In 1913, the Bureau of Municipal Research took on a nagging question: could New York City’s 10,000 police officers live on their salaries?

And if they couldn’t, how were they and their families (average size: 3.4 people) surviving?

The answer to the first question was “no.”

There were various answers to the second question, but the most obvious (dishonesty) was carefully skirted by the Bureau.

In those days, first-year cops earned $800 a year — in today’s dollars $19,186. That’s way below what rookies start at now: $44,744, representing top base pay, longevity and holiday pay, uniform allowance and average night shift differential, but not overtime, according to the NYPD.

 http://www.nypdrecruit.com/benefits-salary/overview

But an average police family’s annual expenses in 1913, the study found,  totaled $848.71, not counting required expenditures like uniforms, equipment and frequent fines, which added another $237.41.

So officers had to spend $1,086.12 on earnings of $800.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Imrie_McKay

How did they do it? And –equally mysterious — why?

Knowing what we know now about corruption in the NYPD through the 1970 “Serpico”‘ scandal broken by The New York Times, the Bureau’s explanations seem less than fully satisfying. But the calculations — based on interviews with 100 patrolmen and their families who agreed to share details of their household budgets — are quite illuminating.

The Bureau based its cost of living on studies from 1905 to 1907, so the financial pressures on the cops were even greater than the figures suggested, the study noted. On the other hand, rents were far less than today — the average was $14.39 a year –or $349 in today’s dollars. On the third hand, the apartments were often hovels, with shared bathrooms and outhouses in the back yard.

More than one out of three lived in apartments without bath. Indeed baths weren’t usually found in apartments renting for less than $15 a year.

So how did they survive?

By living off savings, taking charity, borrowing (including pawning meager possessions), buying on installment, and living on credit. Half the families bought food day-to-day, in pitiful and affordable quantities.

Clothing, many wives said was the first thing to go. “We cut down on clothing, never on food,” one explained, “–we can stay in if we have no clothing but good adequate food is a necessity.”

Amusement was usually out of the question. On rare occasions they went to the movies. Usually for entertainment they took walks.

Why anyone would become a patrolman under such circumstances was difficult for the officers themselves to explain –particularly since other jobs from taxi driver to horse shoer, grocery clerk, brick layer, florist and mechanic all paid considerably more.

They cited job security and the pension, annual raises until the sixth year when the salary reached a respectable $1,400 a year — $33,576 in today’s dollars. (Still far short of the top pay now of $90,829.)

Nobody mentioned what you could take home in booty or bribes.

The Bureau didn’t bring it up either but recommended raising the salaries to $1,000 for the first year, $1,100 for the second year, $1,200 for the third year, and $1,400 thereafter. The paychecks, it said, should be issued twice-a-month instead of monthly, so the families could rely less on credit, the city should supply the uniforms and equipment, or at last advance money for their purchase, provide free hospital care and consider food commissaries for the officers’s meals.

Reforms did follow, slowly, in years to come.

In the bible of civic reform, the Citizens Union of the City of New York begat the Bureau of City Betterment. The Bureau of City Betterment begat the Bureau of Municipal Research. And the Bureau of Municipal Research begat the Institute of Public Administration, Luther Gulick and a new science of efficient, effective, honest, professional and responsive government.

This is a story of how the begats began.

In the beginning was the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, or AICP, founded in 1843. In 1897, AICP was instrumental in the formation of  the Citizens Union of the City of New York, which is still around, one of the oldest and most venerated of the goo-goos, or good-government organizations. The founding chairman of the Citizens Union was a wealthy civic crusader, Robert Fulton Cutting, descendant of that Robert Fulton.

We highlighted Cutting in an earlier post. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/10/the-father-of-the-research-bureau/

In 1905, Cutting and other reformers, notably Henry Bruere and William H. Allen, organized a research wing of the Citizens Union, known as the Bureau of City Betterment. (It would morph into the influential Bureau of Municipal Research two years later.)

The Bureau of City Betterment burst on the scene in 1906 with an incendiary report blandly entitled “How Manhattan in Governed.”  A forerunner of the studies that the Bureau of Municipal Research would become legendary for undertaking across the nation, it fearlessly exposed the wasteful and corrupt administration of the Tammany-controlled Borough President, John F. Ahearn. The impact was devastating.

The report revealed that in 1904 and 1905, Ahearn’s office spent the equivalent of nearly $26 million today on non-bid contracts, work that often went to cronies. And that was only the beginning.

It should be noted that the united City of New York was a mere child at the time, the five counties joining together only in 1898.  As part of the consolidation, the borough presidents sat on the Board of Public Improvements with great sway over highways and streets, rail tracks, sewers, lighting, bridges, public buildings, and purchasing — a patronage-rich portfolio, to be sure.

Ahearn, born in 1853, won election to the New York State Assembly before he was 30, and later served in the state Senate where he started off opposed to the Democratic machine known as Tammany Hall but soon became a reliable ally, gaining Tammany’s endorsement for the borough presidency in 1903. The job at the time paid the equivalent today of about $155,000.

He staffed the office with party hacks, including his chief aide and commissioner of public works, one William Dalton, a butcher and carpenter by trade. When once asked by an Assembly investigating committee to state his engineering credentials, Dalton replied, “I owned an engine for some years.”

Not surprisingly, then, the Bureau of City Betterment found egregious abuses in the purchase of asphalt for the streets, inflated payrolls, and slipshod work. What were then called “incumbrances” — private construction on public thoroughfares — had also run amok, with Ahearn’s office turning a blind eye to the lack of permits. Abandoned trolley tracks that were supposed to be torn up and paved over were allowed to fester, the railway companies pocketing the savings.

It was all laid out, chapter and verse, in the group’s report.

The newspapers jumped on it, giving credit to the scrappy young reform bureau.

So did the city’s two crusading Commissioners of Accounts — particularly John Purroy Mitchel (consistently misspelled by the papers as “Mitchell) who would ride his reformist zeal into City Hall in 1914 as the 34-year-old “Boy Mayor” of New York. Manhattan District Attorney William T. Jerome (a first cousin, once removed, of Winston Churchill) opened a criminal investigation.

Ahearn was not accused of personal enrichment, but rather wasting millions of city dollars on dubious contracts with Tammany sidekicks that left  streets of Manhattan a rutted moonscape. Soon the matter was handed off to Republican Gov. Charles Evans Hughes who removed Ahearn in 1907.

But the story wasn’t over.

Ahearn ran again for Borough President — and won again. By the time the New York Court of Appeals ruled his election illegal, upholding Hughes’s decision, Ahearn had no recourse but to retire. Hughes went on to join the United States Supreme Court and run a losing race against Woodrow Wilson for President.

And The Bureau of City Betterment could justify its name.

Nearly 90 years ago, the National Institute of Public Administration (as it was then known, later just the IPA) studied the police departments of St. Louis, Kansas City and St. Joseph as part of a survey of crime in Missouri. Ferguson, then an obscure rail stop of several thousand mostly white inhabitants just outside St. Louis, rated no mention.

But parts of the study, led by the IPA’s redoubtable police expert Bruce Smith, shed an interesting light on historic attitudes and issues now that Ferguson has crystallized a national debate over race and policing in 21st century America.

Back in 1925, when the survey was undertaken, St. Louis had the highest homicide rate among major US cities — 16.3 per 100,000 people, or almost three times the rate of New York and double the national urban average. (At the time, St. Louis ranked sixth in population.)

More than Kansas City and St. Joseph, Smith wrote, St. Louis “is burdened with that heterogeneity of population to which is commonly ascribed the high crime rate of American cities.”  (Was that another way of saying it had the misfortune of being a melting pot and thus supposedly more susceptible to lawbreaking?)

But population patterns were shifting, Smith noted: “All three are notable for the fact that the native stock is increasing in numbers more rapidly than the foreign stock and negroes.”

That said, policing was in a sorry state in St. Louis and the other cities, Smith concluded. The standards for becoming, and remaining, an officer of the law were abysmal. Men were fired for “abuse of authority” or “conduct unbecoming an officer” only to be quickly rehired, usually on the strength of political connections. Recruits were often middle-aged or old — ne’er do wells who had washed out of other jobs. Chiefs similarly owed their positions to politics, and were swept out with each change of administration. And all policing was a state-controlled function, shredding notions of local accountability.

The Missouri Association for Criminal Justice, which commissioned the study, endorsed its findings.

In its own report on the report, Arthur V. Lashly, the association’s operating director, noted grimly that killers in St. Louis stood only a 1-in-6 chance of being punished. Burglars enjoyed even better odds: 24 out of 25 went free.

St. Louis alone among the major Missouri cities — at the legislature’s behest –still relied on the discredited Bertillion method of criminal identification: taking facial characteristics as telltale signs of outlaw classification and propensities. Elsewhere, police departments were turning to the modern science of fingerprints.

Most interesting — now that a white Ferguson officer, Darren Wilson, has escaped indictment for the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown — is Lashly’s lament for the demise of Missouri’s grand jury system. It was “rapidly falling into disuse,” he wrote, “but the extent of its abandonment as the primary agency of prosecution has not been suspected.”

As he noted, a 1900 amendment to the Missouri state constitution gave prosecutors the right to bypass the grand jury and file what are known as “informations” instead.

This allowed prosecutors not only to charge people without the protective step of presenting evidence to a grand jury “or refuse to begin them, but to stop prosecutions, even when begun by the Grand Jury, without giving any reasons for the action. and whether the Court consents to it or not.”

That wasn’t the issue in Ferguson this time — the prosecutor did submit evidence to a grand jury. But as more than a few critics saw it, the case seemed handled in a way calculated to insure that Officer Wilson walked free.

Much has been said in our time about government — little of it laudatory. In his first inaugural on Jan. 20, 1981, President Reagan famously declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That set the tone for today’s Tea Partyers who regularly castigate government, and government regulators, as somehow evil,  the enemy of democracy.

But Luther Gulick had a different take that he aired nearly 80 years ago in the foreword to a comprehensive study, presented by his renowned Institute of Public Administration, of a landmark issue of his age. The title: “After Repeal.” The widely hailed end of  national Prohibition created nightmarish regulatory problems (as did Prohibition itself). What different kinds of alcohol could be sold? Where? When? And by whom?

Seven of the then 48 states decided to continue to prohibit alcohol, although five of these exempted beer as  non-intoxicating; 12 states okayed liquor but only in homes; the remaining 29 and the District of Columbia approved the sale of beer, wine and spirits by the glass. But some of these forbade the sale of drinks without food, or issued other restrictions.

This is the thicket that Gulick and his two co-authors, Leonard V. Harrison and Elizabeth Laine, braved with their two-year study issued in 1936. They were not concerned with alcohol per se. What the regulations should be were matters of social policy, up to the voters and their representatives.

Ahh, but the administration of alcohol control — that was an issue “particularly rich in lessons for the administrator,” Gulick wrote.

And then he said this — perhaps the most cogent argument for government we have ever read:

What’s the difference between tyranny and democracy?

The answer was embodied in a 1936 study of London, Paris, and Berlin that the New York City Charter Revision Commission asked the Institute of Public Administration to undertake. The aim was to look at those cities and see what ideas of governance New York might adopt.

The German capital was a special case with limited applicability here, it quickly became clear. As the report noted with masterful understatement:

“The National-Socialist revolution of 1933 has made changes of great importance in local government in Germany and at the same time has profoundly affected the government of Berlin…”

So take a look at these two charts from Luther Gulick’s files. First, Berlin’s government under Der Fuehrer in 1936.

Next, a diagram of New York City’s government under Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia in 1939.

Got it?