Police misconduct, as is well known, was a major concern of the municipal reformers whose battle with the political machine was the centerpiece of urban Progressivism in the United States. In New York, the so-called "system" of police corruption conjured up by reformers was absolutely indispensable to the not inconsiderable success they had in weakening the Tammany machine between 1900 and World War I. This oft-told tale remains standard among historians regardless of whether they are sympathetic to the reformers or the machine.

The reformers construction of the police problem had enormous consequences for the subsequent shape of law enforcement in New York and other cities. In this paper I will argue that there were alternative reform constructions of the police problem, that the controversy between these approaches generated an explicit politics of criminal law reform in Progressive New York, and that its resolution - rather than the problem itself - shaped the future of law enforcement.

The paper will concentrate primarily on the career of State Supreme Court Justice - and from 1910-1913, Mayor - William Jay Gaynor. Foe of machine politicians, single-taxer, opponent of the judicial philosophy of substantive due process and friend of organized labor, Gaynor was best known as the most articulate critic of both the police and many reformers' ideal of aggressive law enforcement. His conception of criminal law enforcement was responsive, court-centered and severely circumscribed. Though like fellow reformers he was highly critical of police corruption and protection of vice, he was much more critical of police brutality and invasion of constitutional rights. Rather than wanting the police to enforce the law more vigorously and in accord with his private moral beliefs, he wanted their authority to be more subject to democratic and constitutional control. Widely publicized opinions on these matters made Gaynor an antagonist of the police, and also of well-known citizens who, in pursuit of a reforms in law enforcement, engaged themselves in highly aggressive, and to Gaynor unconstitutional, private enforcement of the criminal law.

The paper will first discuss the main problems with policing in New York, primarily violence and the inability of the force to effectively implement any sort of policy. It will then characterize critics of the police as being largely concerned with either one or the other fault, and briefly describe the private law enforcement activities of the most prominent reformers, who were mainly concerned with the later weakness. The bulk of the paper will then focus on Gaynor, both as a judicial critic (and obstructor) of these activists and as a politician, whose opposition to the violence and unconstitutionality of both reformers and policemen were a major factor in his election as Mayor of New York City in 1909. I will discuss Gaynor's own approach to police reform as Mayor, which was much more concerned with violence and strikebreaking than with implementing anti-vice policy, and explain how he was undone not by the machine or the police, but by other reformers, whose approach to law enforcement he had consistently rejected. I will suggest at the end that Gaynor's demise (in the crucible of the Becker-Rosenthal police murder scandal) resulted in the triumph of a newly aggressive, policy-oriented and politically-minded practice of law enforcement in the city that was an equally violent but far more efficient and dangerous "system" than anything the machine had devised before reform, and that created the need, as Gaynor had warned it would, for a new movement for due process protections in criminal law.