Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  The police not only looked official but looked good. One man said of a cop in that era that in his uniform he was “a handsome man, large and powerful in every sense of the word.”19

  Not only did the patrolmen have to wear the new uniforms, but they had to pay for them out of their own pocket, which angered them even more. The London police did not have to pay for their uniforms, they argued, so why should those in New York? They wrote letters to the newspapers to protest. Many claimed that they had now lost their freedom as men and that they were no different from the slaves in the South. They lost again because, the Common Council and newspapers argued, they were already making more money than the average laborer in New York and could afford it. Paying for their uniform would also encourage them to become more devoted to the force because they had to pay for the privilege of working in it.20

  The police force neatly got around paying for uniforms, thanks to the generosity of stores and businesses in the city. They donated money for “prizes” of forty dollars for victory in special police marksmanship contests. Strangely enough, all of the police, all one thousand of them, won first prize and walked home with forty dollars each, which was more than enough to cover the cost of a uniform.21

  No sooner had the battle over the uniform ended than Chief Matsell started a primitive, ad hoc “police Academy.” He hired military drill instructors and firearms experts to train the police in physical conditioning, fighting, and revolver marksmanship. In a classroom, they were trained in the rules of the police department and given some instructions on how to act with not just criminals but the general public. The training was short, but it was a step in the right direction and the beginning of the road to one of the best police academies in America, which began in the 1890s. When they finished the new training, the 1,102 New York City cops on patrol in 1853 were ready to hit the streets.22

  Officer requirements had increased. A policeman still had to be of high moral character and sober but now also had to know the first four rules of arithmetic in addition to being able to read and write. He now also had to have a doctor’s note and the written backing of at least twenty-five residents of his ward who had known him for five years. However, there was still no requirement for physical conditioning or any skill at apprehending or arresting criminals. No skill in firing weapons, using knives, wielding nightsticks, or wrestling people to the ground was required. The 5'8" height requirement, scoffed at by all, was dropped. The four-year appointment was eliminated, and police were allowed to work as long as they wanted to, pending character and performance reviews. Under the new rules, hailed by all the politicians in the city, a cop still did not have to be qualified to be a cop.23

  The brand-new Police Commission board, charged with hiring and firing all officers and monitoring the operations of the department, now consisted only of the mayor, the city recorder, and one of the city judges. It was hoped that the elimination of the aldermen would remove the politics and all of the patronage from the police department. The new, independent board was one of several instituted under new state laws to decentralize the city government and take power away from the huge Common Council—the “forty thieves,” controlled by Tammany—and redistribute it to the wards and neighborhoods. The mayor was still the head of the board, still had hiring and firing power, and continued to exert considerable control over the other two members of the board. Reformers were elated because the first mayor to serve on the board was Jacob Westervelt, for a year. The first recorder and judge were city liberals who had led one of the reform movements and criticized police corruption. All three were directly elected by the people. The new board seemed perfect to many.

  Others objected to it because the use of the new board meant continued domination over the city by the state legislature. Later, Seth Low, a mayor of Brooklyn, said that “it is a dangerous thing, in wholly democratic communities, to make the legislative body supreme over the executive [the mayor].”24

  Things changed rapidly, however. The second mayor on the commission, who would serve two terms, was Fernando Wood, the politically manipulative representative of Tammany, who had big plans for the future of the city and even larger plans for the future of Fernando Wood.

  The police earned more money under the new, streamlined 1853 board. The men in blue lobbied for salary increases all the time, and the patrolmen did it jointly with the captains to have more strength when they bargained with the city. They pleaded that they were in dangerous work, were often overworked, and had to work both nights and days. At one point, a small group even threatened to go on strike if they did not obtain a pay increase. Between 1844 and 1848, in fact, the captains and patrolmen realized a substantial 40 percent pay increase in their yearly salaries (up to $700 for patrolmen). The new Common Council in 1855 upped that another $100, to $800 for patrolmen, but had to withdraw the offer when the Panic of 1857 hit the city.25

  Religious animosity in the city increased. The strife between Catholics and Protestants increased in the early 1850s, a grim state of affairs that no one thought possible because the animosity between the two groups was so high in the 1840s, as the number of Irish in the community skyrocketed. By the middle 1850s, nearly two million Irish, a quarter of that nation’s population, had fled to America, and nearly one million settled in New York, giving it the highest Irish population of any city in North America. The rush of the Irish to New York was so great that in the year 1850 alone, more than 117,000 Irish arrived on its streets. Thirty thousand abandoned children in the city were Irish. Nearly three-quarters of the residents of Five Points were Irish.26 Catholics would taunt Protestants in speeches and in handbills, and Protestants would do the same to them. One Native American, anti-Catholic ruffian gave a talk standing on top of a wooden barrel on a street corner and had to be saved from a loud mob of Catholics by the police, who hustled him away. He thought nothing of it and advertised that he would be preaching again the following Sunday.”He sets up for a Protestant martyr on the strength of his detention,” wrote Strong, who said of the man’s vow to preach again that “there will be a mob originating with the Irish and German parishes if he’s not arrested, and with the Order of United Americans and the Godly butcher boys of the Hook and First Avenue if he is.”27

  * * *

  Living conditions deteriorated in the 1850s. Everybody suffered from the hot summer weather, and city fathers did nothing about it, such as urging window ventilations in homes and businesses and seeing to it that those who fell ill from heat stroke were treated. The police were not dispatched into neighborhoods to find those who fell ill with heat exhaustion and get them to a doctor.

  The dirt streets became filled with mud after rainstorms, and everybody complained about it. “State of the streets defies description,” wrote Strong in May of 1852. “You can hardly get into an omnibus without going ankle deep in juicy black mud.” He and other New Yorkers were so fed up with mud and dirt that even the beauty of a glistening white snowfall was lost in their sure knowledge of what would follow. “Snowdrifts and banks … are very beautiful. But the lovely whiteness and purity of their soft complex curves of surface will soon be polluted and degenerate into mire and gutter water and mud broth,” Strong added.28

  A much larger problem was the justice system, as it had been in the 1830s and 1840s. It sadly featured a poorly trained, ineffective, and often corrupt system of police court magistrates. They were appointed in the 1830s and 1840s and elected by the people in the 1850s. The men were lawyers with little administrative or judicial experience, knew almost nothing about police work or the prison system, and owed their jobs to the political leaders who helped them get elected and reelected, especially the men who ran Tammany Hall. Since they owed their jobs to these men, they did what they were told and took extreme advantage of legal loopholes to do so.

  As an example, an alderman would tell a police magistrate to make certain that nothing happened to a friend of his who had just been arrested. Under the law, the police magistrate simpl
y dismissed the charges against the man. The law then was written in such a way that the alderman, using the power of his office, could also throw out the charge even before it went to the police court. Magistrates could also drop charges if the accused merely posted bail, which often was later unaccounted for.

  Even in properly run courts, the overwhelming number of cases meant that defendants would have a swift and not very comprehensive hearing. In 1855, the number of police magistrates was the same as it had been ten years earlier, even though the city population had grown by about 50 percent. All cases were rushed through the system, and little attention was paid to them. In fact, the police courts had always been set up for hearings every other week, so in the early 1850s the judges had 50 percent more cases with no extra time to hear them. Many charges were simply ignored because policemen provided little evidence, and the judge did not want to be bothered with a case brought to trial on circumstantial evidence and the word of a cop.

  An incompetent or corrupt magistrate could be removed, but to do that the city had to get the legislature to pass an act to remove one single man, and that was nearly impossible. Magistrates could also be indicted by state and city grand juries, and some were, but not many. Whenever a judge was indicted, newspaper editors would applaud, but their joy would not last long because there were so many other judges.29

  Judicial practices were outdated, too. In that era, witnesses to a crime were forced to remain in a jail cell all day, or overnight, in order to testify against someone, amid vicious criminals, so few witnesses offered to do so, and criminals were let go. It was not until 1841 that the Common Council ruled that witnesses had to be held in separate rooms from criminals and had to be supplied with snacks and drinks throughout the day to make their court appearances a little easier to bear. Property crimes were just as troublesome. In 1850, Simeon Fagan had twenty-two dollars of his money stolen from the police property office, where it was held as evidence in a counterfeit case. Someone had passed the bad bills to Fagan, and he was on trial. The evidence was stolen so that there would not be anything offered in court to incriminate the counterfeiter. A court ordered the police to pay back Fagan just three dollars, not twenty-two, because a magistrate determined that the other nineteen dollars was counterfeit. Fagan fumed.30

  George Walling, who had many cases dismissed due to incompetent judges himself, said that the shabby judicial system was a major reason the crime wave in New York was so substantial. “The accused is [often] discharged from custody, a fact which, I have no doubt, encourages others in the commission of crime in the expectation of similar leniency. A man should be compelled to prosecute in such cases. A magistrate should not allow any compromise in his court, but should enforce the attendance of witnesses on behalf of the people. In not doing so, he is simply permitting what, under other circumstances, would be a criminal offense—the compounding of a felony,” Walling said. “That is what it is, morally, if not legally, and that is constantly winked at by our judges. We cannot expect the laws to be properly enforced.”

  Walling had no praise for the prosecutors, either. He said that all of them were under such pressure in the community, and often threatened, that they believed, and their wives believed, that their lives were in danger. And so they backed off on arrests and trials and let judges dismiss criminals without filing complaints about the practice.

  Prosecutors also had to bow to politicians. “The politician also peremptorily demands the discharge of a culprit after he has been proved guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt, and not infrequently a prisoner is allowed to walk out of the court room a free man, even after he has been committed to the Island [jail] for a term of months,” Walling complained.

  The cop, Walling said, was seen not as the upholder of justice but as “the public enemy.” “The police are by no means supported by the authorities in the enforcement of the law, and as a natural consequence, are sometimes dilatory in bringing culprits to justice, or, as has happened time and again, mete out punishment themselves,” he said.

  Captain Walling loved to tell the story about a procession he had attended for the queen of England in London. A man in a carriage broke through the line of Coldstream Guards lining the parade route. He was chased, beaten up, and tossed in jail. At a parade in New York, a bit later, a well-known gambler and a friend in a carriage broke through a police line to cross the street. The gambler berated the police who tried to stop him and beat one with his whip. The police relented, backed off, and let the man through. Walling said it was the perfect example of good and bad police work. He fumed. “As a nation, we have the best form of government in the world. Under our municipal system here in New York there is less liberty and protection to person and property than in any city in Europe.”31

  White-collar crime soared as the city’s financial markets boomed in the 1850s and stores began to realize significant profits. Smart men realized they could make more money through thievery than through hard work. One was James McIlveen, the bookkeeper for J. Beck & Co., a large department store downtown. It went out of business, and a police investigation showed that for years McIlveen had been embezzling money from the store. He had balanced the books perfectly, and no one was ever aware of his thievery. All told, the bookkeeper stole $130,000 in funds, with which he purchased an expensive city lot and built a large home on it.32

  * * *

  White-collar crime increased like every other kind until the end of 1852, when all of crime burst open like a dam collapsing from the torrent of a raging river. After a long string of weekend burglaries in November, Bennett wrote in the Herald, “Where are the police! There was, last week, a burglary on Fourth Street, another on Broadway, one on Fifth Street and one on almost every street in the city. Six hundred dollars in property were carried away from one house alone, yet no arrests were made. We therefore ask where are the police? The inefficiency of the police of this city, and the irregular manner in which the duties of that branch of the executive are carried out must have attracted the attention of the most superficial observer. Unless some plan is adopted for the better organization of this body, that immense injury and loss of property and life will be entailed upon the citizens of this metropolis.”

  Bennett said that the rising immigrant population and high unemployment had led to more crime but that, in fact, a “vicious portion of the population will be triumphant unless something is done, and right away.” The editor knew who the culprits were, too. “The first and greatest end to be obtained is the entire separation of police from political and party influence.”

  In a scathing denunciation of the police, he argued that a cop needed to be skilled at chasing criminals, and not just someone who was capable at “hunting up barroom votes to secure his election.” Bennett had always argued that officers should not hold two-year terms renewable by Tammany Hall but should enjoy lengthy terms in order to gain skills. They needed to wear a uniform and be devoted to the prevention of crime, not the party success on Election Day. “Thief catching is a trade or art which requires sagacity penetration and skill,” he added.

  At the end of his long and blistering piece, Bennett said that New York needed to adopt the practices of Boston, Philadelphia, and, especially, London. His cry for a better police force, and an honest one, was taken up by most editors in the city as well as civic leaders. It had been nearly eight years since the establishment of the new force, and it was worse than the old one.33

  All one man did to get himself murdered was ask for directions. He was alone, lost, and looking for a certain street and house. He asked a man seated on a stoop to help him. The man walked with him for several blocks and then shoved him between two homes, robbed him, and killed him.34

  White-collar crime grew even more quickly than street crime in the 1850s. In one week in the middle of January 1852, 135 men who worked in the financial district were arrested for various forgeries in their businesses. That followed a wave of forgeries of $1,000 bonds and securities the previous winter.35 />
  Domestic crime grew in the 1850s, too. In the previous two decades, disputes between married people had been few, but the pressures of life in New York caused a lot of domestic strife. There were numerous attacks by husbands on wives and wives on husbands. Love triangles boomed as women got out of the house more to work and met men. New York had a huge influx of young, single men and unhappy married and single women. Trouble naturally followed. One of the saddest cases on the police blotter was that of Barnard and Catherine Rogers of Newark, New Jersey. Catherine was having a love affair behind her husband’s back with a man named Dana in New York. He wrote her numerous love letters, and Catherine mistakenly left one on the kitchen table. Her husband read it and flew into a fury. She told him that she couldn’t stand him and had fallen in love with Dana. She was going to leave her husband to marry Dana, she said. Barnard pulled a double-barreled revolver out of a drawer and shot her dead, then took his own life. The Herald not only did a big story on the murder/suicide, telling its readers that Barnard’s body was “infested with vermin” when found, but shocked readers by printing the entire love letter from Dana to Catherine that was left on the table.36

  Men paid no attention to court orders to stay away from their wives. Frequently a woman obtained a “separate domicile” decree from a judge allowing her to separate from her husband and live in a different home or apartment and start a new life. Men did have the right to visit their estranged wives if they let them. One man obtained approval from his wife, told her he was looking forward to seeing her, and then, when he arrived, pulled out a revolver and shot her in the heart, killing her.37