Introducing Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD

September 9, 2024·45 min·3 clips

Host Chinjerai Kumaneka watched surveillance footage of his father — shot by the NYPD's counterintelligence unit — for the first time.

The episode opens with host Chinjerai Kumaneka describing watching a 1964 surveillance video of his late father Mokasa Kumaneka for the first time — footage taken by an NYPD counterintelligence unit while his father participated in a peaceful protest against police brutality. Nine days after the protest, the NYPD commissioner named Mokasa Kumaneka as a racial extremist alongside Malcolm X before 6,000 officers. The episode uses this personal disclosure to frame the series as an inquiry into the systemic origins of that kind of policing. Educator Mariam Kaba leads the host on a walking tour of Lower Manhattan, starting at the site of New York's earliest colonial law enforcement — Dutch constables with green lanterns and hand rattles. By the early 1800s, constables and watchmen replaced them, operating on a reactive, fee-based system. Historian Wilbur Miller explains that constables like Tobias Boudinot were paid per arrest and had no assigned beat, creating a financial incentive for them to perpetuate crime rather than prevent it. Boudinot was in debt, his furniture repossessed, his bankruptcy publicized in the papers. When Virginia's governor asked New York to return 17 enslaved people who had escaped by boat, the New York governor issued Boudinot a blanket writ authorizing him to arrest any Black person he suspected of being a fugitive — effectively a license for kidnapping. The episode illustrates the system through the story of Miss Brown, a free Black woman lured out of her home by a fake uncle and snatched by Boudinot. She was taken before Judge Richard Riker — whose family would later own the land Rikers Island was built on — who routinely sided with slave owners, and sent south into slavery. Her only surviving record is a letter pleading for free papers. Boudinot's network of constables made a business of kidnapping Black New Yorkers, enabled by a legal system that accepted a slave owner's claim as sufficient evidence. Abolitionist David Ruggles, the man who helped Frederick Douglass when he first arrived in New York, founded the New York Committee of Vigilance. He wrote in Black newspapers, published his own periodical called The Mirror of Liberty, went on patrol at the docks to intercept kidnappers, personally freed three people being held in a Brooklyn home, and coined the term the Kidnapping Club for Boudinot and his associates. Black women in the committee organized a penny-a-week fundraising scheme that raised significant money for legal defense. The Committee advocated for jury trials rather than single-judge decisions in cases of alleged fugitives. The episode recounts the rescue of William Dixon, a Black singer arrested by the Kidnapping Club on pretextual charges. A crowd of Black New Yorkers stormed the courthouse during his hearing; a woman named Keziah Manning grabbed a judge by the neck and kicked him; someone smashed a whitewash brush over a constable's head; Boudinot's gun misfired. Dixon escaped and later went into hiding. The episode closes at Central Park, built on the land of Seneca Village, an early free Black settlement. The host's four-year-old daughter plays in the sandbox, and when asked what police do, she says they keep people safe. The host notes that is what the police say, but not his experience — and the series will trace how the department became what it is today.

As heard by us

A history-minded episode that links policing's beginnings to the present.

Empire City treats policing as a history that has to be traced back to its roots. It moves from slavery's beginnings into the machinery that let a constable like Boudinot profit from kidnapping free Black people.

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Why you'd press play

Start here if you want the untold origin story of the NYPD and the hidden history behind modern policing.

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