Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [509]
The night watchmen—“postmen” at fixed stands and “roundsmen” patroling the streets—were equally problematic. As their numbers expanded from 512 in 1830 to 1096 in 1845, their reputation declined. Many leatherheads were elderly retirees or working a second job: “While the city sleeps,” New Yorkers quipped, “the watchmen do too.”
In 1839 Mayor Clark pushed for a municipal “military arm,” on the grounds that having “the character of a riotous city fastened upon us would be truly calamitous.” Editors called for a force that would prevent crime, not just catch criminals after the fact. Yet reluctance to expand police powers stalled further action until the sensational death of Mary Cecilia Rogers generated a demand strong enough to overbear all objections.
Mary Rogers, known as “the Beautiful Cigar Girl,” had come to New York from Connecticut in the panic year of 1837. In 1838 she took a job selling cigars and tobacco at John Anderson’s popular Broadway haunt for journalists and politicians. (This too was a depression-era phenomenon: as an 1838 story in the Sunday Morning Atlas noted, “times are so hard” that out-of-work young women were taking jobs in cigar stores despite the potential threat to their virtue from rakish young customers.) Early one Sunday morning in the summer of 1841, Mary Rogers left the boardinghouse her mother ran at 126 Nassau Street and went missing. Three days later, her bruised and waterlogged body was found floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken.
The penny press turned Rogers’s death—like that of Helen Jewett—into a sensational event. Initial reports had it that Rogers had been gagged, tied, beaten, and raped by several men, then strangled and dumped in the water. Many assumed, with Philip Hone, that Rogers had “no doubt fallen victim to the brutal lust of some of the gang of banditti that walk unscathed and violate the laws with impunity in this moral and religious city.” James Gordon Bennett blamed a gang of “fire rowdies, butcher boys, soaplocks, and all sorts of riotous miscreants,” or perhaps a “gang of negroes.”
When police made no headway in solving the crime, the press, led by Bennett, escalated Mary’s death into a metaphor of New York’s social and moral disintegration. In a scathing editorial on August 12, 1841, Bennett denounced “the apathy of the great criminal judges, sitting on their own fat for a cushion bench—and the utter inefficiency of their police.” Such incompetence was “leading fast to reduce this large city to a savage state of society—without law—without order—and without security of any kind.”
Hysterical rhetoric about the proliferation of crime was seriously overdrawn, as an 1842 district attorney’s report demonstrated, but sentiment proved more compelling than statistics. Governor Seward, citing the Rogers case, called for improving the police in his 1842 Annual Message. Local influentials now swung round and reached a consensus, as one advocate put it, about “the necessity (as in London) of a civic ARMY, a numerous Municipal Police.”
In 1843 the state legislature passed a New York Municipal Police Act, which the governor signed on May 7, 1844. The new law abolished the Watch Department and the offices of marshals, street inspectors, health wardens, fire wardens, dock masters, lamp lighters, bell ringers, and inspectors of pawnbrokers and junk shops. All these responsibilities and more were turned over to a semimilitary “Day and Night Police,” not to exceed eight hundred men.
New York’s force was closely modeled on London’s, with one crucial difference. London’s Metropolitan Police was an arm of the national government, divorced from local control. New York’s was totally decentralized. Each ward became a patrol district, with its own stationhouse. And each ward nominated its own candidates for police officers;