Title: A Historical Take On The NYPD, And Today's Police Headlines

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I am really grateful you are here on today's show. For today's Food For Thought segment, Jeremy Salamon joins us to discuss his cookbook, Second Generation: Hungarian and Jewish Classics Reimagined for the Modern Table. We'll also talk to Grammy award-winning singer JoJo. Joanna JoJo Levesque will be in studio. Her new memoir is titled Over the Influence, and we'll learn about the history of jazz in Queens. That's the plan. Let's get this started with a new podcast that looks back on the history of the NYPD.

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Alison Stewart: Very soon, New York police will replace the slogan "Courtesy, professionalism, and respect" with a new line, "Fighting crime, protecting the public" will be on all the new patrol cars. Now, there was a brief time when that slogan was changed. In 2023 it was "Protecting NYC since 1845." Maybe they rethought that slogan, given the origin story of the first professionalized police force in the US. In a new podcast, academic and host ‪Chenjerai Kumanyika looks back on how the NYPD evolved.

It's called Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. The episodes get into the history of night watchmen and constables all the way to today's mayor, a former member of the squad. One thing that Kumanyika has come to believe, as he says in the first episode, when powerful people want to deny rights, they use the police to do it to maintain order. Chenjerai Kumanyika, welcome to All Of It.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Hey, I'm so excited to be here.

Alison Stewart: Episode one starts with you and your daughter and your family. Why did you want to start with your daughter?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Obviously there are important reasons for democracy, for safety, to talk about police, but it's also a deeply personal story for me. I learned that my father had been surveilled by the NYPD, and one thing that people will learn very early on in the series is the first and only moving video image of my father I've ever seen was from NYPD surveillance. Then on the other side, I have a five-year-old daughter who I'm raising. She's becoming a New Yorker.

I'm watching her walk in the subways, I take her to school, and in both of those places, subways, and in school, there are police, but the police are also-- sometimes family members give her toys. They're in cartoons. I really wanted to know, what is she picking up, and how can I give her a more robust story about what the police really are?

Alison Stewart: Tell folks who your father was.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: My father, his name at that time was Herb Callender, but he's Makaza Kumanyika, and he was director of the Bronx chapter of CORE. Congress of Racial Equality was really ahead of other organizations in fighting for the rights that I think we all enjoy now. What I think a lot of people have to understand, especially related to police, is that most of the rights that you and I, Allison, enjoy sitting here and that, I think a lot of people agree are what America should be, those are things people had to break laws and protest to earn. When the police wind up on the other side of those battles, these are questions we really have to think about.

Alison Stewart: How did your father's arrest impact your thoughts about the podcast?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So many of the conversations that we have about police today focus on incidents of police brutality or police misconduct, but my father was being surveilled by a unit of the NYPD that was created to stop protesters who were trying to make America and trying to make New York more democratic. This wasn't an issue of misconduct. You can't even put it into the issue of training. They were created to do this, and I wanted to center that kind of work, which was actually more central and more reflective, it turns out, of why the NYPD was created than keeping most New Yorkers safe.

Alison Stewart: What were some of the questions you wanted to answer with the podcast?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: You look at the police cars, even now, if you go to some of the precincts, you'll see there's a 175th-anniversary memorabilia on the cars and it says 1845 to 2020. By the way, those are very telling years, both of those years.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I want to know about the 1845 part. That was one question was, literally, why did this department get created, the modern department? For whom and what interests? I also was interested in how New Yorkers, Black New Yorkers, but not just Black New Yorkers, other groups, like immigrant groups at that time, Italians, how did these people fight for their own safety at a time when the police were organized against them? They could not even indulge in the illusion that the police were here to do that.

Alison Stewart: Like all good podcasters, you do research, you decided to go to the NYC Police Museum, and you find it is permanently closed.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Unfortunately, yes.

Alison Stewart: Why is it closed?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I think it was flooded. I think it was during Hurricane Sandy maybe it was flooded, and so the building had issues. We were unable to get in, but I said, "Well, but what if I could find someone who could speak not just to the exhibits that were in the museum, but how did the museum approach the department's history?" When you listen, you're going to hear some pretty fascinating answers to that.

Alison Stewart: You spoke to Edward O'Dell. He's a historian. He was trying to work on the project with the folks when they were putting together the museum, but then he found himself censored, which is very interesting. Tell us a little bit about that story.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Here he was a historian. He was excited because as a historian, he was going to get to be involved with the project of telling the department's history. He had artifacts and so forth to work with, but he says that when he would try to write about a part of NYPD's corruption, they literally told him he couldn't use the words violence and corruption, and that the museum staff, which was staffed by police, would literally write lines through his historical narrative.

I was just shocked that the censorship was that direct, but it goes to show something that I think is still true about the NYPD, which is that they're-- the NYPD has something like over 86 PR people working for it. When you have 86 public relations people working for you, that's not really, at this point, I think an honest and straightforward conversation about what you're about, and that extends to how they want-- They see their history as a PR effort.

Alison Stewart: That's what I was going to get and get to my next question was, just through all of your research, can you tell why the NYPD doesn't want an accurate portrayal of them, even in a museum?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I think a lot of it is because what you find when you find out that history that's been hidden, it is going to challenge a lot of what the NYPD claims it's about. The NYPD would like us to believe that this was an institution dedicated to safety. Listen, let me just say this for any officer that might be listening. A lot of people put on that uniform because it's a job that working-class people can get, and they really do want to help, and they intend to help.

My job isn't to say that all these 30,000 officers intend to do evil, but my point is that when you see that there really is a blue wall of silence, and you're complicit in not talking about things that you know went down-- and also, I could say throughout history, some of the most horrible things have happened on earth by people who put on uniforms, working-class people. I think that the NYPD doesn't want you to necessarily know that. They don't want to be accountable to what their history teaches, and for that reason, this history has been hidden from us.

Alison Stewart: You head to newspapers after you find out the museum is closed. What did the New York City newspapers teach you about the police force, actually, pre-1845?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Before 1845. Every historian knows newspapers are a tremendous resource. Of course, we would go to newspapers, but what I didn't understand was that newspapers were actually shaping and setting the direction of the NYPD. One of my brilliant senior editor, Diane Hodson, had the insight to say we can draw a throughline here between how the James Gordon Bennett and the Herald-- they literally called for the creation of the new department.

This is at a time when there's not television. He has inordinate power to shape the political agenda. Today, I think we see the same thing. One of the things that has our current mayor embattled is that he has drawn this line where sometimes he'll say New York is a safe city, but he participates in stereotyping migrants, making up these lies and painting like we live in this kind of scary world, and that sets the agenda for policing. That is a long historical trend, and you see it really throughout this history.

Alison Stewart: My guest is ‪Chenjerai Kumanyika. We're talking about Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. The first three episodes are available where you get your podcasts. Now, before, there were police officers like we think, there were watchmen and constables, the Night Watch system was based on, I think it's Amsterdam's force. What did the Night Watchmen do?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Not much that seemed very useful. There's not many places where you can try to find too much humor because, again, we do engage with slave patrolling, but the Night Watchmen do seem like comical figures. Some of them had hats, and people would knock the hats off. Even James Gordon Bennett called them sleepy guardians of the night. They were known for being drunk and falling asleep, but they would announce the weather.

The thing that was most fascinating about that was that people were comfortable with that because if you were alive during that time, many people had lived through the Revolutionary War. The idea of people walking around with uniforms and the power to arrest you was nothing New Yorkers were excited about.

Alison Stewart: Then you had constables. Who could be a constable?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Not most people. Certainly not Black folks or people of color, not women. Also, once the force gets started-- This was fascinating. When you started to develop a modern department, they did not want Irish on the force. This is one of the things about Empire City. So much about policing is a discussion of race that seems like it's very Black and white, but this history of the police is actually a unifier in not the best way. The experiences of immigrants coming from all kinds of places, from Germany, from Italy, Chinese Americans, all experiencing tremendous oppression at the hands of the police.

I think that that archive of New York is both inspiring because you see people who want to be Americans, but you also see the way that the police are stopping them, and the way that becoming police becomes a stepping stone for a lot of those groups, even if the stepping stones are their own people.

Alison Stewart: One constable you concentrate on is Tobias Boudinot, who is called "vile" by an expert in your show.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: John Wells.

Alison Stewart: Yes. He made a living returning Black people to enslavers in the south. Tell us, who was he, and how did he amass that kind of power? Because he was a loser initially.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: He's not really empowered. He's one of these constables that is both-- He's corrupt, he's shady, and he's broke, and he also appears to really be a racist person. One of the things we wanted to do with Tobias Boudinot's story was to say the way he policed and the reason that he did what he did was not just because he himself was a bigot. It was because he was incentivized.

There were other people, including, at one point, New York's governor, who wanted him to have the right to be able to kidnap free Black people and send them into slavery. He was empowered. At that point, this was not necessarily a systemic component of the NYPD, but what we'll see is that over time, that same function through police reform, it's like there's a recognition right away, "We need to reform the constables because they're corrupt, they're incentivized to make money," but then after the reform, the problem in some ways becomes worse.

Alison Stewart: How?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Now, instead of just Tobias Boudinot, one constable kidnapping folks, you have an entire force who is incentivized, basically, to secure the property and secure relationships, which means that in New York, which is emerging as a booming financial capital, relationships with southern plantation owners are crucial. It's true that the NYPD was created around a security, but that security had very little to do and was actually set up against the safety of most New Yorkers.

Alison Stewart: You've mentioned James Bennett Gordon. He was responding initially to the murder of a woman named Mary Rogers in 1841. She really caught the attention of the media. How did her murder lead to a professional police force?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: On one level, listen, murder is serious. I told you that at one point, people weren't excited about having a more professional police force because it reminded them of a standing army, but once Mary Rogers is murdered, her body is found floating, and it sounds very much like a true crime story, and of course, James Gordon Bennett is one of the originators of that genre, but now people are a little bit more receptive to what he's writing. He's really using that.

Often the way that the police justify themselves is they talk about crime and harm that happens that's very real, but the truth is, what you see back then is that the police don't actually solve Mary Rogers's murder. They're much more concerned with policing people in Five Points. Policing poor Irish, policing poor Black folks. Pardon me. You can see the same thing, I think, in some ways today, wherein there's a lot of worry about-- I'm worried about intra-community crime, and I don't want to see anyone harmed, but I don't necessarily see how policing has actually addressed that problem.

What I actually see is things like what we saw with Darrell Mickles, where someone who is accused of being a fairy Vader is targeted, and then four people are shot for pursuing something that actually, I just don't understand how anybody is safer as a result of that.

Alison Stewart: When the first official police office, the police force, is established in 1845, where did they find recruits?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: They're looking for people who might want to join this force. A lot of people are looking for a job. Obviously, poverty is tremendous in this growing city, but what they're not interested in is people who are not considered Native Americans. The very first iteration of-- it's not even the NYPD yet. It is something called Harper's Police. He straight-up doesn't want Irish on it. Then eventually that changes, though, by the time the first force is formed and they're recruiting from this population of folks who still must be white males, but might want to be involved in this.

Alison Stewart: There's a gentleman named George Matzel. He's put in charge to get the force up to shape. He keeps these rigorous records.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Right.

Alison Stewart: What did the rigorous records prove? What did he do?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: George Matzel was tasked with professionalizing the police department. It's interesting because when you talk about the idea of police militarization, a lot of people chart that moment as in the '60s, with the riots and various other things, was the moment when you start to see police start to look more military, but the truth is that throughout their history, professionalization has always meant militarization for the police. Matzel begins to train New York police in what he calls the school of the soldier.

That's the only way they can think of becoming better, is to become more like a military institution. His records are related to surveilling officers. By the way, one thing that's touched on in this show but that we could say a lot more about is police hated uniforms because they didn't want to be surveilled. The first police just have badges. They actually protested at George Matzel's house because they felt that wearing uniforms made them look silly. Also, if you think about it, it makes them objects of surveillance.

If they want to sleep and drink on the job or eat-- One of the first police has an anecdote about going into a cafe and all the police were eating butter cakes at an establishment which was called Buttercake Dicks. If you want to eat buttercakes and drink, you don't want to be in a uniform so you can be recognized doing that.

Alison Stewart: One of the things that Matzel imparted upon people, it's like Back to The Future Again, they're saying, "You know what? You need to be in the poor part of town. You need to be in an area of town where there were Black people." This seems like an obvious question, but does it seem to you that this is ingrained into the fabric of the DNA of the NYPD?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yes. Even Eric Adams, I've seen him quoted saying that he understands that one of the tasks police have to do is to make the city something that's good for business or, as they understand it, good for tourism, but that's not necessarily making it safer for most New Yorkers. It means focusing on people who are deemed to be the problem. I think that that focus on poor and working-class people, what one of our historians called working-class behavior, but not necessarily looking at things like wage theft.

There's a great book coming out called Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis. He says, if you look at all these other ways that are being harmed, ways people are harmed by the wealthy, those things don't come under the kind of scrutiny. Sometimes those things are happening on a much larger scale with more impact. It does seem all the way back then that you see this tendency of Matzel focuses his police on certain areas, but not the wealthy areas.

Alison Stewart: Episode three starts with Mayor Eric Adams. We're going to discuss next with a WNYC reporter. You note his record on stop-and-frisk, and you report the How Many Stops Act which would have the police document how many stops they have to make. The mayor vetoed it. He called it onerous. It passed. Anyway, if you got a chance to talk to the mayor, what would you want to know?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: "How soon will you resign?" No. Trying to take on board the mayor-- being a mayor is a hard job, and assuming that he's somehow sincere, I would say, "How could you, in all seriousness, act like being asked for officers to simply document what they're doing--" I just also got to say, for city council members who are voting to close down Rikers, all these areas where he is just really opposing any kind of police accountability.

We've had two police commissioners who are just engaged in tremendous-- Keechant Sewell throughout a whole bunch of substantiated CCRB cases. Edward Caban was also burying these police cases. My question to Eric Adams is, "How can we take you seriously when you misrepresent the laws that city council has put out, when you just really hurt any efforts at police accountability? How can we take you seriously?" I think that it's hard to participate in a good-faith conversation when you see the ways that he misrepresents these sincere efforts to try to make our city safer.

Alison Stewart: He can always call into WNYC and answer those questions if you like.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I'd love for him to, but he probably won't, because he doesn't engage with good-faith critiques. You should check out that breakfast club because when he does, he always winds up getting ate up by people like Olayemi.

Alison Stewart: Like I said, you can come on WNYC and answer those questions. The future episodes. What can we expect?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: You're going to go on a ride. I'm so excited. When you approach a history like this, you're like, "I don't want it to be too weedsy and boring and stuff like that." People are telling us that they're riveted. I'm having friends telling me they're subscribing, putting off responsibilities. We're going to go on a journey. We're going to touch on all kinds of things. Everything from sex work. We're going to hear about one of the biggest police court cases that you've never heard of, where an apartment is held responsible. You're going to hear about all kinds of interesting and fascinating things.

Ultimately, again, it's a unifier. It's a different way to understand our city. We're also going to be working with some of the people on the show to create more walking tours related to this, because making this show was a way, even with all the darkness, to become inspired about New Yorkers, how New Yorkers have fought to make their city a better place, to make it safe, and just how diverse and incredible this city is.

Alison Stewart: Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. It's a podcast. You can get your episodes where you get your podcasts. My guest has been ‪Chenjerai Kumanyika. Nice to have you here.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Thank you so much for having me.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and now we go from learning about some history of the NYPD to the state of policing in the city today. Joining me is Bahar Ostadan. She's a reporter in the WNYC Gothamist newsroom, covering the NYPD and public safety. Hi, Bahar.

Bahar Ostadan: Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: The NYPD is facing a lot challenges right now. Last week, police commissioner Edward Caban resigned. Remind us why.

Bahar Ostadan: That's right. Federal agents two weeks ago took Caban's cell phone. They also took the cell phone of his twin brother, his chief of staff, and several other police officials. The IRS told us that they're looking into Caban's twin brother's business as a nightlife consultant. The commissioner resigned just a week after that. He said in an email that news of the investigation was distracting and for the good of the city and the department, he'd made the difficult decision to step down.

Alison Stewart: Now, the previous chair, policewoman Sewell, resigned after two years. Right?

Bahar Ostadan: That's right. We reported that her reasons for stepping down were a little bit different. She felt undermined by Adams and his deputy mayor for public safety, Phil Banks. She spoke at an event for women in law enforcement and said, "Understand that you will be second-guessed, told what you should say by someone with half your experience." She went head to head with Adams a couple of times, including on one high-profile disciplinary case against the NYPD's top uniformed officer, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, which we can talk about more. It will be interesting to see how this new commissioner fares.

Alison Stewart: Who is the new commissioner? It's hard to keep track.

Bahar Ostadan: That's right. The new commissioner, his name is Tom Donlon. It came as a surprising choice to a lot of people, but really was a smart political move for Adams, appointing a former FBI official as the FBI investigates Adams's own inner circle. It's rare to appoint a non-cop to be the city's top cop, so to speak. Donlon has worked as the chief of the FBI's National Threat Center. He was New York's Director of the Office of Homeland Security, and he also ran the FBI /NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Alison Stewart: One more resignation. Adams's chief legal advisor resigned fairly abruptly on Saturday. Any reason given?

Bahar Ostadan: She really didn't give advance notice of that. She resigned two days after the police commissioner stepped down. She really just said in her letter that I've concluded that I can no longer effectively serve in my position.

Alison Stewart: As a candidate for mayor, Eric Adams ran on law and order, restoring confidence in public safety, which was a huge part of his campaign. How would you characterize policing in the Adams administration?

Bahar Ostadan: It's a really good question. I would say that it really comes down to cracking down on low-level crimes. For example, we reported the NYPD is issuing twice as many tickets for public drinking under Adams. They issued 40,000 of those tickets last year. Another one of Adams's main campaign promises was making the subways safer at the tail end of the pandemic. He flooded the transit system with police officers. There were 1000 extra cops deployed into the transit system every day.

The city spent over $150 more million on officer overtime for that. The other piece of it is stop-and-frisk. The NYPD has stopped tens of thousands of people under Adams. Just 5% of those people stopped were white, which, interestingly, is actually a starker racial disparity than that at the height of stop-and-frisk under Bloomberg.

Alison Stewart: Adams is walking a really fine line. He got roasted a couple of years ago when he told reporters the subways were unsafe. He doesn't feel safe down there, but on the other hand, he'll point out that New York is the safest city in the United States. How well does he thread this needle?

Bahar Ostadan: It's really interesting. He's moved around a lot. I would say that safety is a complicated word. Of course, we have crime data, which varies police department to police department how that's tracked. Also, he's been trying to address people's perception of safety, which really varies depending on who you are, where you live. Critics haven't received well when Adams has gone on stage at a news conference, say, after a subway shooting, to say this is the safest city in the world, because people want to hear what police are doing to tackle those issues.

The other piece of it, I think, for him is addressing people who are feeling uncomfortable versus feeling unsafe. He's talked a lot about homeless people and people with mental illness in the subway system. It's been a major talking point for him, but advocates will point to data and say for example, unlike what Adams has said, homeless people are actually much more likely to be victims of crimes than commit crimes themselves. He's moved around a lot, and we just take note of each thing he says.

Alison Stewart: How is accountability changed under the Adams administration for the NYPD?

Bahar Ostadan: A couple of major developments on that front. The first is that police commissioner who just stepped down, Caban was lighter on discipline against police officers than his predecessors. The city has a police oversight agency that can make recommendations about an officer's discipline, but it really comes down to the police commissioner. He or she has the final say on whether or not to discipline that officer. Caban has issued discipline in 55% of misconduct cases. That's down from 71% in 2021.

ProPublica also reported that Caban personally buried more than 50 disciplinary cases that were serious. Officers who were accused of choking and beating New Yorkers. That's really up from Sewell, who buried just eight in comparison. On the accountability transparency front, this iteration of the NYPD at One Police Plaza has really had a difficult time with press, too.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Two members of the press were evicted. I understand you were actually there when it happened.

Bahar Ostadan: I was. For better, for worse.

Alison Stewart: What happened? They were just waltzed out?

Bahar Ostadan: One of them was. The other one was kicked out by phone. How this played out was, all of us news reporters were really busy covering the news of the federal investigation into the police commissioner. All of a sudden, the police bureau chief for the New York Times and the police bureau chief for the New York Post are told by a top police official they don't have access to the NYPD headquarters anymore because they reached out to police unions for help scheduling interviews with officers actually on unrelated stories, including one on 911.

They've since got their access back, but it was an awkward scene where we were watching a few officers physically escorted the New York Post reporter out of the building.

Alison Stewart: Bahar Ostadan covers NYPD and public safety. Thanks for the update.

Bahar Ostadan: Thanks for having me.

 

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