geekyIn 1895 when he was 36 years old, Theodore Roosevelt became President of the Board of New York City Police Commissioners, a post he held for two years. During his time in this post, Roosevelt set about trying to institute a series of radical reforms of the police department. At the time, the New York City police force had a reputation for beings one of the most corrupt in America. An NYPD historical record describes Roosevelt as "an iron-willed leader of unimpeachable honesty, who brought a reforming zeal to the New York City Police Commission in 1895."
Ever the reformer, Roosevelt and his fellow commissioners established new disciplinary rules for police officers. They created a bicycle squad to enforce New York's traffic laws and standardized regulations for the use of pistols by officers. Roosevelt chose the Colt New Police Revolver (a .32 Colt Caliber) as the first standard issue pistol for the NYPD. Roosevelt also implemented regular inspections of firearms and annual physical exams for officers. He appointed 1,600 recruits based on their physical and mental qualifications and not on political affiliation. He also established meritorious service medals. During his tenure, a Municipal Lodging House was established by the Board of Charities, and Roosevelt required officers to register with the Board. He also had telephones installed in station houses.
In 1894, Roosevelt met Jacob Riis, a journalist with the Evening Sun newspaper who had a reputation as a social critic. Riis attempted in his articles to open the eyes of New York's rich to the terrible conditions of the city's millions of poor immigrants. He wrote books on the subject, his most famous being "How the Other Half Lives". Riis would often accompany Roosevelt when the latter would walk a police beat. In Riis' autobiography, he described the effect of his book on the future president. Riis wrote:
When Roosevelt read [my] book, ...no one ever helped as he did. For two years we were brothers in New York City's crime-ridden Mulberry Street. When he left I had seen its golden age.... There is very little ease where Theodore Roosevelt leads, as we all of us found out. The lawbreaker found it out who predicted scornfully that he would “knuckle down to politics the way they all did,” and lived to respect him, though he swore at him, as the one of them all who was stronger than pull.... that was what made the age golden, that for the first time a moral purpose came into the street. In the light of it everything was transformed.
In his own autobiography, Roosevelt wrote:
The midnight trips that Riis and I took enabled me to see what the Police Department was doing, and also gave me personal insight into some of the problems of city life. It is one thing to listen in perfunctory fashion to tales of overcrowded tenements, and it is quite another actually to see what that overcrowding means, some hot summer night, by even a single inspection during the hours of darkness. There was a very hot spell one midsummer while I was Police Commissioner, and most of each night I spent walking through the tenement-house districts and visiting police stations to see what was being done. It was a tragic week. We did everything possible to alleviate the suffering. Much of it was heartbreaking, especially the gasping misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers. Every resource of the Health Department, of the Police Department, and even the Fire Department (which flooded the hot streets) was taxed in the effort to render service.
(More of Roosevelt's experiences about his time as police commissioner can be found, in his own words, at this link.)
Roosevelt made a habit of walking officers' beats late at night and early in the morning to make sure they were on duty. Years later when Roosevelt was serving as Governor of New York State, before becoming Vice President in March 1901, Roosevelt signed an act replacing the Police Commissioners with a single Police Commissioner.
A recent look at this period of TR's life can be found in Richard Zacks' 2012 book Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, which those of you who live in or have lived in that great metropolis will find especially interesting.