Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD - If It Bleeds It Leads | 2

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Before the NYPD existed, New Yorkers strongly opposed the idea of an armed police force – until a powerful news publisher changed everything. After a grisly murder takes place, the city’s newspapers sensationalize the story, blame the cops, and a new force is born. But will these cops work to solve the case or will they spend their days hunting something–or someone–else? From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.Voices & References:Ed O’Donnell https://edwardtodonnell.com/Greg Young https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/about-usAlan Singer https://www.hofstra.edu/faculty-staff/faculty-profile.html?id=1412Wilbur Miller https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/history/people/_emeriti/miller.phpJon Wells https://www.jonathandanielwells.com/Mariame Kaba https://mariamekaba.com/The Bowery Boys podcast https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/bowery-boys-first/bowery-boys-podcastFollow Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD on the Wondery App or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/empire-city/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Empire City early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. When my daughter asked me what the police do, I didn't know what to say. And I'm still figuring out how to answer. How did that story, that the police keep us safe, become the story that so many people believe? To answer that, I need to get to something bigger than Tobias Boudinot and the kidnapping club. I need to know the real reasons

why New York's first professional police department started. Tracking down the early history of the NYPD is kind of overwhelming. Where do you even start? Thank you for calling the New York City Police Museum. The museum is currently closed. The New York City Police Museum seemed like an obvious first stop. A quick visit to the website tells you they're dedicated to preserving the history of the New York City Police Department, the world's largest and most famous police service. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for.

Since the museum is closed, we cannot accept memorabilia donations or respond to requests for information. Thank you. Well, that turned out to be a dead end. But I'd still like to find someone who worked inside that museum, who could at least give me a sense of what clues might have been in there about the NYPD's beginning. So I started calling people connected to the museum. How can I help you? Being a good journalist is kind of like being a salesman. Every time one door closes on you, you just tell yourself, no problem. I'm just one more phone call away from success.

And I thought I was getting closer to learning what the museum might have taught me about the history when I found the phone number for the office of Howard Safer. He's a former NYPD commissioner who helped get the museum off the ground. Hi, I'm looking to speak with Howard Safir. So, may I say his name? My name is Chinjerai, and I'm, yeah, my name is Chinjerai. Okay, hold on one moment. Howard's unavailable. So I couldn't talk to Howard either.

But I wasn't giving up. Eventually, my producer Sam found someone else who was even better qualified to give us some real tea on how the police museum dealt with the NYPD's history. So, uh, I'm Edward T. O'Donnell. O'Donnell is a historian who curated exhibits for the police museum back in 1999. I got a call from Mrs. Howard Safer, wife of the chief of police in New York City, to see if I would have a meeting to talk about the police museum.

The police commissioner's wife was also the head of the New York Police Museum's board. And when she got Ed on the phone, she told him, We've got the space, we've got the stuff, but we don't have any, we don't have a historian. So Ed agreed to help. I don't think I'll ever have a stranger assignment. Ed says that at first,

the police museum was open to the public, but it wasn't much of a museum. It was basically a room in the police academy full of historical junk. So there was literally like a display case full of handcuffs, a display case full of nightsticks, a wall covered in old helmets. And so they were historical, but there was no interpretation. It was just like cool police stuff organized by category. But there were plans to turn it into something bigger and grander. They got, you know, a ton of money, private money, to really make it go big time. Hired a first-class architectural firm to build the museum. And then like halfway through, the architectural firm actually said,

how are we going to tell this story? And that's when Ed got involved. When he showed up, the first thing that made him raise an eyebrow was the staff. Most museums have positions like curators, archivists, and docents. But the police museum was run by police,

regular NYPD. Either way, Ed got to work. He started writing up the plan to organize the police museum, to tell the truth about the history. But most of the public never got to see what Ed wrote. They wanted me to write about the New York City Police Department, but without using the words violence or corruption, which is effectively impossible. They were serious about this. So serious that the museum's director,

an active NYPD sergeant, would personally edit Ed O'Donnell's work. I saved the document because he just struck entire pages, just lines right through, lines right through. And then he'd rewrite sentences where I would say, this officer was indicted for corruption or what have you, and just would say, this officer was let go. Maybe I'm naive, but that kind of direct censorship surprised me. It was a very interesting experience

and a good example of, you know, they're trying to do public history, but with a real institutional agenda. When the museum finally relaunched in 2000, there was a big gala to celebrate. Opening night was amazing. You know, got to meet the many members of the cast of Law & Order. They were all there.

It was very, you know, glitzy event. But about six months later, the museum director got caught up in a corruption scandal. The New York Times and the Daily News reported that one of the police sergeants was using the museum to accept gifts of luxury cars and office space that went against police regulations. And by the way, this was the same sergeant

who wouldn't let Ed use the word corruption when writing about the NYPD. He and the other officers were promptly reassigned. For the past eight years, the museum's website has read, the museum is currently closed. Please check back for updates. So it's clear I'm not getting in there. But Ed told me that when he was researching for the museum,

he learned a lot from old newspapers. And that turned out to be amazing advice. It turns out that newspapers have more to teach us about New York's first professional police department than you might think. Because they didn't just report on it. The newspaper played a key role in defining what police would do and shaping what we're told about the police for the next 180 years. From Wondery and Crooked Media, I'm Chinjarai Kumaneka, and this is Empire City, Episode 2. If it bleeds, it leads. What's the first step to growing your business? Getting people to notice you. But how do you do that? Two words, constant contact. Your struggle with expensive, slow,

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So get going and growing with Constant Contact today. Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. Like the beginning of a lot of true crime stories, the creation of the NYPD starts with a murder. So the year is 1841, and there was this young woman named Mary Rogers, a very lovely young woman who worked at a tobacco shop, a cigar store over there, actually.

It was where the cigar shop is, believe it or not. Greg Young hosts the Bowery Boys podcast, and he's an expert on old New York. Greg and I are standing next to a Gilded Age fountain in City Hall Park, right across the street from Mary's tobacco shop. Everyone is smoking. Everyone from City Hall, all of the politicians. And this woman Mary, she's the plug. She sells them good tobacco and chats them up. She's actually kind of a local celebrity, you know, both for her beauty, but also like, it seems like she had good rapport, she had an interesting personality.

One day in the summer of 1841, Mary's lifeless body is found floating in the Hudson River. So just imagine you're living in 19th century New York and you're hearing about this murder. But who's going to solve it? In addition to the constables, the other main authorities in the city are these guys called watchmen, because in theory, they keep watch over the city. But keeping watch doesn't really have much to do with solving crimes. Law enforcement, when it came to like true detective work, was almost non-existent. Now you might think that people in a growing city with a murderer on the loose would want a real professional police force like what we have today. But Greg says back then, large numbers of uniformed men walking around with weapons and the authority to arrest folks

is the last thing most New Yorkers want, for a very good reason. In the early 1840s, you still had people with living memory of the Revolutionary War. It was considered completely un-American because we did so much to get them off these shores. Many, many New Yorkers at that time had that fear constantly. They were like, no, I remember this. This is real. this could happen. To have this kind of like what many consider like a private, uniformed force that was going to be armed and given the power to enforce laws of their own whims,

sounded very much like an invading army to people. But there is another group of professionals who are gaining clout in the city. They immediately get involved in finding out what happened to Mary Rogers. What is kind of shocking though, is how the sort of detective work about the whole thing or everything about the case was being driven

and dictated by the newspapers. The press of the day filled the newspapers with every single detail and rumor about this particular crime. And they were kind of driving the solving of things. Ah, yes, the media. If you know the media like I know the media, then you know nothing is more provocative than the body of a dead white woman. That kind of crime allows journalists to titillate their readers with descriptions of her beauty and horrify them with gory details,

and then set themselves up as righteous avengers, asking readers to contact them with tips that can help solve Mary's murder. And the guy who's the most successful at this is James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald. Bennett takes the story of the Mary Rogers murder and runs with it. His goal is to exhilarate the breakfast table. Alan Singer is a professor at Hofstra University and a former social studies teacher. And I feel like if he'd been my teacher, I might have been more into social studies

because we share an interest. As a high school teacher, you had to be able to rap. Right. I used to call myself Reese's Pieces because I'm better than Eminem. Yeah, I wonder if you ever wrote a rap about James Gordon Bennett. He doesn't deserve one.

Bennett is a legend in media. And if you think papers like the New York Times or the Washington Post are influential today, they have nothing on the sheer power of the New York Herald in its earliest years. This is before radio or TV. Politicians can't speak directly to the public. But Bennett can, and he's using his reach to set the political agenda. So when Mary Rogers is murdered,

Bennett starts talking a lot of smack about New York's dusty, disorganized police. He used the difficulty in solving the case to denounce police incompetence and the moral disintegration of the city. Bennett watches what the police are doing, and then he tells his readers, hey, y'all, the police don't have the answers.

He calls the watchmen sleepy guardians of the night, and he points out that they didn't collect any intel on the case. He complains that the police are too slow, then floats his theory about the murder without any real evidence. It's almost like Tucker Carlson, where he doesn't say it, he suggests it. Now look, some of Bennett's reporting is problematic, like racially problematic. But I didn't want to reduce an important figure in the history of journalism to his worst moments, so I asked Singer to discuss this in a more nuanced way.

He was an anti-Semite and a racist. Couldn't have put it better myself. The pages of the Herald were laced with racial slurs, including the N-word. Early in his career, Bennett staunchly proslavery, and he makes that known in his paper. And when Mary Rogers is murdered, Bennett's approach is, let's blame this on the people that New Yorkers are already scared of. That'll sell a lot of my papers. The paper postulates without evidence

that the woman was murdered by a gang of rightist miscreants or Negroes. And Bennett's fake news is even more reason for him to talk about how ineffective New York's police are. He says these guys are horrible at solving murders. And actually, he's not even sure if they want to. He's pointing to the idea that the police are corrupt, not just incompetent or...

Both. Both. He wants a police force. He wants an organized police force because otherwise the city is in chaos. But even as the Rogers case goes cold, Bennett continues to ratchet up his diatribe on the city's police. In one article, Bennett criticizes the fact that New York's watchmen and constables are like private contractors working for hire. He writes, It appears crime is made to support police. It sets their table. It is their meat, drink, and lodging.

Abolish crime and police starve. But Greg Young thinks that all Bennett's hype about police incompetence isn't really about solving Mary Rogers' murder. And it's not even about reporting the news. I mean, maybe I'm cynical here. Maybe they are genuinely concerned about the about reporting the news. I mean, maybe I'm cynical here. Maybe they are genuinely concerned about the safety of the city, but like, I'm sorry, building up the idea

of this crime wave that's happening is selling papers. So wait a minute, Greg, are you saying that the media has an economic incentive in centering crime, which then structures how policing happens? I mean, this is the beginning because it is the first time that like there is a center of American media and they are all truly powerful.

So Bennett uses his power to make it bigger than just Mary Rogers. He got their attention with one dead white woman. Now he starts complaining about something powerful New Yorkers care about even more. Bennett starts railing about how bad police might threaten their wealth. The issue is disorder. The whole sense of you go out, you step out your front door, and you're in this disorderly, disgusting place. It really upset a lot of people. Nobody likes a sloppy, chaotic city. But historian Wilbur Miller says that a very specific group of people were really worried. The disorder threatens capital directly in that way. If the city gets a reputation for disorderliness, who's going to want to do business here?

Wealthy white folks, insurance companies, business owners, and merchants are especially concerned. It's an articulate segment of the population. They pressure politicians to act in some way. And they voted too. After getting a burglary tip at a wealthy residence overnight, the following morning Bennett writes, Considerable noise is made by these rascals and yet no watchmen hear them. And he announces his solution to the problem. It's time we establish a new night police to protect the property of our citizens.

Some wealthy and powerful New Yorkers are already debating that idea, trying to figure out what a modern police force might look like. And actually, let's talk about their word police for a second. The word police comes from the Greek word polis, which means a city. And for a long time, police meant anything to make the city more orderly. So it started off as a very general sense and it became specific much later. So the idea of policing is very old and so is the idea of policing is very old, and so is the idea of police reform. City council members, military folks, and philanthropists are essentially debating how to make the police better. And they're just the most recent in a long line of people who've been trying to make the police work in New York for almost 200 years, going all the way back to the Dutch rattle guys.

But there aren't a whole lot of places you can look to for examples of something that works better. I mean, they could look to Boston. Boston had drawn up the plans for a publicly funded police force in the 1830s. But it's only on paper. Theory that hasn't been turned into practice. And if we want to keep it all the way real,

they could turn to South Carolina and the Charleston City Guard that was formed 60 years earlier. But of course, one of the main jobs of the Charleston City Guard is squashing slave rebellions and enforcing a curfew on black people. So if you're trying to figure out how to create a police force that can solve murders, deal with unruly communities, and protect wealth, you might as well go to the experts at the core of the British Empire, Robert Peel's famous London Metropolitan Police. It's a functional modern department for a growing city. And even though that example comes from America's former oppressors,

the British, after James Gordon Bennett's media crusade, British-style police don't sound so bad. So in 1844, New York Mayor James Harper takes a cue from the British and establishes a new force of 200 police. Harper's police was established. It was uniform. He had to be a native-born American to even qualify for the police force. The uniform he puts them in is blue, with the letters MP on a standing collar, which looks a lot like the British police. And similarities with the Brits don't stop there. Harper also has

some strong feelings about Irish Catholics. So Harper was a nativist, and a nativist was essentially anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant. Now, most of the immigrants coming into New York in the 1840s and 1844 were Irish Catholic immigrants. Right now, Irish are so identified with the police that it's hard to imagine a time when you're saying when Harper started his police, it was the exact opposite. Opposite. But this was white people hating on other white people, right? Yes, it's white people hating white people. They barely saw them as white. Harper doesn't really want Irish Catholic immigrants working for him,

but they're the ones being policed. And of course, James Gordon Bennett weighs in on New York's new force. He says, We have no police in New York under Mayor Harper worth a straw. He doesn't see these police as much of a step up from the constables and watchmen. Plus, he's a Catholic. Harper's police look like a British standing army on the streets of New York City. People hated it. People rioted against it.

Harper loses his next election after just one term, and a few months later, his police are abolished. But within months, New York will create the nation's first professional police force. Irish begin to apply, and these new recruits will get an annual salary. They'll be given a rule book, training, and badges. And within a few months, the department grows from about 200 to 800 men. This sounds like the police force that James Gordon Bennett's Herald has been fighting for. But what about the rest of New York? What's going to happen when they see an even bigger standing army than Harper's police on the streets. In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma was home to one of the nation's most prosperous African-American communities until a shocking campaign of violence destroyed it. Hi, I'm Lindsey

Graham, the host of Wondery Show American History Tellers. We take you to the events, the times, and the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, an accusation of assault leads to the systemic destruction of Greenwood, a neighborhood nicknamed the Black Wall Street. Listen to the Tulsa Race Massacre from American History Tellers on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or the Wondery app. Join Wondery Plus and the Wondery app to listen ad-free. It's a scorching summer day in New York City in 1845.

800 men are gathered outside of a police station house. They're running military-style drills. A captain runs a call and response with the men. Attention! Squad! Shoulder! Clubs! Carry! Clubs! And a man named Mike Walsh is standing on a corner nearby, glaring at him with disgust. All right, right! Walsh is a young working class Irish politician. And even though he's in politics, he lives in one of New York's most impoverished areas.

And when he sees this new police force in his neighborhood, it pisses him off. Greg Young and I are on a visit to the part of New York where Mike Walsh lived. Today, the neighborhood is part of Chinatown. But back then, it's called Five Points. When Irish immigrants move to New York, they often come here. There's a swamp right in the middle, and blocks of crowded tenement buildings start to get even more packed. I can just imagine that these folks want more from their city, but, like, probably not more police. It's just astonishing because we're so close

to where City Hall is, right? There's just, like, this striking dichotomy of, like, we're right here, we need help. This police force is not really going to be for us, is it? But Mike Walsh doesn't just stand around me mugging police. He also produces a newspaper where he gives a brutally honest take on what New York's police look like from his perspective. We dug up his paper. It's called The Subterranean. And he's writing for a more niche audience than James Gordon Bennett.

His newspaper isn't quite like what the Herald and those things were. This was very much an organ of his own political thoughts. You know, outside of like standing in a square and yelling at people, like publishing your own newspaper was your best way of getting your ideas out to people. So while a media leader like James Gordon Bennett is saying things like, it's time we establish a new night police to protect the property of our citizens. In his paper, he calls city council corrupt and incompetent, and he calls the mayor a brainless rich loafer. He's also a very spirited, spicy individual, getting frequently into like fisticuffs with people. He was sued many times for libel.

I actually love reading Mike Walsh's paper. It's not just because of the way he trash talks the mayor. It's because he's criticizing the way he trash talks the mayor. It's because he's criticizing them without it feeling like it's just to sell papers. He's telling you firsthand that the fix is in. Mike Walsh wasn't against the idea of a police force. He just understood very well that there was no way that an effective, competent, uncorrupted police force was ever going to happen with any of the people that were involved here in New York government. But Walsh isn't just accusing rank and file officers of being corrupt.

His criticisms go straight to the top of the organization. He said some nasty things about the first superintendent of this police department. He was just like, this person was an incompetent clown. That person is George Matzl, the first head of this newly professionalized force. And the reason Mike Walsh hates him has a lot to do with who Matzl works for. Matzl is a representative of a very powerful, by far the most powerful political machine operating in New York before the Civil War. That political machine is the Democratic juggernaut called Tammany Hall. And according to historian John Wells, they control almost every part of the city government

and run things based on what's good for their agenda, regardless of whether it's good for the city. And Matzel, as the police chief, is right at the center of that. George Matzel is a New York native. One newspaper describes him as a big man, both physically and mentally. His sharp wit and 350-pound frame makes his presence known in every room he enters. He spends his 20s in the New York state militia, rising to the rank of major sergeant. When he gets back to New York, before he knows it, he's on the radar of Tammany Hall politicians. They figure he has the military experience and he's loyal to us. He'll play ball

however we need him to. And so elected officials choose him to turn New York's ancient and corrupt system of constables and watchmen into a professional force. He institutes a pretty rigorous system of discipline for officers who are found not to be on duty or to be asleep or to be drinking or otherwise not carrying out professionally the duties that they've been assigned. Matz will make sure that while they're on duty, officers check in every hour. He kept rigorous records of the comings and goings of the officers, who was jailed, what they were jailed for. With pressure from the newspapers and New York's wealthy ruling class, it's clear to Matzl that he needs to unleash New York's new police on crime. Well, sort of. Mary Rogers' murder case had kick-started the process that led to the creation of this new force.

But the police never solved that. There's a lot of crime happening in the wealthier parts of the city. Business people are stealing their employees' wages and exploiting them. Wives and mistresses are being beat up and assaulted by their husbands. Servants are being abused. And we know that across town, Black people are being kidnapped. But that kind of crime isn't what the big newspapers are outraged about. And George Mansell doesn't focus his police on those kind of safety issues.

Instead, he makes sure his officers pay attention to particular parts of the city. The parts of the city full of poor folks and Black folks that the Herald has been complaining about because those areas scare or just annoy elite New Yorkers. Particularly around the riverfront and particularly in poverty-stricken areas like Five Points. And they start to put a whole lot of energy into policing folks in those neighborhoods for doing pretty ordinary stuff. Drunken people in the street, fighting in the street. So it's not as though the crime is really serious. Wilbur Miller says it wasn't really what folks were doing.

The focus was more about the kind of folks that were doing it. Essentially, what the behavior they objected to really, in the end, was working-class behavior. Or just trying to make some money. One day, an officer walks up to a black woman who's selling apples on the street. And that was illegal if he did it in front of a storefront. So he says, you have to move on. She says, what do you mean?

I have to move. He says, you move on. She says, well, I'm not going to move on. You can kiss my ass. Hearing this helped me understand why people like Mike Walsh hate New York's new police. And he peppers every sentence with personal insults about them. Walsh calls Matzl a pitiful lump of meanness, a renegade wretch, a walking mass of moral and physical putrefaction. And he calls the police asses and blatherskites. By the way, I had to look up the word blatherskite, and it means a person who talks a lot of nonsense.

You're welcome. He calls it preposterous to even consider the fact that Matzel would be the head of an effort to reform the police. So just imagine on that hot summer day when Walsh sees New York police doing a military drill, like the British Army, with even some of his fellow Irishmen among them. The officers aren't wearing uniforms, but they're all wearing badges, chanting and marching in unison. All right, right! Some of these cops are even people that Walsh knows, and seeing them makes his stomach turn. He tells them they should resign, and he calls the ones that decide to stay,

servile dogs. A week later, he creates a banner that reads, No Standing Army of Licensed Thieves to Meddlin' Pilfer, and starts parading around town with it. The residents of Five Points cheer. As Walsh ramps up his criticism, he argues that the new police are rife with corruption. He goes as far as publishing a list of men

from the old guard of constables and watchmen who are now part of the new force. He says these dudes were part of the old sloppy corrupt police. You know, they ain't qualified to protect and serve us. But Walsh doesn't have anywhere near the reach of James Gordon Bennett and the Herald. Walsh is a scrappy city politician trying to build his clout

and be a voice for the working class. His paper doesn't have the buy-in from the powerful to exert real pressure. But Bennett's paper can move policy. And a few blocks away on Newspaper Row, the Herald is singing a very different tune. Bennett writes that Matzl is receiving universal satisfaction amongst New Yorkers. He says, Matzl's vigilance never slumbers. There's no such word as fail in his vocabulary. He calls the men serving under Matzl intelligent, incompetent. But with praise from politicians

and New York's most influential media leaders, Matzl's force continues to grow and become more present in people's lives, with hundreds of men joining up. But what does a reformed, better trained, professional police force mean for Black New Yorkers? The answer is about to become terrifyingly clear. If you had been near City Hall on the afternoon of October 27, 1846, you would have seen something that New Yorkers had never seen before.

Hundreds of police officers with badges standing on duty, the most visible display of police power that New York has ever seen. About a year after this new force's form, the mayor sends New York's first police chief, George Matzl, to solve a problem. And not surprisingly, the problem is free Black people. At first, it's just one Black person, a man named George Kirk. Kirk is enslaved in Georgia and figures out a way to escape to New York. And so he took the opportunity to steal away on a ship.

As the ship made its way from Georgia up to New York City, he was discovered. The ship captain finds Kirk when he docks at the harbor, and he's determined to send him back. So Kirk starts screaming out for help. Some Black Stevedores on the dock hear his cries and mobilize in Kirk's defense. They realize that he's about to be arrested, and they whisk him away and hide him.

New York's abolitionist community has grown stronger and bigger than it was in the days of David Ruggles. And this is past the days of the Kidnapping Club and Richard Riker. There are even some abolitionist judges. Black abolitionists run to a local judge named John Edmonds and say, you can't let this captain just send George Kirk back to Georgia. The judge says the captain that brought Kirk in isn't his master, and he rules Kirk free.

The courtroom rings out in cheers. For a time, it looks like George Kirk is going to remain in New York City a free person. This pisses off the ship captain, and he's not alone. Not surprisingly, the court case gets covered by James Gordon Bennett, and he focuses his outrage on black resistance. What's wild is that Bennett's article about Kirk is focused on stopping more black people from getting the right to vote. When he sees black folks using the courts to free Kirk,

what he sees is political power. And he's like, if black folks are this riled up about a slave, imagine if more of them can vote. The first city in the union would be under the control of a violent and ignorant mob. The ship captain goes over the judge's head and urges the mayor and other politicians to arrest George Kirk, because the captain knows they'll be sympathetic. They're the ones who are out front defending slavery. That means that they're the most significant protectors of what they see as the right of the South to reclaim its runaway property. The mayor commands the police chief to get Kirk. So Matzo sends all 900 police

officers to hunt down one man. And I have to imagine, who knows one of those officers? But this time, it isn't just him and a few rogue cops. It's the most police that New York has ever assigned to one task. I know how nervous I feel whenever I get unfairly pulled over by just one or two police officers. I'm highly aware that every word and movement I make could result in me losing my freedom or my life. I can't imagine what it's like to be chased down by 900 police. And because there's so many of them, New York's abolitionist community don't fight back at that moment. The police arrest George Kirk without a fight. And of course, Bennett is thrilled by the actions of the police. He says so the next day in the Herald.

This riotous disposition on the part of the Negroes manifested itself yesterday to such a dangerous extent that in bringing the slave to court, the assistance of the mayor and a strong body of police was necessary to prevent a rescue. Chief of Police Mr. Matzel and his arrangements to prevent any symptom of a riot were admirably planned. Bennett is clear. This is what police should be about. This is what they should do. George Kirk's story is important to me for two reasons. First, his story ends differently than how these kinds of stories usually end. Weeks after his arrest, city officials dropped the charges against him and set him free. It's a major victory. But the second reason that Kirk's victory matters

is that cases like his lead to something that would transform policing all over the United States. In 1850, the federal government passes the Fugitive Slave Act. Essentially, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 turns police forces across the North into iterations of the New York Kidnapping Club. And every community in the North and its police department is being put on notice that this is exactly what is supposed to unfold. When John Wells says the Fugitive Slave Act required every police department in the North to act like a kidnapping club, it really drove home the point for me.

I shared that with organizer Miriam Kaba. She agreed, but she made one important correction. The Fugitive Slave Act didn't just turn every police department into a kidnapping club. It also turned every individual white person into a potential kidnapper. It'll now be a felony for anyone to give aid or comfort to anyone accused of being a runaway. So even those black folks who rescued George Kirk could now be charged with felonies for helping him. New York becomes a testing ground for the first cases of the Fugitive Slave Act, and eventually the U.S. Marshal's Office gives George Matzl an inscribed double-barrel shotgun for his help ensuring that New York would not protect black freedom. Growing up, when I thought about slave patrols,

I thought of a ragtag group of white men in old-timey clothes, armed with shotguns and chains, chasing after black folks through wooded areas down south. The image was of a very specific southern lineage between slavery and policing. What I never thought of was the relationship between newspapers, Wall Street, and a unified force of almost a thousand police marching through the streets of Manhattan with batons and badges to capture a supposed runaway. Why are cops from New York, why would they even care so much about enslavement and particularly about black people?

I'm back on the streets of New York with Miriam Kaba. They are the caretakers of those people who rely so deeply on slavery remaining to exist in this country. People would defend that to the death. Miriam Kaba says to understand why George Matzl policed New York in the way he did, you need to understand his job before he became a police officer. So she takes me to a building that was once the U.S. Customs House, where George Matzl used to work.

It was the headquarters where officials collected taxes on everything that was imported into the city. And this mattered because George Matzl knew the importance of protecting the city's economy. But to really help me get how people like George Matzel viewed the world, Maryam Kaba directed my attention to four statues that adorn the front of the building. These pieces are highly very racist images of what they call the four continents. The marble sculptures are four larger-than-life women meant to personify America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. America, as you might imagine, is depicted in the most positive light.

You see America as kind of upright, and you see like the torch in hand. She's victorious, a leader, and ready to spring into action. And then there's Africa. The only nude statue is Africa. The whole image is she's kind of slumped over and fallen. It's the image of the kind of backwardsness of Africa. She's not awake. Wow.

Yeah, I'm really seeing it. Like, now that you see it, it's funny how that just, this sort of ideology is just embedded in these statues. Right. The message is clear. Business people in the financial capital

of the country didn't look at Africa as a nation they could respect. They saw it as a backward land to profit from. And George Matzl understands that the trade of human beings is a big part of New York's economy, and that's what has to be protected.

If I was a New York police officer, I'd want to distance myself from all this history. But it doesn't seem I'd want to distance myself from all this history. But it doesn't seem like they want to. Today's NYPD claims 1845 as the origin of the New York Police Department, the moment they claim they became modern and professional. If that's true, then we have to recognize that this is what modern and professional means to them. Acting like an army, targeting poor neighborhoods, kidnapping folks. A former NYPD commissioner even said that the job of an officer in 2020 was essentially the same as the job in 1845.

The face of policing has changed a lot since 1845, but the nature of the work itself has not. Which makes this hidden history an even more chilling preview of how the NYPD defines danger for the next 180 years. And the next big test comes a few years later, when politicians get a taste of how police can supercharge their careers. That's next time. Follow Empire City on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. If you have a tip about a story you think we should investigate, please write to us at wondery and Crooked Media. I'm your host and executive producer, Chinjarae Kumunika. For Crooked Media, our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Duran. Our senior story editor is Diane Hodson. Our producer is Sam Riddell.

Bowen Wong and Sidney Rapp are our associate producers. Sound Design, Mixing and Original Score by Axel Kukutye. Our historical consultant and fact checker is History Studios. For Wondry, our senior producer is Mandy Gorenstein. Our senior story editor

is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Mariah Gossett. The executive producer at Push Black is Lily Workne. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismar,

Katie Long, Tommy Vitor, and Diane Hodson. Executive producers at Wondry are Nigery Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis,

and Jen Sargent. Was there a crime committed? As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of? You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.