Law & Disorder
Page 14
The politicians who ran the city agreed. A special committee of the Board of Aldermen issued a blistering report on crime and the police. “The property of the citizen is pilfered, almost before his eyes. Dwellings and warehouses are entered with an ease and apparent coolness and carelessness of detection which shows that none are safe. Thronged as our city is, men are robbed in the street. Thousands, that are arrested, go unpunished, and the defenseless and the beautiful are ravished and murdered in the day time and no trace of the criminals is found,” its authors said.9 The savage report also charged that police only sought to arrest criminals after the commission of a crime but did nothing to prevent crimes from occurring. The protection of the people, it charged, required both the prevention of crime and criminal apprehension. The police were not successful at either.
Crime was so out of control, wrote an observer, that “there is not a day transpires but the citizens of New York hear of some disgraceful outrage of some kind, and everybody there must admit that there is something rotten in Denmark. In the police department, a great reformation is absolutely necessary there.”10
One of those rotten somethings was the corrupt stolen-property recovery-fee system. Constables were paid fees to recover stolen property, so the lawmen made arrangements with criminals to give them property they stole so that they could collect the fee. In return, the constables would not arrest the thief. Sometimes constables would alert thieves who were their friends to where large sums of money or jewels were located so that their haul would be bigger and the constables’ fee heftier. Sometimes police “recovered” most of the property and collected a fee and left the remainder to the thief, who sold it for his “fee.” Police officials said that constables even kept careful records of thieves, and their homes and warehouses, not to make arrests but to make arrangements to collect fees when they recovered stolen goods from thieves whom they had previously let go.11
The size of the night watch did increase because the city’s official boundary pushed northward from Fourteenth Street to Thirtieth Street on the East Side and Fortieth Street on the West Side. The city increased the number of watchmen over ten years. In 1843, when the city population was about 350,000, there were 1,095 patrolmen, 100 marshals, and 34 constables.12 No administrative unit was formed to supervise the larger watch, though. The same system that had functioned badly for decades, with the mayor and/or aldermen in charge of watch appointments and removals, remained in place. All watchmen continued to be hired based on political friendships and patronage, and most of them were highly unqualified for the job. All of the mayors of New York, eager to solidify their own power, supported this scheme. It was ingrained. The local street gangs, who worked for political organizations, routinely nominated men for the watch, later approved by the mayor, who were weak, ineffective, and useless, which is just the way the street ruffians wished them to be.
Newspaper editors and civic leaders were relentless in their condemnation of both the mayor’s power to select and fire police and the ways in which various mayors went about the process. Horace Greeley complained of Mayor Fernando Wood in 1857 that he was a “desperate political tyrant.” The editor said “the autocrat of the police department [was] making the most of his vanishing power” and charged that Wood hired and fired cops around 8:00 A.M., at his office, in order to do it before newspaper reporters arrived.13
Police reporters did not learn much at Wood’s office. They reported that Wood’s police hiring and firing meetings were all held behind closed doors and names were released much later. At these meetings, dozens of cops were dismissed or hired at one time, usually with no reason given for firings and no qualifications listed for those who were hired. Reporters were not only barred from the meetings but located by “scouts” from the mayor’s office who kept them far away from Wood all day. The mayor had total control of the force, hiring or letting go lieutenants and captains as well as patrolmen. The reporters wrote acid stories about the appointments. In one story, a reporter noted that the only qualification that one man named a captain had was that his previous job was as the owner of a downtown liquor store.14
Young people continued to make fun of the watchmen and harassed them. “Youthful and exuberant New Yorkers considered that an evening out was not spent in the orthodox manner unless they played some rough practical jokes on the poor, old, inoffensive ‘Leatherheads,’” wrote police officer George Walling, a slowly balding man with a full beard, mustache, and wide forehead, when he first started walking his beat in 1847. One fellow “lassoed [a watch house] with a stout rope, and with the aid of companions dragged it down Broadway, while the watchman inside yelled loudly for help.”15
Important people did try to reform law enforcement in the late 1830s, but their efforts met with failure. The first effort came after the disgraceful looting that followed the Great Fire of 1835 and the Jewett murder in the spring of 1836. During these two years, the city watch force was increased, and extra watchmen were added for just Sunday. The city built two new watch houses and repaired several. The number of watch districts was increased. Watchmen were asked to patrol the steamship docks, where hackmen and porters had engaged in numerous fights for years. It was hoped the constables’ presence would dissuade arguments. One watchman was always posted in a booth in the cupola high atop City Hall at night in order to spot fires in the area and, with a swinging lamp, direct fire companies toward those blazes.16
Watch houses had been around since before the Revolution. They were one-story, two-room houses, 28' by 18', with two fireplaces and several windows, where watchmen could keep warm in winter and cool in summer and have space to relax, as well as to store clothing and records. Sometimes criminals were held in the watch houses. They made it possible for the constables to work in their districts without having to trudge more than a mile to the police headquarters. They vanished when large precinct houses were built in each section of the city.17
Hundreds of people stole clothing and other items during the fire in 1835 that burned down hundreds of stores and residences. Watchmen at the scene did nothing to stop the thieves, and many charged that the police were part of the scheme, rewarded with clothing for their lack of effort. They were, one editor said, “rogues in pay.”18 Could anybody else have stopped the looting? The fire companies were there, but they were too busy engaging in fistfights with each other to help the citizens and shopkeepers who were robbed.
Mayor Cornelius Lawrence was so incensed about the pathetic state of law enforcement in 1836, especially after the Jewett slaying, that he led a movement to reform the police. In September of 1836, he and police magistrate O. M. Lowndes sent a report to the Board of Aldermen that suggested the city form a new, physically capable, and trained police force with more administrators and more constables, and one that was paid better and did not collect fees as additional income. It was turned down by the Common Council (which did approve the plea for more constables, though). It seems that Mayor Lawrence knew the plan would be stymied by public fears of a “King’s army” type of occupation force. The people did not need to fear “despotic governments,” Lowndes and Lawrence wrote in the report, but the people did fear.19
Lawrence finished his term as mayor, Lowndes finished his term as police magistrate, and police reform died. Public worries over crime and the constables’ inability to stop it continued, but there was not another heinous crime, or series of crimes, with which to connect that apprehension to a reform of the police department. The urgency over fee reform soon faded.
New Yorkers did not listen to Lawrence or anyone espousing an independent, decently paid police force. Foreigners visiting New York realized that necessity immediately. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled through the United States in 1830 and 1831, wrote that what the city needed was “an armed force which, while it remains under the control of the majority of the nation … will be independent of the town population and able to repress its excesses.”20
Mayor Lawrence did get the Comm
on Council to approve, in a separate bill, the nation’s very first detective force. Ninety-two men were hired as detectives, called roundmen, to work in each precinct of the city. Their job was to patrol the streets undercover, seek out and arrest wanted criminals, report on irregular behavior by constables, and try to solve crimes that had eluded the regular watch force. City officials said that “it had become necessary in every large town that there should be several intelligent and experienced men devoting their times and skill to the pursuit and arrest of … robbers, housebreakers, pickpockets and other felons.”21
The early detectives may have been seen as highly skilled investigators, but there were no police academies to train them, and they had no real experience. They learned the job on the job. Actually, most of the beat cops did their own detective work. They ordinarily pieced together information, such as the color of shirts, style of pants or hats, footprints in the snow, eyewitness accounts, people who were left-handed or right-handed, descriptions of men with beards, the sounds of voices. Officer George Walling once broke up a robbery ring because he believed that one of the thieves had lost a coat button during a heist. A month later, a theater owner pointed out three men he believed to be working as pickpockets in his theater. Walling noticed that one of them had lost a button from his coat and the coat was believed to be the one worn by one of the men in the robbery. He and two other police followed the men from the theater and arrested them when they went to their homes. The one obscure coat button proved to be their undoing.22
In the early 1840s, following new and numerous public complaints, the New York state legislature conducted an investigation of New York City’s police force and police courts system that shocked all. The report charged that constables made no arrests in criminal investigations and brought few suspects before the police magistrates. The report recommended that fifty additional officers be hired. Statistics show that police in Brooklyn, then a separate city from New York, made far more arrests per capita than those in New York, where police were involved in bribery schemes or looked the other way on potential arrests. In 1860, as an example, Brooklyn had 198 police officers who made 15,334 arrests. That same year, New York’s 1,414 patrolmen made 65,809 arrests. Since New York had so many more patrolmen, its force should have made around 105,000 arrests, according to comparative statistics. The state investigation found that many criminals, prostitutes, pickpockets, and counterfeiters paid police bribes to drop all charges against them or not arrest them at all. As early as 1815, the court clerk for the city’s Fifth Ward openly charged that police were taking bribes from prostitutes not to arrest them or lending the prostitutes money to pay fines ordered by local courts. “It seems that all connected with the police office get rich very soon,” wrote the Herald’s James Gordon Bennett twenty-five years later.23
The police freely admitted that. Walling wrote that the partnership of the police with professional criminals was frequent and that the police often accepted bribes. He added that was common. “We are robbed and swindled right and left by the wealthy corporation which seizes upon our property with impunity and without reservation down through all the various grades to the thief with political influence who ‘snatches’ your watch while human life … can be taken with safety.”24
Police were often bribed with goods and not money. A popular bribery scheme involved clothing. Street vendors and the proprietors of clothing shops whom police were investigating offered to buy any extra clothing that cops did not need. It was a purchase, not a bribe, but it was really a bribe.25
The state report prompted New York City to launch its own investigation, in which even more corruption was uncovered. Its report said that some police, through bribes, were earning $300,000 to $400,000 a year (in today’s money). The report accused police of knowing about robberies days before they took place, sharing plunder with the robbers, developing friendships with criminals, protecting lawbreakers, and paying off judges to let their crooked friends go free.
The police covered over much of their lack of effort in arrests by heavily publicizing the good works that they did. As an example, statistics released for the year 1858 showed that while not as many arrests were being made as could have been, noble efforts were continually made to aid the citizenry. In that year, 121,597 disorderly or disoriented people were allowed to spend the night in precinct houses, 7,500 missing children were brought back to their parents, 58 abandoned infants and 751 sick or disabled persons found on the streets were taken care of, 134 persons were rescued from drowning, 180 fires were extinguished by the police, 1,724 stores with opened doors were locked, and some $160,000 worth of stolen property was recovered and returned to its owner.26
The idea of a “criminal class,” heralded in major world cities as well as New York, grew dramatically in the early 1840s as crime spread not just in bad neighborhoods but in all neighborhoods. The Prison Association of New York even did a study a short time later that proved the theory. Its investigator, Richard Dugdale, visited numerous city and country jails and reported a clear class of dangerous men and women that should be eliminated. They were people who were “breeding like rats,” said Dugdale, “in their alleys and hovels, [and] threatened … to overwhelm the well-bred classes of society.” By the mid-1840s, too, novelists, short story writers, and playwrights embraced the idea of a “criminal class” being responsible for society’s woes.
A considerable problem with the “criminal class” was that it was generally made up of young men, fourteen to thirty-five. They were a large group of people who were born and raised in poverty and were from broken homes. Fathers unable to support their families fled, as did mothers, and children grew up with one parent or none. They did not go to school. Their opportunity for advancement in the world was either through hard work and good fortune or committing crimes. Many chose the latter. These men and boys had other poverty-stricken members of that class as their friends, not middle-class students or young men who were brought up by two-parent, hardworking families. The support they had, and inspiration, came from other criminals.27
* * *
There was danger everywhere, even in celebrations. Revelers in the sprawling, eleven-acre City Hall Park got a jump on the Fourth of July in 1836 and began firing the latest firearms on July 3 at a nighttime celebration. It disgusted young lawyer George Templeton Strong, who lived nearby. “It was a shameful spectacle: the booths lighted up, the people as drunk as dogs, and such popping of squibs, rockets, pistols, etc. as I never heard. It did not look much like Sunday evening in a Christian country,” he wrote in his diary that night.28
By the 1840s, Strong was six years into his career as a diarist covering the New York scene, from low taste to high society, gritty to gaudy, and crinoline to crime. He lived in the rarefied world of the rich and super-rich. He spent his days in his large mansion or at his high-powered law office, but at night he gamboled through the congested city streets on his way to extravagant balls and haughty receptions held behind the doors of the most expensive homes in America. On the way to and from his parties and balls and law courts, he observed New York and New Yorkers very closely. Like former mayor Philip Hone, Strong was a chronicler of the lives of New Yorkers in a frenetic era. He wrote privately about the city, its street vigilantes and criminals, its debutantes and politicians, much as Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley did publicly.
Strong’s father was a very successful lawyer who, in partnership with others, had represented some of the city’s and the nation’s most impressive corporations and individuals. His first wife died at twenty-three, and his second gave birth to George in 1820. Young George followed in his father’s footsteps and became a successful attorney. The Strongs lived in a large brick mansion on a tree-lined street near Battery Park, an immaculately groomed park full of trees, shrubs, and small, well-kept gardens overlooking the harbor where city dwellers strolled and listened to band concerts in the summertime. It was home to Castle Garden, one of the country’s largest
entertainment centers, where the sensational “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, performed at the start of her national tour. The park and Castle Garden were gorgeous. “The city lamps surround you, like a shiny belt of constellations,” wrote Lydia Child. “And there stands Castle Garden, with its gay perspective of coloured lamps, like a fairy grotto, where imprisoned fire-spirits send up sparkling wreaths, with rockets laden with glittery ear-drops, caught by the floating sea nymphs as they fall.”29
Castle Garden was joined in 1855 by the spectacular Crystal Palace, made almost entirely of glass, which became home to huge concerts and shows. People flocked to performances at the Palace, where Bryant Park is today, and often arrived just to stroll around it and look at its magnificence. The showplace burned to the ground in 1858.
Strong was a very inquisitive child. As a teenager, young George told friends that one of his goals was to know about life in every neighborhood in the city. He wanted to know not just how the other half lived but who the other half was. What were their triumphs and tragedies, their problems? How did life in the ever-expanding city affect them? Why were the criminals running loose? Why did the government seem unable to keep up with the stupendous growth of the town? Why could the police not stem the tidal wave of criminality?
Strong was brilliant. He read his first complete book at four and a book on the American Revolution at ten, and he was at the head of his class at nine. As a child he learned to play the piano and organ. His father spent several hours each night studying with him. He started to write journals, as his father had done, and friends and family said that he wrote well.
More than anyone else, Strong was a representative of the upper crust of New York society, a group of high-toned, well-heeled people whose presence and importance in the city were often overshadowed by the wave of crime, prostitution, and drunkenness for which New York was famous. The city had a number of colleges, literary societies, parlor poetry readings, gardens, horse academies, debutante organizations, balls, and receptions that were supported by the rich. The upper crust, like Strong, kept homes on Long Island in the summer, where they maintained large staffs of servants and kept horses and carriages. They owned large yachts that were anchored either at harbors on the island or along the Manhattan waterfront. The wealthy did all they could to establish their colony of proper etiquette, literature, and fashion in a world around them that seemed to have gone mad.