The Restless Sleep:

100 Years Ago in New York

Murder was worse! (If I did my math correctly.)

One hundred years ago, in 1906, 255 people were murdered in New York City. The population of New York was 3,437,202 in 1900, and it was 8,085,742 as of 2003. At the 1906 murder rate, 600 people would be murdered this year. Murder has gone up so far this year, but the total last year was 540 -- even with the current increase it should still come out under 600.

Interesting, no? In the good old days, we were not so good. 1913 was particularly bad. 326 people were murdered that year. What was going on in New York that year??

Based on what I was able to find out about clearance rates for the time period, I estimate that 84 of the murders in 1906 and 136 of the murders from 1913 were never solved.

(The picture is Orchard Street in 1906.)

NYPD Annual Report Facts

When I was first researching this book I spent a few weeks down at the Municipal Library reading NYPD's Annual Reports going all the way back. I wrote down various facts that stood out for me, like this, which I did not put in the book:

From the 1887 Annual Report: 71 fetuses found, 82 dead infants found, 34 still-born children found, 246 people drowned, 11 human bones found.

I mean good God. You can see how that might stand out. I'm not sure what is meant by "found." On the street? I guess it could mean anywhere. Anyway, harsh times. And I'm guessing there were a lot more drownings back then because people actually swam in the Hudson and East Rivers.

Animal Rescue

I'm an animal lover, so these pictures of the police rescuing a horse are among the photographs I kept from the Photo Unit at One Police Plaza. At least, I hope they are rescuing a horse. They could just be pulling up a dead horse, I suppose.

Before

After

Catherine the Great's Pistols

The history of the Property Clerk Division of the NYPD isn’t pretty. I go into this in my book. They have their act together now though, and I found one story about them that I just loved.

In 1982, Property Clerk personnel took a second look at two guns that were seized in a raid in the South Bronx in 1971. The weapons weren’t like anything they’d recovered before, so they took them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see what they could find out about them. The Museum had seen the pistols before, in 1933, when they were lent to the Museum and displayed that summer. They turned out to be handmade flintlock hunting pistols that were made for Empress Catherine the Great in 1786.

The police department didn’t smelt them, they didn’t throw them into the Hudson River, and they didn’t sell them at a police auction (typical fates for property in their possession). They lent them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art who put them on display for the second time in fifty years. The New York Times ran a piece about the pistols which were then recognized by the family of John M. Schiff, who were able to document their purchase in 1939, and their theft in 1970. In 1986, John Schiff donated the pistols to the Museum in memory of his wife, Edith Baker Schiff. After strongly expressing the difficulty in placing a value on items of such artistic and historic importance, Peter Finer, an English arms and armour dealer, estimated that the ivory, gold, steel and brass pistols were worth a million dollars.

Is This Ray Kelly?

This is one of the uncaptioned photographs I got from the Photography Unit at One Police Plaza. I had it up on the wall at the launch party and one of the detectives insisted it was Ray Kelly, New York's Police Commissioner. I can't tell for sure. Could be. What do you think? Here he is now:

Good lord, does this man have an impressive resume. You can read it here. I have a lot to say about murder in New York City, and the reality of crime stats, and the ambivalent support given the Cold Case Squad, (and I will) but my sense is that between Bloomberg and Kelly, they're doing a better job protecting New Yorkers (and hence the rest of America) from terrorists than the federal goverment is protecting the entire country from the same threat. I'm glad they're on the front lines. (Sorry federal government. It's not your fault. You are hampered by your leadership.)

The Property Clerk Division

As an amateur historian, I was fascinated with the NYPD's Property Clerk Division. I wanted to see what they had saved. What I learned was: not much. Before I go any further, as far as I can tell they have their act together now, which I detail in the book. They got serious about storage when they starting using DNA forensically.

Prior to that, things were thrown out or lost in various ways. For almost 100 years, weapons were taken out to sea and sunk. In 1933, 3,816 guns, knives and swords were dumped into the sea at the Scotland Lightship station off the New Jersey coast. A couple of years later 1,575 phony token slugs were dumped into the Long Island Sound at Eaton’s Neck in Huntington Bay, along with 500 slot machines and 4,000 weapons. Two years after that the Property Clerk poured 10,000 gallons of wine, whiskey and beer into the Lower Bay. As of the 70’s they were still throwing what they could into the various bodies of water in New York, but in the 80’s they began melting handguns down in a foundry in Pennsylvania. Rifles and knives were put in a metal shredder.

One day, while going through photographs at One Police Plaza, I found a shot of them destroying the slot machines they would shortly throw into the water at Eaton's Neck (not far from where I grew up, coincidentally).

Mugshots

The NYPD says this is their first mugshot. I found an 1857 New York Times article announcing a Daguerreotype Gallery of Criminals at the Detective Police Office, though. I wish the police department were hoarders. What a treasure that collection would have been if only they had saved it.

Old Police Technology

This picture of a cop using an old police radio is from the group I got from One Police Plaza, and is undated. Now they can dial into various databases from their cars, and communicate to each other online (although, like people everywhere online, what they're frequently doing is bickering).

I wonder where he is. It looks like he's under a bridge somewhere, but it also looks like a bomb just went off or something. The photograph didn't have a caption, alas.

Old Mug Shots - Part 1

I'm a little slow. I always wondered why guys in mug shots looked somewhat deformed. "That's because someone just beat the crap out of them," a Cold Case Squad commander explained. Oh. "We don't do that anymore," he added.

The First Cold Case Squad

The first Cold Case Squad was in Florida. In 1979, the Metro-Dade Police Department (now the Miami-Dade Police Department) created the first cold case squad in the United States. They called it the Pending Case Squad. There were some problems, and the squad was disbanded. They tried again in 1983 and solved a 1982 murder of a little girl. By 1984 they decided to formally give it another go, this time calling it the Cold Case Squad.

http://tinyurl.com/cfjuw