Overview

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse city. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts import tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devise modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrate supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, or German police to form ""ethnic squads,"" the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime-even the introduction of fingerprinting-were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly ""colorblind,"" technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.

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9781478025405

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Reviews

"“A remarkable historical narrative that details the racial and ethnic projects at the center of the development of the institution of modern policing.” -- Alex S. Vitale, author of * The End of Policing * “Exhaustive, meticulous, and brilliant, Police and the Empire City is an indispensable addition to our understanding of race, empire, law enforcement, and the places where these elements intersect. Matthew Guariglia’s work has provided us a genealogy of the problems that continue to beset modern policing and the thinking that produced them in the first place. A striking scholarly achievement.” -- Jelani Cobb, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Columbia University ""Guariglia excels at teasing out the numerous ways the NYPD helped enforce racial boundaries, including by shutting down interracial 'Black-and-Tan' nightclubs (which served Black and white patrons) and offering Irish and Italian officers opportunities to 'consolidate their ""whiteness""' by meting out violence against Black New Yorkers. He also draws parallels with more recent eras of NYC policing. . . . The result is a damning investigation of the NYPD’s past."" * Publishers Weekly *"

“A remarkable historical narrative that details the racial and ethnic projects at the center of the development of the institution of modern policing.” -- Alex S. Vitale, author of * The End of Policing *

A remarkable historical narrative that details the racial and ethnic projects at the center of the development of the institution of modern policing. -- Alex S. Vitale, author of * The End of Policing *

Author Information

Matthew Guariglia is Affiliated Scholar at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and coeditor of The Essential Kerner Commission Report.

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