Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

What was required in officers, but never written down, was toughness and attitude. The force was made up of men who had trained themselves to be rough, at times brutal, and men who could run fast and wrestle criminals to the ground. There was no rule book to read, no official instructions to follow. The hiring was not done by trained law enforcement officials, either, but by members of the city’s Board of Aldermen. Each alderman or assistant alderman appointed the new policemen who worked in his district. Generally speaking, each district got the same number of patrolmen, so a high-crime area had the same protection as a low-crime area. Residents of high-crime areas complained bitterly that they were being discriminated against and needed far more police than had been assigned to them.

  A large number of the first police were of Irish descent, and that number would grow until, in midcentury, nearly three-quarters of all cops would be Irish. Oddly enough, the most-targeted victims of the Irish police were other Irish immigrants. Sociologists of the era said that the Irish police beat up other Irish in New York to make up for old scores and grudges from the days they all lived together in Ireland. Regardless of whom they arrested and beat up, New Yorkers who did not like the Irish, and there were many, complained bitterly that the city was hiring an ethnic police force.70

  The mayors could interview the candidates but soon halted that practice and turned it over to the ward heelers, managers for the political machine who found work for party people, took care of people’s problems, and who did all of the choosing. The new police paid the aldermen who hired them for the privilege, generally about $150. The patrolmen then asked to work with particular captains, usually friends, and each paid his captain $40 for that honor. The captain, in turn, usually paid $200 to the alderman who hired him. All made their payments back rather quickly by performing odd jobs for politicians or simply accepting some of the numerous bribes that floated through the precinct house. The crooked cops enjoyed their work, and the honest police, those few that were honest, were demoralized by the fact that all of the payments and graft swirled about them and that absolutely nothing could be done about it.71

  One outrage that continued for years was the appointment by captains of friends to serve as precinct house clerks without any prior approval from the city. Hundreds of clerks owed their jobs to their friends the captains.72

  An enormous cost to the city in the police budget was salary overruns at the end of each year. There was little planning done to determine what the total salaries of patrolmen and captains would be, and each year additional fees had to be paid to cover the salaries of extra police, which critics said were staged so that police and their friends could make more money. As an example, in 1849 the police hired an additional forty-three watchmen during the year, not in the budget, and then had to pay these extra salaries in the early months of 1850. Another civic complaint was that the magistrates approved special, additional fees for police already on salary to transport convicts from the courtroom to the jail for internment, another case of double-dipping.73 The cost of the new force became so high, and so quickly, that just two years after it was established, in March 1847, several aldermen asked the chief of police if the size of the force could be reduced so that the city could save money. The chief, furious, refused.74

  The size of the force was not the only problem the new police presented. Captains constantly urged the construction of brand-new precinct houses or vast renovations of the old ones. The precincts also served as refuge houses. Captains let hundreds of indigent citizens and homeless people sleep inside precinct houses at night, especially in winter. There was little control over prisoners. The lack of discipline was so great that in 1847 the city had to order the police to take more steps to stop prisoners from setting their cells on fire to protest their arrests.75

  The ineffectiveness of the new police, after all of the promises, depressed George Templeton Strong. There was crime, crime, and more crime in the streets, literal death in the air. There seemed to be burglars, killers, and robbers in every neighborhood. It was all people talked about. In just the last ten months of 1840, there had been nineteen riots and twenty-three murders. That summer the editor of the Commercial Advertiser complained that the New York police were “wretchedly inadequate” to combat crime. “In a word, lawless violence and fury have full dominion over us whenever it pleases them to rage and it is more owing to the forbearance of the riotous and viciously inclined than to any preventive of repressive means employed.” Those complaints were heard from Strong and many others at the end of the summer of 1841 and in the succeeding years.76

  New Yorkers kept repeating a new joke: “While the city sleeps, the Watch sleeps, too.”77

  One night in the spring of 1845, as the new police force was settling in, Strong stood quietly on a street watching yet another great fire consume an entire block of buildings. He gazed over huge groups of onlookers including whores still putting their clothes back on, disheveled actors, now-homeless tenants, a few curious Bowery B’hoys and their girls, and a large group of suspicious-looking people. “Loafers of most unquestionable genuineness,” he called them with disdain, “on the lookout for anything they could lay their hands on.”78

  By the time the new police took over in late 1845, the city had changed. It was “a new kind of city and city life.… Something new came into the world,” said a historian, “and it had to be endowed with meaningful representation” in newspapers, books, and letters.79

  The problems of the 1830s and 1840s did not disappear under the new police in the ever-expanding city; they grew. The police were proud that they had developed new systems to arrest criminals, but the criminals were even prouder of the fact that they continually outwitted the police. Banks were a perfect example. In the 1850s, banks started sending messengers to other banks or to the homes of clients. Robbery rings followed these messengers and garroted them, sometimes killing them, when they walked through a desolate neighborhood or past a dark alley. Later, the police rode on bank wagons and trucks to protect the bank shipments, but thieves concocted ways to disable the trucks and the police.80

  Pauperism was a growing problem in New York City. Laborers who did work earned only two hundred dollars a year, hardly enough to raise a family on. Those women who did work only earned about a hundred a year. The number of poor increased dramatically, as did the number of almshouses funded by the city and civic organizations. People continued to live in hovels burrowed into the basements of the city of stone buildings. “In this one cellar, my father and mother, two brothers and two sisters and myself all lived together—ate, slept, cooked, washed, and ironed and did everything in this one dank and noisome hole.… My mother and my father drank whiskey whenever they could get a chance and I early imbibed a passionate fondness for it,” said a teenage girl about her childhood in a damp slum in 1850.81

  Prostitution under the new police was worse than ever, and the ladies of the evening were bolder than before as they walked the streets, come-on smiles on their lips. “Here are two ladies approaching us, magnificently attired,” wrote George Foster in 1850, “with their large arms and voluptuous bosoms half naked, and their bright eyes looking invitation at every passer by.… Diamonds and bracelets flash from their bosoms and bare arms, and heavily-wrought India shawls of that gorgeous scarlet whose beamy hue intoxicates the eye, hang carelessly from their superb shoulders, almost trailing on the walk.… They would be taken for queens or princesses, if such things were ever seen among us.… As they pass, they look hard at you and exclaim familiarly, ‘How do you do, my dear? Come, won’t you go home with me?’”82

  Many complained that by the 1850s the city and police still had no plan for the treatment of the illegal prostitutes. “[They] cause more guilt, crime and misery than even bad rum,” argued Whitman. “We trust that our police, in dealing with this class of offenses, will act on some settled plan—either tolerate such of these places as are quietly kept or steadily suppress them all.”83

  Prostitution was so profitable in the
1850s that one man said that more money changed hands in one day in the prostitution business in New York City than was exchanged at all the banks in Europe in an entire week.84

  The terror found in the streets was often matched by jubilation, such as on the evening of May 7, 1847, when the city was lit up like a carnival to celebrate a victory in the Mexican War. George Templeton Strong was caught in the crowd of surging New Yorkers, packed like fish in cans, who streamed down city streets to set off fireworks, shout, drink, and holler. “Nearly every building on Chatham Street and Broadway lit up and glittering. Rockets and Roman Candles whizzing and popping in every direction, fireworks blazing away on the Astor and American [hotels], and half a dozen other places, and every side street that one looked down, glowing, sparkling, as far as its houses could be seen from the park.”85

  By 1847, most of the city was prospering. Even the grimy old wooden piers had loveliness to them in the summer of that year, when kids dove off of them into the rivers. Whitman later spent an afternoon one summer watching teenagers swimming in the river amid the piers. “The laughter, voices, calls, responses—the springing and diving of the bathers from the great string-piece of the decay’d pier, where climb or stand long ranks of them, naked, rose color’d, with movements, postures ahead of any sculpture. To all this, the sun, so bright, the dark-green shadow of the hills the other side, the amber-rolling waves, changing as the tide comes in to a transparent tea-color—the frequent splash of the playful boys, sousing—the glittering drops sparkling, and the good western breeze blowing.”86

  For a few minutes, at least, the beauty of the city overshadowed the dark hue of the ever-widening crime wave.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Police Brutality Raises Its Ugly Head

  They were powerful, fearless men, who dispensed the law with a nightstick, seldom bothering to make arrests.

  —Patrolman Cornelius Willemse

  Crime in 1856 was far more widespread than it had been years earlier. The increase in crime was always blamed on the ever-increasing population of the city, climbing to 629,810 by 1855.1 The number of residents approached a million by the very end of the 1860s, and police chiefs used the population in their reports to the mayor and Board of Aldermen, constantly whining that the huge number of people meant more crime. It was not the inept police; it was the population.

  In 1855, Walt Whitman called New York “one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in Christendom.” He added that by that time the criminal element in the city had been joined by new robbers and murderers who had moved to Gotham from other states, such as California after the gold rush there. They were, he said, “thieves, expelled, some of them, from distant San Francisco, vomited back among us to practice their criminal occupations.”

  Crime was so prevalent, and the police were still so inept, that Whitman warned visitors to Gotham not to walk around alone at night and not to trust anybody. “Any affable stranger who makes friendly offers is very likely to attempt to swindle you as soon as he can get into your confidence. Mind your own business,” he wrote.2

  The Aurora editor told tourists, too, of “various kinds of scamps who do business upon the inexperience of strangers … sojourners robbed, swindled, and perhaps beaten.”3

  Whitman was one of many in the city who scoffed at newcomers and tourists. He told them all to stay inside their hotel and put their money in the hotel’s safe. Those who were robbed, especially those robbed in visits to prostitutes, gained no sympathy, just scorn, from newspaper people who told them that all they did when they reported robberies to the police or got into the newspapers as a victim was give advertising to the brothels where they were robbed.4

  How to stop all of the crime?

  The cops on the first professional police force were told to be tough as soon as they were hired. The old constable had been not only ineffective but weak. Killers, robbers, and gangbangers had gotten away with murder for decades, and the public was sick and tired of it. The new officers were told to use as much force as they felt necessary to apprehend criminals and stem the ever-rising crime wave. A common practice was to crack criminals over the head, or across the back of the neck, with their thick, fourteen-inch-long wooden nightsticks, or billy clubs, regardless of the consequence. Police pushed, shoved, and kicked men down a street. Ears were pulled hard, throats were put in a vise hold, knee pressure was applied to the lower back, ankles were kicked, feet were stomped on. Usually, the nightstick blow to the head knocked men down, or unconscious, and sometimes victims later suffered brain damage.5

  Police argued that their job often made it impossible to keep the peace without violence. Patrolman Walling found himself the cop on the beat in a neighborhood in which most of the tenants on the east side of the street were English and those on the west side Irish. There were at least a dozen fights per night, and they were nearly impossible to break up. “After dusk the life of a policeman who patrolled the beat alone was not worth much, but by a severe course of discipline, the neighborhood was made safe,” he said, referring to cop beatings.6

  This was the “necessary force” needed to subdue a prisoner and was considered acceptable by police, city officials, and the public. The new police thought nothing of keeping control of a recently arrested prisoner by using their nightsticks. Some refined the technique by wrapping the stick in one or two handkerchiefs so that there would be no marks on it after a beating. Others only hit arrestees in soft places on the body so there would be no bumps or bruises to show violence. Many men were brought to the jail and then, hidden from the public, were beaten badly. Suspects in criminal investigations were often beaten up, kicked down stairs, and shoved against walls in the precinct house and forced to confess to crimes. This was soon dubbed “the third degree,” and it became an acceptable form of brutality. Force was often excessive. A Philadelphia woman was beaten to death by one policeman, and a bystander to an arrest who argued with the arresting officers was shot dead.7

  Police often advised victims of harassment to take matters into their own hands and beat up those bothering them. Captain Walling told one man to beat up the man who was annoying him in order to stop the man’s badgering. Walling assured the man that the police would not then arrest him for assault. He beat the man nearly to death; the man never bothered him again. Captain Walling? He said he knew nothing about it.8

  Sometimes brutality was carried out strictly by the book. A woman who was arrested in New York at her boardinghouse was forced to walk as quickly as possible, almost at a forced-march speed, through dreadful weather and amid streets of mud more than a few inches deep, lifting her ankles and knees up and down, for over a mile to the Tryon Row jail. She said that the walk through the miserable conditions wore her out and made her sick.9

  Officer Walling said that police supervisors offered few instructions on how to make arrests, disperse a crowd, or bring detainees to the precinct house. One problem police often had was when they confronted a group of rowdy men alone. Walling mastered the situation early with a persona of threatened force. He stood up to the group he was trying to disperse and told them to stop what they were doing or they would all be arrested. He pulled out his nightstick and held it in front of him, holding it tight, looking at each man with steely eyes and a hard-set jaw. There was then a quiet between them until the men realized that one or more of them was going to be hurt in a confrontation with the cop, even if they won the fight and escaped. “Well?” Walling would say. The men usually backed off.10

  Treating criminals brutally had another effect. Lawbreakers began to tell fellow felons they did not fear the punishment meted out by police courts, often lenient, as much as they feared the violence by the cop. A criminal could be permanently injured at the overly rough hands of the police officer, but not harmed at all by a judge. Fear of the brutal methods of the police began to intimidate criminals by the late 1840s.11

  The police also found that the immediate use of force quickly established their superiority in
any confrontation and that the more criminals knew that, the fewer problems there would be. Police often plunged into a crowd of street toughs, hitting several over the head with their nightsticks. This measure often brought success and, overall, built up the image of all policemen as strict protectors of the law who got their way. Their captains not only looked the other way in cases of brutality but encouraged their officers to use whatever force they thought necessary to achieve their goals. A famous phrase was that the patrolmen needed to do whatever had to be done to uphold the law.12

  The public approved. Walling said that “by dint of a few hard licks” police did their work and that the public was so terrified of crime that they allowed the police a wide berth in making arrests. Force was a necessary evil.13

  There were many who were convinced that cops just had a mean streak and used their nightsticks, or any weapons they could find, in order to hurt people they suspected of lawbreaking. One was city political leader Robert Livingston, who testified at a state legislative hearing that “officers of justice, often uneducated or overbearing men, either do not know or designedly exceed the boundaries of their authority. The accused sometimes submits to illegal acts; in others, resists those to whom he ought to submit.”14

  Officers did not accept any verbal abuse, either, whether from those they arrested or bystanders. The cop had to maintain law, and to do that he had to be violent. People soon began smiling at cops as they passed them on the street, or tipping their hats. Men and women wished them a nice day or a good evening. Cop questions were always answered with a “yes, Officer” or “yes, sir” somewhere in the conversation. Within a year, New Yorkers feared the new police and, intimidated, were congenial toward them. “There is no remedy for insulting language,” said one New York captain, “but personal chastisement.”15

  The police always defended their tactics, despite some public complaints against the increasing severity of the attacks by the men in blue. “A New York police officer knows he has been sworn in to ‘keep the peace’ and he keeps it. There’s no ‘shilly shallying’ with him, and he doesn’t consider himself half patrolman and half Supreme Court judge,” scoffed Officer Walling. “He can and does arrest on suspicion. In times of turbulence or threatened rioting, he keeps people moving.”16