Matthew Guariglia is an 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. In his new book Police and the Empire City, Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department and demonstrates how it was built on and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States.

Your book focuses on New York City police in the years between the Civil War and World War II. Why this time and this place in particular?

To me, this is the era that sets the stage for many of the political and societal issues we’re still grappling with. A moment when, for good or for ill, everything seemed in flux and people were genuinely unsure of what the United States would look like 20 years in the future. Or, as the musical Ragtime put it: “an era exploding.” In terms of policing, this seems to be the moment when modern police departments forged their legal, technological, and methodological tools that continue to serve as its primary operating procedure. And while there were many things police were eager to deploy, things like colonial tactics, surveillance techniques, deportations and other legal mechanisms of exclusion and control, for people on the ground things remained relatively unchanged. Especially for Black urbanites, immigrants, activists, people with same-sex sexual desires, and people who did not conform to the era’s strict gender roles, any “new” tools of policing just became ways of re-legitimizing or making more efficient the harassment and violence of the previous decades. As for New York, it really was the portal between the United States and the rest of the world, with people from every corner of the globe arriving in New York City and navigating a landscape blanketed in various levels of exclusion. With New York also being the United States’ connection to Europe, and both attempting to manage and subordinate overseas colonies, the city became an important hub in sharing information on these colonial tactics. 

What is unique about your approach to examining the history of policing?

I hope that my telling of policing history is one that will bring together many different branches of a rapidly growing and very strong field. As a few other have, I hope to bridge histories of policing and incarceration of Black Americans with the policing and deportation of immigrants in hopes of showing that these two processes happen simultaneously and in the context of one another. Policing played an incredibly central role in making European immigrants white by allowing them to join the force and participate in racial management in the city, and because police themselves understood the violence they enacted in Italian or Jewish communities as “inclusive” — i.e. training them with force to be assimilated Americans — while the violence they enacted in Black and sometimes Chinese communities was understood as more strictly exclusionary.

The time period your book details is full of individuals who shaped policing as we know it today you call “police intellectuals.” Could you describe a few of them and their interventions in policing at the time? 

The period between the 1890s and 1920s specifically was full of people who were in and out of police departments, universities, civil society, the press, government, and the military. These were people who were obsessed with understanding and “solving” the “problem” of how to police a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual society. Men like Raymond Fosdick, Richard Sylvester, Arthur Woods, William McAdoo, and eventually August Vollmer were all deeply committed to learning from the military, private industry, and other countries and their overseas colonies in order to bring back tools and tactics they thought would be useful in the United States. While serving as police chief of Washington, D.C. and president of the International Chiefs of Police, Sylvester proposed putting together a World Police Congress for the purpose of discussing Italian organized crime. Fosdick traveled through Europe and brought back with him plans for an incredibly detailed system of centralized police file management. Arthur Woods earned the ire of his uniformed officers by insisting they wear wristwatches so their reports were more accurate. These were all small pieces of a larger, collaboratively built police apparatus looking for more effective and efficient ways to uphold racial and gendered hierarchies in cities like New York.

One of the surprising things about the history your book covers is how similar it is to the debates around policing happening today. Do you see a continuity between policing in the 19th and 20th centuries and the state of policing today? 

I often say that debates being had today on issues of policing don’t just resemble the debates people had in the early 20^th century — they are the same debates that have never ended. One movement I’m fascinated is the prolonged legal and legislative battle to prevent police from taking and storing biometric information like fingerprints and mugshots until after conviction. Lawyers and legislators across the country voiced real concern about what would happen to a person’s reputation or future presumption of innocence if police retained a photograph of their face after they’d been found innocent. To me, this is part of the same debate we’re having now about whether Google should be able to crawl a person’s mugshot, the use of DMV photos to make face recognition prints for law enforcement, or some newspapers’ programs to let people erase old articles concerning crimes so it doesn’t serve as a perpetual obstacle to their future success.

Calls to abolish the police have become increasingly common after the uprisings we saw in 2020. Is there anything about the history of policing you chronicle that you think activists should pay attention to?

There is a lot we can learn about our collective future by studying the history of policing — namely that after nearly 200 years we can say pretty definitively that reforms to make the system better and more equitable do not work. Politicians and departments have been working together to try to reform away corruption and brutality since police have existed. These reforms either don’t trickle down to a resistant rank and file, they run out of steam, or worse — they end up creating new problems that different reforms will be called upon to fix later on. Departments stopped deploying officers to their own neighborhoods to decrease risk of corruption or preferential treatment. Now, decades later, we’ve found that deploying police into far away communities encourages stereotyping. History has also shown that no amount of policing or surveillance can eradicate crime and create safety for all people. In that way, the history of policing is a history of experimentation and failure and invites us to ask: how much failure is too much before we try something new? If medical procedures or medicine failed to produce results, how long would it be allowed to be the primary mode of treatment until the medical community found a new model?

There is an assumption that because police look similar all over the world that this institution emerged naturally from the organization of an industrialized society. I hope this history shows that this is not true. There is nothing natural, per se, about the very formalized and calcified version of policing we see today. It had to be built very meticulously and with a great deal of international effort.

Read the introduction to Police and the Empire City for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23PATEC.