Over the last quarter-century, America has witnessed a remarkable decline in urban crime—most notably in New York City, where murders dropped from a record high 2,245 in 1990 to 335 in 2016. This drop coincided with a change in police practices, with the NYPD leading the way in more active policing. Academics still debate how much of the decline in crime is due to policing, as opposed to increased incarceration or demographic trends.
Recently, however, there has been pushback against the kind of policing the NYPD pioneered. “Stop and frisk” has faced court challenges and promises of reform by the city’s Democratic mayor. Black Lives Matter has brought the issue of police shootings of minorities to the national agenda, while more Americans, including some conservatives, worry about over-policing and over-incarceration.
Some of these criticisms simplify and exaggerate the problems, yet they point to a broader unease about police violence. Granting fellow citizens the right to use violent force against the public presents a moral and political dilemma in a democracy. Law enforcement is necessary for civil order, but the public also needs safeguards to ensure that the police do not abuse their authority.
The first professional, trained municipal police force in the United States dates back only to the 1830s. Americans in the early republic were leery of creating such armed forces, perhaps still smarting from the armed occupation of British troops leading up to the revolution. The boisterous urban culture of Jacksonian America would not succumb easily to the authority of the police.
How New York City came to create its own police force is the subject of Bruce Chadwick’s vivid yet deeply flawed popular history Law & Disorder. New York’s population grew rapidly in the mid-19th century, from 152,000 in 1820 to 696,000 in 1850. Irish immigrants, flooding into the city’s poorer sections, accounted for much of that growth. Crime rates, including murder rates, rose rapidly. Riots were not uncommon.
The city lacked an organized police force to deal with the crime and disorder, relying instead on ragtag crews of night watchmen, city marshals, and constables—men more interested in earning fees for solving crimes and pleasing their political patrons than in creating an orderly city.
Inspired by London’s new police force, New York officials created a full-time professional police force in 1845 to patrol the streets. In 1857, the Republican-led state government created its own police force for the city, the Metropolitans, in a bid to weaken the power of city Democrats—so that, for a few months, the city had two police forces. (After some police-on-police violence, the courts intervened and the Metropolitans were declared the new official force.) By the late 1800s, crime rates declined as the city’s police force grew.
Insofar as Law & Disorder sticks to that story, the book offers a reasonable look at 19th-century New York life. Yet page after page, Chadwick traffics in gross exaggerations, hyperbolic prose, and skewed interpretations.
The problems start as early as the short “Author’s Note” that opens the book. “The crime wave that engulfed New York” prior to the Civil War, Chadwick writes, “was perhaps the biggest in the history of the United States.” This is the entire premise for his book: that antebellum New York was one of the most crime-ridden cities in American history. But that premise is utter nonsense.
Crime statistics for the 19th century are not completely reliable, but enough work has been done to give us proximate data on crime for those years, and Chadwick correctly presents those data. In a chapter entitled “Crime Everywhere,” he notes that the murder rate in New York City during the 1830s was about 4 per 100,000 residents; by 1850, the rate had climbed to around 13 to 14 per 100,000 residents. These were “extraordinary rates rarely seen again in U.S. history,” Chadwick breathlessly informs his readers.
But anyone with passing knowledge of recent New York history should know that for the 30 years between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, New York City experienced a murder rate higher than that of the supposedly horrible 1850s. New York’s murder rate in 1970 was over 15 per 100,000 residents. By 1980, it was over 25, and by 1990 it was nearly 31—two and a half times the rate of the 1850s.
Let’s move away from New York and look at recent murder rates in other American cities. Chicago, which has recently attracted a great deal of publicity for gun violence, had a murder rate of 28 per 100,000 residents in 2016; Detroit’s rate in 2015 was almost 44, while Baltimore and St. Louis in 2015 saw rates of 55 and 59 respectively. And if we want to look at one of the worst murder rates in recent years, that would be New Orleans in 1994 at about 86 murders per 100,000 residents—seven times the rate of New York in the 1850s. So much for Chadwick’s claim that the antebellum years were “the most violent and crime-ridden era in both New York City and American history.”
Chadwick even cites data on abortions—“one estimate was that there was one abortion for every four live births” in New York in that era—implying that if they were counted in the official crime rates it would bolster his case about life in 19th-century New York. Unfortunately for Chadwick’s thesis, current abortion statistics are even grimmer. In 2014 there were over 63,000 abortions in New York, meaning that there was one abortion for every two live births in the city that year.
Of course, Chadwick’s distortions do not mean that mid-19th-century New York was paradise; it was a disorderly city full of brothels, saloons, and gambling dens. Chadwick notes that there were over a quarter-million arrests between 1845 and 1853. Half of those arrests were for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and vagrancy. Fighting was common and at times it could turn into full-fledged riots. High-profile murders, such as that of the prostitute Helen Jewett, would periodically grab public attention. In addition, New Yorkers had to deal with deadly diseases like cholera and tuberculosis. The city was developing a clean supply of water delivered through a system of aqueducts, but sanitation and other public health services were still primitive.
Subtlety is not Chadwick’s forte, so instead of telling this rich and fascinating story of a rough-and-tumble city, he resorts to over-the-top descriptions that misrepresent the real history. “There was crime, crime, and more crime in the streets, literal death in the air,” he writes. “There seemed to be burglars, killers, and robbers in every neighborhood.” Elsewhere, Chadwick claims that streets of New York were “covered with rivers of blood.”
One reason for Chadwick’s faulty analysis is his sources. His assertions seem sensationalistic because he mostly relies on sensationalizing newspaper stories from the period. Rather than interpreting them for us with appropriate skepticism, Chadwick simply rehashes their rhetoric. If Chadwick ever writes a history of the Spanish-American War, readers should be prepared for descriptions of the dastardly attack on the battleship Maine by the perfidious Spanish military.
Relying on such sources, Chadwick cannot provide a reasonable look at what life was actually like for most people. “Many of those who lived there hated it, mostly because of the crime threat,” writes Chadwick. The entirety of his proof that “many” New Yorkers hated living there is a single quotation from reformer Charles Loring Brace (born and raised in rural Connecticut).
If New York were as horrible as Chadwick claims, why did so many people move there in the mid-1800s? That is the kind of question that should animate a historian. Yes, many unfortunate souls died young from crime and disease, or saw their lives ruined by alcoholism, prostitution, and tough working conditions. But many others survived and earned enough money to raise the standard of living for their families ever so slightly. That’s the real story of New York.
Chadwick suffers from what we might call the “Gangs of New York problem.” Martin Scorsese’s 2002 movie paints the notorious Five Points neighborhood as a gang-infested wasteland of violence. Chadwick’s chapter on the neighborhood is similar, titled: “Five Points and the Boundaries of Hell.” What is missing from both Scorsese’s movie and Chadwick’s history is a window into the lives of the average Five Points resident, struggling to survive amid difficult conditions. At one point, Chadwick writes: “Reformer Lydia Child was one of the few women adventuresome enough to explore Five Points.” Well, I’m pretty sure there were lots of working-class women who lived in Five Points.
Chadwick makes very little use of Tyler Anbinder’s well-researched history of Five Points, which portrays the neighborhood with a nuance missing from Law & Disorder. Anbinder notes the number of poor immigrants in Five Points who managed from their menial labors to open up modest bank accounts at Emigrant Savings Bank. Eventually, many residents of Five Points and other poor districts would move to slightly better neighborhoods and slowly improve their lots in life.
Instead, Chadwick gives his reader an oddly neo-Marxist analysis, arguing that workers suffered from a “loss of self-respect that brought about alienation.” With little evidence, he argues that “life for the unskilled laborers did not improve” because “the new jobs were all low-paying menial work.” Yes, if only those poor 19th-century New Yorkers had access to all of those high-paying STEM jobs.
Chadwick goes on to note that while crime was increasing in American cities, it was decreasing in Europe. His novel explanation: “People in those [European] countries had their faith in their nations not only restored but strengthened by far-ranging sets of laws that gave all the people more power and control in the governmental system.” All of which raises an obvious question: Why then did millions of Europeans during the 19th century leave such enlightened rule and come to the American cities whose streets were filled with “rivers of blood” and that could only offer them “low-paying menial work”?
Chadwick seems to have missed that this was the age of Jacksonian democracy, an era of universal (white male) suffrage. Many average citizens felt empowered. A good deal of the disorder that Chadwick locates in the city was a product of the lower classes flexing their newfound powers, often by controlling urban street life and political machines. And much of the contemporaneous criticism of the city by middle-class reformers and the wealthy—the sources on which Chadwick relies almost exclusively—is a product of their fears of the unruly and newly empowered working class, in addition to their loathing of Irish Catholic immigrants.
Crime would eventually decline in New York in the late 1800s and remain fairly stable until the early 1960s. Yet Chadwick fails to explain why crime rates fell and the role of the new professional police force in aiding that decline.
It is a shame, because he ends the book by correctly noting that the “success of the NYPD, over the long run, after all of its troubles, paved the way for good policing in America.” That is a story that deserves to be told. Unfortunately, the reader won’t find it in Law & Disorder.
Vincent J. Cannato is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
