Dartmouth Events

Matthew Guariglia is an Affiliated Scholar in the Department of History at Emory University and Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where he focuses on how local and federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private corporations use technology. This roundtable discussion panel will explore Matthew Guariglia's new book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, in conversation with the author. Panelists will include Bench Ansfield (History/Society of Fellows), Salonee Bhaman (New York Historical Society), and Monique Flores Ulysses (History/Society of Fellows).

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and Society of Fellows at Dartmouth. Masks are encouraged and appreciated.

Book Description:

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts imported tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devised modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infilitrated supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, and German police to form "ethnic squads" to the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime - even the introduction of fingerprinting - were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly color-blind, technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.