9/11 and the Rise of the NYPD | PART ONE The Launch of the City's Police Department

For roughly the first 200 years of its life, New York City had no police force — at least not one we’d describe as such by contemporary standards. It had a hodge-podge of watchmen and constables, sheriffs and court officers erratically making their rounds through the streets and lanes of what we now in what was then New Amsterdam.

But now, everything about The NYPD is big: 36,000 officers policing 8.5 million people across 360 square miles. The budget is 5.4 billion dollars and there's even an intelligence and counterterrorism unit that operates overseas.

In the first installment of our series “9/11 and the Rise of the 21st Century NYPD,” WNYC's Jim O'Grady says the department has come a long way since its 17th-century origins, back when eight men carrying wooden rattles started walking around Manhattan.