with their eyes open doing radio motor patrol, see Jonathon Rubinstein’s ethnographic account in City Police (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), chap. 5.
85.
Francis V. Greene, The Police Department of the City of New York: A Statement of Facts: Address by Police Commissioner Greene (New York: City Club of New York, 1903), 11-12.
86.
see Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 86-86, for a similar point of view.
87.
The obvious exceptions are saloons and brothels. Compared to big corruption scandals (typically involving mainly higher ups and/or detectives or specialized units, often involving substantial bribes), this kind of influence was modest.
88.
The impact of the law was often softened by informal adjudication, as William O’Dwyer makes clear in Beyond the Golden Door, 105-106, in which he asserts that patrolmen in the 1910s “knew every family and its problems”—an implausible claim, as we have seen—but then describes the benefits of nonlegalistic mediation.
89.
Willemse, A Cop Remembers, chap. 8.
90.
For more on conflict as a motivator and influence on the police sense of duty, see Thale, “Civilizing New York City,”486-493.
91.
See The Chief, September 3, 1909, November 28, 1903, for goat land, and September 20, 1913, for “glad hand.”
92.
and see his Behind the Green Lights, 48-50, for complaints to captains and higher ups in general. Willemse almost certainly is referring to nonshop-keepers.
93.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), chap. 10, shows the complex ways in which vice was distributed. Obviously, those influences were exercised via higher officials as well.
94.
But only some of the differences. In addition, Boston’s police at the time was less scandal ridden than New York’s was. Furthermore, though von Hoffman reports that Wakeman’s diary records drunks “sneering” at Wakeman, such a source is less likely to capture the sullen glares of corner loungers (see McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 62-62), the ambivalence of citizens sometimes hostile to police but also willing to mobilize them, and the silent contempt of the affluent.
95.
Von Hoffman, “An Officer of the Neighborhood,” documents thieves and troublemakers in outlying parts of Boston.
96.
Fourth Deputy Louis H. Reynolds to Commissioner William F. Baker, July 20, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ-15, f. 5. This probably resulted from an upper- or upper-middle-class consciousness of appropriateness rather than ward-level political clout. Arthur Wallander, Interview, Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, 26-27. For another example, see “A Taxpayer” to Mayor Abram Hewitt, April 29, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 27.
97.
See New York Times, December 6, 1897, for an example of a patrolman responding selectively to the most serious offenses on his busy post. Mechanical post assignment practices are visible in post lists pasted or written inside precinct blotters; the biggest collection is in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library.
98.
and Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, documents declines in street activity.
99.
O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 111-111.
100.
See Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 131-135, for an example of someone fondly recalling an “Irish” neighborhood that in fact was not especially Irish.
101.
see Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for this as well as for such tasks as returning lost children. Thale, “Civilizing New York City,” chap. 4-5, documents order maintenance and other police work not reflected by arrest figures.
102.
At odds in two senses: in conflict with disorderly people, who were quite numerous (and had many more friends and supporters) in some neighborhoods, and held in contempt by others, who saw patrolmen as ineffective, corrupt, brutal, or beneath them socially.
103.
Schweppe, The Firemen’s and Patrolmen’s Unions, ix-xi, 78-78, 118-119, discusses the paper.
104.
Having begun publication in 1897, The Chief was well established by 1902. The alternating-week pattern was originally intended to allow analysis of seasonal patterns.
105.
Thale, “Civilizing New York City,” 513-14. In 1916, the figure was 0.23; data are unavailable for 1901 and 1902, but in 1903, the number was 0.68.
106.
For the meaning of a thirty-day fine, see The Chief, July 11, 1903, and June 18, 1904.
107.
The Chief, June 5, 1909, April 28, 1917, for examples of incentives.
108.
“Confessions of a New York Detective, by an Ex-captain of Police,”Cosmopolitan Magazine, 40, no. 1 (November 1905): 105-105.
109.
The City Record reported the charges and dispositions but not other information. The New York Times occasionally reported on discipline but not for a sustained period.
