Matthew Guariglia in conversation with Carl Suddler - Police and the Empire City
Thursday, Jun 06, 2024 7:00 PM
Location:
The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
441 John Lewis Freedom Parkway, NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
“A remarkable historical narrative that details the racial and ethnic projects at the center of the development of the institution of modern policing.” — Alex S. Vitale, author of "The End of Policing"
The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and A Cappella Books welcome author Matthew Guariglia to discuss his new book, "Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York." Guariglia will appear in conversation with author and Emory University history professor Carl Suddler.
This event is free and open to the public. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the venue. Masks are optional.
About the Book
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 infiltrated 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.
About the Author
Matthew Guariglia is Affiliated Scholar at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, Senior Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and coeditor of "The Essential Kerner Commission Report."
About the Conversation Partner
Carl Suddler is an associate professor of history at Emory University. His first book, "Presumed Criminal: Black Youth" and the Justice System in Postwar New York (2019) is widely used in college and graduate classrooms across the country. His expertise is in high demand from scholarly communities and media outlets such as CNN, ABC News, Al Jazeera, Black News Channel, and NPR.
