Gotham's War Within a War
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A01=Emily Brooks
Ann Petry
anti-vice policing
Author_Emily Brooks
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSL1
Category=JK
Category=JKV
Category=NHK
City Patrol Corps
construction of criminality
disorderly spaces
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Fiorello La Guardia
gambling
Harlem uprising of 1935
Harlem uprising of 1943
juvenile delinquency
New York City
New York City Police Department
NYPD
People's Voice
police brutality in New York
Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine
police discretion
prostitution
Social Protection Division
twentieth-century liberalism
wartime campaigns against venereal diseases
World War II home front
Product details
- ISBN 9781469676593
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 31 Oct 2023
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A surprising history unfolded in New Deal– and World War II–era New York City under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the "disorderly" establishments that officials believed housed these activities.
This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war.
This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war.
Emily Brooks is a full-time curriculum writer at the New York Public Library's Center for Educators and Schools. She received her PhD in history from the Graduate Center at the City University in New York.
