Police_Riots_Of_1857

Police Riots Of 1857 Political corruption in the 1800’s destroyed the City of New York. The combination of feuding police forces and increasing gang activity in the mid 1800’s made New York a very unsafe place. In 1857, the feuds and rivalries of the police had culminated and turned New York City into a war zone. New York State created its own police district in 1857, which compromised the city’s force. New York then had two police departments, of equal strength and each regarding the other as an outlaw force. One was Fernando Wood’s Municipal Police and the other was the state’s Metropolitan Police, headed by Frederick Talmadge. The decent people of the city began to worry, knowing that the day would soon come when they would be left alone on corrupted streets to fend for themselves. The feud raged just as the people had thought. Members of the two forces were no longer concerned with the public’s safety and became entirely tied up in their vendettas against each other. Criminals were thriving on the feud. Respectable people were now being held up at gunpoint in broad daylight. The officers would literally fight over a police, city, wood, mayor, york, metropolitan, force, 1857, new, municipal, hall, two, one, corruption, bowery, walling, talmadge, people, municipals, metropolitans, marched, history, gangs, forces, feud, fernando, each, captain, boys, arrest, years, wood’s, while, war, turned