Other riots followed the Astor Place melee. In 1852, a horde of thirty drunk men roared into the Bowery Street Theater, refusing to buy tickets, and rumbled down the aisles. Several police in the theater tried to push them back into the lobby but failed. A full-scale riot was stopped because a ticket seller ran to the nearest precinct house, and the captain there dispatched a squad of men to the theater. They put down the disturbance and arrested all of the men in front of a very shaken crowd. From time to time, in the early 1850s, there were riots involving a half-dozen men or fewer, often drunk, and in most cases the rioters evaded arrest.68
The Astor Place riot was the perfect example, right at the end of the decade, that the new police were just as ineffective as the old constable corps and that the city was hurtling blindly into the 1850s, which promised to be yet another decade of law and disorder. The new police had been on the streets for seven years by 1852. Crime was up, and residents were afraid to walk through neighborhoods at night. One man called police in New York in the early 1850s “the worst in the world,” and most residents agreed.69
At the end of the 1840s, blame was being placed all over New York for bad police, riots, drunkenness, whores, illegal gamblers, and, especially, criminals. Many people had made up their minds that the city had spawned a criminal class, similar to the tawdry underworld portrayed in some of Dickens’s novels. Many others argued that since statistics showed that an overwhelming percentage of men in prison and city jails were immigrants, and that many street gangs were ethnic in composition, all criminals had to be immigrants. The Protestants said all the criminals were Irish Catholics, and the Irish Catholics said they were all Protestants.70
One New York judge on the bench in 1855 was so convinced that all criminals were immigrants that he joked that all murders, riots, and violent assaults were committed by the Irish, daring burglaries and highway robberies were the work of the British, and petty theft, larceny, and forgeries were crimes of native Americans.71
Police Chief Matsell? He did not listen to anybody. When he looked out of his office window, or strolled down the avenues of New York, all he saw was police triumph. “The discipline of the department has been steadily improving during the past year, and it may be fairly anticipated that, under the operations of the amended law, the department will become what its original projectors intended it should be—an efficient organization for the prevention and detection of crime,” he said.72
Matsell had statistics, too. He pointed out that in the year 1852 there were approximately 38,000 arrests, a 3.5 percent increase from 1851. He had deployed far more policemen on the streets and out of the office in 1852. There were more patrolmen to make arrests and, he said proudly, a police presence that deterred crime. What he did not say, and knew, was that many of those arrested were, for a few dollars shoved into the palm of a patrolman, allowed to escape. One pair of policemen went to a jail one night in 1851 to find it empty, the cell never locked by the police officer who “incarcerated” the men.73
Matsell admitted, too, that despite the increase of police in the department over the previous five years, and more cops on the street, actual crime prevention was quite low because so many officers were working in administrative capacities. A study of the police force that year shows that there were 903 police. One hundred and seventy-eight were on special detail that did not involve patrolling the streets—civil court personnel, police court workers, and administrative assistants. That left 36 men in each district at night, but half of them were sleeping in precinct house dormitories, resulting in just 18 cops on the streets in each district. That meant that one man had to oversee fifteen blocks of city turf, a nearly impossible task. Each cop realized, too, that hard work would not bring promotion; that was all political. There was no incentive for hard work, and, consequently, the officers worked little, spending much time having coffee in street shops, chatting with passersby, and complaining about their jobs. Little crime prevention was undertaken.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Blood in the Streets
Probably in no city in the civilized world is life so fearfully insecure.
—Isabella Bird Bishop
The police department could not stem the crime wave or stop riots, and by the late winter of 1853 its leaders were admitting that things were just about out of control. The chief told the state legislature in his annual report on crime the previous year that “offenses against the person became of such frequent occurrence that peaceable citizens became alarmed and were afraid to venture beyond their domicile after a certain hour in the evening, while it was evident that many of the policemen were careless, if not indolent, and rather preferred to turn away from places where they were likely to get hard usage and but little honor, than to interfere with such evil disposed persons.”1
James Gerard, a police reformer, conducted a study that showed that crimes against people were three times as high as property crimes in the late 1840s and six times as high as in the late 1830s. Foreign visitors said they did not feel safe in the city. “Probably in no city in the civilized world is life so fearfully insecure,” said Isabella Bird Bishop, a visitor from England.2
The three main causes of crime in the 1830s and ’40s—prostitution, drinking, and gambling—were even more prevalent in the 1850s. The swelling size of New York meant far more customers for those trades. More and more women drifted into prostitution, and they made more money. Their appearance was seen by some as sexual and romantic, but many, such as Whitman, had only scorn for them. “Dirty finery, excessively plentiful; paint, both red and white, draggle-tailed dress, ill-fitting, coarse features, un-intelligent, bold glance, questioning, shameless, perceptibly anxious, hideous croak or dry, brazen ring in voice, affected, but awkward, mincing, waggling gait,” he said of the whores.3
By the early 1850s, the way the police ignored the problem of prostitution, and all of its crimes, was obvious to everybody, and public officials and newspaper editors often complained about it. All realized, too, that many police officers were in collusion with madams who paid them to look the other way. The involvement of the police with whores and madams was greater, and deeper, in the early 1850s than it had been in the last quarter of a century. One man said in 1852 that the cops were too involved with brothels and bars to do their job. Later, looking back, New York City police critic Reverend Charles Parkhurst said that “the guilt of the proprietors [of vice] is not nearly so great as the guilt of a police system that tolerates and fosters guilty proprietorship. It is our police system that is the supreme culprit.”4
A continuing problem for the new police, one that escalated in the 1850s, was the old harbor pirates, small gangs that had been preying on ships docked in New York Harbor, generally East River docks. The total value of cargo on the ships was probably the highest of any harbor in the world. In the early 1850s, police estimated that about $400 million in cargo was in the holds of the ships at the docks that ringed Manhattan each year—attractive targets. There were several small gangs in the city, totaling a hundred or so men, who slipped out from underneath piers in small, wide boats in their home Fourth Ward and quietly moved up or down the river after midnight, unseen by anybody in the dimly lit waterway. They boarded a berthed vessel that had few security guards and when the crew was sound asleep. The guards were overwhelmed quickly and quietly, tied up, and gagged, and the ship was looted. Men carried off whatever they could that was worth something and could be put on their boat. Gold, silver, and jewelry were best because they were small items and could easily be concealed. They also raided the cargo areas of ships and stole coffee, tea, sugar, and other foodstuffs. The loot and cargo were taken out of the bags they came in and put into bags the thieves brought with them to eliminate any sign of ownership by the vessels. Then the men sailed back into the darkened waters, still unseen. If they were captured, they were put in jail and arraigned in the morning. The problem the police and judges had, though, was that the property that was confiscated was never in vessel bags,
just nondescript brown bags or canvas sacks carried by the pirates, who claimed the goods were theirs. Few were incarcerated.
The river bandits infuriated the police. “The river pirates pursue their nefarious operations with the most systematic perseverance and manifest a shrewdness and adroitness which can only be attained by long practice. Nothing comes amiss to them. In their boats, under cover of night, they prowl around the wharves and vessels in a stream and dexterously snatch up every piece of loose property left for a moment unguarded,” said Chief Matsell.5
Another group of harbor pirates, mostly children below the age of twelve, were the “daybreak boys,” who boarded ships between 5:00 and 6:00 A.M., just as the sun rose, and stole whatever they could find that was small. Then they rifled the bags and pockets of sailors still sleeping and got away in small boats, like the older harbor pirates. They were not as organized as the older thieves, though, and sometimes wounded or killed their victims.
An example of their violence was an encounter in the 1840s. Several daybreak boys were rowing up the East River and noticed a rowboat with three teenagers in it who were dressed like sons of wealthy parents. The daybreak boys sailed up next to them and, brandishing long knives, boarded the boat. The three victims, trying to resist, were beaten up and robbed of all their money and watches.6
Merchant-ship owners and dockworkers begged the police to attack the harbor pirates, but the constables had neither the resources nor the inclination to do so. It would not be until the eve of the Civil War, and a generation of controversy and turmoil within the police department, that special units would be formed just to patrol the harbor and its hundreds of docks to cut down on the waterway robberies.7
A perfect example of how crime escalated, in public, with no law enforcement to stop it, was the melee that took place at Cozzens’, a restaurant at the docks on the Hudson River. Several boatloads of boys from New Jersey street gangs, the Jersey City Riflemen, Short Boys, and others, landed and went directly to Cozzens’ to get drinks. Upon seeing them, and recognizing them, the owner refused to let them stand at the bar or even walk into the restaurant. “[They] thereupon proceeded to break windows, pull up the planks of the piazza, smash chairs, etc. broke Cozzens’s head, and hurt his two sons badly. It was a melee of the fiercest sort for a few minutes; the three Cozzenses, five workers and Mrs. Connolly … against some sixty blackguards, the latter finally beaten off,” wrote an irritated George Templeton Strong, who knew Mrs. Connolly and the Cozzenses. There were no police anywhere in the vicinity of the restaurant to save those who were nearly killed. The gang members got back on their boats and disappeared over the water.8
* * *
New York had a brand-new journal in the early 1850s, The New York Times. The Times had a lot of money behind it, and its editor, Henry Raymond, thought nothing of spending huge sums of cash to get the news. The Times quickly became successful, and one of the reasons was its crime coverage. In its “Police News” each day, it covered most of the courts in the city and kept up with the Herald and Sun in crime news. It kept up with the Sun in the citywide criticism of James Gordon Bennett, too, calling his Herald, a newspaper with a heavy concentration of medicinal ads, “the recognized organ of quack doctors.”9
The trouble the police had in fighting crime, too, was that the criminals simply became better at what they did, especially the burglars. The small burglary rings had become well-oiled crime machines by the middle of the 1850s; their members were far more skilled and experienced than they were in the early ’40s, when burglary first became a significant problem in the city. By the md-1850s, burglars not only had smoothly operating teams but carried whatever tools, oils, greases, crowbars, and explosives they needed to succeed.
Burglars scared residents. One man woke up in the middle of an early-morning robbery and panicked. He yelled and then ran for the bedroom window. Still in his underwear, he flung open the window and jumped out of it. He fell on several flagpoles that jutted out over the front of the building and then hit the ground. He was terrified, but still alive.10
Many patrolmen called them the “princes of larceny” because they were so good and difficult to catch. “A ‘second story’ man is required to be shrewd, have an absolute knowledge of police methods, be an ‘A-1’ judge of human nature, know the ways of servants, profound in divining feminine artifices in concealing valuables, expert in judging the value of precious stones, and, but rarely, furs and garments,” said Walling, who chased burglars all of his career. Walling added, too, that burglars knew what to look for, did not waste time on objects that were not worth a good deal of money, and got out of an apartment or house in less than two minutes to prevent suspicion or capture.11
The burglars’ success always came at the expense of Walling and his fellow officers, but there did not seem to be much they could do to halt the tide of carefully planned and executed thefts. “The complete prevention of their depredations has always seemed to me to be impossible, and the only safeguard against their operations is incessant vigilance on the part of store-keepers and householders,” added Walling.12
The police in the 1850s continued to be targets of those who said they were still corrupt, perhaps more corrupt than the constable force of the 1830s. Critics had plenty of evidence. Stories abounded of police taking money from gamblers, whores, unlicensed tavern owners, pickpockets, and burglars. Police were often accused of shaking down street vendors whom they were about to arrest for operating without a license. Sometimes those who were arrested were brought to court by the dozens and usually paid a fine of fifty-nine dollars. The police were often accused of being afraid to grapple with armed criminals or break up fights, instead padding their arrest totals with useless arrests of cart vendors who peddled food or clothes without a license. Some cops, like William Bell, arrested a dozen frazzled vendors at a time, each counting as a separate arrest for him to add to the totals for the month.13
Chief George Matsell was seen as crooked from the first day he left his beloved bookstore and took charge of the country’s largest police force. He helped slave catchers find and capture runaways under the terms of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Horace Greeley called him a “slave catcher” himself.14 He was rumored to be in the pay of Madame Marie Restell, the ill-famed head of a large city abortion ring. Ever since the Mary Rogers murder in 1840, directly connected to Restell and her abortionists, critics had accused Matsell of taking money from her to protect her operations and interfere with investigations of her (she avoided jail despite nearly twenty investigations and indictments). Some said he was paid a salary by her, and others said he received a cut of her income. He was said to have sent some under arrest to particular lawyers for representation and collected a percentage of the legal fee. Others said he steered friends of his who were arrested to the courts of friendly magistrates. Sometimes, it was charged, he even directly interfered, getting friendly aldermen or magistrates to release his friends, for a fee.
Many pointed fingers at his estate in Viola, Iowa. Somehow, on his moderate police salary, and with no second job, Matsell had earned enough money to build a twenty-room mansion, with an impressive wine cellar, that sat on three thousand acres of lush, rolling land. He and his wife entertained there as if they were European royalty. Where did that money come from?
The only thing the aldermen did prove was that Matsell was an alien. They said he had not been born in the United States but had moved here from England. An investigator was sent to England, and he brought back records proving that charge. “[He] has monstrously bamboozled the people. He has … lobbied law through the legislature through which he ha[s] retained his office for life, palpably against the spirit of our institutions. He is the source of the bloody strife at primary and legal elections and continues, through brute force and his own police satellites, to elect nearly all the heads of departments, judiciary and who, in return, are his abject slaves,” read the report.15
The aldermen then fired him, but an independent board,
led by new mayor Fernando Wood, exonerated Matsell, finding that since his father had become a naturalized citizen in New York, so, then, had his son.16
Matsell just shrugged his shoulders at the torrent of charges against him over the years. He blamed all inquiries on “evil disposed persons, seeking the advancement of their own ends. If any abuses exist, they are unknown to me,” he said, and added that after his retirement he had become editor of the Police Gazette and earned a comfortable income there to fund his home in Iowa.17
Captain Walling and his fellow officers had a new look in the early 1850s—an official uniform. The police had rebelled against persistent orders to adopt a uniform since 1844, when the law authorizing the new force called for a silver star badge to be worn at all times (the badge was soon made of copper). Most police did not wear it for fear of being attacked by street thugs or of being asked to work by civilians.18 They railed against it even more in the 1850s when police reformer James Gerard suggested it. Gerard, who studied the police of the country and the world, told the Common Council that part of the effectiveness of the police in London was their uniform. It suggested authority and made it easy for people in trouble to summon an officer. The New York cops wanted nothing to do with it; in addition to previous defenses, they argued that nearly a thousand uniformed policemen would send the message to New Yorkers that they were, indeed, the mayor’s army and that the city was occupied by the enemy. The “police” on their caps would make them targets for underworld bandits, they wailed. The Common Council disagreed and, despite several public protests and a court battle by the police, ordered them to adopt a new uniform. It included a smart dark blue, double-breasted wool coat with a stand-up collar and two rows of eight gold buttons in front. The collar and cuffs were made of blue velvet. The cop wore a gold badge on his coat and a navy blue cap with gold leaf braiding on the front and sides, a starched white shirt and single-breasted blue vest, striped blue pants, and a thick leather belt. The city fathers were certain that the uniformed police would be more successful.
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