On Oct. 5, the FBI raided the headquarters of the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association and the home of the union’s president, Ed Mullins. The nature of the investigation remains unclear, but the incident led to Mullins’ resignation. The following day, the press gave broad coverage to the news, with reports of alleged mismanagement of funds and mail fraud.
That same week, the 75th Precinct tweeted that two of its officers, responding to a call from a hysterical mother whose 1-year-old baby had lost consciousness, rushed the child to the hospital, while performing CPR. “Baby is now OK,” the tweet reported.
New York media have in excess of 4 million daily readers. The 75th Precinct has 10,300 Twitter followers. Hands up, all those who think the NYPD is getting a fair airing.
When I set out to write a history of policing New York, one of my aims was to redress this inequity.
The story begins in 17th century New Amsterdam with its first patrolman, Johann Lampo, arguably the most underemployed cop in the city’s 400-year history of policing. In Lampo’s six years on the beat, he never had cause to make a single arrest.
As the city grew, so did its security needs. Despite claims by Black Lives Matter, policing, at least in New York City, did not have its roots in slave patrols. Instead, it was the increasingly hazardous streets of Battery Park that led to the creation of the “Rattle Watch” in 1658, the nation’s first paid police force. This was a squad of eight patrolmen charged with a sunset-to-dawn patrol carrying wooden rattles, to alert citizens to impending danger.
The NYPD as we know it came into being in 1898, when Manhattan and the four outlying boroughs were consolidated into the City of Greater New York. At the stroke of a pen, New York was endowed with a single law-enforcement agency covering the entire metropolitan area, a force that now ranks as the nation’s largest.
The intervening century witnessed a plethora of colorful characters and episodes that left an indelible imprint on the city’s history.
Jacob Hays was the 18th-century precursor of the New York “super cop.” The son of Jewish Dutch settlers, Hays was appointed marshal in 1789, coinciding with Tammany Hall’s debut on the political stage. Hays was the “he got his man” detective incarnate, whose name resonated in foreign circles and who, in 1842, led Charles Dickens on a tour of the Five Point slums.
Fast forward nearly a century to Louis Valentine, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s Mafia-busting commissioner, who famously declared of contract killer Harry Strauss at a line-up, “When you meet men like Strauss, draw quickly and shoot accurately. Don’t be afraid to muss ’em up.”
There was even a time in the 19th century when New York had two police departments, the Municipals and the Metropolitan, each battling for the right to police the city. This often resulted in something akin to Buster Keaton-style confrontations, with patrolmen from one force struggling to wrench an arrested suspect away from rival officers.
No matter who occupies the seat of former Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt at One Police Plaza, policing the Big Apple will always remain a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t job. There have been many misdeeds, and not a few with tragic outcomes. It would be ingenuous not to expect to find the odd rotten apple in an organization of some 55,000 people.
Yet as my research progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the other side of the story needed to be revealed — from 1930, when police distributed eggs and bread to the needy in the Great Depression, to 9/11, when the NYPD facilitated the largest boat lift in history, evacuating half a million people from Lower Manhattan in nine hours.
The fact remains that, despite the “defund” campaign, no city can function without a police force. It is a tough message to convey to some New Yorkers, for while there are those who will perceive the police as oppressors and targets for their grievances, there are also those moments when the cop on the beat is welcomed as a redeemer.
Jules Stewart is the author of “Policing the Big Apple: The Story of the NYPD” (Reaktion Books), out now.
