Journal of Urban History

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The Informal World of Police Patrol: New York City in the Early Twentieth Century Christopher Thale Journal of Urban History 2007 33: 183 DOI: 10.1177/0096144206290384

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Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 THE INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL New York City in the Early Twentieth Century

CHRISTOPHER THALE Columbia College Chicago

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foot patrolmen did not have friendly contact with all citizens on their beats. Police-citizen relations were sometimes hostile or simply anonymous. Beats embraced large, socially divided populations, which did not always agree on police priorities. This article explores street-level police-citizen relations in New York City in the early twentieth century using disciplinary records, police-oriented newspapers, autobiographies, and other sources. Police-citizen contacts were selective. Merchants, shopkeepers, watchmen, and janitors shared common interests with police, which were strengthened by exchange of goods, services, the use of space, and sympathy and conversation. Police became especially attentive to their concerns about crime and disorder. Few other citizens could establish such links with beat patrolmen. Officers’ relationships on their beats were influential but had significant built-in biases, reinforcing the enforcement of law and control of disorder in ways congruent with the needs and views of neighborhood notables.

Keywords: neighborhood; police; community relations; New York City

It is commonly assumed that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century police had more contact with ordinary citizens because walking a beat enabled the officer to participate in the life of the neighborhood, affording far more opportunities for informal contact and socializing than is typically the case in areas where police patrol in automobiles. Many policy experts regard the world of the early twentieth century as one in which cops could and did learn from citizens, leading to well-informed and perhaps even neighborhood- sensitive policing.1 Historian Alexander von Hoffman documented substantial friendly contacts between cops and citizens in Jamaica Plains, Boston, in the 1890s, and other police historians have argued that the automobile, telephone, and radio gradually transformed police work, in part by reducing informal contact with citizens.2 An important variant of this theme argues that the decentralized police of this era were “adjuncts of the machine” and that neighborhood political feedback mitigated the potentially disruptive

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author is grateful to Kathleen Neils Conzen, James R. Grossman, and the late Norval Morris for their encouragement and advice and to the anonymous referees of the Journal of Urban History for their very helpful comments.

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Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 184 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 effects of strict enforcement of laws that were insensitive to working-class and immigrant mores. A wealth of evidence points toward extensive police- citizen interactions that ranged from gossiping in the streets to hanging out in saloons.3 Yet aside perhaps from police contacts with saloon, brothel, and gambling house proprietors, the character and meaning of most of these interactions is far from clear. Did it really mean context-sensitive policing? Did it prevent police actions that would have led to rioting on the order of the 1960s? Empirical answers are so far not available. Furthermore, scholars have documented broad areas of police-citizen conflict over the tasks of the police, the use of force, corruption, and racial and ethnic differences.4 Ordinary cops, police officials, and observers were acutely aware of public hostilities, which Jacob Riis made clear in describing neighborhoods “where stores of broken bricks, ammunition for the nightly conflicts with the police, are part of the regulation outfit of every tenement.” But except to note that in some cases police were neighborhood outsiders, historians concerned with conflict have paid little attention to neighborhood-police relations, perhaps because macro-social variables such as race and class seem more significant than neighborhood processes, with their frequent connotations of wholeness or harmony. At any rate, no one has yet satisfactorily reconciled the contrasting portraits of friendly and hostile relations. In fact, we do not know with whom the cops were in contact, nor why.5 A few preliminary considerations narrow the problem. To begin with, police could not have known everyone on their beats or posts. They patrolled territo- rially defined areas, but whether it was a few blocks of a tenement district or a sprawling suburban area, thousands of people lived on every officer’s post, and many more worked there, hung out there, or passed through.6 It is inconceiv- able that an officer could have known every one, and research on police assignments and schedules in the early twentieth century reveals that police were often reassigned from one post to another and always rotated from one shift to another, cutting opportunities for contact with citizens.7 Thus, both citizens and officers on foot patrol were limited in their ability to interact with each other. But police could participate in local social networks, interacting with some but not necessarily all neighborhood people.8 The population of a police post was inevitably diverse because most neighborhoods were socially and functionally complex. Economic and ethnic spatial segregation was by no means universal or complete in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cities.9 In addition, local merchants, politicians, teachers, clergy, other professionals, and union leaders played important roles in predominantly working-class neighborhoods. Proprietors and professionals were far more likely to be opposed to such forms of disorder as rowdiness, drinking, and street life and more protective of property than were workers. Furthermore, men and women made use of public space, the police officer’s chief area of concern, in different ways, as did residents of different ages. The patrolman’s post was not necessarily, or even likely, a socially homogeneous area with a single voice on most police matters.10

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The authority of the police was a resource, and their mission was a defining agenda, drawing them into relationships with subsets of the neighborhood’s people. Certainly, interaction between police and the people on post was far from random, never primarily a matter of their bumping into each other on the sidewalk. Walking a beat likely afforded more opportunities for police-citizen contact than does auto patrol but without some purpose related to the police officer’s powers and mission, neither citizens nor police would be likely to break through the anonymity of passing by on the street.11 The officer’s uniform made him a unique passerby, but it hardly guaranteed that others wished to talk with him. It represented powers, however, including the power to arrest and to use force, which some might wish to mobilize or to deflect. In principle, the patrolman was to use these powers for a wide range of purposes. One typical police rules manual instructed officers on patrol “to pre- serve the peace, prevent crime, detect and arrest offenders, and enforce all laws and ordinances,” as well as to check doors and windows at night, stop loiterers and suspicious people, prevent soliciting, and make bureaucratic reports on dead animals, unlighted street lamps, and other subjects.12 Patrolmen were instructed, of course, to nab felons, but even more important, they were also expected to deal with window breakers and apple stealers. Police on patrol were also expected to give directions, assist sick people, and enforce ordinances concerning peddling and keeping sidewalks clear. They were trained to stop runaway horses and to shoot horses with broken legs. Their bosses instructed them to shoo away people engaged in low-level disorder, including children playing in the streets, young men hanging out on corners, beggars, drunks, and the like.13 Some of these mandates were contentious, and many called for interpre- tation. Police discretion was considerable, though it was hardly unlimited. Police departments shaped patrolmen’s behavior in direct and indirect ways. Police patrolled as members of a large bureaucracy, which assigned them to predetermined posts, fixed their schedules, clothed them in uniforms that imposed a public identity on them, and sent sergeants and other supervisors to keep them on the job and badger them to action. Patrolmen in turn developed a work culture that (like the bureaucracy) transcended the lines of neighborhood or post. Still, supervision was relatively minimal and legal ambiguity substantial, so their interpretations and decisions were significant. Understandably, neighborhood people hoped to influence them. From a patrolman’s point of view, a beat or post included both potential opponents—from children pitching pennies, to drunks, to tough corner loungers, to ordinance violators, to burglars—and potential friends, who might offer assistance or moral support.14 A post included numerous people who would make demands on him as well. The intensity of their purposes would vary, and because the post was diverse, so would their resources. Patrolmen negotiated this tricky and ever-changing terrain purposefully, and for aims beyond simple duty, cash, or small talk. Police patrolled as workers whose needs and perspectives shaped their relations with neighborhood

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 186 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 residents. Police were deeply enmeshed in an occupational identity centered not only around upholding a version of the law and protecting life but also (not unlike most workers) achieving autonomy and maintaining self-respect. This was especially important to the police because of the controversial nature of their work and the fact that they worked in uniform in public view. They also had mundane on-the-job needs, structured by their long and irregular hours on the street. The complex motives of police officers, and of neighborhood people with disparate perspectives and resources, pushed them to selective contacts and relationships.15

SOURCES

Systematic sources for studying police-neighborhood relationships are rare, as Alexander von Hoffman has pointed out. His study, based on a police officer’s diary, is a notable exception, unlikely to be duplicated. Other historians have relied heavily on such sources as Alexander Piper’s investigation of the Chicago police—a study showing widespread loafing and socializing, including in saloons—and press accounts of Theodore Roosevelt’s brief but dramatic career as a police commissioner, during which he personally tracked down officers loafing, drinking, and talking with people on the street. These sources, usually managers or reformers, have been criticized for their lack of sympathy with the police, who in the nineteenth century worked extremely long hours.16 In addition, they fail to analyze to whom the police related. Some police autobiographies seem to confirm this portrait of police loafing in the street and socializing, framing it, however, as part of a romantic celebration of the autonomy of the street cop who knows his people well and is therefore able to wisely exercise his discretion in ways never foreseen by the rules book, for example, by engaging in curbstone justice.17 Other police autobiographers, however, offer a starkly contrasting portrait: of officers faced with hostile citizens, who stare sullenly or even throw bricks at them.18 Some citizen autobiographies, as well as other sources, support the account of bad police-citizen relations.19 Finally, other sources suggest that police work was often a lonely business.20 Clearly, this is a complicated story, requiring careful attention to all of these, along with other, sources. A great deal of evidence is in fact available, but it is scattered widely. By using multiple sources, which offer multiple views of police-citizen relations (including the views of police, merchants, local residents, and outside observers), we can begin to see with whom the police connected and why.21 New York City offers a comparative wealth of police memoirs, as well as citizen autobiographies, official and reformist investigative reports, and the mayors’ papers, which include an extensive file of complaints regarding police matters. A unique civil service press—weekly newspapers aimed at public employees, with considerable attention to the police and their points

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 187 of view—supplement the daily press. Taken together, these sources allow us to analyze the police as neighborhood figures with greater clarity than in any other city in the United States.22 The evidence is drawn from the period 1880 to 1935, but it is most abundant from 1900 to 1920. Police officers patrolled the streets on foot during this period, working as part of a large bureaucracy with stable traditions of policing and managing police. It was prior to the development of two-way radio motor patrol in 1935.23 On the other hand, the New York Police Department (NYPD) developed and changed during this period, responding both to well-known external pressures and to quieter internal ones originating in both management and the rank and file. Despite the notoriety of its corruption scandals, the city was in fact a battleground on which reformers acquitted themselves well, win- ning mayoral elections, allying themselves with independent-minded mayors, and influencing police discipline, training, and policies on violence.24 New York’s police department was run by a single commissioner after 1901, and in the early twentieth century, it was actively adhering to a nonpartisan civil service system. Some of the worst sources of corruption were curbed, discipline and training strengthened, and new technologies adopted or even pio- neered. Police management was among the most advanced among United States cities, and this in turn generated an organized rank-and-file response.25 Police business changed, as it did in many cities, as historically high levels of disorder declined while traffic control grew into a significant police task. Meanwhile, the police themselves increasingly focused on control of serious crime as the department’s chief mission and role in society.26 These changes affected the public image of the police and may have influenced police-neighborhood relations, particularly those that reduced friction with the public. Simultaneously, twentieth-century New York police were increasingly likely to be nonresidents in the neighborhoods they policed, partly because of NYPD conflict-of-interest rules and partly on account of commuting patterns. The police were more likely to move from post to post as well, reducing opportunities for contact with neighborhood people. On the other hand, while the mission of the police changed in some ways, making it plausible to believe that the level of hostility in poor neighborhoods in particular declined during this period, there was considerable continuity as well, and police remained conscious of public hostility throughout the period. The social distribution of favorable and unfavorable feelings toward patrolmen probably changed relatively little, and there is no sign of basic changes in patterns of motive or resource distributions among police or neighborhood people. Direct supervision of patrolmen remained limited too. Insofar as we are concerned with whom the police knew, then, we are justified in treating the period as a whole.27 New York City was a vast city, comprising five boroughs after 1898, with a huge variety of police posts in areas ranging from “goatvilles” with grazing cows to densely populated old neighborhoods such as Manhattan’s Lower

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East Side and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. These posts typically were a few blocks long, and after 1901 they were laid out in a trunk-and-branch system, along an avenue with a half block on either side. Posts were often doubled up, and by the 1920s (and probably much earlier), officers were switched frequently. In 1912, the average police post had 1,722 residents (2,255 in Manhattan), but because posts were doubled up, the typical officer patrolled 1.9 posts, with 3,272 residents. Most posts included many small shops, and it was not unusual to find warehouses, docks, rail yards, and industries on a police post. One notable area without significant numbers of residences was Manhattan’s financial district, while some undeveloped suburban areas embraced enormous territory with small nodes of residences. These neighborhoods differed in the amount and type of police business, citizen attitude toward officers, and density, and this will require some attention in our analysis. High density in particular facilitated an especially vibrant street life. However, street life in this era was hardly limited to dense neighborhoods nor, as I have suggested, was it essential to police-citizen relations.28 More generally, the overall mission and bureaucratic procedures of a citywide department, the subculture of the police themselves, and the underlying social processes drawing police and citizens together or driving them apart (the processes outlined above) were fundamentally the same throughout the city.

THE PATROLMAN AND THE PEOPLE ON POST

The informal world of the police was on display in disciplinary trials, in which supervisors reported on officers’ locations when found off post or behaving improperly. A sample of trials during 1902 to 1903 and 1916 (see Table 1) shows a striking pattern of relationships. Roughly half the officers seen off post were in restaurants, bakeries, hotels, shops, and other semipublic places; about one in five more was in a semiprivate place such as a factory, watchman’s hut, or stable. Shopkeepers and saloon proprietors, along with a handful of neighborhood workers, maintained ongoing relationships with patrolmen. They had much to offer each other, overlapping interests, and common perspectives, which shaped the patrolmen’s work.29 An Upper West Side laundry, for instance, attracted officers who, according to an observer, “can be seen in full uniform chatting with employees inside of the store at frequent occasions.” Police flirted in shops as well; Cornelius Willemse met his future wife in a bakery.30 It is no surprise that patrolmen gravitated to such spaces. Semipublic places such as butcher’s shops or restaurants were accessible (as homes were not), while the enclosed space of a shop spawned conversation more readily than the street, with its rule of defensive retreat into anonymity. And police devoted more of their patrol time to the busy, business-filled avenues than to the quieter side streets.31

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TABLE 1 Location of Officers Seen off Post from a Sample of Police Discipline Cases

Not on Post and Not on Post Petty Misconduct

Location Number Percentage Number Percentage

Street 11 13 48 38 Shops, stores (including saloons) 44 51 45 35 Saloon, liquor stores only (15) (17) (16) (13) Workshop, office 19 22 20 16 Residence 7 8 7 6 Miscellaneous 6 7 7 6 Total known location 87 101 127 101 Missing location 59 61 Total 146 188

SOURCE: Systematic sample from The Chief, 1902-1903, 1916. See the appendix for further information. NOTE: Totals add to more than 100 percent due to rounding. “Not on post” includes cases of officers seen entering shops, residences, and so forth along the post in question: by definition, these places were “off post” unless the officer was engaged in legitimate police business there. Petty misconduct includes smoking, talking on duty, and the like; it excludes serious offenses (assault, corruption) and such violations as not reporting for duty.

Conversation itself brought police into shops, but other purposes, equally personal and mundane, were at work too. “The height of the patrolman’s ambition,” wrote Cornelius Willemse, was “a steady post where there was plenty to eat, drink and smoke.” The police went into shops and befriended the owners because they got hungry, thirsty, sleepy, cold, or wet; needed to relieve themselves; or wanted to stash their overcoats or rubbers. These concerns of the police were important in shaping police-neighborhood interactions and bear a closer look.32 Eating and drinking were special concerns. Willemse’s memoirs read like a gastronomic tour guide to Manhattan, with stops at the Waldorf-Astoria, Delmonico’s, and the Holland House and a discussion of learning to like kosher food on the Lower East Side.33 Willemse ate better than most cops, but as one sergeant said, “Who ever heard of a cop starving on post?” In precincts far from Delmonico’s, a peculiar sociability as well as sheer hunger brought officers into local eateries. Often these men in uniform ate in back rooms, away from the other customers, “without anyone staring” but enjoy- ing the status of regulars and the attentions of the staff. The Chief’s “old policeman on the long post” disliked his own post, but at least he knew where to get eats. Another post was therefore less desirable.34 Many of these meals were free, furnished by police enthusiasts or by restaurant and hotel owners who found it advantageous to have befriended the cop(s) on the beat. Though a few officers regarded free meals as “petty graft,” most were perfectly willing to accept, publicly pleading necessity.

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“You wonder,” Willemse wrote of the early 1900s, “why cops don’t go into restaurants and pay for their food. In those days how could you when you were being paid $66.66 a month?”35 Even more urgent than hunger or thirst was the patrolman’s need to relieve himself during the course of his tour of duty. Commonly used as an excuse by patrolmen not found on the job, “personal necessity” was inherently plausible and probably true much of the time. Cops found toilets not only in shops and saloons but also in residential buildings and semiprivate places as well, including machine shops, horseshoeing establishments, and tailors’ shops.36 Exhaustion also brought many officers indoors. New York’s patrolmen were never able to adopt regular patterns of sleep because they rotated shifts about once a week. Instead of continually adapting their schedules to suit the department, officers tried to maintain some semblance of stable home lives. When they worked late tours, they invariably lost sleep, but many managed to catch a little shut-eye in the middle of the night when there was “nothing doing.” Patrolmen retreated to whatever spots they could find and slept.37 The patrolman’s relationships with people who provided sleeping space differed from their relationships with most shopkeepers. Most of these “coops” were in semiprivate places, such as stables, bakeries, and boiler rooms.38 Sleeping required space and privacy; hence, shops were less usable than boiler rooms, factories, warehouses, and stables. The timing was also different, and unless an officer was trusted enough to be given a key, someone had to be around to let him in. In addition, “cooping” implied an ethic of duty that paid employees might have understood better than shopkeepers; hence, stable hands, janitors, sawmill hands, bakers, and park workers were accomplices of cooping cops.39 A lawyer involved in the management of a Harlem apartment reported that “day after day I went to the furnace room of that [apartment] house and there were two of your good coppers lying on the ground, their coats hung up on a peg, taking a nice quiet rest.” Cool in summer, warm in winter, this coop evidently had become a stable institution in these patrolmen’s lives, dismaying the attorney but not inconveniencing the building’s residents or janitor.40 Bad weather was another occupational hazard that sent police indoors. A patrolman found in the basement of an apartment house in 1916, for instance, told the trial commissioner hearing his case that he was there because of rain. Any space used as a coop might serve, but escaping rain or snow required less space and perhaps less time than sleeping, so other places were also available. Doorways were popular, especially at night; the occu- pant’s permission was not necessary, and no relationship needed to be established, but doorways offered less protection than indoor spots. And they offered no company. Thus, for instance, on a cold night around 1909, when the New York Public Library was being built on 42nd Street, two officers left their posts to smoke and shoot dice in a watchman’s toasty hut at the edge of the building site.41

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Of all the places in which patrolman-citizen contact occurred, the most troublesome seemed to be the saloon. Its enemies condemned it as the headquarters of disorder, front of crime, dissolver of family, and enemy of reli- gion. Its political significance was deeply disturbing to many reformers. Though it was supposed to be publicly regulated, private interests appeared to ensnare the police, interfering with discipline and preventing them from doing their duty. In the 1880s, journalist and police critic William Ralston Balch wrote that an officer, “when on duty, is more apt to be drunk than sober...[and] is so intimate with the rum-seller that due notice is afforded [to] that genius of police intentions to suppress him.”42 But patrolmen were not in fact as frequently in saloons as the stereotype suggests. One missionary, who had witnessed “one of these men who wear the uniform sneak as no man should” into an Upper West Side establishment serving beer, conceded that “we quickly observe those actions we most dis- like.”43 Police discipline cases reveal a rather limited pattern of policemen hanging out in saloons. In a sample of discipline cases from 1902 to 1903 and 1916 (see Table 1), 17 percent of the officers seen off post were in (or next to) saloons or establishments selling liquor.44 Most police liked to drink, but as even the hypercritical William Balch admitted, they wanted not only “sly potations” but “secret sandwiches.” Patrolman Gustave C. Duerholz, found sitting in the rear room of a saloon in February 1916, told the trial commissioner, “I went in for a plate of soup.” Other equally mundane reasons included using the toilet and even buying peppermints. An “ordinary citizen” reported seeing “many a Policeman taking a quiet nap either on the out-side or in the back room.” Patrolmen entered saloons for about the same reasons they entered other shops, and, like other patrons, presumably they sought places to socialize with other men.45 Shopkeepers and janitors had their own reasons for befriending patrolmen, again typically going far beyond mere conversation. While some hoped that the law would not be enforced, most hoped to sensitize patrolmen to their particular needs for law enforcement and security by establishing friendly relationships with the cop(s) on post. Restaurant and hotel owners provided free meals to be assured of police sympathy in case they were victimized by thefts or by deadbeats. “If a bum refuses to pay,” wrote one contributor to The Chief, “phone a cop.” The proprietor of one oyster stand, for example, finding himself in a dispute with a customer, relied on the officer on post to administer a little street justice on his behalf, with no questions asked. A fancy restaurant or hotel could count on friendly patrolmen for discreet handling of unruly patrons or embarrass- ing problems.46 Other small-business people hoped that officers would prevent stealing (petty or not so petty), vandalism, ball playing (which might lead to broken windows), and disorderly boys congregating in front of their shops—a nuisance to the owner or source of fear for customers. Business associations

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 192 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 frequently voiced their members’ concerns about loiterers, beggars, and peddlers. Shopkeepers hoped that the cops on post would conscientiously try doors and check windows at night and secure them and notify the owner promptly if anything was amiss.47 Janitors and watchmen also had an interest in cultivating the police. Janitors were responsible for broken windows or other damage to their buildings, and some worried about drunks wandering inside or corner loungers hanging out in front. In 1910, janitor Joseph Tocci, who worked in a West 6th Street building, seeing a drunk sitting on the doorstep, “thought it was time to have him removed by a policeman.” When Patrolman Timothy Hynes of the 42nd Precinct found a store door open early one morning in March 1921, it was janitor George Vietch whom he roused to search the premises and secure the door. For similar reasons, police were officially instructed to “keep in harmony with the watchmen...on your post.”48 Establishments such as stables, factories, and schools had less need for police services. For instance, machine shop proprietors were probably less concerned than druggists about disorder in front of their businesses. On the other hand, the employees of a machine shop, brewery, or park district or an apartment house owner might be far more tolerant about such matters as the officer’s sleeping in the boiler room or outbuilding.49 Neighborhood business people might summon the cop on the beat to han- dle crimes of modest importance, such as shoplifting or employee theft; less often, they sought out and befriended patrolmen on post to spur them on against major crimes.50 Armed robbery was a relatively unimportant crime before the 1920s, and its main victims were banks and fur and jewelry shops. Burglary was a potential problem at any business, but rarely acute; watchmen were employed where the stakes were high. “Solving” a burglary after it had happened was chancy at best, usually work for detectives rather than patrolmen.51 Still, having a good cop looking out for one’s interests was never a bad idea, especially since burglaries and thefts were often commit- ted by neighborhood people. Merchants valued a friendly patrolman who tried doors, kept an eye out for fires or broken windows, and secured open premises honestly.52 Shopkeepers and other small-business people, of course, were not always proponents of tough law enforcement. City ordinances required merchants to keep sidewalks free of snow, ice, dirt, and obstruction and to store garbage in cans with tightly shut lids. Many merchants violated occasionally, a few seriously—especially cramped merchants eager to display wares on the sidewalks and wholesalers and contractors unloading goods on the sidewalks. Sunday laws stood in the way of business and were especially resented by merchants catering to a Jewish clientele. And saloon keepers faced a host of regulations, beginning with rules against late-night and Sunday liquor sales. But even a normally law-abiding merchant might worry about minor or temporary violations. Small-business people in New York dealt with these

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 193 problems as best they could, sometimes making an expected payoff, sometimes offering gifts, sometimes simply extending a welcome to the patrolman.53 In these situations, the lines between influence and bribery, friendship and extortion, could be murky. Shopkeepers who were not egregious violators aimed to establish a friendly relationship in which favors might be traded back and forth. Free eats and Christmas gifts were surely intended this way. But some were afraid to protest if an officer wandered into the back of the shop to use the toilet or figured that in the natural order of the universe, the policeman on post would help himself to free fruit. Merchants got nervous when asked to buy tickets to the police athletic games or to make a two dol- lar loan. An interviewer reported one patrolman’s claim that he had accepted several hundred dollars “of what he calls honest graft from persons who have insisted on paying him not to do something that he probably wouldn’t have done anyway.” But he did nothing to discourage them and came to expect certain small favors almost as a matter of right.54 Strict enforcement threatened saloon keepers more than most shopkeepers, and to survive, they befriended politicians, precinct commanders, and even lowly patrolmen. “Free liquor is his [the patrolman’s] at every saloon on his post, providing he should return the compliment by closing his eyes to violations of the excise law,” journalist and historian Augustine Costello reported in the 1880s; some received cigars or small amounts of cash. Police reform trimmed some corruption (mainly at the top), while Prohibition deep- ened it for a time, without fundamentally changing it. By the mid-1930s, the patrolman on post could hope to get “drinks on the cuff” but little more. But like other small-business people, saloon keepers were concerned about maintenance of order and enforcement of law. Some ran quite respectable places, and many wished to avoid disorder, which might annoy customers or lead to property damage. The handling of intoxicated disorderly people and troublemakers both inside and outside the saloon was therefore of great interest, but it was important that it be done discreetly. In “low dives,” it was “not safe to quarrel with a woman or a waiter, for both are protected by the bouncer, and the policeman on post is the latter’s friend,” according to one observer in 1909. Saloon keepers were thus at once violators of (some) laws and ordinances and proponents of property rights, public order, and propriety. Their relations to the police involved a shifting mixture of licit and illicit means and ends.55 Police relations with shopkeepers were often superficial and sometimes tainted by suspicion of extortion. But they typically involved more than a utilitarian exchange of gifts and favors, which kept them from descending into paranoia or loathing. The merchants on post were instinctive partisans of law and order, not only as members of the middle or upper middle class but for specific pragmatic reasons as well. No doubt their visions of “public order” were (like all such visions) specialized ones. They were narrower— more focused on business concerns—than other visions. Yet their visions

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 194 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 overlapped in crucial respects with those of the cops. The police, for their part, prized the merchants as a constituency that valued the men in uniform and typically wanted them to do their jobs. On the street, an officer could expect massive indifference or even hostility precisely because of his uniform, but inside of each shop was an ally. And if this ally happened to want nonenforcement of some ordinances, he (or she) would make it worthwhile, with cash, goods, or favors of some sort; he (or she) would not fight or throw things from a rooftop. Shared enemies and overlapping viewpoints linked patrolmen and merchants.56 Sociability flowed from this. It was probably of greater importance to police than to merchants, who had coworkers, family members, and customers to talk to on the job. But some shopkeepers were police buffs, enthusiasts of the police in general, and moved by admiration for the uniform, fascination with heroism or crime fighting, or belief in the mission of the police.57 A gregarious policeman might even build up a large following of business and professional people on post. A group of lawyers and businessmen in the Evening Post Building, for instance, wrote the mayor in 1902 to express their appreciation for the dutifulness and diplomacy of an officer there.58 Patrolmen sometimes cultivated connections with citizens that they later put to use for such purposes as obtaining or protecting choice assignments, getting witnesses in discipline cases, or getting jobs or money after retirement. Patrolman McAuliffe of the West 37th Street Precinct brought “several reputable businessmen of the neighborhood” to his 1909 trial for intoxication. “They swore that once when his captain changed his post they requested that he be returned, as he had succeeded in controlling a band of hoodlums that infested the neighborhood.” Efficiency was not always at stake; a group of professional and business people asked for reassignment of a popular traffic man on the east side, only to have the request denied because the officer was not very good at his job.59 The web of relationships between patrolmen and merchants gave merchants considerable influence over the direction of policing. Neither sullen corner loungers nor ambivalent, nonviolent, working-class citizens could claim the attention or sympathies of the patrolmen in these ways. These relationships inevitably led to favorable treatment. Just as important, they must have led to reinforcement, and perhaps refinement, of police notions of order. They were important ways for shopkeepers to shape the definition of public order. As a result, local business people held a prominent place in police discussions of neighborhoods. At the turn of the century, for example, an instructor at the police school told a group of recruits to “make a good friend of every business man and a bitter enemy of every crook, and you’ll be a success on your post.”60 The patrolman’s relationship with janitors and other neighborhood workers was founded on a somewhat different basis. Many workers surely sympathized with the police officers’ theory of duty and with their desire to escape the weather, to sleep, and to smoke and chat “on dead winter nights” or when “there

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 195 wasn’t a thing doing.”61 Janitors and watchmen were occupationally concerned about law and order and interested in policing and in knowing the police. To escape boredom, watchmen might befriend patrolmen, hoping to find a good card partner or another bored worker with whom to chew the fat. A story in The Chief in 1913 described a patrolman sneaking into a warehouse to smoke his pipe and discuss Darwin and the Bible with the night watchman. Possibly other night workers had similar motives. At Ehret’s Brewery on the Upper East Side, for instance, policemen regularly stopped in at night for a drink. But few other workers had the motives, or the free time, of the watchman.62 At first glance, cops seemed close to residents, always talking with them, sometimes getting in trouble for it. Police Commissioner William McAdoo observed that

The policeman . . . is singularly gregarious....He dislikes to be by himself, and he loves to talk to some one or to something. I am quite sure that some of these men would talk to lamp-posts if they could find no human company. The citizens who find opportunity of conversing with the men on post are apt to be pleased with them. They have had much experience, and are generally good story-tellers; and, besides, they know all the gossip of the neighborhood, and are standard authorities on the political situation in the city and the State.

As the department’s top disciplinarian, McAdoo naturally focused on this sort of issue, but he was hardly alone in noting cops “in conversation” on the street. One angry Brooklyn man, looking for an officer to chase and arrest some boys, found one in front of a grocery, talking with several people and not very eager to hurry after the boys.63 Patrolmen claimed to be discussing “police business” or portrayed themselves as innocent victims of a talkative public. When an experimental patrol system was tried in 1911, forcing many officers to remain riveted to a single spot in an intersection, patrolmen objected that talkative citizens had become impossible to escape. “There is the ‘Cop’ on fixed post,” wrote “A Retired Policeman,” “quite easy to ask him for a match, or again he can tell him his troubles. The ‘Cop’ cannot run away from him.”64 Many conversations were probably too short to generate official complaints, so discipline cases seriously understate how much cops talked to people on the street. But it is clear (from these and other sources) that, even when they were not obliged to talk to citizens, police often did so.65 Official observers liked to make special note of officers in conversation with young women. A young cop working at Park Row and Chambers Street in 1887 got a complaint for “flirting with two girls—at 2 o’clock in the day—on one of the most crowded thoroughfares.” The officer compounded his offense by ignoring a woman with a toddler who clearly needed help getting to the streetcar. Sensing that this was a major problem, one trial commissioner announced that he was “going to put a stop to conversation between women and policemen on the streets of New York.” These complaints are interesting

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 196 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 but fairly random. A few officers claimed that a woman had asked for an escort; some of these claims were probably true.66 But for the most part, patrolmen had comparatively few interactions with women on their posts; even disorderly people were overwhelmingly male. The world of the policeman on post was heavily masculine, more even than the streets they patrolled.67 The bonds between cops and residents were rarely strong enough to bring patrolmen into residents’ homes.68 Among officers disciplined for being off post, one in twelve were seen in, or coming from, private residences. Cornelius Willemse socialized with some Italian families on Minetta Lane, who gathered on the stoops to drink, sing, and chat. “I had become friendly with these four families. A good spaghetti dinner was waiting for me any time I was hungry, and a glass of Barbary wine if my throat was dry.” Almost certainly this occurred indoors, safely away from the sergeant’s prying eyes. For a few officers, entering a residence meant romantic involvement. One officer told a journalist in the 1930s that he “got in pretty deep with a dumb Italian girl on his tour, and later on he had quite an affair with a rather swell lady.” But the police experience was an isolating one, which made it very difficult to sustain these relationships. The officer in question “couldn’t talk to either of them and finally gave up that sort of thing as too troublesome, too risky, and unsatisfactory all round.” Close relationships with people on post were rare.69 Unlike merchants, most citizens had few reasons to befriend police and fewer resources to offer them, and public attitudes mixed sympathy with unease and even hostility, limiting relationships between cops and public.70 But on the street, as inside its shops, mutual interests linked police more closely with citizens who worked there—newsstand operators, newsboys, pushcart dealers, streetwalkers, and cab drivers. They shared a common interest in the street scene—their workplace—and the other people in it. Stephen Crane illustrated this in the 1890s in a sketch of a Division Street traffic jam. The street was populated by shopkeepers, passersby, and no less than three store pullers-in. A policeman who wandered along interspersed order maintenance—keeping teamsters from fighting and making a hand organ man move along—with conversation with one puller-in, a gum- chewing girl. Another sketch, rooted in Crane’s observation of the details of New York street life, has a policeman “standing in the entrance of [a] theatre chatting to the lonely man in the box-office.”71 Pushcart dealers worked the streets as well, but their relations with police were never good, partly because merchants badgered police to strictly enforce regulations limiting peddling in front of their businesses. The peddlers, many foreign born, some newly arrived and not very savvy, complained that police not only hounded them about licenses and ordinance violations but ruthlessly extracted bribes. Immigrant autobiographies do not portray this as a personal matter. While peddling chocolate near Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, Marcus Ravage reported, “The policeman took a strange dis- like to me and chased me from one corner to another.” “The policeman” is a

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 197 regular villain in such accounts, never described or named. On the other hand, police sometimes relied on street sellers for food and drink, and now and then we see police aiding or chatting with them. In late winter 1918, for instance, Patrolman John T. O’Shea was charged with loitering and talking to a peddler; he claimed to be instructing the peddler as to the law. A woman at a hot corn and chicken stand alerted Patrolman Cornelius Willemse to a raid on a gambling house on his post. This was Willemse’s first day in a new precinct; the woman’s motives had more to do with his position and their common interest in the street than his person.72 Patrolmen often found people on post to help them in ways both mundane and dramatic. As a boy around 1913, Robert McAllister not only fetched coffee and ran other small errands for officers of the West 100th Street Precinct but also warned them of the sergeant’s impending arrival. His biggest reward was a great sense of importance, but he earned some money as well.73 Other cops evaded supervisors around the same time with citizen help. When Patrolman Peter Lenz of the 276th Precinct in Queens spied two roving lieutenants in plain clothes, he informed another patrolman, who talked to a woman on the street. She passed the tip, via a back door, to Patrolman Edward J. Connell, who was in a delicatessen. The lieutenants, or “shooflies,” nabbed Connell anyway, but the woman’s role is significant. In a similar case, Patrolman Emil Kochman, spotting two shooflies on the street, “haled a trol- ley car...to urge the motorman to warn all the patrolmen he saw that the shooflies were in the neighborhood.”74 These kinds of helpers were even more important in emergencies. When Patrolman Milton Alexander found himself surrounded by a crowd trying to free his arrestee, he sent a boy to the station house to get assistance; the boy led another officer to the scene.75 The number of helpers on any police post may not have been large, but they were important to the patrolmen both for the concrete help they gave and for the sense of solidarity. While relations between kids and cops on the whole were not very good— police were obliged to break up ball games in the street—one can easily find examples of officers befriending children and vice versa. Patrolman Bernard Bennett, for instance, was described as “a prime favorite with the children on his beat” in Flatbush in 1909. Not only police sources but also citizen memoirs mention such relationships. Little Benny Woodward was friends with an Irish cop, who bought Benny slices of watermelon, gave him nickels, and took him for walks up and down his beat.76 Cultivating such friends could prove useful to an officer who wanted to send messages to the station house, get a cup of coffee, or learn where the neighborhood boys were shooting crap. But officers such as Benny’s friend must have been motivated by a real fondness for kids or by a simple desire for company.77 On the street, the people best known to patrolmen were corner loungers, streetwalkers, chronic drunks, larcenous kids, and other minor offenders. Conflict gave police opportunities for contact; the potential for further

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 198 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 conflict gave them incentives to keep track of individuals. “A wide awake policeman knows pretty nearly everybody on his post in the localities where thieves hang out,” observed the Times in 1922, “if he has been on post long enough to acquire such knowledge.”78 This overstated the case; even an officer with a regular post could not know all its offenders. Some scampered away at the sight of a uniform; others lived elsewhere. Some were occasional offenders, not previously noticeable. Over time, the ranks of offenders would change considerably, as streetwalkers retreated into brothels, married, or died; youthful ballplayers grew old; tough corner loungers moved away; and others replaced them all. Nonetheless, the patrolman would learn before long about the most serious and chronic offenders, the young men spoiling for a fight, and the most troublesome boys, and this knowledge could be useful. But ordinary citizens, if they were not at odds with the police, might never come to the patrolman’s attention. Of course, any officer with an opinion on baseball’s New York Giants could make casual contacts with the city’s many baseball fans, but there is little to indicate that such contact was very important to patrolmen when set beside their interests in merchants, janitors, or newsboys. Plain citizens had less information and fewer resources, and there was always the possibility that they might wish to express criticisms of the police. For their part, many citizens lacked any purpose that could be real- ized by knowing or conversing with one of the policemen on post. Some New Yorkers lived in neighborhoods with few problems of any sort, and many more felt safe living amidst corner loungers and ball-playing boys and within wide limits had no interest in summoning, let alone knowing, the police. Thus, while policemen and citizens might be known to and friendly with each other, hostility and simple anonymity were also very common. “People don’t think much about policemen,” former commissioner Arthur Woods observed in 1919. “They are rather taken for granted, like a lamp- post, or a letter-box, or any other feature of the natural scenery of a city.” One “often lonely” Manhattan patrolman complained in the 1930s to a journalist that “when he speaks to a fellow-man, it is almost always to upbraid him.” Sources sympathetic to the police worried that the daily press was “the policeman’s only medium of contact” with most citizens.79 The distance between patrolmen and the citizens helps explain descriptions of the boredom of patrol. “Beats in Williamsburgh are long,” complained Michael Fiaschetti, who had patrolled there in 1908, “and it was tiresome, day after day, mile after mile. It was no fun flattening your feet on the pave- ments....How long would I have to endure this drudgery before I got a promotion?” Conversely, the attractiveness of a post in a well built-up area was not its citizenry but “the glad hand of the coffee vendor”—people who would extend a welcome to the police. Casual contacts with ordinary citizens were a small part of the social world of the patrolman on post.80 The patrolman’s preferred companion on his post was always another patrolman. Police bosses worried about cops in conversation, and other

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 199 sources show officers arranging to meet after the sergeant had made his rounds, perhaps at a call box used by more than one post. In a poem published in 1918, Patrolman Patrick Hickey lamented that on long posts in the city’s outskirts, it was impossible to meet one’s “side partner.” Talking might be especially important to an old hand who had taken a rookie under his wing, or at night, when officers were bored. It might well be, as officers claimed, that legitimate police business was discussed. What is more important than the topic was the point of view—for no one, not merchants, police buffs, or crime victims, could view police work the way other police did.81

PATROL WORK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

The patrolman’s relations with neighborhood people had important con- sequences for his knowledge of the neighborhoods, its problems, and possible solutions, as well as for his motivation. For one thing, his inevitably selective concerns and contacts implied selective and limited knowledge. While neighborhoods of the period often had dense information networks, police were by no means always able to take advantage of these.82 For example, on his Brooklyn post, Michael Fiaschetti “struck up a small acquaintance” with the owner of a “hole-in-the-wall grocery store,” which was “a meeting place for the neighbourhood, a headquarters for gossip,” and there, while chatting one day, Fiaschetti got a lead on a stolen horse. Once the grocer had squealed, Fiaschetti had leverage for extracting more information. “The grocer was a regular source of information about all kind of things, usually petty ones: which kid it was that knocked the baseball through the plate-glass window, or about the young fellow down the street who was running around with a bad mob.” Fiaschetti’s awkward relationship with this grocer, however, suggests an important limit to neighborhood contacts as a source of information, especially for officers lacking Fiaschetti’s sharp intelligence and fierce determination. Information was not a free good, even from merchants; it had a price.83 Often it was completely unavailable, even to a cop with a regular post. Consider a West Side officer of the mid-1890s known as Old John, responding to a complaint from a butcher who was missing a load of hams. Old John “prowled around in hallways, sniffing for tell-tale ham and cabbage cooking on the stoves. He even stopped kids on the streets and demanded to know what they had for dinner. ‘Bread and tea,’ they all said”. The thieves had played Robin Hood, distributing their loot widely, and it was not surprising that the neighbors who had benefited kept their mouths shut. What is more significant is that Old John had to stop kids on the streets, instead of bring- ing the matter up casually in the course of his conversations with kids. Cornelius Willemse, on the other hand, found a boy who was happy to coop- erate in giving information against professional thieves. Lacking the Robin

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Hood factor, the situation was favorable, especially since the boy, a reader of dime novels, was enthusiastic about fighting crooks. But Willemse was in plain clothes and not on his own post. His action was typical of a smart cop with his eyes open, rather than something unique to the cop on the beat with intimate knowledge of its people.84 In fact, thorough knowledge of the people on the beat was never essential to effective police work. While the veteran of a regular post acquired intimate knowledge of its people and places over time, every New York patrolman possessed the basic knowledge to perform creditably on the first day in a new post, rapidly augmenting that knowledge by identifying potentially troublesome people and places. The foundation of this was categorical knowledge of situations, problems, and types of people. The instability of the city, the post, and the patrolman’s assignments required him to interpret people and events in ways not specific to neighborhood or person. Categorical knowledge was essential if police were to make any sense out of posts they had never before patrolled or contend effectively with people they had never before met.85 The officer’s motivation, too, was largely independent of knowledge or experience of the neighborhood. It is hard to believe that after working a post for some time, an officer would not identify with it and feel more responsible for it. In fact, what we know about the sense of responsibility indicates that it was surprisingly impersonal and detached from the people or particu- larities of the post. Robert McAllister, looking back on his first day as a patrolman, remembered feeling “a great affection” for the sordid buildings of his post. “This might be a mean block,” he wrote, “but it was mine, and I’d take care of it and keep it respectable despite itself....I was alone and in full charge.” McAllister acquired this sense of obligation before he knew anything about the post. During his training, he had been steeped in the police subculture, which valued being “the monarch of the post.” Actual experience of a particular post and its people was irrelevant.86 Patrolmen were street level-bureaucrats, whose tasks were fundamentally defined by outsiders to the neighborhoods and ultimately by larger social and cultural and political conflicts. From its inception, the department was a bureaucracy, a citywide institution operating under uniform rules. Police discipline and subculture knew no neighborhood limits, and an officer faced with a defiant tough guy, a fleeing burglar, or a stumbling drunk would respond to the offender far more than to the locale. Of course, neighborhood relationships often motivated police. But which relationships counted? It is easy to assume that the patrolman on post distilled what the neighborhood wanted and tempered his actions accordingly, that he softened the harshness of the law and mediated between neighborhood people and distant lawmakers. Yet the neighborhood itself was part of a larger social structure, with all its inequalities of resources and conflicts of interests and views. Within it, as we have seen, the patrol officer’s contacts were skewed.

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Police were most closely linked to those people who were best organized, had the most resources, and felt the most solidarity with the police. What was available for patrolmen to distill from this selected group was the sentiment not of the whole neighborhood, but only a part of it, particularly shopkeepers and property owners. Sometimes these influences pushed the officer toward modest nonenforcement of selected ordinances, but more often they reinforced upper-middle-class and upper-class norms of order and protection of property. The entanglement of police with these selected people bore only a limited resemblance to the reformer’s nightmare of the cop corruptly enmeshed in the neighborhood. The great irony is that these most petty of cor- ruptors generally favored the dominant, reform-endorsed version of law and order.87 If anything, the officer’s local involvement, though probably modest, reinforced the tendency to maintain a divisive order, and to this extent, historians interested in conflict between police and citizens will find support precisely by attending to neighborhood processes. The mandate for order did not come exclusively from the elite- or upper-middle-class-influenced top of the police hierarchy. Neighborhood relationships thus had political implications but not necessarily the softening ones of lore.88 It is plausible to suggest that the police-neighborhood relationships documented here had a citywide impact on police subculture. Patrolmen experienced similar relationships with influential neighborhood people throughout the city, and though each post was unique, the fact that officers were trans- ferred frequently among posts and precincts—only 35 percent had been in the same precinct for four years in 1908, for instance—presumably meant that common features emerged out of police discussions and became part of the citywide police subculture.89 If this was the case, then, the policeman’s sense of responsibility to his post was rooted in a general police experience of regular contact with (some kinds of) citizens, just as it was also rooted in a general experience of confrontation with (other kinds of) citizens. Neighborhood constituencies for order, then, far from being influential merely on individual officers, were important in shaping police subculture and were part of the way in which class has influenced policing.90 I suggested above that the key processes underlying the formation of police ties with neighborhood people were the same throughout New York City, indeed throughout urban America. These relationships were based on exchange of resources and common interests in dealing with crime and disorder. But the available resources and common interests varied to some extent by neighborhood. The police, for instance, held that suburban areas were undesirable because the only company was cows rather than “the glad hand of the coffee vendor”—an exaggeration no doubt but one that points to a difference between inner-city and outlying neighborhoods. Tenement dis- tricts, with considerable disorder or crime, posed more problems for property owners, janitors, shopkeepers, and police than more affluent neighborhoods, where the shopkeepers may have felt less need for police services and where

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 202 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 patrolmen presumably felt less need to be alert for trouble or resistance and less need for moral support.91 There may also have been differences in the level of residents’ demands on police. One officer reported that on a tough post, “you never heard the word ‘taxpayer’ from complaining property owners and that was a great relief.”92 Although the taxpayers in question here directed their complaints to the precinct commander rather than the officer himself, the officer’s comment suggests that class-based neighborhood differences in residents’ tolerances and sensibilities translated into different patterns of complaints. And illegal businesses, unevenly distributed across the city, with peculiar needs for nonenforcement, were an important influence on the practices of ordinary patrolmen.93 These neighborhood differences may explain some of the differences between the portrait here—which draws heavily on evidence from inner Brooklyn and lower Manhattan—and von Hoffman’s account of Jamaica Plains, Boston, home to few of the very poor and many of middle or upper middle income.94 But we should not exagger- ate the differences in police-citizen relations between inner- and outer-city or between lower and higher income neighborhoods. Outlying and suburban shopkeepers were not immune to thieves, deadbeats, or troublemakers. Patrolmen’s material needs were little different in the city center or periphery, poor neighborhoods or rich, and while in middle- or upper-income areas they may have faced fewer drunken young men spoiling for a fight, criticism—of corruption, brutality, and inefficiency—was in no way limited to poor neighborhoods. Patrolmen everywhere needed friendly harbors.95 The neighborhood relationships of patrolmen were by no means the only reason different neighborhoods were differently policed. Some evidence suggests that ideas about neighborhood respectability influenced how police approached complaints. In an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood, for instance, a deputy police commissioner reported in 1910 that a high noise level would be unacceptable, and ordinary patrolmen presumably were also conscious of such neighborhood standards of appropriateness. On the other hand, police judged behavior on the Bowery in a much different light, and unsurprisingly, former commissioner Arthur Wallander, himself a patrolman in the 1910s, looked back on drunkenness arrests as useless.96 The distribution of patrol officers across the city further complicated matters. The NYPD assigned officers to posts and precincts apparently with little consideration of the amount of police business. In busy areas, police were hard-pressed to keep up and often could not attend to lesser offenses.97 Elsewhere they were in a better position to respond to neighborhood demands.

CONCLUSION

Opportunities for fortuitous informal contact between police and citizens on their posts enabled police officers to take part in local social networks

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 203 conveniently. These opportunities diminished in early-twentieth-century New York City as police were shifted from post to post and later as street sociability declined and as radio motor patrol replaced foot patrol. Perhaps, as some have argued, this had some effect on the course of police-citizen relations. Yet police patrolling in squad cars have transcended these limits when their aims required them to do so.98 By itself, rubbing elbows was never the key to police- neighborhood relations. More important were the aims and the resources of police and citizens, the social structure that patterned citizens’ resources and aims, and the work organization that structured those of the police. A police post was no gemeinschaft, yet each was a unique social configu- ration, blending topography, architecture, peoples, and local economy in particular ways. Each post had special meaning to its residents and a unique character from the patrolman’s point of view, making some posts good and others undesirable. Each confronted a newly assigned patrolman with its own demands and its own mix of people ready to fight him, avoid him, or befriend him. Beginning on his first day on a post as an anonymous, uniformed presence, an officer quickly gained a place in some local social networks, and soon, as William O’Dwyer wrote, “felt that I knew almost everyone.”99 Though in fact he did not know everyone, O’Dwyer’s experience of neighborhood was in many ways typical of big-city patrolmen and perhaps of city dwellers generally.100 Working in a small corner of a vast and anonymous metropolis, amidst people frequently indifferent or hostile, a New York patrolman created for himself a social microcosm both friendly and useful. But if it was unique, the police patrol post was but a small fragment of a large and complex city. Social relationships and forces stretching far beyond the post shaped the patrolman’s neighborhood relations and connections. On a typical post, nonresidents walked the streets and worked many of the jobs, while residents often worked and socialized elsewhere. Its people understood law and order and made demands on the patrolmen because they were parts of social structures of which the neighborhood was but a small and sometimes subordinate part. Furthermore, its police were parts of a citywide bureaucracy and took part in its occupational subculture, and their motives were powerfully shaped by these citywide institutions. A patrolman was a stranger to many on his post, and he could expect hostility from some. The fact that police were never integral to most neighborhood social networks did not prevent police from doing their jobs with reasonable effectiveness and modest efficiency.101 Police relations on post were influential but had significant built-in biases. The social microcosm of the post was divided. More important than not knowing everyone equally, an officer was not influenced by everyone equally. The patrolman established relationships with people on post selectively, and his relationships were patterned by his mission and authority, his own mundane material needs, and the psychological needs peculiar to a street-level public official potentially at odds with much of the neighborhood.102 Given a

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 204 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2007 steady post, he became familiar with disorderly people and troublemakers, police buffs, and others, but he was linked to shopkeepers, janitors, and watchmen much more closely and more positively than to anyone else. Differences in neighborhood class mix created differences in the pressures brought to bear directly on the officer on post and indirectly via his superiors, and differences in problems (without corresponding differences in resources) contributed to create major differences in policing between posts and neighborhoods. As historians focused on conflict have argued, class structure and power counted in policing, but we must add that this happened not only outside or above the neighborhood. Instead, the fact that patrolmen were far more important members of some social networks reinforced the impact of class on policing both by influencing the individual officer and by shaping police subculture and perceptions of law and order.

APPENDIX Learning Where the Police Were Based on Discipline Cases Table 1 and Table A1 (from which Table 1 is drawn) are based on two systematic samples of police discipline cases in The Chief during the periods from 1902 to 1903 and 1916. The Chief was a weekly newspaper founded in the 1890s to cater to civil servants in the New York region, especially firefighters and police. Its biggest concerns were appointment and promotion exams and policies; it covered hiring and layoffs, public employee organizations, and broader city news of interest to public employees and published editorials, cartoons, humorous items, social news, and letters to the editor.103 The sample represents every ninth case reported in The Chief from July 26, 1902, when the earliest extant issues are available, through January 17, 1903, and every eighth case from alternate weeks from January 1 through December 30, 1916, which yielded 194 and 121 cases, respectively. The latter period ends shortly before the United States entered World War I, which affected both policing and police labor.104 The years chosen are times when the city was governed by reformist mayors and the New York Police Department by their appointees. The bulk of routine police discipline cases were much like parking tickets today: the tip of an iceberg, capturing very widespread activities. Between 1903 and 1920, the number of charges filed per officer was as high as 0.7 (in 1908), dropping to 0.15 in 1918.105 Caution, perhaps bred of experience, may have separated those caught from the others, but it is unlikely that caution correlated with patterns of sociability. For the purpose of understanding sociability and constituencies, they provide a useful snapshot of police connections with the public. Excuses offered by officers at their trials were sometimes reported, and these (discussed in the text) help us flesh out these connections and understand them as relationships. The charges were ordinarily neither trivial nor corrupt.106 The system was oriented toward punishing officers who failed to perform duty and above all to getting them

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TABLE A1 Location of Officers from a Sample of Police Discipline Cases

Petty Petty Misconduct Location Not on Post Misconduct and Not on Post All

Street 11 37 48 53 Shops, stores (including saloon) 44 1 45 48 Saloon, liquor stores only (15) (1) (16) (18) Workshop, office 19 1 20 22 Residence 7 0 7 9 Miscellaneous 6 1 7 22 Total known location 87 40 127 155 Missing location 59 2 61 160 Total 146 42 188 315

SOURCE: Systematic sample from The Chief, 1902-03, 1916. NOTE: Definitions of locations are as follows: “street” includes street, sidewalk, park, news stand, bootblack stand, bench, railing or other street furnishing, doorway, and address only (unless clearly indoors). “Shops and stores” are semipublic places including barber shop, unspecified shop or store, subway office, railroad terminal, baggage room, el platform, cigar store, eating establishment, hotel, train, streetcar, hall (in which events are held), bakery, shoe store, grocery, and stationer’s store. “Saloon” was coded for cases of officers adjacent on the sidewalk or in a hallway or doorway of any liquor establishment. “Workshop or office” indicates semiprivate places including watchman’s hut, undertaker’s shop, park building, horseshoeing shop, boiler room, stable, tool house, engine room, machine shop, snow removal office, factory, “office,” hotel shed, garage, and barge office. “Miscellaneous” includes crowd scenes, station house, another officer’s post (otherwise unspecified), boat, police booth, under a pavilion, in court, and police headquarters.

to actually patrol the streets, and roundsmen and sergeants had incentives to maintain discipline.107 The charges were treated in The Chief and other sources—with due allowance for disagreement over specifics—as concerning the alleged misconduct. While officers sometimes complained that sergeants were too quick to file formal charges, it was rarely argued that the charges were entirely unjustified. Officers found off post, in conversation with other cops or citizens, or engaged in other misconduct were sometimes given warnings, and only repeated or egregious offenses resulted in filing of charges, but there is no evidence that when charges were finally filed they were trumped up or that location information was erroneous.108 While other sources provide some information on discipline cases, The Chief’s thumbnail sketches are the fullest available.109 In these years, The Chief appears to have reported all police discipline cases, although some details were often missing. Information reported included offender’s name, rank, type of duty, precinct, and offense(s); time and date of offense; location; other people present; additional cir- cumstances; excuse offered; and information on accuser and disposition. Information on other people present was not always reported, but locations were known in about half of all cases and roughly two-thirds of the cases of officers whose offenses took place while they were actually on patrol duty. Location information is best for officers not on duty or engaged in petty misconduct on duty. (“Petty misconduct” includes smoking on duty, talking, and drinking; it excludes such offenses as assaults against citizens and failure to make an arrest.) Other main categories of offenses, included in the 315 total cases, include failure to

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perform police duty, failure to show up on the job, offenses against citizens, and a miscellaneous category that includes, for instance, insolence to a superior and wear- ing the wrong kind of uniform. Some of these offenses took place in the station house; others, like not showing up for work, took place in locations irrelevant to our concerns. Even cases of failure to perform police duty (e.g., not reporting a dead cat) usually provided no useful information on location (we can locate the cat, not the cop). The most useful information comes from officers not on post, reported in Table 1. Of 146 such cases, 87 were seen off post (and reported in The Chief as such); most of the rest were simply not found where they should have been. Sergeants and especially shooflies sometimes waited to see where officers were and often found officers coming from the offending locations. There is no reason to suspect that sergeants had a notably easier time spotting cops coming from barber shops (for instance) than homes, and with the possible exception of saloons (discussed in the text), there is little reason to believe that missing location information introduces large biases into the data.

NOTES

1. George Kelling and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1996); Malcolm K. Sparrow, Mark H. Moore, and David M. Kennedy, Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing (New York: Basic Books, 1990), chap. 2; but see also Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M. Hartnett, Community Policing, Chicago Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), for a different approach. 2. Alexander von Hoffman, “An Officer of the Neighborhood: A Boston Patrolman on the Beat in 1895,” Journal of Social History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 309-30. Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, D. C. Heath & Co., 1977), 109, 136-37, 142-45, discusses the impact of telephones, radios, and cars; see also James F. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 116-20, for technology. The term citizen is used here to distinguish the officer from all who lived or worked on or passed through the officer’s post; it does not refer to citizenship status. 3. Robert Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); see also Mark H. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890-1925,” Law and Society Review (Winter 1975):303-23; David R. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800-1887 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979). Political systems play a large role in these accounts, but they show that because supervision of officers on patrol was difficult, the patrolman in fact exercised great discretion. 4. Samuel Walker, “Broken Windows and Fractured History: The Use and Misuse of History in Recent Police Patrol Analysis,” Justice Quarterly 1, no. 1 (March 1984): 75-90; Marilynn Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Dennis Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805-1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department 1900-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and W. Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). See also Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Policing: A Minority View,” Perspectives on Policing 13 (January 1990), 1-16. Roger Lane, in William Dorsey’s Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 92-95, however, shows that African Americans were by no means at such odds with police in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. 5. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 120; see Lewis J. Valentine, Night Stick: The Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine (New York: Dial Press, 1947), 19, for an example of police “looking skyward” for objects thrown from rooftops. In a much-repeated line, James Baldwin described the policeman in Harlem as “an occupying soldier in

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 207 a bitterly hostile country” in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), 62; he is cited by, among others, Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), 230. 6. New York City, Board of Aldermen, Special Committee to Investigate the Police Department, Report of the Special Committee (New York: M. B. Brown Printing and Binding Co., 1913; hereafter Curran committee report), 108-10, has numbers of residents per post in Manhattan (2,255) and New York City (1,722) in 1912. See U.S. Census Office, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, by John S. Billings (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 47-48, for nationwide figures on population per police officer, which, however, do not take account of the fact that many officers are needed to staff a single beat or post. See also Leonhard F. Fuld, Police Administration: A Critical Study of Police Organisations in the United States and Abroad (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), for undermanning, and Cincinnati Regional Crime Committee, The Cincinnati Police Beat Survey (Chicago: American Public Welfare Association, n.d.), 2, 5, for officers’ schedules and undermanning of beats. Post is the term used by New York police to refer to their assigned patrol areas. 7. Christopher Thale, “Assigned to Patrol: Neighborhoods, Police, and Changing Deployment Practices in New York City Before 1930,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 1037-64. 8. Barry Wellman and Barry Leighton, “Networks, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 14, no. 3 (March 1979), 363-90; Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), chap. 1. Not only does the social network approach point to the “unbounded community” outside the neighborhood but also allows us to see the neighborhood itself as consisting of multiple social networks that may include nonlocal residents such as neighborhood workers (including police) and visitors. 9. As Scherzer has shown in Unbounded Community, mid-nineteenth-century cities experienced relatively little class or ethnic segregation. As late as 1910, only a handful of the largest cities could be described as having the kind of regular rings of income groups emanating out from the center as described by the Chicago school of sociologists; see Todd Gardner, “The Slow Wave: The Changing Residential Status of Cities and Suburbs in the United States, 1850-1940,” Journal of Urban History 27, no. 3 (March 2001), 293-312. Von Hoffman documents a wide variety of resident and nonresident actors in Jamaica Plain in Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 10. Class is a major feature in the work of Fogelson, Big-City Police; John C. Schneider, Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830-1880: A Geography of Crime, Riot, and Policing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), chap. 2; and of Peter Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). See John Collier and Edward M. Barrows, The City Where Crime Is Play (New York: The Peoples’ Institute, 1914), for age and gender patterns in street use. 11. Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973). A basic assumption of much policy discussion and some history has been that the automobile reduced opportunities for contact, including casual contact, creating a social distance between police and citizens. Though this is certainly plausible, we cannot understand how it panned out without analyzing purposes and resources of police and citizens. 12. New York Police Department, Rules and Regulations of the Police Department (New York: New York Police Department, 1905), rule 52. Criminal investigation, traffic, crowds and strike control, and undercover vice enforcement were the work not of officers on patrol but of officers specially assigned, whatever their rank. See Sean Wilentz, “Document: Crime, Poverty and the Secrets of New York City: The Diary of William H. Bell 1850-1851,” History Workshop 7 (1979): 126-55, for a detailed daily account of an officer engaged in nonpatrol work; many of the police autobiographies cited below are also relevant. 13. The most complete source for police duties is Cornelius F. Cahalane, Police Practice and Procedure (New York: New York Police Department, 1914). Fuld, Police Administration, 126-42, discusses police powers, duties, and discretion. At least in New York City, police were allowed to enforce laws concerning saloons and vice, though most of this was done by specially assigned officers at the direction of captains or other superiors. Unlike Boston’s police, New York’s were not involved in permit appli- cations; see Cahalane, Police Practice and Procedure, 230-40. See Grover A. Whalen, Mr. New York: The Autobiography of Grover A. Whalen (New York: G. P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1955), 12, for an example of an arrest for window breaking; “Confessions of a New-York Detective,” Cosmopolitan Magazine 40, no. 1 (November 1905), 111, for apple thieves arrested; and Robert McAllister with Floyd Miller, The Kind of Guy I Am (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), 63, for an example of shooing.

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14. Cornelius Willemse, in collaboration with George J. Lemmer and Jack Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), is perhaps the best single source for the variety of police contacts; see (among others) pp. 38-39, 42-43, 48, 66, 76, 80-83 (opponents), 113-14, 142-43, 153-54 (friends). Other important police sources include “Average Cop,” The New Yorker, February 10, 1934, 23- 27; Samuel Battle, Interview, Columbia University Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University; Michael Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough: The Adventures of Detective Fiaschetti of the Italian Squad as Told to Prosper Buranelli (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Duran & Co., 1930); John J. Hickey, Our Police Guardians: History of the Police Department of the City of New York (New York: John J. Hickey, 1925); McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am; William O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, ed. Paul O’Dwyer (Jamaica, NY: St. John’s University Press, 1987); Valentine, Night Stick; and George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (New York: Caxton Book Concern, 1888). 15. Some historians of police have considered them as workers, though not in analyzing neighborhood relations. See, for example, Haia Shpayer-Makov, “The Making of a Police Labour Force,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 1 (Fall 1990), 109-34; Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Relinking Work and Leisure in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: The Emergence of a Police Subculture,” International Review of Social History 47 (2002): 213-41; and M. Greg Marquis, “Working Men in Uniform: The Early Twentieth-century Toronto Police,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 20 (November 1987): 259-77. For police subculture, see Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, 143-46; Jerome H. Skolnick, Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), chap. 2. Walker has pointed to police labor concerns as an explanation for police alienation; see Critical History, 110-20. Taylorist approaches to policing have been noted by Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows, 76-80, among others. 16. Von Hoffman, “Officer of the Neighborhood”; Alexander R. Piper, Report of an Investigation of the Discipline and Administration of the Police Department of the City of Chicago (1904; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1971); Jay Stuart Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform: Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner of New York (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 41-45, criticizes the reformist critics. 17. O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 105-6; Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough, 29-30. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, has many stories of eating, drinking, and talking on post. These officers portray themselves as engaged in work about which there was broad consensus, with only a minority of hardened tough guys in opposition. The neighborhood they celebrate was in a sense celebrating them too. 18. Valentine, Night Stick, 9; McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 24-28, 60-62. 19. Arthur Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (New York: Bernard Geiss & Associates, distributed by Random House, 1961), 36-37; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 119-20. 20. Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough, 28; Arthur Woods, Policeman and Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), 91-92. 21. Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 121-28, discusses methods for investigating urban social networks in the past; see also Scherzer, Unbounded Community, for a fine example. 22. The very idea of neighborhood is typically a vague one, which might mean anything from a single city block to one of Chicago’s “community areas,” with tens of thousands of residents or more. For useful discussions, see Albert Hunter, Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago’s Local Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “The Neighborhood-City Relationship,” in Howard Gillette, Jr., and Zane L. Miller, eds., American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 258-70. This study focuses on the New York City patrol post—typically a few blocks long, though often doubled up—which provides the most basic frame of reference. The police precinct provides a second, less local level of analysis, one that incor- porates the most basic level of the police command structure and that is of a size akin to the Chicago community area or to the neighborhood as conceived by von Hoffman in Local Attachments. 23. One significant source, the rank-and-file–oriented weekly The Chief, is available from 1902 on, while autobiographies provide their best coverage from the 1890s through about 1920. For late-nineteenth- century police, see Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, especially chap. 4; Walker, Critical History, 33-37, for police literature, an indicator of stability; and Harring, Policing a Class Society, especially chap. 2-3. Radio motor patrol with two-way radios was feasible by 1935, but because of technical difficulties and high costs, it was not used extensively until after World War II. 24. Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pt. 2 ; Johnson, Street Justice,

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 209 chap. 3, for reformers’ weak efforts to curb violence; and Nancy Joan Weiss, Charles Francis Murphy, 1858-1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1968), who argues that Tammany Hall responded to reformist pressure by, among others things, mini- mizing the grossest forms of police corruption and taking the police out of partisan politics. 25. Fogelson, Big-City Police, especially pp. 1-6, 11-12, on New York’s scandals; James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 228, and chap. 10-11, for the commissioner, the department’s separation from supervision of elections, and civil service in the 1890s; and Jerald Elliot Levine, “Police, Parties, and Polity: The Bureaucratization, Unionization, and Professionalization of the New York City Police, 1870-1917” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1971), 316-21, for later civil service reforms. Levine’s work as well as Emma Schweppe, The Firemen’s and Patrolmen’s Unions in the City of New York: A Case Study in Public Employee Unions (New York: King’s Crown Press of Columbia University, 1948), are concerned generally with the rank and file responses to management. Christopher Thale, “Civilizing New York City Police Patrol, 1880-1935” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995), chap. 8, traces technology. 26. New York City arrest data in Eric H. Monkkonen, “Police Departments, Arrests, and Crime in the U.S., 1860-1920,” Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Study #7708, show the sheer drop in disorder arrests. See Fogelson, Big-City Police, 54-55, 60-61, for early reformist crime focus in New York City, and The Chief, March 20, April 3, May 1, May 22, July 10, 1909, and March 19, 1910, for police (including rank-and-file) use of extreme crime control rhetoric. 27. Thale, “Assigned to Patrol,” for assignments. Fogelson, Big-City Police, documents public criticism and traffic (p. 115). For hostility of ordinary New Yorkers, see, in addition to the works cited in note 5, Andrea Marie Kornmann, Our Police . . . by a Policeman’s Wife (New York: J. J. Little & Co., 1887), 10, 35, 49, 68-71, 79-81; Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Americanization of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years Later (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 441; and New York Police Department, Annual Report (hereafter NYPD AR), 1918, p. 12. 28. Patrol work in “Goatville” was the subject of considerable humor; see, for example, The Chief, September 20, 1913, and April 20, 1918. Thale, “Assigned to Patrol,” discusses post layout. Before 1901, posts were simply straight lines, and cross-streets were separate posts. A general discussion of types of precincts and posts can be found in NYPD AR, 1914-17, pp. 41-44. The role of small shops in this period is vividly described in Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 4. 29. One form of sociability was by definition absent in these figures: brief conversations with citizens violated no rules and so never resulted in a charge, while any entry into a boiler room or grocery was a rules violation unless specific police purposes could be demonstrated. Other evidence (below) points strongly to the importance of shopkeepers and selected neighborhood workers for the police; the brief conversations are discussed below. 30. “A Citizen” to Mayor William J. Gaynor, February 26, 1910, Gaynor Papers, New York Municipal Archives and Records Center (hereafter MARC), box GWJ 14, f. 4 (laundry); Cornelius W. Willemse, A Cop Remembers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933), 121-22, for flirting; and Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 75-77, for his wife, and for a Greenwich Village mosaic shop that drew many officers (p. 135). 31. For attention to avenues, see West End Association, Bulletin 16 (October 1919). Spending time on avenues was in part a result of relationships with shopkeepers. For defensive anonymity, see Lofland, A World of Strangers, chap. 1; John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), chap. 4; and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Ladies: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 32. Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 153-54; see also New York Senate, Report and Proceedings of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York (Albany, NY: James B. Lyon, 1895; hereafter Lexow committee proceedings), p. 5313, for “lively posts.” 33. Willemse’s best yarns are centered on food. Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 119-23, describes eating at the Waldorf and Holland House and being fed by a wealthy man; 128-29 describes being fed well at raided premises, and see page 146 for kosher food; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 73-75, tells of a birth in a restaurant, 78-79 had a wealthy man again, and 98-99 has him escaping “shooflies”— supervisors in plainclothes—disguised as waiter. 34. Times, June 20, 1906 (sergeant quoted); Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 121 (staring); The Chief, September 3, 1904 (old policeman). See also The Chief, March 18, 1916 (patrolman in Newtown, Queens, restaurant); Commissioner Richard E. Enright to Mayor John F. Hylan, February 13, 1919, Hylan Papers,

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MARC, box 27, f. 2 (mayor orders police cars away from hotels and restaurants); Herman Mitchell testimony, LaGuardia Papers, MARC, box 3148 f. 1 (officers at Metropolitan Grille in Harlem know owner). 35. Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 124 (necessity). For “petty graft,” see the poem by Patrick Hickey in The Chief, April 20, 1918. Many workers were paid less than patrolmen and might not have found this argument convincing. Perhaps some sense of power came from this, but Willemse (p. 121) noted he was happy to eat in a little cubbyhole without being stared at. 36. The Chief, April 29, 1916 (tailor). Toilet claims are frequently found in disciplinary cases; see also Fuld, Police Administration, 262-63. Officers were allowed to leave their posts for reasons of personal necessity provided they recorded the time and place in their notebooks. 37. The connection between schedules and “cooping” is discussed in Patrick V. Murphy and Thomas Plate, Commissioner: A View from the Top of American Law Enforcement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 225-26. I have not been able to distinguish the effects of various schemes of tours of duty. It was not discussed much in autobiographies or disciplinary cases. By its nature private and beyond the ken of shoofly or sergeant, it was not considered something to brag about by most police authors, Willemse as usual excepted. But cooping has become a topic deemed suitable to the more recent era of gritty, realis- tic writing on cops. See Peter Maas, Serpico (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 63-64; Gene Radano, Walking the Beat: A New York Policeman Tells What It’s Like on His Side of the Law (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1968), chap. 1. 38. The term coop was used by New York police at least as early as 1904; see “The Old Policeman on the Long Post,” The Chief, May 28, 1904. See Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 135-37, for grocery, and 97-98 (funeral home). Some discipline cases involving officers coming from residential buildings probably involved cooping. 39. For a key to an office, see “Taxpayer” to Mayor Abram Hewitt, June 25, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 26; and “Under the Green Lamp,” The Chief, September 27, 1913, for a fictional account of the same. For park buildings, see the more recent evidence of Radano, Walking the Beat, 46, and also 156-57 (hotel) and 14 (movie house boiler room). For schools, see Maas, Serpico, 64. For another apartment cellar, see McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 45. For an example of a bakery, see Times, November 16, 1909. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 138, describes a barn used as a coop. 40. Edgar Pitske to Mayor John P. Mitchel, August 29, 1914, Mitchel Papers, MARC, box 130, f. 25, for lawyer. This is the only evidence of a shared coop used by foot cops in this period, though there is evidence of mounted cops sharing coops. Maas and Radano describe coops used by many officers in the auto era. Places apparently used as coops were also used for socializing, smoking, eating, and gambling; see McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 45, and The Chief, November 3, 1917 (eating in a park building); Times, March 29, 1912 (Bronx mounted cops off post, not clearly sleeping). 41. The Chief, December 9, 1916 (telling trial commissioner). Bad weather was probably considered more acceptable as an excuse than the desire to gamble and smoke, but like the toilet excuse, it was inherently plausible, even when additional motives are apparent. For the two officers, see Willemse, Beyond the Green Lights, 101-3. Presumably officers in stores and saloons were sometimes escaping the weather as well. 42. William Ralston Balch, “The Police Problem,” The International Review, 13 (December 1882): 508. This indictment listed many other counts against the typical officer. Balch was writing about what he perceived as a national problem, but clearly the NYPD was foremost in his mind. See Jeff Kisselhof, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 588, for a later example. 43. “An Honest Worker and Christian” to Mayor Abram Hewitt, September 6, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 34. 44. See the appendix for details of this study. There were 188 cases of officers who were not on the job or were engaged in petty misconduct on the job: talking, smoking, and the like. In some of these cases, we cannot tell where the officers were, among other things, because their bosses never found them. But of 127 cases in which we do know where the erring officers were, only 12.6 percent were in saloons or in or next to any establishment selling liquor. The 17.2 percent in liquor establishments of any type includes officers at a side window and in adjacent hallways. It seems likely that this figure overrepresents saloons since it was harder to concoct a good excuse for being in a saloon than in, say, a grocery. Saloons were enforcement priorities for police supervisors as well. 45. Balch, “Police Problem,” 508; The Chief, January 15, 1916 (peppermints); The Chief, March 11, 1916 (Duerholz); The Chief, June 3, 1916 (toilet); and “An Ordinary Citizen” to Mayor William J. Gaynor, March

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26, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 1. Police socializing in saloons raises questions about the extent of police isolation, the nature of police interactions in saloons, what type of saloons, and so on, but the sources do not help very much. Perry Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), is the now classic analysis of the saloon’s social functions. The charge of intoxication was much less common than being in a saloon; between 1888 and 1910, less than 3 percent of the discipline cases involved intoxication; calculated from Levine, “Police, Parties, and Politics,” Appendix A. 46. See Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 66, for solving thefts by workers; Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 120, for Willemse’s looking out for restaurant owners’ interests; see below also for more on this theme. See William T. Stead, Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, or, Despairing Democracy (New York: R. F. Fenno & Co., 1897), 127, for the oyster stand. Robbery was not a serious problem; see below. Ludwig Bemelmans, Life Class (London: John Lane, 1939), 148-49 and 153, offers a restaurant view: police were expected to help, unofficially, with unruly customers at an elite hotel. For a not so elite hotel, see Harry Golden, The Right Time: An Autobiography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 184. “R. O’C,” “Call the Cop,” The Chief, July 10, 1909 (“if a bum”). 47. New York Times, May 11, 1919; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 84; Greater New York, 10, no. 19 (May 9, 1921); The Avenue, 1, no. 3 (September 1917); and Bronx Home News, January 24, 1922. See Johnson, Street Justice, 42, for a dramatic earlier example. 48. Captain James Thompson to Police Commissioner, attached to Commissioner William F. Baker to Mayor William J. Gaynor, February 9, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ-14, f. 1, for Tocci. It should be noted that the first officer Tocci found was a sergeant on the street. NYPD, 42nd Precinct Blotter, entry for March 8, 1921, 6:30 a.m., at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library. See The Chief, March 11, 1916, for a patrolman who “had known him [janitor] about a year”; and The Chief, October 4, 1913, for a patrolman who claims he discussed disorderly boys with a watchman. See Cahalane, Police Practice and Procedure, 12, for instruction. 49. See Inspector John Daly to Police Commissioner, July 26, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 15, f. 6, for an example of a factory official who seeks police aid against disorderly people. Vandalism, crime (see below), and the personal feelings of owners and officials may have determined owners’ feelings in similar cases. Hoping for favorable police handling of labor disputes might have influenced some business owners as well, though at least by the early twentieth century, use of out-of-precinct officers minimized the potential for informal influence. 50. Before the advent of the cash register, till tapping was a problem. In addition, shoplifting, though it grew with development of the consumer culture, has a long history; Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, 54. For insider theft, see Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 66. Willemse claimed that because police hung out at a shop on crime-ridden Minetta Lane, children felt safe to play there, despite nearby roughnecks and undesirable characters; see Behind the Green Lights, 135. Willemse’s grocer friend felt safe from a cheap liquor store a few doors away. These are rare references specifically to this. 51. The New York Telephone Company routinely offered, and policemen collected, rewards, usually of $50, to officers who apprehended thieves (see The Chief, March 28, 1903, for an example), but few companies were large enough to do this. There is no evidence of personal relationships between post cops and bank officials. See note 55 for robbery concerns of saloon and gambling house proprietors. 52. For direct evidence of merchant interest in the police securing doors and trying windows, see Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 153; and The Chief, February 12, 1916 (officer’s claim in disciplinary case). Police blotters regularly recorded these; see, for example, NYPD, 13th Precinct Blotter, March 6, 1923, 8 a.m., in John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library. For problems solving burglaries, see Richard J. Butler and Joseph Driscoll, Dock Walloper: The Story of “Big Dick” Butler (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933), 39 (butcher wants hams back; neighborhood stymies patrolman). Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 48-50, indicates merchants demanded action, which the commanding officer translated into a demand that officers watch carefully. See also The Chief, April 9, 1913 (watching for boys stealing hams). The propensity for burglars to be youthful local residents can be seen in Willie Sutton with Edward Linn, Where the Money Was (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 23. 53. F. H. McLean, “An Experience in the Street-Cleaning Department,” University Settlement Society Annual Report (1897):20-24; Times, January 15, 17, and 18, February 4, and August 24, 1894, for sidewalks and extortion involving captains. A business point of view on sidewalks can be seen in, for example, Thomas Scovill to Mayor Thomas F. Gilroy, January 5, 1894, Gilroy Papers, MARC, box GTF 14. For one account of saloon graft, John Martin to Mayor Abram Hewitt, October 13, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 27. See Times, February 6, 1901, for tribute demanded of merchants on the Lower East Side to stay open on Sundays.

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54. See Emanuel H. Lavine, Secrets of the Metropolitan Police (Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1937), 43-46, for a good description of gifts freely offered by (but later demanded from) merchants on post; and “Average Cop,” for quotation. These cases come from the 1930s, but for earlier, see Stead, Satan’s Invisible World, 95. For tickets, see The Chief, December 17, 1904 (ban due to public suspicion); also Scheuer deposition in Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 26 (preposterous denial of pressure to sell tickets); Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 155; Greater New York 10, no. 31 (September 5, 1921; bulletin of the Merchants Association complains); and for a favorable view, see Hickey, Our Police Guardians, 146. 55. A. E. Costello, Our Police Protectors: History of the New York Police from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (published by the author, 1885), 573 (quotation); Anonymous to Mayor Hugh J. Grant, January 25, 1889, Grant Papers, MARC, box 88, GHJ 40, f. 4 (cops on post get all the free drinks they want “and Borrow 1 or 2 dollars a week from the keepers”; but captains get $25 a month in Precincts 10 and 14); and “Average Cop,” 26 (free drinks; arrests of drunk patrons). For bouncers, see Ignatz L. Nascher, The Wretches of Povertyville: A Sociological Study of the Bowery (Chicago: Joseph J. Lanzit, 1909), 58 (quotation); and Willemse (a former bouncer), Behind the Green Lights, 21-23. See Stephen Crane, The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. Robert Wooster Stallman (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 164-65, on ejecting a bar patron and getting a cop, and 116 (bartender gets a cop when fight seems imminent). See The Chief, March 23, 1918, for fear of robbery as excuse for a patrolman to be in a saloon. According to the Times, April 2, 1902, the president of the 10th District Liquor Dealers Association has “done [patrolmen] such little favors as a man in this business does for police men.” Even gambling houses sought to obtain police favor as protection from robbery. For “dirty money,” see Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 153. See Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 48-49, for the saloon keeper as “a social force in the community” and advocate of order. 56. For evidence of this in the middle twentieth century, see Howard Aldrich and Albert J. Reiss, Jr., “Police Officers as Boundary Personnel: Attitude Congruence between Policemen and Small Businessmen in Urban Areas,” in Harlan Hahn, ed., Police in Urban Society (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1971), 193-208. 57. See Valentine, Night Stick, 24, for politicians or business people as buffs. 58. The Chief, November 1, 1902; the officer was a traffic cop. For another example, see W. P. Hamilton to Commissioner Richard E. Enright, July 15, 1918, Hylan Papers, MARC, box 27, f. 7. 59. The Chief, October 23, 1909 (McAuliffe); Commissioner Arthur Woods to Mayor John P. Mitchel, December 24, 1914, Mitchel Papers, MARC, box MJP 131, f. 31 (traffic man). For other examples, see Commissioner Michael C. Murphy to Alfred Downes, August 22, 1901, Van Wyck Papers, MARC, box VWRA 11 (local “constituency” influences details); Quincy S. Mills to Arthur Woods, January 30, 1914, Mitchel Papers, MARC, box MJP 128, f. 4 (recommending appointment to bicycle squad); and “Names of Witnesses in Behalf of Officer James Mulvey,” June 22, 1882, attached to Chief Clerk William Kipp to Mayor William R. Grace, June 22, 1882, Early Mayors Papers, MARC, box 84, GWR 14 (local “con- stituents” as witnesses in a discipline case). 60. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 31, for quotation, and 35-36 for a similar statement. For a more pragmatic version, see Cahalane, Police Practice and Procedure, 17-19. For a more recent, similar statement by a distinguished police chief, see O. W. Wilson and Roy C. McLaren, Police Administration, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 359-60. Police–business people relations at midcentury are discussed in William A. Westley, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 61. O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 104 (dead winter nights); Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 101. Many no doubt resented the police as tax-eating loafers, as well as for other reasons. Locating the sympathizers was obviously a problem. 62. See The Chief, May 3, 1913, for the story, and September 20, 1913, for a watchman well known to a patrolman; “One Who Believes in You” to Gaynor, July 20, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 15, f. 6, and attached correspondence and report, for brewery. The conflicting accounts leave it uncertain whether the head brewer or the workers (or both) welcomed the officers. 63. William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City (New York: Harper & Bros., 1906), 25; V. A. M. Mortensen to Mayor John P. Mitchel, March 4, 1914, Mitchel Papers, MARC, box MJP 129, f. 11 (Brooklyn man). 64. The Chief, March 9, 1912 (fixed post). 65. Some thirty-seven of fifty-three officers seen or presumably seen on the street were engaged in petty misconduct; eleven were off post (i.e., on some other post or in a streetcar on post), four were abus- ing citizens there, and one was not at work. Disciplinary figures underestimate total conversation on the

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 213 street because much of it was very brief and because an officer there was in a good position to observe the approach of the supervisor. 66. “OK” to Hewitt, no date [1887], in Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 26, for the Park Row officer; The Chief, September 27, 1913, for the trial commissioner. For other examples, see The Chief, March 11, 1916 (young woman on stoop asking patrolman the time), and July 9, 1913 (cop and “young girl”); Crane, New York City Sketches, 61 (cop flirts); and Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 117, girl on post. 67. For example, in 1910, 74.4 percent of arrestees for disorderly conduct, disorderly conduct and intoxication, and intoxication were male; males comprised 84 percent of all arrestees that year. NYPD AR, 1910, 10-14. The discipline study unfortunately gives inadequate information on gender. There are only 59 (of 315) cases in which we know whom the officer was; the officer was engaged in petty misconduct in only 28 of these. Roughly two-thirds of these are cop-cop cases. It seems likely that shooflies and sergeants picked on cop-cop cases: the patrolmen must have talked with a higher proportion of ordinary citizens, but only a few got singled out for special attention by supervisors and/or mention by The Chief. 68. One would not enter a residence without a prior relationship and presumably an implicit or explicit invitation, which was not true of entering a shop. Being found in a residence is thus not strictly compa- rable with being found in a shop or boiler room. Still, the infrequency of being found in a residence is striking, all the more so because some of these cases probably represent officers going to basements and boiler rooms rather than homes as such. 69. “Private residence” includes probable residences, reported as unspecified addresses from which officers were reported coming that appear to be residential. Some of these may have been basements and boiler rooms, not residences, and so the figures given may overstate the extent of police intimacy with residents. It also includes officers’ own homes. See The Chief, December 23, 1916, for a cop at home when his wife gives birth; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 113-14; and “Average Cop,” for the Italian woman. In the era before widespread telephone use, police were rarely summoned to respond to crimes indoors. 70. For hostility, see notes 5 and 27 above. 71. Crane, New York City Sketches, 6 (jam), 206. For news dealers and newsboys, see “OK” to Hewitt, n.d. [1887], Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 26; Hickey, Our Police Guardians, 158 (author knew principals of Becker-Rosenthal affair as newsboys in 1890s); and The Chief, September 20, 1913 (noisy newsboys known to two patrolmen at 40th and Park). See James V. Matesca, My Flag Is Down: The Diary of a New York City Taxi Driver (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1948), for police as a constant presence in the cabbie’s life. 72. Marcus E. Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (New York: Harper & Bros., 1917), 95; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 64, for the raid; and The Chief, March 16, 1918, for O’Shea. See also Philip Cowen, Memories of an American Jew (New York: International Press, 1932, repr. ed., Arno Press, 1975), 293-94; Golden, Right Time, 36, for the peddler’s view; and Captain John J. Farrell to Commissioner William McAdoo, June 1, 1905, McClellan Papers, MARC, box MGB 20, f. 3 (pushcart man helped by officer after boys upset cart). 73. McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 45-48. For another example, see The Chief, October 20, 1917, apparently involving a stranger to the officer. 74. The Chief, March 4, 1916 (Lenz) and June 24, 1916 (Kochman). It is unclear whether the helpers were friends of the officers or anonymous bystanders sympathetic with patrolmen (or anyone) against their bosses. See also McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, 26, for helpers against supervisors. 75. For Alexander, see Chief Inspector Max Schmittberger to Police Commissioner, September 17, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ 16, f. 3. The crowd, of course, should not be ignored. 76. The Chief, August 7, 1909 (“prime favorite”); Helen Woodward, Three Flights Up (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1935), 70, for Benny Woodward. For other examples, see The Chief, July 15, 1916, July 14, 1917; Gladys Brooks, Gramercy Park: Memoirs of a New York Girlhood (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 34 (traffic cop known to girl en route to school); Marie Jastrow, A Time to Remember: Growing up in New York before the Great War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 118-21 (hazy, nostalgic account of officers who knew everyone); and Al Smith, Up to Now: An Autobiography (New York: Viking, 1929), 25-27, a nostalgic account asserting police were known to “all the neighbors.” 77. Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 117, for a ten-year-old girl who tipped him off to crap games and kept the money left behind. Willemse claimed to cultivate good relations with kids to stand well with parents; whether breaking up crap games was part of this strategy is unclear. Note that both little Benny and Willemse’s friend were quite young; the latter’s parents were poor shopkeepers (who were helped by the money their daughter brought in). Another rare account of a child knowing a policeman (here, by first name) was Sophie Ruskay’s, whose father owned a garment manufacturing business; see her Horsecars and Cobblestones (1948; repr., New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1973), 148-49.

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78. Times, April 7, 1922. 79. Woods, Policeman and Public, 12; “Average Cop,” 23 (Manhattan officer); Francis Basuino, “”A New Year’s Message from the Policeman,” Police Journal, 1928 (February): 7 (medium of contact); and Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1885, 366, for a similar view. 80. Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough, 28; The Chief, September 20, 1913 (glad hand). However, the Curran Committee Report, 106-21, shows posts in Williamsburg’s densely populated 159 and 160 precincts were actually fairly short in 1912. Fiaschetti simply was bored. See also The Chief, November 8, 1913, for an account of the “isolation of superiority,” which makes the patrolman’s presence on the street a calming one. Murphy and Plate, Commissioner, 36-39, describe the boredom of patrol and the problem of stranger policing. Murphy made friends on his Brooklyn beat in the 1940s, working hard to overcome the barriers between an Irish cop and Italian citizens. He exemplifies the growing sense (visible in the work of Valentine and other professionalizers) that police were remote from citizens and that individual officers needed to actively make contact with citizens. 81. The Chief, April 20, 1918 (Hickey), September 20, 1913 (top cops campaign against cops in conversation); Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 88 (old hand); Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform, 80-81 (Roosevelt’s campaign against talking cops). 82. For a notable example, see Russell Sage Foundation, Boyhood and Lawlessness (New York: Survey Associates, 1914), 66, for a West Side mother reluctant to move because her network of friends and acquaintances kept her informed of her son’s doings. For community in general, see also Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880- 1930 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984), 96-97, 103-8; and Irving Howe, with Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), chap. 6, 8. 83. Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough, 29-32. 84. Butler, Dock Walloper, 39 (Old John); Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 116. For an example of smart cops with their eyes open doing radio motor patrol, see Jonathon Rubinstein’s ethnographic account in City Police (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), chap. 5. 85. Lofland, World of Strangers, 15-16, discusses categorical knowledge. For very rapid learning, see Curran Committee, Proceedings, 2487; for examples, see Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 112, 125; Francis V. Greene, The Police Department of the City of New York: A Statement of Facts: Address by Police Commissioner Greene (New York: City Club of New York, 1903), 11-12. 86. McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 62; monarch of the post is a phrase used by O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 104; see Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 86, for a similar point of view. 87. The obvious exceptions are saloons and brothels. Compared to big corruption scandals (typically involving mainly higher ups and/or detectives or specialized units, often involving substantial bribes), this kind of influence was modest. 88. It remains a possibility, however, that local political involvement with policing provided feedback to commanding officers, in turn restraining them from policies that might seriously aggravate poor community-police relations. The hubris of reformed, centralized, politically isolated departments after the mid–twentieth century seems to have been a factor in the advent of alienating “sweeps” in which officers stopped and frisked large numbers of people (especially young men) on the streets. See Fogelson, Big-City Police, 232, 259-60, and chap. 10, and Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 110-16. The impact of the law was often softened by informal adjudication, as William O’Dwyer makes clear in Beyond the Golden Door, 105-6, in which he asserts that patrolmen in the 1910s “knew every family and its problems”—an implau- sible claim, as we have seen—but then describes the benefits of nonlegalistic mediation. 89. Thale, “Assigned to Patrol,” 1045, Table 5. For informal police discussions, see The Chief, November 6, 1909; Willemse, A Cop Remembers, chap. 8. 90. Von Hoffman, in “Officer of the Neighborhood,” 320, notes the ways in which middle-class residents and business people influenced police but also points to the influence of working-class com- plainants. In general, he makes much less of class divisions than I have here. In emphasizing neighborhood-level class influences, I do not want to deny the importance of citywide political processes (or upper- and upper-middle-class influences); instead, I want to show that in many respects, they worked in tandem. For more on conflict as a motivator and influence on the police sense of duty, see Thale, “Civilizing New York City,” 486-93. 91. NYPD AR, 1889, 26-28, shows the considerable variation in arrests among precincts and discusses high-arrest precincts; see also NYPD AR, 1910, 15-16; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 119-20, for neighborhood differences; and O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 106, for a charming description

Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at SAGE Publications on February 17, 2014 Thale / INFORMAL WORLD OF POLICE PATROL 215 of officers’ adaptations to differences in the environment and its demands. See The Chief, September 3, 1909, November 28, 1903, for goat land, and September 20, 1913, for “glad hand.” 92. Complaints to the mayor or precinct commander were not unusual; complaints to mayors can be found throughout the police files in the Mayor’s Papers in New York’s Municipal Archives and Records Centers, and they have been described by Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr., in The Gentleman and the Tiger: The Autobiography of George B. McClellan, Jr., ed. Harold C. Syrett (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1956), 292-94. For “taxpayer,” see Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 134, and see his Behind the Green Lights, 48-50, for complaints to captains and higher ups in general. Willemse almost certainly is referring to nonshop- keepers. 93. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), chap. 10, shows the complex ways in which vice was distributed. Obviously, those influences were exercised via higher officials as well. 94. But only some of the differences. In addition, Boston’s police at the time was less scandal ridden than New York’s was. Furthermore, though von Hoffman reports that Wakeman’s diary records drunks “sneering” at Wakeman, such a source is less likely to capture the sullen glares of corner loungers (see McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 62), the ambivalence of citizens sometimes hostile to police but also willing to mobilize them, and the silent contempt of the affluent. 95. Fogelson, Big-City Police, 46-47, 110, documents middle-class criticism. Police were acutely conscious of press and judicial criticism; see Walling, Recollections, 599; Kornmann, Our Police; and Hickey, Our Police Guardians, 73-74, 87-88. Von Hoffman, “An Officer of the Neighborhood,” documents thieves and troublemakers in outlying parts of Boston. 96. Fourth Deputy Louis H. Reynolds to Commissioner William F. Baker, July 20, 1910, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ-15, f. 5. This probably resulted from an upper- or upper-middle-class con- sciousness of appropriateness rather than ward-level political clout. Arthur Wallander, Interview, Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, 26-27. For another example, see “A Taxpayer” to Mayor Abram Hewitt, April 29, 1887, Hewitt Papers, MARC, box 87, HAS 27. 97. In precincts in 1890, the simple correlation between total number of arrests and number of officers was not significant, while in 1915, among eighty-nine regular precincts, the correlation between number of officers and arrests was a modest R2 = .12, significant at .0009. Data are from the NYPD AR, 1890 (analysis for all precincts and squads as well as for regular precincts only), and AR, 1915. See New York Times, December 6, 1897, for an example of a patrolman responding selectively to the most serious offenses on his busy post. Mechanical post assignment practices are visible in post lists pasted or written inside precinct blotters; the biggest collection is in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library. 98. Steve Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 126-36; Rubinstein, City Police, chap. 5; and Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, documents declines in street activity. 99. O’Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 111. 100. See Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle- Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 131-35, for an example of someone fondly recalling an “Irish” neighborhood that in fact was not especially Irish. 101. One measure of police efficiency is the enormous number of arrests; see Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), for this as well as for such tasks as returning lost children. Thale, “Civilizing New York City,” chap. 4-5, documents order maintenance and other police work not reflected by arrest figures. 102. At odds in two senses: in conflict with disorderly people, who were quite numerous (and had many more friends and supporters) in some neighborhoods, and held in contempt by others, who saw patrolmen as ineffective, corrupt, brutal, or beneath them socially. 103. Schweppe, The Firemen’s and Patrolmen’s Unions, ix-xi, 78, 118-19, discusses the paper. 104. Having begun publication in 1897, The Chief was well established by 1902. The alternating-week pattern was originally intended to allow analysis of seasonal patterns. 105. Thale, “Civilizing New York City,” 513-14. In 1916, the figure was 0.23; data are unavailable for 1901 and 1902, but in 1903, the number was 0.68. 106. See Fogelson, Big-City Police, 30, for reformers’ criticisms. For the notoriously corrupt Chief William Devery, see Richardson, New York Police, chap. 11. For the meaning of a thirty-day fine, see The Chief,July 11, 1903, and June 18, 1904.

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107. See The Chief, April 3, 1909, for a statement by Chief Inspector Max Schmittberger on the importance of patrol. See Lexow Committee, Proceedings, 574-75; The Chief, June 5, 1909, April 28, 1917, for examples of incentives. 108. McAdoo, Guarding a Great City, 26-27; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 137-39, for a close- up view of the process. Even corrupt supervisors were portrayed as hunting relentlessly for real violations, not inventing them; for examples, see Alfred Henry Lewis, “The Diary of a New York Policeman,” McClure’s, December 1912, 164; “Confessions of a New York Detective, by an Ex-captain of Police,” Cosmopolitan Magazine, 40, no. 1 (November 1905): 105. 109. The City Record reported the charges and dispositions but not other information. The New York Times occasionally reported on discipline but not for a sustained period.

Christopher Thale teaches at Columbia College Chicago. His interests include American urban history, crime, and police. He is the author of “Assigned to Patrol: Neighborhoods, Police, and Changing Deployment Practices in New York City before 1930” (Journal of Social History, 2004) and is at work on a book on New York’s police.

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