The police officer often kept them moving, and swiftly, with a few smacks to the back of the head with the billy club. Walling always used the billy club when he had to do so and urged all of his men to do the same.
Criminals who feared the police because of clubbing, it was believed, would not commit crimes. Another reason for the violent clubbing of suspects was the poor image maintained by the New York public of the old constable, who did nothing to rein in criminals or stem the crime wave. The new cops felt that they had to be violent and brutal right away to assure the citizenry that they were tough enough to police the streets. They also faced the time-honored “perp walk” challenge of bringing their suspect from the point of arrest half a mile or so to the nearest police precinct house for incarceration. On the way, friends of the arrested man might attack the police officer and beat him in an effort to get him to release their friend. The new cops, like the old, had to fight for their lives. Their brutality in beating up those who assaulted them was one more sign to all that they were rugged. They may not have yet been New York’s Finest, but they were certainly New York’s Toughest.17
The rougher they were, and the faster they were rough, the better off they were in the eyes of the public. New York residents accepted that as necessary because the people felt safer. The new officers understood early that brutality was just a part of their job and continued to utilize it.18
“The New York police have liberty of action—more by far than the London police, who dare not lay a hand on a man unless he is engaged in the very act of violating the law,” Walling said, adding that New York’s hard-edged policy was far more successful. Walling, who had been to London, said that British police had to stand by while known criminals gathered and prepared for assaults on citizens and hordes of pickpockets roamed the streets. New York’s police not only did not allow that, he said, but arrested men, and groups of men, merely on suspicion. They also arrested criminals the department had been looking for if they spotted them in a crowd, something European constables rarely did. The London bobbies did not arrest drunks or prostitutes walking the streets, either, but New York’s police did, often manhandling the inebriated men and women drinkers and streetwalkers. A study by the New York Prison Association in 1853 showed that the number of drunk and disorderly people arrested in New York City from 1848 to 1853 rose by 278 percent.19
Cops had to be careful. The patrolman who was not careful was often soon a dead patrolman. Charles Baxter was a fine example. He was assigned the East River dock beat, where, one chilly November day, he was scheduled to board the vessel Thomas Watson to inspect its cargo, which consisted of six hundred bags of coffee with a value of fourteen dollars per bag. More interested than Baxter was a quartet of young men intent on robbing the Watson of its cargo. Thomas Kelly bumped into one of them that morning. He saw William Johnson standing on the dock, eyeing the ship. Johnson wore a straw hat with a red stripe on it. Kelly engaged him in conversation, and Johnson, looking left and right, talked pleasantly to him. He told him that three of his friends were on board, looking to get a cup of coffee, and that he planned to join them, adding that they all might take a cruise on the ship. Later, Johnson got on board (Kelly did not see him), with three other men. They apparently did not know that the watchman, Baxter, was inspecting the ship, and he tried to arrest them when they approached the bags of coffee. There was a melee, and three of the men beat Baxter to death as the fourth stood guard—all over a few bags of coffee. It was one of the first cases in history where a prosecutor convinced a jury that if four men were involved in a murder, then all four had to be hanged; one could not be given a lesser sentence just because he was only the lookout.20
The beating of a police officer was highly frowned upon, too. An ex-convict, Ben Waterman, was sent to prison for three months in 1842 for beating up a watchman. New York police were routinely assaulted by people they tried to arrest. One officer went to a home to serve a warrant against a man. The man threatened to punch the officer, and while they were arguing his wife sneaked up on the cop and dumped a large pail of water over his head. Both were arrested and convicted.21
Sometimes the judicial tables were turned against the cops. In 1850, two patrolmen arrested a suspect, Bernard Trainor, on the grounds of the Croton Water Works, a state property, where he was employed. He charged them with trespassing, and the state pursued the case against the officers. Incredibly, the patrolmen were fined for doing their job. After much argument, the city then paid their fines and went after Trainor in revenge.22
The patrolmen were backed up by their captains and the chief of police, even though those officials always publicly acknowledged public complaints against police. Each policeman realized that all of his fellow cops faced the same problems that he did and reacted in the same way. They defended each other, stood up for each other, and lobbied for each other. By the early 1850s, the police, under attack by criminals, newspaper editors, and civic leaders, banded together as “brothers” in the “blue wall.” There were accusations that some police even committed perjury in official investigations or trials to protect their brothers in blue. Older officers taught rookies the traditions of the police. Squad rooms were set up as traditional meeting places, decorated with police notices and photos of retired officers. Stories were swapped between cops about notorious criminals, or dangerous investigations and arrests. Older officers would instruct their younger colleagues on how to make an arrest and how much force to use. One generation of officers groomed another, and part of that grooming was the idea that the police had to stick together. This sense of blue solidarity was built up with numerous “police parades,” in which nearly the entire force marched down Broadway to remind residents that a powerful and massive group of officers were protecting them. It was a forerunner of the contemporary “show of force” in which dozens of police cars, sirens blaring, race through city streets to remind residents they are in good hands. In that era, too, the ceremonial “police funeral” was founded, in which every officer in the department, in uniform, accompanied by bands, attended any funeral of a slain officers in a magisterial display of blue unity. All for one and one for all.23
From the early days of the constabulary force through the late 1850s, the New York police had not only loose street controls but exceedingly loose authoritative controls from above. The chiefs and captains in charge of each precinct hailed their patrolmen and detectives, pointed proudly to the soaring number of arrests, and spent considerable time publicizing the good civic deeds police routinely performed, such as caring for lost children and helping elderly ladies cross crowded downtown streets. Families with a low-intelligence relative living with them often went to the police to beg them to find the relative, who had fled. The officers did so happily.24 Police also patched up differences between feuding store owners, or told street vendors who sold certain goods not to sell them in front of stores that sold the same goods. Businessmen all appreciated these efforts.
The New York police force never had serious oversight from its administrators—the internal affairs division did not come until generations later—or figures of authority. Leadership did little to punish recalcitrant police or to arrest police who were bribed or participated in illegal schemes. The city was growing too fast and criminality becoming too professional for captains and chiefs to keep up. They did not try, either, and because of that, the force always had a difficult time maintaining law and order.25
The men in blue sometimes turned out to be a motley crew, however. Many of those first officers did not meet the height requirements or even approach any of the physical requirements that made them “able-bodied men.” In 1847, after medical exams were finally given two years after the new force’s debut, police doctors found fifty men, or 6 percent of the force, unfit for duty even though they drew full pay. Cops were not in good health generally, and many reported sick, frequently. All police were not the strapping young men the force bragged about. A British tourist wrote in 1852 that the police
were “of all ages and sizes including little withered old men, five foot nothing high.”26
Officer Walling wrote in his memoirs that her remarks were common. He reminisced about his own hiring. “It is amusing to me to recall the ease with which the appointment was secured. The men at that time owed their appointments to entirely political preferences; there were no surgeons’ inspections, not any civil service examinations. As a matter of fact, no attention was paid to the physique or mental requirements of the applicant.… I received no special instructions as to what were my duties [either],” said Walling.27
Walling was told to be tough, as were all of the police. Why? The criminals were tough. Cops began to feel like they were targets of rowdies, robbers, killers, and street gangs. They did not have enough brethren to win skirmishes against street toughs, so they turned vigilante. Many men were killed by the new police, who waited for them to walk down a street and then attacked them out of an alley and beat them to death. Men were killed by gun-wielding patrolmen who waited for hours for them to walk down a certain street. The cops would then assassinate the criminals. Why? They felt that they were losing the war against crime and needed a sneak-attack mentality to win it.
In his 1915 memoir, officer Cornelius Willemse said of nineteenth-century cops, “They were powerful, fearless men, who dispensed the law with a nightstick, seldom bothering to make arrests.”28
They knew that the magistrates, even the new police magistrates, would most likely toss their charges against criminals out of court or assess them fines instead. In one heatedly debated case in 1850, a magistrate found a man guilty of a crime and ordered him sent to prison. Then, suddenly, he asked him to pay fifteen dollars in bail money. The man did so, and the judge released him; he never went to jail. This was a common occurrence.29
Mayors themselves did the same thing. Anybody of importance who was arrested could plead his case to the mayor and have his conviction overturned. In the fall of 1835, three French noblemen got drunk and scuffled with constables. They were arrested and tossed into a cell at a local watch house. Word of the arrests reached City Hall, and the next morning the mayor came down and had them released. They thanked him profusely and went on their way. The mayor’s intervention annoyed many, but it was rather commonplace.30
The police took justice into their own hands and were very careful to cover their tracks so the finger of blame would not be pointed at them. These men knew, too, that criminals were as likely to kill them as they were likely to murder criminals. They believed it was better to strike first and try to avoid detection, or if caught say their actions were nothing more than self-defense in a city soaked in crime. The police magistrates worried, too. They were so afraid of the criminals in their courts that several were armed. In one unforgettable courtroom in St. Louis, related in a story in the Herald, an angry magistrate stood up behind his bench, drew a long sword from the belt of his trousers, flashed it in the air menacingly, and threatened to stab anybody who came near him.31
There were complaints against the men in blue. From January 1 to July 1 of 1854, as an example, citizens filed 239 complaints against police. Nineteen cops were fired and seven retired after these complaints were filed. One hundred and thirty-eight were suspended without pay. Seventy-five of the complaints were dismissed.32
Some citizens were so irate at the way they were treated that they published pamphlets to tell their story and point fingers at policemen. Frances Connor was one. In 1848, she wrote a letter that was part of a case against someone else. The police arrested Connor at her boardinghouse and put her in jail for several days, and then she went to trial. She wrote that everything possible was done to harass her and wreck her reputation over a very minor incident. “Conspiracy, false pretense, false imprisonment, my moral character has been grossly abused, health injured, intellect impeached and my name forged,” she wrote bitterly in the pamphlet. “If crime and misrule be supported, as in the present case, and individuals robbed of their claim, there can be no discipline to be supported in society.”33
Many residents kept away from the police, fearing consequences. Later, Jacob Cantor told a state legislative hearing that “it seemed in fact that every interest, every occupation, almost every citizen, was dominated by an all controlling and overshadowing dread of the police department,” and added that the 95 percent of middle- and working-class New Yorkers knew that they did not have the money or influence to be free of persecution, as did the rich.34
The arrest of criminals was one goal of the “new” police force. The other was crime prevention. Over eight hundred men in blue had to be able to stop criminals, no matter how many there were, from attacking citizens or robbing stores. Crime prevention was necessary. Captains told their officers to keep notes on how long it took them to walk their beat, how many stores they passed, how many residences. They were told to keep a record of the number of unlocked houses or stores they found and records of whom they talked to and for what reason. Lists of suspicious-looking people and of men who lounged on street corners were required. Cops wrote down physical descriptions of people they were looking for so that others could arrest them if they spotted them in their neighborhood. Each cop was asked to point out lawbreakers to other cops so that they would be known on sight. Police kept records of criminals who were visiting New York from other cities, with notes on local criminals with whom they met. The notes were turned over to all patrolmen to increase surveillance.35
In the late 1850s, police went so far as to round up suspected criminals, several dozen of them at a time, and hold a mass police lineup of them. The police got newspapers to run stories asking anyone who had been robbed lately to come into the station house for a viewing of the lineup of suspected robbers to make identification.36
When photography arrived in the late 1850s (there were seventy-seven photography galleries in 1854), New York was the first to establish the infamous “Rogues Gallery,” a series of books of pictures of known criminals, with descriptions, that police studied at their precinct houses for street familiarity. They were quite detailed. One man was described thus: “smooth shaven and wears a dark brown wig, reaching over the forehead. He squints a great deal and is constantly chewing tobacco … complexion sallow, with hollow cheeks, receding chin, prominent nose, on the left side of which are two prominent warts, stoops considerably and has a halting gait.”37
The crude 1857 Rogues Gallery would later lead to the enormous lists of criminals maintained by large urban police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIA and Homeland Security, national lists of fingerprints and DNA samples would follow.38
The new New York City police, like the old, always deferred to the rich. Wealthy men and women were rarely arrested for anything, even when they were drunk or disorderly. The police determined who was well off strictly by their clothes. If you made enough money to buy expensive clothes, you were a member of society and not a common criminal. If you did commit a crime, your clothes kept you out of the dock and the jail. Those dressed shabbily, police believed, clearly belonged to the lower classes, and as such committed thefts and robbed people. The “floater” or “drifter” or “idler” was always a target of the police. The idler had no job and therefore, police believed, would rob individuals to pay his bills and obtain food.
“An idler … has no right to complain … if the eyes of the police follow him wherever he roams or rests,” said one editor. “His very idleness is an offense against all social laws. He wrongs somebody and only wants a faint impulse to push him into a league with burglars and incendiaries.”39
The entire nation was awash, one editor said, in a “carnival of murder.” The story of two Massachusetts men, Weeks and Whitney, who had held grudges against each other for years, was typical. Whitney told Weeks that if he could pick him up and throw him a few feet he would be judged the stronger of the two, and Weeks agreed. As he moved in to pick Weeks up, though, Whitney, the father of four small children, punched him a few times
and then pulled out a long jackknife and stabbed him several times, killing him.
Murders were so frequent, and so infuriated the public, that many longtime anti-capital-punishment champions changed their mind on the subject and now called for executions. Walt Whitman was one. After an 1857 murder, he feared that a jury would be lenient with the killer, a man named Rogers. “We hope not. An example and a warning are imperatively demanded. The extreme penalty of the law should be inflicted. Let him hang!” Whitman said.40
The police targeted teenagers. Young men were seen as capable of anything. Youthful, headstrong, and jobless, they preyed on all. What really appalled the residents of New York was that the crime wave swept up young children, aged eight to sixteen, and most were the children of dirt-poor immigrants. “Nineteen out of twenty of these mendicants are foreigners cast upon our shores, indigent and helpless, having spent the last shilling in paying their passage money, deceived by the misrepresentation of unscrupulous agents and left to starve amongst strangers who, finding it impossible to extend relief to all, are deterred from assisting any,” wrote Philip Hone.41
Many of the kids were asked to steal food and money by parents who lived in shantytowns or one-room hovels in tenements. Few suspected theft by children, and the kids usually got away with it. Many were taken in by street gangs and small robbery rings because magistrates always felt sorry for children brought before them and rarely put wide-eyed children in jail. These New York robbery gangs’ use of children was similar to the way that Dickens’s Fagin-led London street gang utilized them.
Law & Disorder Page 25
