New York’s power-hungry mayor weaponizes the police to help him control the city – and bulldoze a thriving Black community for his own real estate profits. The state, fearing that the mayor and his police have become too strong, wage a war for control – and create their own rival force. 

From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.

Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still  impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.

Voices & References:

Jeff Broxmeyer https://www.jeffbroxmeyer.com/

Mariame Kaba https://mariamekaba.com/

Leslie Alexander https://drlesliealexander.com/

Gregg Simmons https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4206025/

TRANSCRIPT

Chenjerai Kumanyika: At a recent NYPD Police Academy graduation, the keynote speaker offered some powerful words to the crowd of 631 new recruits.

[clip of Eric Adams]: I thank God every day that we have a cop that’s the mayor of the city of New York that has went through the training that you have going through and is ready to serve this city in a manner that it should be served.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And the man thanking God that a cop is the mayor of New York City is a cop. It’s also mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. When Adams won the election two years earlier. I’m not sure anybody was thanking God, but a lot of folks did celebrate. I mean, Adams was a Democrat and he wasn’t just a cop. He was a Black cop who bragged about having been a leader on police reform.

[clip of Eric Adams]: And right now, in this audience, when you finish your career, one of you will be a congressman. One of you will be a governor. One of you will be a mayor. One of you may be the president of the United States. You’re going to take that experience that you have and you’re going to show how to lead, how to lead from the front.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: As a Black man raising my daughter here, I’m worried about what a former cop is the mayor leading from the front means for everyday New Yorkers. And looking at the police data since Mayor Adams has taken office, it looks like my worries are justified. At a moment when Adams was threatening to cut social programs and public goods, he increased police overtime and he’s refused to support any kind of police oversight. All of this while the NYPD recorded more stops of New Yorkers in 2023 than it has in nearly a decade. And 89% of those who were stopped are Black and Latino. It’s a pattern this persisted, says George Kirk. And it stretches all the way back to the kidnaping club. But last year, New York City Council decided to do something to try to disrupt that pattern. In a vote with overwhelming support, they passed the How Many Stops Act. It would force NYPD officers to document these street stops with New Yorkers. When I heard about it, it sounded so basic that I was sort of amazed it wasn’t already the law. This was a clear chance for Mayor Adams to lead from the front. All he had to do was sign it. But that’s not what happened. Instead. On January 19th, 2024, Eric Adams held a press conference and announced that he was vetoing City Council’s vote How Many Stops Act, in press conferences and social media he lambasted City Council for even suggesting it at a private NYPD gala surrounded by cops and members of The Sopranos cast, he really let loose.

[clip of Eric Adams]: And I’ll I’ll be damned. If I was willing to stand up against bullies as a cop. I’m going to stand up against socialist organizations as the mayor. And I’m going to fight back to. So stand tall. This is the greatest profession and the greatest police department on the globe.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Watching them stand there and foam at the mouth about a bill that just asked cops to document what they’re doing is a cartoonishly clear example of why having a former police officer as mayor might be great for cops, but horrible for New Yorkers. This closeness between police and mayors, it’s not new. [music plays] That collapsing of police and politicians was supercharged ten years after New York got its first formalized police force with the mayor, who was willing to spill police blood to stay on top. From Wondery and Crooked Media, I’m Chenjerai Kumanyika and this is Empire City. Episode three. What’s Done Can Be Undone. [music plays] For most of my life, I didn’t really pay much attention to Shakespeare. I was getting all the drama I needed from hip hop and Toni Morrison, you know, the regular old movie theater. Shakespeare just felt British and far away. But to early New Yorkers, theater is a place that belongs to them. When they come together, catch up with each other and experience epic, riveting storytelling as a community, you know, let off some steam. So imagine one night you’re leaning back into your aisle seat, enjoying the latest performance of Macbeth at the newly opened Astor Opera House. When a rock flies through the window, it could have been an accident. But then another rock comes tumbling down, hitting the person to your left. And then another. And another. Until nearly every window in the opera house is broken and the theater is in chaos. [sound effect] I know Shakespeare is supposed to bring the drama, but I don’t think running for your life is the experience any theater goer was expecting that night. But apparently this is what you get when you cast a British actor as Macbeth. [clip of Macbeth] On the same night an American actor performs Macbeth in a working class theater across town. [clip of Macbeth] See working class New Yorkers look at this bougie theater with British actors as the symbol of New York is growing into a place where ordinary folks and their culture won’t be welcome. So before the performance, they put up fliers all over the city to persuade New Yorkers to heckle the British production. The fliers say things like Working Men, Shall Americans of English Rule This City? One night, Police Chief George Matsell gives word that some shit’s about to go down and he sends 200 police to post up inside the opera house. But this crowd is infuriated and them cops ain’t enough to turn them away. They descend on a theater in between, hurling rocks through windows. People curse at the stage and throw furniture. The police just can’t handle the people inside the theater. And they really aren’t ready for the enraged crowd of thousands of folks outside. So they stay. Or you might say hide, inside the state militia gets called in and after a single round of warning shots, the militia starts firing into the crowd. More than 20 people are killed, almost all of them bystanders, struck down walking past the theater. The youngest was 15 years old. People are pretty upset at the disastrous performance of the police. It’s been four years since they formally became the NYPD, but clearly they still don’t have this shit together. Even James Gordon Bennett basically calls them cowards. It’s the first time one ever heard of police being shut up in a house in order to quell a riot in the street. And other elite New Yorkers have to admit that having to call the military to put down a theater riot, it’s not a good look for business. Now, obviously, none of this is good news for Police Chief George Matsell. He’s been trying to get the police to function like professionals since the NYPD started. But the Astor Place Riot showed that so far it isn’t working. Matsell needs to take his plans for professionalization to the next level. One big thing he has to tackle is uniforms. Without them, you can’t tell who’s a police officer in a crowd. And that’s a problem in a riot. But some New Yorkers still don’t want the police in uniform because it looks too much like a standing army. And the truth is, the police hated the idea of uniforms from the very beginning. They’re expensive. They make it easier for their bosses to surveil them. And they’re demeaning. Police grumbled that wearing uniforms makes them akin to servants. But after years of debate, Matsell gets a uniform design for his force, a blue coat and a leather hat, and he parades uniformed officers around at society events. And it’s not enough for them to look the part. Matsell also has to address the lack of training. He orders his captains to train officers in the school of the soldier. He hires a drill captain to train new recruits and tries to command more military style discipline. But some neighborhoods in New York don’t get soldiers. They get thugs. When Matsell tells some of his police to go deal with Irish gangs. They organize strong armed squads, groups of cops and regular clothes with clubs made of locust wood, that are strong enough to break bone on impact. When these squads hit the street, anybody they run into would get their head cracked open. Innocent people get caught up in the violence. But New York’s business community loves it. The response is so positive, the club’s become standard issue. And this is the first way that the NYPD officially arms its officers. But these changes to the NYPD pale in comparison to what happens when the city elected a new mayor. Fernando Wood.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Fernando Wood is one of the great scoundrels of the 19th century. And by great I don’t mean in terms of, you know, good, I mean in terms of magnitude.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But according to Jeff Broxmeyer, a professor who writes about this period, the new mayor sees this army of men with clubs, uniforms and the power to arrest and says, I can use this.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Fernando Wood is a risk taker. Sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it just is a disaster.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And just like Macbeth, Wood’s quest for power ends in bloodshed. All his life, Wood is chasing after two things money and respectability.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Wood was a very ambitious figure who grew up in poverty, who had nothing really. So he does things like he tries his hand at a career in the theater, actually, and that doesn’t work out. And then he moves to New York and he tries a hand at all of these small shops which mostly fail.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But Wood is willing to go to any length to come up and eventually learns that his real power isn’t going to be the value he brings as a business person. It’s that he can look people right in the face and knife them in the back.

Jeff Broxmeyer: He’ll make an agreement with someone in secret and then another agreement with someone else that is completely contrary to what he has previously said he would do.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And this talent for lying and double crossing people that he claims he’s helping proves useful in this new world that Wood is about to enter the world of politics. He also starts hanging out with members of New York’s strongest political machine. Tammany Hall.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Tammany Hall is the main political machine that’s really the dominant force in Democratic Party politics throughout the mid 19th century, all the way up into the 1960s in New York, actually.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Tammany Hall had figured out how to appeal to New York City’s marginalized white ethnic immigrants. And Wood learns that race and nationality are powerful political wedges that he can exploit to his advantage. He isn’t scared to take controversial positions and say the quiet part out loud. This helps him to rise through the ranks of Tammany and as he’s gathering political clout, knifing people in the back, he winds up making a windfall of cash the old fashioned way. He inherits it. His wife, dies and leaves him a ton of money. And now Wood is more than just rich.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Fabulously wealthy for the for the age in the period when he’s in in an age when very few people were millionaires. And that was a new thing. He was a millionaire.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: His worn down shoes and cheap suits, had always given them away as a scrappy con man. But now shit was different. He starts buying the most fashionable clothes and hanging with the wealthier crowd. But Wood decide that it’s not enough to be a rich New Yorker. He wants to be king. So would runs for mayor in 1850 and loses, but tries again in 1854 and wins. Thinking about Wood’s rise to power, I can’t help but think back to when those folks were sitting in the Astor Opera House looking up at Macbeth on stage before all hell broke loose. They weren’t just enjoying the drama of Shakespeare. They saw more than an actor in a costume. They saw their own political leaders motivated by greed and power. [clip of Macbeth] And one thing that Macbeth drives home is that ambition comes with a cost. And that thirst for power is definitely going to cost Fernando Wood as soon as he’s inaugurated, Wood sets his sights on transforming the police into his personal army. An army that’ll do anything he needs them to do, including fighting to the death. [music plays]

Mariame Kaba: We’re standing in front of both City Hall and City Hall Park across the street.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Organizer Mariame Kaba and I are standing on a crowded corner in Lower Manhattan, and she calls attention to something right above our heads.

Mariame Kaba: There’s a street sign that says Elizabeth Jennings Place.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Thousands of people pass this sign every day.

Mariame Kaba: But I would suspect that most people, even people who are from New York, when they look up and they see Elizabeth Jennings place, probably have no idea who the hell Elizabeth Jennings was.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And one person who probably hadn’t heard of Elizabeth Jennings Graham was New York Mayor Fernando Wood, at least at first. [music plays] When Wood takes office in January of 1855. Jennings is a teacher, and as a Black woman, she isn’t someone that would be on the mayor’s radar. But a month into Wood’s first term, Jennings grabs the city’s attention. The story starts a year earlier. Jennings and a friend, Sarah Adams, are waiting for a railcar. It’s a Sunday, and they’re dressed up in hats and fancy dresses.

Mariame Kaba: She was going for service at the church organist. She was running late, so she decided to board a horse drawn railcar here in New York.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: As soon as Jennings and her friend get on, some white folks are complaining that Black women are on their streetcar. The conductor stops the streetcar and tells them to leave. At that point, most Black folks would have just rolled their eyes and gotten off. That’s just the way things work. You comply. But Elizabeth Jennings Graham has support that other people don’t have.

Mariame Kaba: Her father is well known because he was a Black abolitionist here in New York City.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Both her mother and father had work with David Ruggles and the Committee of Vigilance. She grew up around adults who preached, wrote and fought for Black liberation. And on that day, she’s just trying to get to church. So she looks at the conductor like, Nah, we’re not doing this today.

Mariame Kaba: She told the conductor he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church. [laughter]

Chenjerai Kumanyika: More than 100 years before Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama. Elizabeth Jennings Graham clings to the window ledge and refuses to leave a streetcar in New York. The conductor drags her and her friend off the car. But before the driver can speed away, Jennings and a friend get right back on. And so the conductor calls for backup from the police.

Mariame Kaba: And the cops show up. And here’s what Jennings said. The officer, without listening to anything I had to say, thrust me out and taunting me, told me to get redress if I could.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Kaba says this was a typical move for the NYPD.

Mariame Kaba: The cops were pulling people off trains and subways and stuff in 1854 and telling them, You can try to fucking get satisfaction, but you’re not going to get satisfaction because who are they going to believe? You or me?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But this time it ain’t going to be that easy. This is the definition of the wrong one. [laughter] They got the—

Mariame Kaba: They got the wrong one.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: When Jennings gets home, she tells her people what happened, and they were like, hell no. They pulled together the most influential folks they can contact. They publish a story in the papers. They form an organization and they say, Since you fuck with us, we’re going to go big. We’re going to fight to desegregate every streetcar in New York. They hire a white lawyer. Future US President Chester A. Arthur and head to court. And when they get there, the judge surprises everybody by ruling in Jennings favor. Elizabeth Jennings is compensated for her treatment at the hands of the police. And some but not all streetcars in New York are officially desegregated. Her victory rings from five points to Seneca Village. Black folks even create a holiday called Elizabeth Jennings Day. According to historian Leslie Alexander, Mayor Fernando Wood isn’t celebrating with the rest of the city.

Leslie Alexander: Fernando Wood was just sort of a devout and committed racist. He was just wholly opposed to emancipation and equality for the Black population and opposed their existence in the United States.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Wood is a Democrat, but they were kind of the opposite of how we think of the Democratic Party today. Democrats were pro-slavery party. They supported states rights and the Fugitive Slave Law. Later on in his career during the Civil War, he gave a full speech calling for New York to secede from the Union like the Confederate States. And by the way, he had a lot of support for that.

Leslie Alexander: If this was like an old school cartoon. He would like be the guy, like, twisting his mustache, you know, looking kind of evilly to the side.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So if I were him and I just watched Elizabeth Jennings Gram and other Black folks who are barely citizens, win a battle to desegregate streetcars, I’d be worried about their growing power in the city and Wood doesn’t want to share power with anyone. In his first statement to the city Council, Wood declares that New York’s government is a bureaucratic monster with too many heads. He says that it’s time to chop off every head but one, that the mayor should be the absolute power in the city.

Jeff Broxmeyer: He calls it one man rule. He wants to be a kind of one man power in the city.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: He’s basically saying the city is broken and I’m the only one who can fix it.

Jeff Broxmeyer: And he has lots of battles over that. And he largely loses He’s he’s not really able to to centralize authority into his hands in the way that he wants to, except the one place where he is successful is the police.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Even though Wood is the mayor, he starts acting like he’s the police chief.

Jeff Broxmeyer: And he worked to gain control over appointments. Right. Who was going to be a police officer? Who was going to be a police captain? And the way in which he does that is he makes the police really part of the party machinery and the financing of his political machine.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: This isn’t Matsell trying to professionalize the cops. It’s about pimping them, Wood starts offering up police jobs in exchange for money or political favors. If you want to be a police officer first, got to make a donation.

Jeff Broxmeyer: So $25, $50, you got to pony that up to the party treasury, right? The Tammany Hall, Treasury. And then that’s going to go towards the mayor’s reelection. And he raised a lot of money that way.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And then to show off his power to the public, Wood has this new and improved uniform police march up and down Broadway in the city’s first police parade. Many of these cops walking past New Yorkers in full regalia were chosen because they could afford to pay to become a cop because they had the right connections. Which means that the NYPD is now even more bound to the mayor than to the people, especially Black people. He sees a way to use these loyal cops to take his personal wealth to a whole new level. And he realizes it’s also going to deal a serious blow to Black political power.

Leslie Alexander: The community like Seneca Village, it sent a very clear and distinctive message to white New Yorkers and to the society at large, saying, actually, this is a nation that exists because of our blood and sweat and tears and we intend to stay here.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Seneca Village is a free Black settlement founded in the 1820s. One of the few Black enclaves where Black New Yorkers are able to own property. It’s a thriving community full of homes, schools and gardens. It becomes a symbol of power and resilience in a city that has never really been safe for Black people. It’s also a symbol of Black political power because in order to vote, Black people are required to own a certain amount of property. So the few Black people that could vote in New York lived in Seneca Village. And it’s one of the few places in the city that could happen. But this bastion for Black safety is at risk because Wood starts to eye their land. Wood makes a plan for a big part of town that will increase the value of property he already owns this new park, Central Park will go straight through the middle of Manhattan in straight through Seneca Village. So starting in 1855, he seizes hundreds and hundreds of acres of land north of 42nd Street through eminent domain, the more than 200 residents of Seneca Village are ordered to evacuate their homes.

Leslie Alexander: There is a group of residents of Central Park in 1857 who refused to vacate their homes and insist that they have a right to remain in their community.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But Wood has an army of white cops that answer solely to him. So you can probably guess what he does next.

Leslie Alexander: He calls forth the police and the police are unleashed on the remaining Seneca villagers and they are subjected to extreme brutality and violence and are removed from their homes.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: A report from the New York Times describes the scene this way.

Leslie Alexander: The supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman’s bludgeon.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Seneca Village is destroyed, so thoroughly destroyed that it nearly vanishes from public memory.

Leslie Alexander: And if you were to enter Central Park right around 87th, 88th Street, there’s a little playground there. And right adjacent to the playground. If you walk there, you will be walking over the graves of Seneca villagers.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: It was a win win for Mayor Fernando Wood, the new Central Park Board, as some of Wood’s real estate holdings. And once the park is built, he makes a killing. Plus, hundreds of Black folks lose their property and the voting rights that come with it. Like a lot of politicians, when Wood makes decisions about what the police should do or how they should do it, he’s not thinking about what’s going to make most New Yorkers safer or what’s good for the city. He’s thinking about winning the next election. And at this point, what has proven that the NYPD can be an extremely effective way to line his pockets and build political power. It almost feels like nobody can stop him. But there is one group who definitely wants to try. They don’t care about Seneca Village or how the police are treating working class New Yorkers. For them, it’s about party politics. Fernando Wood got to be mayor because he had help from Tammany Hall. New York City’s Democratic machine. And that meant Republicans didn’t have much power over the most populated city in the state. So up at the statehouse in Albany, they start asking, what’s the best way for us to weaken Tammany Hall? And then a light bulb goes off.

Jeff Broxmeyer: They say, Well, let’s do something about Fernando Wood’s control over the police, because they rightly identified it as the central pillar of his political machine.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So they pass an act that essentially says New York City is too corrupt to police itself. So we’re abolishing the New York City Police Department. And then those same Republican politicians create another equally corrupt and racist police force called the Metropolitan Police.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Mayor Wood is openly defiant of that. He is very, very clear that he’s going to resist this with all of the means that he has.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Wood challenges the order to shut down his police. And he sends the word out to all of his cops that he’s not backing down. He says, my police are still the real police.

Jeff Broxmeyer: And he directs all city officials not to obey metropolitan police commissioners and their orders. And that’s the way in which you get this very strange situation where there are two police forces.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So in June of 1857, the two warring New York City police departments, the state’s new Metropolitan Police and Fernando Wood’s old supposedly abolished municipal police. These two police forces hate each other not just because one works for mayor Wood and the other is run by folks up in Albany. Wood’s municipal police are also largely Irish-Catholic immigrants, a demographic shift from just a few years prior. And the Metropolitan Police are mostly white Protestants who don’t think Irish Catholics and other immigrants are real Americans. Imagine being arrested by the state metropolitans one night and then the next night. Wood’s municipal show up and set you free? Or even wilder? Imagine police from these competing forces fighting over who gets to arrest you, and then they just arrest each other. It was chaos. Republicans up in Albany realized that Wood is not giving up. They’re going to have to find someone brave enough or stupid enough to take him and his men down. [music plays] When I was a kid, my family told me this crazy ass story that back in 1964, my father, Makaza Kumanyika, marched up the steps of City Hall with two other activists and announced that they were placing the mayor under arrest for his shady and racist use to city funds. This was just four months after he had handcuffed himself inside the police station. NYPD officers intervened and quickly grabbed all three of them, threw them in front of a judge and even carted my dad off to the psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital. For a long time, I felt like having a family member that tried to arrest a mayor was a one person club. Until I met this guy.

Gregg Simmons: This. You want to see this old man—

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Okay, let me get my glasses on. This is Greg Simmons. That’s. That’s the original?

Gregg Simmons: This is a second edition.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Oh my God. Greg Simmons is the costume supervisor for a long running police procedural show. And he’s showing me a 19th century copy of the memoir written by his great great grandfather, a guy named George Washington Walling. And what’s wild is that George Walling winds up right smack in the middle of Mayor Wood’s battle with the state.

Gregg Simmons: I was quail hunting in New Jersey when a friend accosted me—

Chenjerai Kumanyika: In his memoir, Walling says that he didn’t become a cop because he wanted to catch criminals or keep anybody safe. He says a friend just randomly asked him and in his words, I decided to carry a club until something better turned up. And just like that, Walling becomes one of the first officers in George Matsell’s NYPD. Kind of on a whim. And get this, his boss is none other than Captain Tobias Boudinot. And for someone who really didn’t even want to be a cop. Somehow George Walling always winds up where the action is. He was on duty in the theater during the act to place riots. He was the cop who led the first strong armed squads that went out with clubs and beat up random folks. So when the state decides to abolish its police force Wood basically tells his men, I need to know how many of y’all are with me. If you’re not, this is your chance to leave before shit gives real. Walling has a choice to make.

Jeff Broxmeyer: All of these police officers in the force have to decide who they’re going to go with. Right? Are they going to throw their hat in with Wood? Are they going to throw their head in with the metropolitans?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And Walling decides to break from Wood.

Jeff Broxmeyer: And about 800 police and 15 captains, which is the majority of the force. Right. They go with Wood and only 300 policemen and seven captains go with the metropolitans.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: With 800 police and the state firmly against him. Wood starts becoming even more crazed and paranoid. [clip of Macbeth] He goes full on Macbeth. He wants to prove that he can be strong enough and cold enough to vanquish any threat to his power, which starts egging on his political supporters. And they start hunting down any police that aren’t loyal to him. One even stabs a metropolitan officer in the stomach with an icepick until finally everything comes to a head. Now that the state is abolished, this force Wood won’t let any Albany backed officials work for him. When a state appointed hire shows up at City Hall, would has his police throw him out on the street. And since Wood knows there’s going to be backlash. He barricades himself in his office and puts 300 of his police around the perimeter to protect him. The guy who was tossed out on his ass is infuriated. He gets up, dusts himself off and stomps off to get some backup and a warrant for Wood’s arrest. It’s new. And George Washington Walling gets called into Metropolitan Police headquarters.

Gregg Simmons: He expected a little something, but not the. Not the storm that he walked into.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Walling was given the job to arrest the mayor. And according to his great great grandson, they ask him, how many men do you need? And according to his memoir, he says.

Gregg Simmons: I’ll do it. I can do it by myself. Sure. I mean, that’s some brass balls. It’s like damn. Thick headedness runs in the family. [laughs]

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Apparently without any backup. Walling marches through Lower Manhattan to City Hall, he manages to make it past the hundreds of municipal police officers without saying what he’s about to do. And he burst into Woods office and tells them, Hey, Mayor, you’re under arrest at first. Wood just brushes them off? He tells them, Bro, if you ain’t working for me, you ain’t even a real police officer. But then he orders his police to toss Walling out of city hall.

Gregg Simmons: He’s basically thrown out on his ear by former coworkers. And literally, like, four guys chucked him out on the street.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: So Walling leaves to get some backup. Word gets out about the mayor’s arrest warrant. And Wood loyalists are starting to gather around city hall. A writer at the time refers to the crowd as a miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soapbox Irishmen and plug uglies operating in a guerrilla capacity. By 3:30 in the afternoon, a group of 50 metropolitans arrive at City Hall to deliver the warrant that George Walling hadn’t been able to deliver alone. They come marching up toward the rear gate and Wood’s police are there to meet him. At that point, municipal police chief George Matsell says, wait a minute, let’s calm down. We are officers of public safety. We have to show people that we can resolve conflict in a way that respects the law, human rights and dignity. Nah actually, I’m just joking. They beat the shit out of each other. As soon as the two groups of police see each other, someone in the pro Wood crowd shouts. Pitch in to the sons of bitches. And right there on the steps of City Hall, the New York police goes to war with itself.

Jeff Broxmeyer: There is a knockdown, drag out street brawl, of the kind which is common in the working class neighborhoods. But it happens on the steps of City Hall and you have fists flying and clubs flying.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The battle lasts for almost half an hour. 12 people are seriously wounded and one is permanently disabled. The headline in The New York Times the next day reads Civil War. The Times describes the riot this way. The scene was a terrible one. Blows upon, naked heads fell thick and fast, and men rolled helpless down the steps to be leaped upon and beaten until life seemed extinct. And just like the Astor Place riots, the fighting only ends when a regiment of the state militia gets called in and disperses the crowd. But later that day, Wood finally allows himself to be arrested. His bail is set at $50,000. Almost $2 million today. Wood spend the night in city hall with the police official keeping an eye on them and from his office. Wood issues A statement. He basically says, look, everybody’s blaming me, but I’m the one protecting our city and I’m still not stepping down.

Jeff Broxmeyer: Wood’s strategy is pretty much the same throughout the entire police riot. These are nefarious political forces that have usurped the traditional local governance of New York and that he’s expecting the public to rally behind him.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The next day Wood pays his bail and he’s released. Fernando Wood had lost control and even the support of his personal army. And he lost his next election. When I think of Fernando Wood and how he wrapped the police around him to consolidate his power at any cost, I can’t help but think of more recent politicians who pander to police and stoke people’s fears about crime for votes.

[clip of Eric Adams]: When you have is this that makes you feel as though there’s no law and order. Let me tell you, you have and law and order, mayor, and you have a law and order commissioner. And this is going to continue to be the safest big city in America.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Eric Adams says it’s about safety. But when I think about what would make the city safer for my daughter, it’s about access to health care and education. Getting to the roots of why people turn to violence to solve problems. And making New York a place where my daughter can run, play and express herself without worrying about the police. Because here’s the thing. Adam’s vision of law and order might be good for his election campaign. But I think it also makes the city more dangerous for everyone, including the police, who get dispatched as the solution to everything and who one like him are on the front lines. And those front lines are increasingly everywhere. From the subway to sidewalk food stands to protests on university lawns. And that definition of safety is how I ended up handcuffed at one Police Plaza, surrounded by the full force of the NYPD. That’s next time on Empire City. Empire City is a production of Wondery and Crooked Media. I’m your host and executive producer Chenjerai Kumanyika. For Crooked Media. Our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Duran. Our senior story editor is Diane Hodson. Our producer is Sam Riddell. Boen Wang and Sydney Rapp are our associate producers. Sound design, mixing and original score by Axel Kacoutié. Our historical consultant and fact, checker is History Studios. Our voice actor is Demetrius Noble for Wondery. Our senior producer is Mandi Gorenstein. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Myrriah Gossett. The executive producer of PushBlack is Lilly Workneh. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Tommy Vietor and Diane Hodson. Executive producers at Wondery are N’Jeri Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Lewy, and Jen Sargent.