Author Bruce Chadwick spent years writing about the NYPD. In his new book, Chadwick decided to explore the origins of the police department known around the world.
Chadwick, an NYPD expert who has spent years teaching about murder in America at Rutgers University and covering crime for the New York Daily News, is a natural candidate to chronicle the founding of the department in the crime-ridden 1800s and the ways in which the NYPD has inspired many of its counterparts around the country.
The book is the product of detailed research through diaries, journals and more; and its decades-spanning approach through the 19th century reveals the progression of policing into something near its modern form.
“I knew that the era in New York City’s history was a real boom era for the growth of the city,” Chadwick says of the mid-19th century. “The city didn’t have a police force until 1844 because they feared the police force would be like an occupying army. So they decided they would have a police force, but there were no qualifications — they were relying on this brute force.”
But wasn’t until the 1870s, as Chadwick explores in his book, that crime in the city started to dissipate.
“In the 1870s, there were more police, honest police, to patrol the streets, and crime and corruption declined,” he writes in the book, adding: “The New York City Police Department served as a model for other urban law enforcement agencies in America throughout the nineteenth century. … Everything in New York was bigger, more complicated, more problematic, and more expensive.
“The success of the NYPD, over the long-run, after all of its troubles, paved the way for good policing in America.”
