Guariglia, Matthew

OUR SYNOPSIS: Matthew Guariglia explores how from 1845 to the 1930s, New York City’s police, politicians, reformers, and others “attempted to transform nineteenth-century-style policing into a modern science ready to tackle New York’s new and more multiracial century. They were the producers, recyclers, and legitimizers of the knowledge on which racial violence and exclusion were built and justified.” He refers to these various knowledge creators as “police intellectuals,” arguing that they vitally constructed the city’s racial order by vigorously targeting immigrants and Black New Yorkers. (2) In doing so, they also policed the boundaries of citizenship in the United States. By turning against their own ethnic compatriots, immigrant and especially Irish police officers could shed racialized immigrant stigma to gain relative social privilege. However, they remained disproportionately targeted by reformer charges of corruption. For Black and immigrant New Yorker women, the gender discrimination of officers and reformers furthered their oppression. Guariglia also argues that American imperial efforts abroad at the turn of the twentieth century shaped domestic policing methods, with increased emphasis on social control. In the early twentieth century, NYC police developed ethnic policing squads designed to cross enforcement barriers of immigrant language and culture.  This period also included the introduction of Black officers to target Black New Yorkers and neighborhoods. During World War I, NYC police increasingly prioritized the standardization of officers and of their racial knowledge. After the war, reformers imported international policing methods with a focus on personal identification.