This article was originally published by The Amsterdam News.
“‘Empire City’ is an objective history of the police,” said Chenjerai Kumanyika when asked to classify his new narrative nonfiction podcast that chronicles the history of the NYPD.
“What you might feel is different about ‘Empire City’ stems from the fact that the dominant story about the police — one that is still being told in newspapers — is a … lie.”
Kumanyika, a veteran podcaster and journalism professor at New York University, was speaking at a university event titled “Reporting the Empire City: Ethical Reporting on Crime and Police,” which took place on Friday, Oct. 20. He was joined on stage by story editor Diane Hodson, producer Sam Riddell, and public historian Asad Dandia, who was featured on the podcast.
The podcast, an eight-part series produced by Crooked Media, Wondery, and Pushblack, challenges the commonly held belief that the NYPD was created to keep all city residents safe. By delving into the events surrounding its formation in the mid-19th century while weaving in present-day examples, the series reveals how the impetus for the department had much more to do protecting the physical and economic security of the city’s elite — motivations that shape the force’s operations to this day.
Ryan Howzell, project manager of NYU’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative, moderated the panel. The conversation ranged from technical discussions about the creators’ archival research process to the media’s central role in shaping public understanding of the police.
Kumanyika kicked off the conversation by discussing his motivation for creating the podcast: He had always viewed the institution of policing with skepticism because his father, a civil rights activist, was arrested and surveilled by the NYPD for protesting racial injustice in the 1960s. After the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, his skepticism sharpened into a question for which he couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.
“At a certain moment, one of the things I began to wonder was: Where did the police actually start?” he said.
Kumanyika’s genuine curiosity as he searches for an answer through a variety of interviews with historical experts, and a sprinkling of endearing conversations with his four-year-old daughter, makes for an engaging listener experience.
“It’s an actual journey that you’re going through versus one that you’re just crafting for the purposes of the podcast,” said Hodson. “When you have to create an artificial journey, the listeners feel it, they hear it. When we can make it as real as possible, it translates.”
During this journey, the creators unearthed an array of compelling anecdotes and historical figures. One of the main challenges was selecting which stories to feature, with an overarching goal that was twofold.
“Everybody has a feeling about the police. Very, very few people know how we got to this point … so we had to both show the dominant narrative, what was being said, and also simultaneously subvert that,” Hodson explained.
Much of this work involved combing through various newspaper archives.
James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald provided insight into the mainstream narrative that drove the creation of New York’s first modern, professional police department in 1845. In the years leading up to that point, Bennett used his influential newspaper to criticize the existing police force, which was a more informal group of constables and watchmen. Frustrated by their inability to solve crime, and fearful of how a growing sense of disorder in the city’s poorer neighborhoods could harm the city’s business prospects, Bennett called for a new and improved force.
Black and abolitionist newspapers, meanwhile, highlighted how the police posed a threat to the city’s Black population, as constables, and later NYPD officers, arrested those accused of escaping slavery and returned them to the South. The Subterranean, a newspaper self-published by the working class Irish politician Mike Walsh, criticized the presence of police in poor immigrant communities, whose residents were frequently cited for committing minor offenses.
In all, Kumanyika paints a picture of a department that emerged to safeguard the lives of the white upper classes, whether by heavily policing the city’s poorer neighborhoods or protecting the economic structure of slavery that enriched the New York elite.
“What gets defined as danger — and the media, James Gordon Bennett plays a key role in initiating this — is about what’s dangerous to capital,” he said.
As the podcast entered the 1900s, Kumanyika turned to the Amsterdam News to tell the story of Black activism against police brutality, such as the community’s reaction to the 1964 killing of Harlem teenager James Powell, which set off a wave of protests across the city.
“I think we already had a New York Times version of history, but we don’t have the Amsterdam News version of history, so I had to go to the Amsterdam News and see what they were saying about police killings and what Black folks were saying, and what the community was calling for,” Kumanyika said in an interview after the event.
From past to present
Uncovering the NYPD’s origins was only part of the podcast’s goal, however. “The real project … is to look at the lines of continuity,” Kumanyika said.
One way the series accomplished this was through the story of panelist Dandia. Dandia, a Brooklyn native, was featured in the seventh episode, “The American Problem,” which described how the police developed methods for surveilling immigrant communities.
In the early 1900s, the NYPD’s Commissioner Francis Vinton Greene implemented the tactics he learned during America’s colonial rule over the Philippines, when the American colonizers created a Filipino-run police department to keep tabs on revolutionaries. After Greene took command of the NYPD, the department began to surveil immigrant Italian and Chinese neighborhoods by using people from those neighborhoods as undercover informants or hiring them as officers. Anarchists and communists soon became targets as well.
By the mid-2000s, the NYPD was focusing its efforts on Muslim communities like Dandia’s under the guise of fighting terrorism.
“I grew up in the type of New York City neighborhood where English is spoken not even as a second, but as a third language,” Dandia said.
While in college, Dandia and his friends started a mutual aid food charity called Muslims Giving Back. Soon after, he began to hear from friends with police contacts that the NYPD was surveilling them. His fears were confirmed in the fall of 2012, when he opened up Facebook to a post from a young man who had recently become a volunteer at the charity.
“The first thing I see is a confession from that young man, who had reached out to me earlier that year [and] said he had a troubled past and wanted to get involved: ‘I was an informant sent by the NYPD to investigate terrorism,’” Dandia recalled.
Dandia was soon approached to become a co-plaintiff in an ACLU lawsuit that challenged the NYPD’s surveillance tactics. In 2016, the group reached a settlement that shut down the unit that was spying on him and other Muslim New Yorkers.
As the discussion came to a close, panelists discussed some of the overarching lessons of the podcast. Kumanyika argued for a more nuanced approach to the common refrain in activist circles that the policing system in America is operating as it was designed. This perspective, he said, can lead to a sense that the way the police developed was inevitable, and is now set in stone.
“I think when we say everything is working in design, we’re ignoring stories like Asad’s, when someone pushed back and carved out a victory,” he said. “I just think it’s a more powerful indictment, not to say they were working as they were designed back in 1845, but to say there were all these moments where they had an opportunity in that history to [in] a different direction, where people pointed it out, where people protested, where they could have formed in a better way. And instead, they developed in the wrong way.”
He also had a message for the news media, calling on journalists to interrogate and shift how they cover crime. Rather than focusing on what the police define as crime, he said, journalists on a public safety beat should focus on harm.
“Start asking: Where is harm being committed? Who’s committing it? Who’s committing harm on the most massive scale? Is it a person who hops a turnstile and doesn’t pay a $2.90 fare, or is it someone on Wall Street who is doing things that affect people all over the world?”