Assigned to patrol: neighborhoods, police, and changing deployment practices in New York city before 1930.

Public and scholarly discussions of twentieth-century policing seem to agree that police became disconnected from citizens and neighborhoods during the twentieth century, and that political, technological, and organizational changes have resulted in suspicion, alienation, and loss of important feedback to the police, with the changes taking hold between 1930 and 1960. However, empirical work on police-neighborhood relations as such is extremely limited, while many police policies affecting these relations remain unexplored. Both the timing of changes in police-neighborhood relations, and the causal explanations offered so far, are problematic.

Robert Fogelson, in his influential Big-City Police, describes a long, multi-stage process of reform, rooted in political conflict but which ironically cut police off from neighborhood political feedback, redirected them to a narrow focus on crime control, exacerbated a stark ethnic and racial separation between neighborhood and police, and created a police subculture separate from and hostile towards the most heavily policed communities. Reformism not only came to dominate public discussion but became the agenda of top policemen themselves in the 1920s and 1930s, though many of the results were not evident until mid century. Others have amplified this narrative, a number of them emphasizing the "crime control decades" of the 1920s as a turning point. (1)

Other historians have noted the impact of the automobile, radio, and telephone in isolating police. Between 1930 and 1960, observers occasionally worried that cops in cars were losing contact with citizens, and recent scholars sympathetic to community-oriented police reform have pointed specifically to the ways in which radio motor patrol (RMP) disrupted "beat integrity," diminishing the patrolman's contact with and responsibility for a given small area. Under the new regime, police ride around big cities with their windows rolled up, connected with radio dispatchers, computer terminals, or with their partners, far more than with ordinary citizens. Some of these scholars have linked Fogelson's account with the adoption of the radio and automobile, an approach that usefully puts technological change in the context of politics and administrative structures. (2)

These accounts of the distancing of police and neighborhoods seemed to help explain heightened public suspicion of the police, even urban rioting in the 1960s. Among alternative explanations, racial and ethnic conflicts have provided the most dramatic examples of police-citizen hostility, but accounts centered on race and ethnicity are consistent with the critique of reformism and modern patrol methods. (3) Also consistent are other explanations of the decline of police-neighborhood relations, such as civil liberties rulings and Taylorism (both limiting patrolmen's autonomy in dealing with local conditions), failure to adopt social-worker-style police reforms, and anti-corruption reforms. (4) And while not everyone endorses this view of the importance of political reformism, or emphasizes technologies such as radio motor patrol, no one has proposed a convincing alternative account. Yet there are serious problems with this outline's periodization and causal explanation.

The standard model of police reform (and its failings) overstates the importance of machines and reformers, and underestimates the possibilities of changes--in police-neighborhood relations, among other things--in the "machine" era. It assumes that Progressive era reformism set an agenda that led gradually to mid-twentieth-century distancing of police and neighborhoods, while machines fought tooth and nail against these changes. The timing of changes in police-neighborhood relations hinges on this battle. But recent research on urban politics suggests that the machine-reform distinction should not be drawn too sharply, for machines often adopted modernizing, centralizing, and efficiency-oriented practices. (5) City governments achieved an "unheralded triumph" in the era of supposed machine dominance. (6) Because policing was politically very sensitive, there is reason to believe that it was much less of a triumph than other areas of city government, but at the same time, it was not immune to pressures for reform. In addition, the mid-twentieth-century dating of effective reform--and the presumed beginning of deteriorating relations of police and neighborhoods--is rendered problematic by evidence of earlier police reforms. (7) In fact there has been no systematic study of official policies with respect to neighborhoods in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, that is, in the era before radio motor patrol, and any impact on citizen-police relations is consequently unknown. (8)

In addition, in dealing with technological changes, the standard model is conceptually weak and empirically limited. It fails to consider radio motor patrol as part of a comprehensive system for deploying officers across urban space, a system which included not only communications and transportation technologies but precinct--and post-assignment practices, as well as supervision and discipline insofar as they address or structure getting cops on the street. The implication is that police departments made no significant changes in these in the era before RMP. (9) However, despite considerable interest in police in neighborhoods, no one has systematically studied the ways in which police were deployed in neighborhoods during the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. In particular, no one has ever actually demonstrated that officers had unstable assignments or were otherwise disconnected from neighborhoods only after the introduction of RMP. (10)

This paper investigates police assignment practices in late 19th and early 20th century New York City, looking at precinct of residence, precinct assignments generally, and assignments to police posts. It considers these as police policies which tell us about official intentions with respect to the police-neighborhood relationship.

New York City's Police Department, arguably the first modern department, was in many respects the most advanced and dynamic police department in the United States. New York encountered disorder and crime, bureaucratic structures, scandal and reform, earlier and more dramatically than other large cities, but the underlying processes were at heart the same. New York generated more paper than most cities, and its police department Annual Reports and rules books, civil list and precinct blotters, cop autobiographies, and unique civil service press, make it possible to study assignment practices more thoroughly than in any other place.

The Patrolman's Own Neighborhood

When the New York Police Department (NYPD) was established in 1845 Mayor Isaac Varian expressed the hope that the city's peace officers would be "but a part of the citizens" rather than outsiders. To that end, each ward had its own police station, while policemen were nominated by the ward's assistant alderman and required to live in the precinct. Local control was a political necessity of the time, but with the department established, localism began a long decline. The residency requirement was never strictly enforced, but at first, two-thirds to three-fourths of the police lived in the ward in which they worked. After the requirement was abolished in 1857, the number of local residents dropped to less than half. Regardless of the rules, practical considerations dictated living near the workplace. Mass transit was limited and expensive, and police, like other workers, had to walk to work. (11)

Did it actually matter if officers lived in the same place they policed? A precinct was never a homogeneous neighborhood, but a mixture of land uses, social classes and ethnic groups. Would an officer living on Ninth Avenue have much in common with wealthy Fifth Avenue residents on account of living in the same precinct? In any case, NYPD rules and procedures were the same for all officers. Yet residence surely made a real difference. Social differences often had a spatial dimension by the late nineteenth century. At the heart of the Jacksonian insistence that a policeman be part of the neighborhood he policed was the sense that a resident officer might feel personally implicated in the neighborhood's fate, perhaps answerable to its inhabitants when off duty. A number of police repeated these arguments when an investigating committee questioned them in 1912. A patrolman should do duty in his home precinct, one said, "because he is more familiar with conditions". Another argued that he would be "more anxious to keep his home neighborhood good." Police opinion was divided; some feared petty corruption. But though an officer's residence may have been less important than Jacksonians thought, it was still important. (12)

But as New York became a city of socially distinct neighborhoods, police lived increasingly outside of the precincts in which they worked. Table 1 shows this happening in six varied precincts selected for study. In 1887, 41% of the police in these precincts lived in the precinct of residence. By 1928, only a tiny fraction still did so. By this measure, the police had become outsiders by the 1920s.

There were big differences between precincts, however. The First Precinct, located at Old Slip and Front Street in the heart of the financial district, was policed mainly by outsiders as early as the 1880s. So was the notorious Tenderloin precinct, though many Tenderloin officers lived a short distance to the west. By the eighties, the financial district had largely ceased to be a desirable or even possible residential location, at least for stable employed people like policemen. But transportation to the financial district was unparallelled. Up in the Bronx, by contrast, almost three fourths of the officers assigned to the precinct at 160th and Third Avenue lived in the precinct, and many more lived very close at hand. This area was then a quiet, semi-suburban area, appealing to civil servants and to skilled working-class families with enough income to consider home-ownership. The story was similar, but less dramatic, in Washington Heights. But even in the Lower East Side precinct located at First Avenue and 5th Street, a majority of officers lived in the precinct. (13)

By 1908, it was less common for cops to live in their precincts. Business expansion drove housing out of areas like the financial district, while population pressures drove up housing prices in dense lower Manhattan neighborhoods. Like many others, police officers felt the lure of a yard and comparative quiet, especially by contrast with areas such as the Bowery and Tenderloin. Perhaps Irish officers felt less at home in the increasingly Jewish and Italian areas. Between better transportation (including a new subway) and shorter work hours, officers could commute from outlying areas. (14) The creation of Greater New York now allowed "New York" police to commute to Brooklyn, Long Island City, even Staten Island. Resident officers virtually disappeared not only from Wall Street and the Tenderloin but from the Lower East Side, and became a minority even in the Bronx. (15)

Official policies encouraged the trend to non-resident policing. Not one of the Tenderloin's officers lived in the precinct, because North America's most infamous precinct had just undergone a house-cleaning aimed at rooting out corruption. Using a time-honored method, massive transfers forced out the old guard, but evidently a ban on living in the precinct had been insituted there as well. (16) Prohibition of working in one's home precinct was not entirely new. The "Roosevelt police board" had inaugurated the first sustained policy against conflicts of interest, assigning new officers to non-home precincts in the midnineties. (17)

That policy fell by the wayside with a change of administration, but was revived a decade later. The policy aimed to control corruption, improve discipline and avoid conflicts of interest in routine patrol work. Commissioner Theodore Bingham was concerned that a patrolman might "wish to be stationed near his home, where he can loaf among his friends." Bingham's successor, Police Commissioner William Baker wrote that:

  It is the policy ... not to transfer men, or assign them to their home
  precincts, on the theory that they will not do as good police work as
  they will in a precinct where they are not well known; and also to
  remove the temptation to go into their homes when they should be out
  on the street patrolling their posts.

Baker also worried that policemen could more easily secure favorable testimony from neighbors in disciplinary cases. (18) Among police surveyed in 1912, those favoring a ban on working in one's home precinct cited mundane conflicts of interests. "The boys around would impose on him," one argued. "If he had to arrest any of them their mothers would be down on him and that would make it very hard." Another observed that an officer "can't make friends behave when [they are] cutting up." He would have "More authority in [a] strange district." (19)

At first, these policies were geographically limited. In 1914, most police in "outlying areas" still lived in the precincts to which they were assigned. (20) Out in Goatville there were few significant graft opportunities, fewer reasons to arrest one's friends, and only limited transportation to and from work. Baker in fact tried to assign officers to the borough in which they lived, to minimize transportation problems. The NYPD strengthened these policies, and by 1928, the ban on policing in one's home precinct was evident. By then, residence in the work precinct had almost disappeared. Outside of one Bronx precinct, only a handful of officers still lived in their precincts. (21)

Though conflict-of-interest policies affected police residence patterns, they created little hardship. They fit well with other trends affecting the home-work relationship. Police work hours were gradually shortened as reserve duty was curtailed, and cops were comparatively well-paid. They could easily take advantage of new commuting possibilities, and did so more than most New Yorkers. (22) Neighborhoods with the most acute problems were increasingly policed by outsiders.

The Patrolman's Precinct

Regardless of whether he lived among them or not, an officer's relation to the neighborhood's people depended partly on how long he had patrolled among them--how long he had been in the precinct or on the post. But police worked for a distinctly impersonal, citywide bureaucracy, which treated patrolmen as interchangeable parts in a vast machine. If a new precinct opened in eastern Queens, somebody had to serve there. If one officer was punished by reassignment to Goatville, another had to replace him. A shakeup affecting all the cops in one precinct would reverberate throughout the department. A patrolman who got promoted was normally sent to a new precinct, and someone would have to take his place, while deaths and retirements, redrawing of precinct boundaries, and shifting priorities forced a continuous movement of officers from precinct to precinct. These movements can be seen in a steady stream of "special orders" of the Commissioners, appointing, promoting, and retiring officers and above all assigning them to new precincts. (23)

Newly minted cops were scattered randomly to the precincts, judging by these orders. Fresh out of the police school, William O'Dwyer and three other recruits were assigned to a Brooklyn precinct. "Not one of [us] had ever been in that part of Brooklyn before," he reported; a bartender gave directions to the station house. (24) A new officer quickly established a track record and relationships with superiors, which might lead to transfer. Precinct commanders might want to get rid of incompetent officers, for instance; they (and perhaps higher-ups) might want to punish derelict officers by assigning them to undesirable precincts. (25) A smart or energetic cop might attract favorable official attention and find himself transferred to a plain clothes squad, or a detective group. (26) In the nineteenth century, transfers involving corruption or even extortion were not unknown. (27) But in all likelihood, bureaucratic necessity drove most police transfers.

These assignments suited the bureaucracy, not the officer. Patrolmen typically wanted to work as near as possible to their homes. Most preferred to avoid semirural areas, with much walking, few amenities, and nothing to do. Strategies for advancement sometimes required particular assignments, perhaps with graft opportunities, or, as in Lewis Valentine's case, a chance to study for promotion. Some were eager for excitement, or the promise of making arrests and getting promoted. (28)

Political and personal influences could be brought to bear on the police bureaucracy to obtain desired assignments. This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when major political factions were represented on the Board of Police Commissioners, and police managers were frequently obliged to pay attention to the wishes of District Leaders and other influential people. (29) To benefit, patrolmen had to befriend a political figure, who might expect favors in return, though some no doubt merely sought good will. Nonetheless, personal requests concerning assignments could carry weight. (30) Civil service and administrative centralization reduced the power of politicians, but transfers continued to be influenced by "buffs" and "rabbis"--outsiders with an interest in the department who might put in a good word on behalf of someone seeking a transfer. There is evidence, though, that the police themselves overestimated the roles of both money and influence in determining transfers and assignments. (31)

Twentieth-century reformers attempted to further "rationalize" and depersonalize transfers and assignments, hoping to minimize the role of influential people and of arbitrary or corrupt captains. In 1903, Commissioner Francis V. Greene required applications for transfer to state reasons in writing. A few years later, the NYPD instituted the "mutual transfer," in which two patrolmen simply switched precincts. None of this guaranteed that desired transfers were made; but it concentrated power over transfers in the Commissioner's hands and put matters on a written, rational-bureaucratic basis. A number of Commissioners explicitly allowed or encouraged officers to work in a precinct "near" their homes. (32)

Regardless of the procedures, however, the changing roles of Commissioners, commanding officers, politicians, rabbis, and rational bureaucracy, need to be assessed against the background of a vast organization that always needed labor to get the work done. Even at the height of Tammany Hall's influence over the NYPD, there were limits to the role of influence. Tammany Hall could not eliminate the constant flow of demands for police labor. Obscure precincts continued to need a full complement of patrolmen. Influence operated--when it operated at all--within the limits of these larger priorities and demands, and its function was to mitigate a few of the personally inconvenient consequences of a large bureaucracy's operation. When rational-bureaucratic forms and norms were extended to eliminate some of the influence of "influence," it only ratified the logic of bureaucracy.

The upshot was that officers had to move about fairly often. As usual, Cornelius Willemse is a good example. Appointed in February, 1900, he did probationary work on the Upper West Side, then was sent to the 17th Precinct on West 20th Street. In the fall of 1902 he moved to an adjacent precinct on West 30th, serving five years. When a new captain took a dislike to him, he was moved to the 16th Precinct in Greenwich Village. After a year he was accused of misconduct and reassigned to the 8th Precinct, whose captain didn't want him and quickly pawned him off on the 17th Precinct on the Lower East Side's Madison Street. When the Police Commissioner changed his mind about Willemse, Willemse asked to go to the 61st Precinct in the Bronx, near his home. There, when perhaps he should have been patrolling, he studied for the sergeant's exam; and in 1909 was appointed sergeant and transferred to the remote 69th Precinct in the East Bronx. Not counting a day in the 8th or his probationary work, Willemse's nine-year career as patrolman took him through five different precincts. Patrolman William C. Johnson, appointed a few years after Willemse, had a similar career. After probation in the Bowery's 11th Precinct, he served as an ordinary patrolman in seven precincts in a little under fourteen years, worked in plain clothes under Commissioner McAdoo and Inspector Hayes, and did clerical work in yet other commands. (33)

Johnson and Willemse were typical, as we'll see. We can measure this systematically by checking official records to see how many officers had been assigned to their precinct as long as four years. (34) A four-year veteran would know his precinct rather well. In the late 1880s, about one cop in three had been in his precinct four years or more (Table 2). The two "suburban" precincts studied had fewer four-year veterans, because they were too new. Only in the financial district had a majority of officers been assigned four years. (35) The overall pattern is one of moderate stability.

The 1880s looks little different from the 1920s, as Table 5 suggests. Over four decades, a little more than one third of the officers had been members of their precincts as long as four years. Better information for later years shows that Cornelius Willemse and William C. Johnson, switching precincts roughly every two years, were typical. A majority of the police had been assigned to their precincts for two years in both 1908 and 1928 (Tables 3 and 4).

Though each precinct was unique, all of them included both highly stable officers and fly-by-nights. (36) Between one tenth and one sixth of the officers in most of these precincts had worked there less than half a year. But a core of officers had been assigned to their precincts for at least seven years. In every study precinct except the Tenderloin, at least one of ten officers was an old-timer, and in many cases one out of five had been there a long time. Thus the cop on the beat may have been a newcomer to the neighborhood, or he might also have been someone with long experience there.

What these figures tell us is largely negative: a policeman did not have a permanent claim on a job in a precinct. The cop on the beat was not typically a fixture of his precinct who had been present since time out of mind. Though an officer's position as patrolman in the NYPD was remarkably stable, his connection with a particular work place was not, whether under machine or reform regimes. And, just as the people who lived in the precinct varied in the stability of residence, so police varied in the stability of their assignments to the precinct. Both citizens and police were typically only moderately stable, and the links between them were constructed over the short and medium term. Before we consider the construction of those links, we must zero in on the patrolman's post, for it was here, not in the precinct as a whole, that officers could hope to become familiar with a neighborhood.

The Patrolman's Post

New York patrolmen spoke casually about "their posts" early in the twentieth century, but we must go back to the 1860s to find any official recognition of this idea. Inside the covers of two extant precinct blotters from the Civil War era are handwritten lists of officers and their posts. The precinct officers were divided into "platoons" and "sections." Next to each man's name is the number of "his post"--or, to be precise, his day post, and his night post, for at night more men were assigned to the precinct's smaller, more numerous, night posts. When the roll was called and officers were dispatched to their posts, the desk officer simply recorded which platoon or section was on duty. Blotter entries never listed individual names or post assignments unless someone was absent; then the desk sergeant filled in the name of the officer covering the post for the regular. Illness, court attendance, and so on, often interrupted this routine. But stability of assignment was the norm, and only the exceptions had to be spelled out in the blotter. When officers were transferred into the precinct, the desk officer pasted a new list over the old one, assigning the newcomers regular posts. (37)

Within a decade the official assumption of regularity was gone. Blotters surviving from the 1870s listed every officer assigned at every roll call; the list of regular assignments disappeared. In practice, fairly regular assignments remained common, but they were not universal. For instance, over a twenty-day period in the Bronx's 34th precinct, Patrolman David Sealey was assigned to day posts 1,2, and 3 (there were six day posts) and night posts 1,2,3,4, and 10 (there were ten night posts). But Sealey spent 82% of his nights on post 2, and 86% of his days on post 3, so that we can still speak of his having a regular post. Most officers had even more regular assignments. Half spent at least 90% of their time on a single day post, and night work was even more stable. (38)

Cops' patrol assignments grew far more irregular over the next four decades, as a group of surviving Manhattan blotters covering 1916-35 show. By then, blotters recorded post assignments and re-assignments as often as every ten minutes. Stronger management, using call boxes, moved officers frequently, assigning them to temporary duty, testifying in court, policing a strike or a baseball game, handling a crowd at a funeral or parade, sometimes in other precincts. When a cop left his post for any of these reasons, or because he had made an arrest, other filled in for him. The cumulative effect was to cut into the stability of assignments without obliterating entirely the connections between officers and "their" posts. (39)

The daily routine of Patrolman Otto Hinz, of northern Manhattan's 42nd Precinct, shows how this worked (Table 6). Hinz, a ten-year veteran officer who had spent the better part of his career in the 42nd Precinct, was assigned to no less than sixteen posts during a twenty day stretch in late spring, 1920. (40) Hinz's main work was on posts 5 and 6, Amsterdam Avenue between 178th Street and Ft. George Avenue, about 194th Street. He was assigned to Post 5 for 68.5 hours, but typically covered other posts simultaneously. Hinz worked Posts 5 and 6 together for 40 hours. He patrolled them, sometimes in combination with nearby Posts 2 and 4, as follows:

Posts         Hours

5 & 6         40.0
5             12.5
5 & 1/2 of 4   8.0
2, 5 & 6       4.5
4 & 5          3.5
2 & 6          3.5

These assignments accounted for 72 hours, exactly half of Hinz's 144 hours of work in these few weeks. The turf he covered in the four posts was twenty-odd blocks of Amsterdam Avenue, and an adjacent and larger section of park and parkway. Presumably Hinz knew this area pretty well, especially its core, Post 5.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

But Hinz patrolled less familiar territory during the other 72 hours. He devoted one day to neighboring Audubon Avenue, for instance, though whether he actually walked the full 29 blocks lying within the precinct is doubtful. He spent two days in a police booth at 225th and Broadway, waiting for calls for service; and more time in an assortment of other posts and assignments. If Hinz was the cop on Post 5, he was at it only half time. The rest of his efforts and attentions were spread across the precinct.

Hinz was quite typical in the way his efforts were scattered, as Table 7 shows. In his precinct, the 101 cops on patrol averaged more than 9 posts during the same twenty days. Only nine officers were assigned to one or two posts during this time. On Memorial Day, much of the patrol force was busy at the parade or at a ball game at the Polo Grounds, or was enjoying a day off granted to veterans. For several hours, a single patrolman was assigned to 35 posts at once.

Because they were spread thin, half of the precinct's officers on patrol spent 65 hours or less on their most important post--only 58% of their time on patrol (and less than half of the maximum possible 144 working hours in these 20 days). By contrast, four decades earlier, the median officer in the Bronx's 34th Precinct had devoted over 90% of his patrol to his main post. (41)

Hinz patrolled his main post only part time. The 42nd Precinct was divided into 35 patrol posts, usually a few blocks long, longer for parks, parkways and undeveloped land. About 2,200 people lived on the average post in the 42nd Precinct, which was typical for Manhattan. (42) Patrolman Hinz wasn't necessarily "the cop on the beat" for these 2200 people even during the 47% of his time, or 68 hours, when he was assigned to Post 5, since he usually had other posts to cover as well. Hinz patrolled, on average, 1.82 posts during the hours when he was responsible for Post 5. He was responsible for Post 5 alone, a mere 12 1/2 hours. The rest of the time, his attention was split. (43)

Like Patrolman Hinz, most cops in the 42nd precinct worked more than one post at a time, averaging 1.9 posts at a time (Table 7). Only nine officers were responsible for a single post at a time throughout the period; and some of these were assigned to police booths. Booth cops did not walk a beat, but waited to be summoned for emergencies; they alone could count on not being spread thin. The experiences of other officers varied, but most were like Hinz. Indeed, the NYPD, measured by its own yardstick or by that of comparable European cities (which had significantly more officers per thousand residents), had always been chronically understaffed, and so throughout the city posts often had to be doubled up. (44)

NYPD work schedules created one more obstacle to regular relationships with people on post. Patrolman Hinz, we saw, worked the day shift for six days, took a day off, switched to the night shift (for six days), then did six evenings (Table 6). This 20-day cycle, standard for patrol officers, precluded even the regularity of a weekly rotation. The NYPD was out of sync with the rest of New York, and a patrolman's contact with people on the post was correspondingly irregular. In twenty days, Hinz, the cop on the beat, spent all of one evening tour and half of three others on Post 5, for instance. People routinely out and about at 181st and Amsterdam after dinner might have little or no idea what Otto Hinz looked like or who he was. Insofar as regular presence was important, the NYPD's shifting schedule was a destabilizing element in the police-citizen relationship. (45)

It may be useful to consider all this from the point of view of people such as those who lived, worked, and traveled on the stretch of Amsterdam Avenue patrolled by Otto Hinz. The cop they saw most was not Otto Hinz, but John W. Whalen, as Table 8 shows. (46) Twenty-four different officers patrolled Post 5. We might reasonably single out Whalen, Hinz, and Martin Connolly, as "the cops" on the beat. They covered Post 5 for a little over 217 hours out of 480. But Patrolmen Whalen and Connolly, like Hinz, had other posts and assignments, and they worked the same sorts of tours as Hinz. (47)

Police managers deployed patrolmen and scheduled their work in ways that conspired against any notion of "the cop on the beat." Instead, there were many officers, a few of whom concentrated on any given post but none of whom spent anything like a majority of his working hours on that one post. This was an old story. In the 1890s and 1900s, investigators found that illicit businesses seeking protection from arrest had to bribe not the cop on the beat but five or even eight of them. In 1920, an ordinary citizen who had reason to get to know the cops on Post 5 would have made a good start by getting to know Connolly, Whalen and Hinz; but it was only a start. (48)

Where were these cops when not on regular posts (but on duty)? When officers made arrests, of course, they left their posts to bring in the arrestee; court dates often followed. Hinz, like most cops in the quiet 42nd Precinct, made no arrests in this period. In busier precincts arrests probably disrupted schedules somewhat more. Local demands for services--that noise, or peddlers be controlled, or a big funeral get assistance--might compel the precinct captain to make special arrangements, possibly pulling someone from a patrol post. (49) More routinely, illness and vacation disrupted the precinct's routine as well (Table 9). And in the 42nd Precinct, administrative work took all or most of the time of four officers, who served as Acting Sergeant, attendant, and clerical officer.

Police headquarters also drew continually on the precinct's patrol force to fill specialized assignments outside of the precinct. Otto Hinz spent a day at a strike in the 4th Precinct downtown and five hours at a baseball game at the nearby Polo Grounds. In 20 days 61 cops from the 42nd spent some time at the Polo Grounds--typically about six hours. (50) A majority of the 42nd's officers spent some time policing strikes; others combated vice, studied police methods, or even sang in the department glee club. Assigning police to work outside their precinct served both to insulate them from improper local influences, and to spread the work throughout the department.

As a result, 28 patrolmen (out of 129 assigned to the precinct) did no patrol work whatever in the twenty days studied. Even the 101 who did at least some patrol work, however, performed an average of 45 hours of non-patrol work. The 42nd Precinct was hardly unique in its contribution to non-patrol work; the NYPD reported in 1920 that two-fifths of the force was not available for patrol duty. (51) Of course, a dull precinct in "Goatville" was more vulnerable than a busy one to external draws on its labor power. The 42nd sent five officers to strike duty in the 4th Precinct when several Harlem precincts, for example, sent only two officers. On the other hand, dull precincts comprised much of the city, and it is apparent that any precinct might be called on to furnish men for strikes, inspection districts, and special assignments. (52)

Yet this continual stream of police officers fails to account for the instability of post assignments. Patrolman Hinz spent only 13 hours at jobs outside the precinct, which might pull him from Post 5. It is true that his colleagues on patrol during this time did more non-patrol work more than Hinz (average 45 hours). But when Hinz was away from his most important post, Post 5, it was because he had been sent to other patrol posts in the precinct. There is no obvious reason why he couldn't have been back at Post 5--or why the officers replacing him on Post 5 could not have been assigned to regular posts of their own.

Post assignments sometimes involved a personal dimension difficult to recapture. Precinct commanders enjoyed the prerogatives of assignment, and sometimes used this power to discipline or supervise particular officers. Some assignments reflected supervisors' judgments about patrolmen's abilities. But it is hard to see why this should have led to instability in post assignments. Precinct commanders delegated roll call assignments, and there is evidence that desk sergeants responded sympathetically to patrolmen's requests for particular posts. But patrolmen generally preferred stable posts themselves. None of this should have led to instability. (53)

Official policy called for assignment "to regular posts, wherever practicable," but this provided stability not for individual officers but for squads, groups of a dozen or fifteen officers who rotated shifts together. Three squads patrolled the 42nd precinct during every tour of duty, and the precinct's 39 posts were parceled out to particular squads with some regularity. One or another member of Hinz's Squad 1 patrolled post 5 during 94% of the hours when they were on duty. Two other squads (Connolly's and Whalen's) patrolled the post to an equal extent. (54)

The NYPD, in other words, did recognize continuity of the patrol force within a neighborhood as a policy, and it adhered to this policy reasonably well; but the continuity was of groups of officers (easily three dozen) rather than individuals; and it embraced a substantial territory (perhaps 25,000 population). Judged from the viewpoint of posts and their residents, or individual officers, the department's commitment to a strong neighborhood-police relationship was modest by 1920.

Some of this instability of post assignments was rooted in the very project of a unified, centralized, city-wide police department. Unifying day and night police in 1845 opened the door to shift rotation. Unifying diverse law enforcers under one superintendent opened the door to demands for shifting of resources, while patrol--generalized protective services with no easily measurable results at the margin--was inherently vulnerable to other claims. Not surprisingly, there is evidence in the 1870s, for instance, of "details" drawing cops from patrol. (55) Still, the earlier "details" were semi-permanent draws on the overall police labor force, reducing the amount of patrol but not the continuity of post assignments by the cop on post. What makes 1920 different from a half century earlier was that so many officers were pulled from their posts, sometimes (even if not usually) to go out of the precinct. The project of centralization had expanded, and ordinary continuity of patrol post assignment was affected. (56)

While draws on the precinct and post labor force were not inherently destructive of patrolmen's relations with citizens on their posts, they are evidence of a managerial mentality that placed far less emphasis on the post-patrolman relationship, indeed, on patrolling altogether. (57) By 1920 (probably earlier) police officials regarded patrolmen as interchangeable parts in a complex machine, much of which had nothing to do with patrolling the neighborhoods. Managers at police headquarters were reaching out for more minute control of the police labor force, not only carrying out the earlier project of a unified, centralized police department, but the contemporary project of municipal reform and corporate managerial reform. But in addition to the more ambitious management vision, the neighborhood itself had become an object of distrust by reformers who were influential in shaping NYPD policy. (58)

All this implied variability in the experience both of the police themselves--they were eager for regularity on the job--and of the citizens. The public experienced not "the" cop on the beat, but "the cops," and the familiarity of any of these officers with the neighborhood might vary wildly from one to the next. But we must ask what it meant for an officer responsible for, on average, 1.9 posts at any given time, to be familiar with the 3759 people living on those posts (New York City's population per post of 1978 X 1.9), or many others working, visiting, or passing through. To complicate matters, many of these residents would move away from the post. May 1 was moving day in nineteenth-century New York, a day when nomadic New Yorkers, like city-dwellers everywhere else in the United States, played musical homes. Over time, this tradition waned, as did the propensity to leave the city altogether in search of opportunity. Meanwhile the NYPD was becoming less localistic. But even the most stable officer would have had trouble knowing all of the people on his post. (59)

The image of the police officer in touch with the neighborhood he patrolled needs substantial revision. Despite the nostalgia of some New Yorkers, it was not mathematically plausible. The sheer fact that thousands lived, and more worked or passed through a typical post suggests that even in the era of very regular post assignments, it was impossible for the cop on patrol to get to know everyone on sight (as required by police regulations). Assessing the impact of deployment changes on the relations of citizens and police officers is difficult, however. A long-term decline in police-neighborhood relations may well have occurred, but direct evidence is scanty, while other factors also weakened these relations. The tasks of the police, and their use of coercive force, have always been contentious, and many citizens regarded them as anything but friends. As late as the 1870s, New York City police were obliged to patrol some posts in pairs, and well into the twentieth century officers kept an eye peeled for bricks flying from tenement rooftops. Some police families worried about being ostracized by their own neighbors. Street-level communications networks may have mitigated some of the most troubling features of this far-from-golden age, but such networks were if anything weakened by official policies. (60)

The New York Police Department inaugurated neighborhood-unfriendly deployment policies long before radio motor patrol. Though the Jacksonian city was still committed to localism in policing, this commitment quickly evaporated, and when call boxes, street cars, and other techniques allowed, police managers began shuffling police officers around freely, to suit administrative convenience, or to prevent corruption, as in the cases of strike duty and the rule against living in one's own precinct. The latter was a quick response to Progressive demands for change, and the other changes were in place by the 1920s. The Progressive period itself was a time of important alterations, even though not all were inspired by self-conscious reformers. (61)

The sources of change were complex, but they were not new, which explains why the timing of change was fuzzier than a progressive-reformer-oriented approach suggests. Affluent city-dwellers had long regarded working-class neighborhoods as dangerous and corrupting places, and turn-of-the-century police officials shared at least some of that view. Working-class neighborhoods harbored seemingly corrupting institutions such as saloons and gambling houses; and reformers denied that either saloons or street corners could be useful sources of police information. (62) Progressive reformers with such views pushed for new precinct assignment practices, but they were not alone. Though it cannot be demonstrated conclusively, it is likely that senior police officials who worked their way up through the ranks originated new and destabilizing practices in assignments to posts. Bureaucratic stability had been reached before the Progressive period (especially in New York City), and police managers displayed viewpoints sometimes at odds with those of both their political superiors and the rank and file. New post assignment practices most suited bureaucratic and managerial needs. (63) Ordinary police officers also made a difference (albeit an indirect one) by pressuring for a better schedule. And patrol officers themselves participated in the process of separating their own homes from workplaces, moving elsewhere and commuting to work as affordable and convenient transit became available, becoming agents in the development of class- and ethnic-segregated neighborhoods. In so doing, street cops, police managers, and reformers contributed to the creation of neighborhoods policed by outsiders.

Table 1 Police Officers Residing and Working in Same Precinct Selected
New York City Precincts (Number of officers, number resident, percentage
of precinct's work force)

                              1887               1908
                        Total   Resident   Total    Resident

Old Slip
 (Wall Street)          105      14 (13)    93        1 (1)
First Ave. at 5th
 (Lower East Side)       82      45 (55)    98        8 (8)
W. 30th/W 20th
 (Tenderloin)           123      20 (16)    71        0 (0)
152nd/Amsterdam Av.
 (Washington Hghts.)    114      69 (61)   129       77 (60)
160th/Third Ave.
 (Bronx)                 69      51 (74)   133       64 (48)
Rapelye St.
 (Red Hook, Brooklyn)           NA          70       29 (41)
All Study Precincts     493     203 (41)   594      179 (30)

                               1928
                         Total   Resident
                         Force   No. (%)

Old Slip
 (Wall Street)            117     0 (0)
First Ave. at 5th
 (Lower East Side)        150     1 (1)
W. 30th/W 20th
 (Tenderloin)             297     0 (0)
152nd/Amsterdam Av.
 (Washington Hghts.)      148     1 (1)
160th/Third Ave.
 (Bronx)                  211    30 (14)
Rapelye St.
 (Red Hook, Brooklyn)     124     3 (2)
All Study Precincts      1047    35 (3)

Source: New York City Civil List, originally published as a Supplement
to the City Record and available at the Municipal Archives, for "1887,"
"July--December, 1907" and "July--December, 1928." July-December lists
appear to have been current to the end of December or beginning of the
next January. Table includes all ranks, not just patrolmen.

Table 2 Length of Service in Precinct, 1887 Selected New York City
Precincts

                     No.,  Assigned to Same
                     1887  Precinct, 1883
                           No.  %

Old Slip             105   59   56
5th/1 st Av           82   37   45
W. 30th              123   49   40
152/Am'dam           114   36   32
160th/3d Av           69   18   26
All Study Precincts  493   176  36

Source: Published Civil List, 1887, 1883, available in the New York City
Municipal Archives and Records Center. "Officer" includes all persons
listed on the civil list, from doormen through captain.

Table 3 Length of Service in Precinct, 1908 Selected New York City
Precincts

                            Assigned to Same Precinct at Earlier Time
                No., 1908       6 mos.    2 yrs.    4 yrs.    7 yrs.
                                No. %     No. %     No. %     No. %

Old Slip              93         80 (86)   50 (54)   30 (32)   17 (18)
1 Av/5th              98         85 (87)   39 (40)   11 (11)   10 (10)
W. 20th               71         43 (61)   10 (14)    6 (8)     3 (4)
152/Am'dam           129        117 (91)   80 (62)   62 (48)   48 (37)
160/3 Av             133        124 (93)   89 (67)   62 (47)   38 (29)
Red Hook              70         58 (83)   38 (54)   24 (34)   23 (33)
Astoria               75         64 (85)   50 (67)   40 (53)   19 (25)
All Study Precincts  669        571 (85)  356 (53)  235 (35)  158 (24)

Source: Civil Lists, compiled and published as Supplements to The City
Record in January 1908, 1906, 1904, and 1901, and July, 1907; available
in the New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center. "Officers"
includes all persons listed on the civil list, from doormen through
captain.

Table 4 Length of Service in Precinct, 1928 Selected New York City
Precincts

                               Assigned to Same Precinct at Earlier Time
                   No., 1928    6 mos.     2 yrs.    4 yrs.    7 yrs.
                                No. %      No. %     No. %     No. %

Old Slip              118        110 (93)    73 (62)   37 (31)   23 (20)
1 Av/5th              150        135 (90)    88 (59)   63 (42)   24 (16)
W. 30th               298        276 (93)   188 (63)  100 (34)   11 (4)
152/Am'dam            148        140 (95)    72 (49)   41 (28)   15 (10)
160/3 Av              211        198 (94)   106 (50)   46 (31)   45 (21)
Red Hook              124        114 (92)    76 (61)   49 (40)   24 (19)
Astoria               134        125 (93)    72 (54)   41 (31)   25 (19)
All Study Precincts  1183       1098 (93)   675 (57)  377 (32)  167 (14)

Source: Civil Lists, published as a Supplement to The City Record in
January of 1928, 1926, 1924 and 1921, and July, 1927; available in New
York City Municipal Archives and Records Center. "Officers" includes all
persons listed on the civil list, from doormen through captain.

Table 5 Police Officers' Length of Service in their Precinct Selected
New York City Precincts

Percentage of Officers Present in Precinct 4 Years Earlier

                                                  1887  1908  1928

Old Slip (Financial District)                       56    32    31
5th street/1 st Avenue (Lower East Side)            45    11    42
West 30th/West 20th (Tenderloin)                    40     8    34
152nd/Amsterdam (Washington Hghts.)                 32    48    28
160th/Third Avenue (Bronx)                          26    47    31
Rapelye Street (Red Hook, Brooklyn)                 --    34    40
Astoria (Queens)                                    --    53    31
All Study Precincts                                 36    35    34

Source: See Tables 2., 3, 4. "Officers" includes all persons listed in
the civil list, from doormen through captain.

Table 6 Patrolman Otto Hinz's Work Schedule, May 19-June 7, 1920

Numbers are posts to which Hinz was assigned. All assignments were for 8
hours unless otherwise noted (in parentheses).

        Night Shift           Day Shift            Evening Shift
        12:01-8:00 am         8:00 am-4:00 pm      4 pm-Midnight

May 19                        {4 & 5 (3.5 hrs)
                              {5 (4.5 hrs)
May 20                        29 & 30
May 21                        {2, 5 & 6 (4.5 hrs)
                              {2 & 6 (3.5 hrs)
May 22                        25
May 23                        38
May 24                        16 & 17
May 25                        OFF DUTY
May 26  5 & 1/2 of 4
May 27  29-30
May 28  5 & 6
May 29  5 & 6
May 30  38
May 31  Strike, 4th Precinct
June 1                                             5
June 2                                             5 & 6
June 3                                             {24 & 28 (3hrs)
                                                   {Ball Pk.(5hrs)
June 4                                             5 & 6
June 5                                             5 & 6
June 6                                             {7, 8, 9 & 10
                                                   {  (7 hrs)
                                                   {8 & 9 (1 hr)
June 7                         OFF DUTY

Source: 42nd Precinct Blotter, opened May 19, 1920, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice Library.

Table 7 Work Schedules of Officers on Patrol All 101 Officers Who Did
Some Regular Patrol Work 42 Precinct, May 19-June 7, 1920

                                             mean        median

Hours patrol work                            98.8 hours  111.8 hours
Hours in top post                            67.2         65.1
 % of patrol hours                           67.5%        69.8%
 % of 144 work hours                         46.7%        45.2%
Total number of posts, during 20 days.        9.6          9.0
Average number of posts at any given time *   1.9          1.9

* "Average number of posts at any given time" is reckoned by adding up
the hours of responsibility for each post and dividing by the number of
hours on patrol duty. An officer assigned to ten posts at once for, say,
an hour, is counted as responsible for ten hours by this reckoning. All
figures are computed for each of 101 officers.
Officers assigned to half of a post are treated as working a whole post
for computational simplicity; this may inflate slightly the figures for
number of hours on top post. Those working more than ten posts were
treated as working ten only. In a few cases, where two officers
routinely switched multiple-post assignments every two hours, I have
arbitrarily assumed that each worked equal amounts of the two
assignments, an assumption that probably works out over twenty days.
Source: NYPD, 42nd precinct blotter, at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice Library, entries for May 19 through June 7, 1920.

Table 8 Officers Patrolling Post 5, 42nd Precinct May 19-June 7, 1920

Officer's Name  Hours   Squad

Whalen          89.2     4
Hinz            68.5     1
Connolly        59.5     7
Wendell         36.5     7
Feighery        32       1
Ahearn, T.      24      10
Gross           24       7
Taggart         24       4
Mahon           21.5     1
Brown           11.5     1
McMahon         11.5    10
Pardua          11       4
Pfeiffer         8      10
Rudden           8       7
Sweeney          8       7
Fay              8       5
Lewis            8       8
McCarthy         8      10
Fitzmaurice      4.5     4
Heiden           4.5     4
Kearns           3.5     9
White            2.8     2
Brennan          2.5     1
Donnellan        1       8

Source: 42 Precinct blotter, opened May 23, 1920, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice Library.

Table 9 Patrolmen's Time Devoted to Non-Patrol Activities All 129
Patrolmen, 42nd Precinct, 20-day Cycle

Activity                     Number of Hours

Precinct Administration            617
Court and related                  231
Miscellaneous duties               299
Vacation                          1464
Sick                               536
Strikes                           2296
Inspection Districts              1320
Education, recreation             1086
Ball Games                         420
Missing                            326
Hours Non-patrol Activities       8596
Hours on Patrol                   9980
Total Hours                      18576

Source: 42nd Precinct Blotter, opened May 19, 1920, John Jay College
of Criminal Justice Library.

ENDNOTES

The author wishes to thank Kathleen Neils Conzen, James R. Grossman, and Norval Morris for their advice, criticism and encouragement, as well as two anonymous readers, whose comments were very helpful.

1. Robert Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, MA, 1977); see also Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, Mass., 1977); Nathan Douthit, "Police Professionalism and the War against Crime in the United States, 1920s-30s," in Police Forces in History, ed. George L. Mosse (Beverly Hills, 1975), 317-333; and Janis Appier, Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD (Philadelphia, 1998). For an important analysis of pre-reform police, see Mark H. Haller, "Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890-1925," Law and Society Review (Winter, 1975), 303-323. William A. Westley, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality (Cambridge, 1970), based on a 1950 dissertation, provided dramatic evidence for an alienated police subculture, elaborated on in many subsequent studies. Observers in the 1960s grew alarmed at police distance from citizens; see President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: Police (Washington, D.C., 1967); James F. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington, New York, 1974), chapter 11; Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams (New York, 1994); William A. Bopp and Donald O. Schultz, A Short History of American Law Enforcement (Springfield, Illinois, 1972), chapter 11, for a police view which subscribes to the declension thesis. Crime control is a major focus of Walker, Fogelson, Appier, and Douthit, and it can be linked to alienation, with obvious implications for police-citizen relations in general.

2. Walker, Critical History, 109, 136-7, 142-145, discusses the impact of telephones, radios, and cars, while Alexander von Hoffman, "An Officer of the Neighborhood: A Boston Patrolman on the Beat in 1895," Journal of Social History 26:2 (Winter, 1992), 309-330, argues that foot cops were highly and positively connected to citizens on their beats. See also Richardson, Urban Police in the United States, 116-120, Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 111, and James Lardner and Thomas Repetto, NYPD: A City and Its Police (New York, 2000), 293-295. Fogelson largely ignored technological changes. Prominent researchers who share this view include George Kelling and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (New York, 1996); Malcolm K. Sparrow, Mark H. Moore, and David M. Kennedy, Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing (New York, 1990); but for a different approach, see Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M. Hartnett, Community Policing, Chicago Style (New York, 1997). Ethnographic accounts have documented ongoing relationships between radio motor patrol officers and citizens, and strong territorial knowledge on the part of such officers. See Jonathan Rubinstein, City Police (New York, 1973), and Steve Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis, 1997).

3. Writers focusing on ethnic and racial conflicts have often downplayed police-neighborhood issues as such. Dennis Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805-1889 (Baton Rouge, 1996); Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department 1900-1945 (Berkeley, 1999); W. Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington, 1996). See also Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, "The Evolving Strategy of Policing: A Minority View," Perspectives on Policing 13 (January, 1990), 1-16. Roger Lane, in William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America (New York, 1991), 92-95, however, suggests that African-Americans were by no means at such odds with police in the late nineteenth century.

4. See Walker, Critical History, 79-120, for social work; Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows, 76-80, and chapter 2. Police alienation from the public, though closely related, is logically distinct.

5. Among the most important works on local government are Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991); Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Berkeley, 2001); Terrence J. McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley, 1986); Eric Monkkonen, The Local State: Public Money and American Cities (Stanford, 1995). The central work is Jon Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore, 1984), which documents city government achievements during the era of supposed machine control. Teaford makes a partial exception for policing, but agrees that police departments adopted many modernizing practices, and that some were "modern" in personnel practices, especially after 1900. Christopher Thale, "Civilizing New York City: Police Patrol, 1880-1935" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1995), argues that nineteenth-century police did much to control disorder.

6. In part this was because machines did not always win elections, and often they adapted their policies to draw support from constituencies beyond the stereotypical base of patronage workers and vice, saloon, and traction interests. Businessmen were typically integrated into governing coalitions, while senior professionals and managers within city agencies were essential to operation and policy-making. See Teaford, Unheralded Triumph. In addition, tax-payers (many working-class) with low-tax goals were influential, while at times organized labor had a voice. See Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97 (Urbana, 1998); Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (Amherst, 1968).

7. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, 177-179, discusses some of these, and Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915, (New Brunswick, 1983), challenges the Progressive Era dating of police reform. Others have argued that police arrest patterns indicate a crime-control model at work as early as the 1890s in the largest American cities; see Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge, 1981).

8. Walker puts some emphasis on internal bureaucratic development in the early stages of the process, but he too stresses politics; see Critical History, 33. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 109-128, analyzes a narrow though interesting slice of police-community relations, using statistics of police returns of lost kids in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; but while this tells us something about the reconfiguration of police as crime fighters, it tells us little about changes in police-community relations or cops in neighborhoods.

9. Sparrow and others, Beyond 911, esp. chapter 2; Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows. See Walker, Critical History, 136-7, for the impact of the telephone and RMP. Theodore Roosevelt's energetic investigations of loafing cops in New York, and Alexander Piper's in Chicago, provide dramatic examples of police non-patrol in the period; see Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York, 1996), chapter 13, and Alexander R. Piper, Report of an Investigation of the Discipline and Administration of the Police Department of the City of Chicago (New York, 1971 [orig. publ. 1904]).

10. Several related topics have been investigated. For example, Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, 168-170, provides examples of politically-motivated mass dismissals. Eugene J. Watts, "The Police in Atlanta, 1890-1905," Journal of Southern History 39 (1973), 165-182, has studied residential locations of police, while Joel Tarr, with Thomas Finholt and David Goodman, have studied communications systems in "The City and the Telegraph: Urban Telecommunications in the Pre-Telephone Era," Journal of Urban History 14:1 (November, 1987), 38-80.

11. Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago, 1973), 28-32, and 180 n. 12. For transportation, see Clifton Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (New York, 1993), 35-42; and Charles W. Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1880-1912 (Cambridge, 1980), chapters 1-3.

12. An example of precinct boundaries can readily be found in New York Police Department, Annual Report (hereafter, NYPD, AR). 1907. Nicholas Alex, Black in Blue: A Study of the Negro Policeman (New York, 1969), chapter 6, for New York cops living and working in black neighborhoods. See New York City, Board of Aldermen, Special Committee to Investigate the Police Department (Curran Committee), Stenographer's Minutes: Hearings of September 9, 1912, to March 27, 1913, (New York, 1913), 77, for 1912 comments. Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875 (Durham, 1992), describes neighborhood differentiation in mid-century.

13. Precincts are identified by location, not number, because of frequent re-numbering.

14. New York Times, June 20, 1906, for the impact of the two-platoon system of work scheduling on commuting. Edward Ewing Pratt, Industrial Causes of Congestion of Population in New York City (New York: n.p., 1911), 118-122, shows that workers with shorter hours commuted farthest from Lower Manhattan jobs in 1911, and (pp. 128-129) that workers with higher incomes could afford to, and did, commute farther.

15. The pattern in our Bronx study precinct probably is explained not only by improved transportation to and from that part of the Bronx, but also by the rapid development of other parts of the Bronx, for that is where most of the out-of-the-precinct officers still lived. The East Bronx had not been part of New York City in 1887.

16. See Table 3, below, for evidence of massive transfers. Boundaries of precincts were frequently reshuffled. The Tenderloin was split into two precincts in 1907, and the southernmost (located at 120 West 20th Street) was used for the 1908 study because of insufficient data on the northernmost precinct (at 130 West 30th Street).

17. See Jay Stuart Berman, Police Administration and Progressive Reform: Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner of New York City (New York, 1987), 81 for destroying alliances as a motive for transfers; Times, July 20, 1892, for efforts at eliminating cliques as several precincts; April 12, 1901, for transfers as a standard solution, but one limited by the need to have officers knowledgeable about the precinct on board; March 2, 1907, for 105 patrolmen transferred. Massive one-day transfers were made in the 1890s to insure police neutrality at the polls; see John J. Hickey, Our Police Guardians: History of the Police Department of the City of New York ([New York], 1925), 70; and Avery D. Andrews, "Police Control of a Great Election," Scribner's Magazine, 23:2 (February, 1898). For the "Roosevelt board," see Jerald Elliot Levine, "Police, Parties, and Polity: The Bureaucratization, Unionization, and Professionalization of the New York City Police, 1870-1917" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1971), 249.

18. Theodore A. Bingham, "The New York Police in Politics," The Century Magazine 34 (September, 1909), 726; Commissioner William F. Baker to Mayor William J. Gaynor, March 2, 1910, Gaynor Papers, New York City Municipal Archives and Records Center (hereafter cited as MARC), box GWJ 14, f. 2. For an example of an officer off post who "went home to change my underwear", see The Chief, July 1, 1916; and see the same, January 1, 1916 for a similar case.

19. Curran Committee, Report, 78, for the survey. Graft of any sort was mentioned by only one officer cited by the Committee, and then obliquely. It should be added that the Report simply lists arguments of a number of officers (and their spouses) pro and con living in the home precinct; it makes no pretense of representativeness, so all we can say is that these arguments were alive in the NYPD. For similar discussion of favoritism, see the Interview with parole officer David Dressler, Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, 114.

20. For "outlying precincts," see Chief Inspector Max F. Schmittberger to Police Commissioner, April 13, 1914, Mitchel Papers, MARC, box MJP 129, f. 15.

21. For policies of Commissioner James Cropsey see NYPD AR, 1911, p. 2. For Woods, see Civil Service Chronicle, August 13, 1915, for patrolmen, and September 11, 1914, for transfer of all sergeants out of home precincts. For Richard Enright, see General Order 21, issued February 16, 1918 (available in New York Public Library). The rationale for exceptions is not publicly stated; presumably the threat of corruption and/or availability of transportation were still at work.

22. U.S. Census figures indicate that police were more inclined than the general city population to move to the outlying boroughs in 1920 and 1930. When Manhattan was still home to 41% of the city's population, only a quarter of the police lived there. A decade later only 14% of police lived in Manhattan, while more than twice that number lived in burgeoning Queens. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the U.S., Population, vol. 4, Occupations (Washington, D.C., 1921), 1160-1178; the same, Fifteenth Census of the U.S., Population, vol. 5, Occupations by States (Washington, D.C.: 1932), 1130-1148.

23. NYPD, Special Orders, are available from 1905 on at NYPL; they were often published in The Chief. The minutes of meetings of the Board of Police Commissioners, published in The City Record, provides the same information for earlier years.

24. William O'Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Doors, ed. Paul O'Dwyer (Jamaica, NY, 1987), 99-100. Most of this evidence is for the twentieth century; special orders are readily available on for 1905 on, and autobiographical accounts provide little guidance to the nineteenth century. The logic of the bureaucracy was a powerful one even in Tammany's golden age, though.

25. See Cornelius W. Willemse, in collaboration with George J. Lemmer and Jack Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights (New York, 1931), 24, for the Commissioner transferring an officer for supposed corruption; and The Chief, September 29, 1913, for exile as a punishment. A precinct's undesirability depended on both the precinct's characteristics and sheer distance from the officer's home.

26. Robert McAllister with Floyd Miller, The Kind of Guy I Am (New York, 1957), 80-82, is an example.

27. The captain might wish to dump (or acquire) an officer because he, the captain, was crooked, or because the officer was crooked, or both. Chief William S. Devery used transfers to extort money from patrolmen; but transfers were used by honest Commissioners and Captains to punish suspected misconduct without the trouble of official charges and a trial. See Levine, "Police, Parties, and Polity," 293-294 for transfers of honest officers to uptown and outlying precincts under Devery. For a captain kicking out a patrolman, see Cornelius W. Willemse, A Cop Remembers (New York, 1933), 155 (the officer didn't sell political fund raising tickets).

28. For being near homes, see Curran Committee, Report, 77-78, and The Chief, May 24, 1913, for Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo's claim that half the force wanted to live in their home precinct (the other half to be on the traffic squad: this to a traffic squad dinner); and Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 147. For study, Lewis J. Valentine, Night Stick: The Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine (New York, 1947), 27. It is unclear to what extent officers moved to accommodate job assignments.

29. New York Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York (Lexow Committee), Report and Proceedings (Albany, 1895), 336, 457-458, 491, for transfers in the early 1890s, some clearly due to the political influence of liquor dealers, some supposedly for punishment or at the request of officers themselves.

30. Of course, the cop's desires might be held up for ransom, a la Devery: but this tack was dangerous indeed: 75% of the police voted for reformer Seth Low in 1901, and hostility to Devery was an important reason. Levine, in "Police, Parties, and Polity," argues generally that police, especially through the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, favored a rationalized system governed by test-taking and seniority. I have little direct evidence on police feelings about transfers.

31. Valentine discusses rabbis in Night Stick, 24; and see Albert A. Seedman and Peter Hellman, Chief (New York, 1975), 40. Richard J. Butler and Joseph Driscoll, Dock Walloper: The Story of "Big Dick" Butler (New York, 1933), 84, argues that saloon-keepers, controlling many votes, could get cops who displeased them sent to the sticks. Influential outsiders were said to be important in helping promotion to detective and to senior posts lacking civil service protection. See William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City (New York, 1906), chapter 21, for political and non-political (including clerical) influences; and Bingham, "The New York Police in Politics," for politics. For decline of politics, see Citizens Union of the City of New York, Bureau of City Betterment, The Police Problem ([New York], 1906), 4-5, suggesting that transfers due to politics were rare and could be harmless (though the potential danger of corruption was great). Alan Block, East Side, West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950 (New Brunswick, 1983), describes Jimmy Hines' passing on 75 transfer requests per year; these may have differed little from a pastor's recommendation. For police belief in the power of money and influence, see Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York, 1958), 105-106.

32. Francis V. Greene, The Police Department of the City of New York: A Statement of Facts: Address by Police Commissioner Greene (New York, 1903), 67. See The Chief, February 23, 1918, for Enright policies. For mutual transfers and working near homes, see NYPD AR, 1906. For an example of mutual transfer, The Chief, December 8, 1917. These changes are similar to managerial changes occurring in large corporations at the same time. The problem of assignment to a precinct near one's home grew with consolidation of Greater New York, whose first police administration abusively and corruptly reassigned officers to other boroughs.

33. Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 95, 131; A Cop Remembers, 71, 108, 130, 145-147, 169. See The Chief, March 11, 1916, for Johnson.

34. Historians have studied the "persistence" of city residents in their cities or neighborhoods, meaning the number of people living in a city (or neighborhood) in a certain year who are still there, say, a year, or ten years later. This method focuses as much on the people who left as those who stayed; it does not tell us what proportion of people were long-time residents. To a citizen who wants police familiar with his or her neighborhood, that is the important question. Thus it seemed more useful to study "length of service in the precinct" to get at this question more precisely for the police.

35. The 32nd Pct. in Washington Heights grew 63% between 1883 and 1887; the Bronx's 33rd Pct. grew 77%. By contrast, the 1 st Pct. in Old Slip grew a mere 2%. Because the study precincts included two which were rapidly growing, it may under-represent somewhat the stability of the force throughout the city.

36. Variation between precincts was especially great during the turbulent Bingham years, reflected in the 1908 figures.

37. NYPD, blotters for 12th Precinct (Harlem), opened August 19, 1863, and 3rd Precinct (Chambers Street), opened November 29, 1865, both in the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia.

38. NYPD, 34th Precinct blotters, opened October 2, 1874, and (for analysis) December 5, 1878, New-York Historical Society. Six day and ten night posts had common boundaries, and, combining them, half the officers spent 89% or more of their time on their main post. Twenty officers were engaged in patrol work during this period, and two others had other assignments. Doubling up of posts was common, but in only two day posts were officers doubled up more than half the time, and on five of the ten night posts there was no doubling-up whatever. In reckoning the percentages in this paragraph I have counted time on a post whether or not the officer was also responsible for another post.

39. These blotters are available in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library.

40. This information is derived from the 42nd Precinct blotter opened May 19, 1920, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library. Information on Hinz from the Civil Lists for 1920, 1913, 1918, 1916. Hinz was listed in 1913 as part of the 42 Precinct.

41. More specifically, the median officer in the Bronx's 34th Precinct had devoted 94% of his night patrol time to his main night post and 90% of his day patrol time to his main day post. No distinction of day and night posts was made in 1920. Hours on the main post hours varied with seniority in the precinct, with newcomers working only 52 hours on main posts, those with more experience averaging 75 hours at it.

42. These posts were usually organized on a trunk-and-branch principle along the north-south avenues, with the officer responsible for a half block either way on side streets. This was the way posts had been arranged since early in the century. Blotter post lists give the sense that posts were redrawn rarely and that change over time was slow.

Counting regular patrol posts only, but not police booths, there were 2205 people per post in 1920. Population figures are derived from Walter Laidlaw, Population of the City of New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1932), 53. The Curran Committee Report, 108-110, indicates that in 1912 Manhattan posts averaged 2255 people per post, while the citywide average was 1722. The 42nd Precinct had only 574 people per post in 1912, but by 1920 population had almost tripled (to 77,167) while the number of officers and posts had dropped from 150 and 47 to 142 and 39.

43. During 131 hours of regular patrol duty, Hinz averaged 1.86 posts. The first figure is reckoned by adding the number of hours (during the relevant 68.5 hours) that Hinz was responsible for each post (whether alone or in conjunction with other posts), adding the totals for each post, yielding a grand total of 125 hours of responsibility-for-one-post. Dividing this by 68.5 hours yields an average, therefore, of 1.82 posts. The second calculation is similar. Both calculations count 1/2 post as 1/2 post. For the sake of simplicity in calculating, I have counted half posts as whole posts in precinct-wide calculations reported in Table 7; but the results would not differ greatly.

Another way of reckoning is to assume that when Hinz was assigned for an hour to Posts 5 and 6, he could spend one half hour on Post 5. By this sort of figuring he spent 41 hours on Post 5.

44. Thale, "Civilizing New York City," Appendix C, Table C.1, has a frequency distribution of officers working specified numbers of posts at any given time. See Curran Committee, Report, 118-121 for doubling-up of 1898 of the city's 2800 posts in 1912. It attributed much of the problem to the recent establishment of fixed posts, which were abolished shortly thereafter; but it also establishes that the problem went deeper than that. For an early example of doubling-up, see Times, October 3, 1880, reporting 270 of 812 night posts doubled up. One gets the same impression from other precinct blotters in the 1920s and '30s.

New York had more police per thousand citizens than most other American cities, as shown by U.S. Census Office, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, 1890, by John S. Billings (Washington, D.C. 1895), pp. 47-48, but unusual demands were placed on the police of a great metropolis as well, as the police themselves pointed out. By comparison with Paris, London, and Berlin, the NYPD was understaffed; see NYPD AR, 1911, p. 10, for one such comparison; see also Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, p. 276, for comparative figures for 1900. Primary cities in all likelihood are magnets for social and other problems requiring special police attention--reasons, perhaps, for New York's well-developed Steamboat Squad and Detective Bureau in the late nineteenth century--and governing authorities may feel impelled to maintain high standards of order. New York police officials frequently indicated that more officers were needed, couching their requests as pleas for coverage of newly developed areas and as responses to population growth; see NYPD AR, 1872, p. 13; NYPD AR, 1889, AR, p. 6, for example. Further, it is fair to assume that police posts were drawn for department use to define territories that could be well patrolled by one officer.

45. One might argue that such rotations were useful in acquainting officers with the totality of conditions on the post. Officers were guaranteed at least 24 hours off at the end of every 6-day period, but one time out of three that still allowed them to work two calendar days in a row. Thus their work cycle was twenty days, not weekly or tri-weekly. Even factory workers with rotating shifts tended to have a weekly cycle. New York police officers also served six tours of reserve duty every twenty days. Work schedules changed considerably in the decades after 1901; see Thale, "Civilizing New York," 91-95.

46. Four officers was the minimum possible, three working a full 144 hours on the post and another working one-third of that time.

47. Like Hinz, they spent a lot of time on Posts 2 and 6. Whalen worked Post 6 for 106 hours (much of it in conjunction with post 5), and Connolly spent more time on both 2 and 6 than on 5.

48. Times, March 29, 1907, for paying off five officers under then-new five-platoon system; Lexow Committee, Proceedings, 1079, for Mrs. Thurow's payoffs to seven or eight officers in the early 1890s, under the two-platoon system. Though an old story, new work schedules with shorter work weeks increased the minimum possible number of officers on any post.

49. These sorts of demands on the precinct labor force are occasionally visible in the 42nd Pct. blotter, but are quite evident in the lower East Side's 13th Pct., where peddlers, prostitution, traffic problems, strikes, and noise complaints were among the concerns leading to special assignments or, in some cases, to pulling officers from their posts. Arrests were probably not common enough to be very disruptive in most precincts. Throughout the period, the average officer arrested roughly two dozen people a year. Only in extremely high-activity precincts, such as the 11th precinct in 1890, where precinct wide there were 27 arrests a day on average, was this likely to be a highly disruptive activity.

50. The 61 officers spent 420.4 hours at Polo Grounds duty, an average of 6.9 per officer; but many of the 61 were sent more than once, for as little as 2.5 hours.

51. NYPD, AR, 1920, p. 32. Some of the 42's non-patrolling patrolmen may have been semi-permanently attached to Borough squads, and others were probably regulars at clerical work and the like. The 101 cops who did at least some patrol performed a median of 32 hours of non-patrol work.

52. NYPD, 37th, 42nd, and 43rd Precinct Blotters, entries for May 26-27, 1920, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Library; other blotters are not available for this date for purposes of comparison. A systematic look at draws on seven Manhattan precincts on July 16, 1935, shows considerable variation in the number of officers called on for such assignments, but the logic of these draws is unclear; neither distance from lower Manhattan nor precinct size determined these assignments. My impression, based on 20-day cycles of the 42nd and 13th precincts, is that precincts with more internal specialized demands were less subject to external demands.

53. For examples, see The Chief, January 19, 1918 (a not-highly-recommended officer put where he can be watched); William O'Dwyer, Interview, Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, 77-78, 88 (captain punishes by assignment); Stead, Satan's Invisible World Displayed, or, Despairing Democracy (New York, 1897), 95 (threat of moving to another beat if patrolman interferes with captain's graft); Willemse, A Cop Remembers, 155 (captain uses assignment as inducement), 87-88 (patrolman gets cross post so he can talk with another patrolman); Lexow Committee, Proceedings, 457, 5326, for liquor interests' and wardmen's influence, and 5313-5316 for the sergeant's important role (including favoritism). See Peter Maas, Serpico (New York, 1974), 76, for asking for a particular post in the 1960s.

54. NYPD, Regulations of the Police Department, 1920, p. 14. This seems to be a fairly new procedure, but the principle of rewarding seniority with stable assignments was older; Cornelius Willemse noted that when he was a patrolman early in the century, the newest cop was liable to be "flyed all over the precinct"; A Cop Remembers, 146.

Officers who had been in the 42nd Precinct a year or less spent only 52.3 hours on their top posts, compared with 74.6 hours for all the rest (for 101 officers, t=3.03, sig. at .003).

The 1st and 7th squads patrolled 136 hours, the 4th for 133 hours. Together this amounted to 84% of the 480 hours in the twenty days studied. The 10th squad, composed of newcomers to the precinct, regularly filled in on other squads' days off, and it accounted for 11% of the patrol of Post 5.

55. "Details" to guard duty in city offices, along with the Tenement House Squad and boiler inspection work, were targets of reform campaigns after 1901. For an early complaint, see NYPD, AR, 1872, p. 20, indicating 1620 officers were available for patrol duty and 261 to special duties. One report during Mayor McClellan's administration noted that 1366 officers were engaged in non-patrol work ("Number of Patrolmen," attached to Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham to C.E. Hughes, March 23, 1908, McClellan Papers, MARC, box MGB-52, f. 4). The Bureau of Municipal Research claimed that in 1909, 54% of the police force (64.6% of the patrolmen) were available for patrol duty; these numbers rose in 1912. "Memorandum Relative to Additional Patrolmen," July 9, 1913, Gaynor Papers, MARC, box GWJ-87, f. 12.

56. The draws on the patrol force in 1920 apparently included a lot of semi-permanent assignments of this type.

57. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI, 1995), ably tells the general story, and Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana, 1986), describes management among workers who, like the police, interacted with the public and could not always be minutely supervised. Articles in The Chief, July 17 and July 31, 1914, describe Commissioner Arthur Woods' plans to establish a management system tying promotions to productivity.

58. Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914 (Leicester, UK, 1987); Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 2001), chapter 7; Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (New York, 1978), part 1, describe reformist and upper middle class opinion; notable contemporary examples include Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York, 1957; orig. publ. 1890); Helen C. Campbell, Thomas W. Knox, and Thomas Byrnes, Darkness and Daylight: Lights and Shadows of New York Life ... (Hartford, 1897), part I-II and chapter XXXIV; Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago, 1929). Reformers campaigned to centralize such institutions as schools and justices' courts in part out of hostility to working-class neighborhoods as such, as well as to promote administrative centralization, achieved in the NYPD in 1901. For schools, see for example David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 132, 138-141.

59. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875, discusses mid-nineteenth-century mobility; Times, April 30, May 2, 1880; and Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880-1915 (New York, 1977), 140, 142, 147-148, 153, 158, for growing but still limited persistence among Jews and Italians between the 1880s and 1915.

60. For nostalgic reminiscences, see Helen Woodward, Three Flights Up (New York, 1935), p. 70; Marie Jastrow, A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York Before the Great War (New York, 1979), pp. 118-121; Al Smith, Up To Now: An Autobiography (New York, 1929), pp. 25-27; and, on the police side, O'Dwyer, Beyond the Golden Door, 104-105; Willemse, Behind the Green Lights, 36-38; Samuel Battle, Interview, Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University, pp. 37-9; Michael Fiaschetti, You Gotta Be Rough: The Adventures of Detective Fiaschetti of the Italian Squad as told to Prosper Buranelli (Garden City, 1930), pp. 29-30; and McAllister, The Kind of Guy I Am, 25-28. The rule about knowing people on sight can be found in New York Police Department, Manual Containing the Rules and Regulations of the Police Department, 1905 (New York, 1905), Rule 52. For patrolling in pairs, see Matthew Hale Smith and others, Wonders of a Great City (Chicago, 1887), p. 169, and Charles T. Harris, Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies (New York, 1928), p. 39. The danger of bricks flying from the rooftops is discussed in Battle, Interview, 24-5; Valentine Night Stick, 9; The Chief, November 5, 1904, and ostracism in A Policeman's Wife [Andrea Maria Kornmann], Our Police ... By a Policeman's Wife, (New York, 1887), pp. 35, 79-81. Given the sheer numbers of citizens and the hostilities of some, the nostalgia seems explicable only if police and citizens were selective in their relationships.

61. Some other features of police reform also took place in the early Progressive period or before. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, sees a crime-control focus in the largest cities after 1890, and Thale, "Civilizing New York City," 771-822, finds crime-control rhetoric emerging by 1910. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph, points to early development of stability of employment and to reliance on senior professionals' expertise in decision-making before then. Harring, Policing a Class Society, argues that police reform was a response to post-civil war labor conflict. Philip J. Ethington, "Vigilantes and the Police: The Creation of a Professional Police Bureaucracy in San Francisco, 1847-1900," Journal of Social History (Winter, 1987), 197-227, sees a much earlier reform era in San Francisco.

62. For mid-nineteenth-century examples, see Stuart Blumin "Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City," Journal of Urban History 11:1 (November, 1984), 9-38; and John C. Schneider, Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830-1880: A Geography of Crime, Riot, and Policing (Lincoln, NE, 1980), which shows the influence of such ideas on police administration. See Piper, Report of an Investigation of the Discipline and Administration of the Police Department of the City of Chicago, 4-5, 8; Piper was a former

Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD whose study of Chicago treated this as a universal theme in police work.

63. Bureaucratic stability and the role of senior police managers in policing are discussed in Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, 170-171; Walker, Critical History, 33-37; Ethington, "Vigilantes and the Police;" Harring, Policing a Class Society, chaps. 2-3; Tarr and others, "The City and the Telegraph," pp. 67-68; and throughout Levine, "Police, Parties, and Polity."

By Christopher Thale

Columbia College, Chicago

600 S. Michigan Avenue

Chicago, IL 60605