Police Courts

Origins

In 1798, not long after independence from British rule, the New York state legislature created a constabulary and night watch for the city.   The legislation provided for the appointment of two special justices attached to the Police Office; these two justices were to examine those unfortunates arrested by the constables, to render their verdict and pronounce sentence.  By 1845, when New York first established a professional police force, the number of special justices, now known as police justices, had grown to six.  Each police justice was elected from one of the six judicial districts into which the city (Manhattan Island) was then divided.

The nomenclature assigned to these tribunals is spectacularly misleading.  The Police Courts over which the police justices presided were not, as the name might suggest, tribunals for enforcing internal discipline within the police department.  Rather the jurisdiction of each Police Court within its district included most misdemeanors; a police justice had the authority to commit a vagrant to prison; to investigate complaints by master craftsmen against their apprentices; to order the detention of an intoxicated or disorderly person; to commit a person to an asylum; to bind out orphaned children to service; and so on and so forth.

Political corruption

The positon of police justice was an elective office and most police justices had little, if any, legal training or education.  Political calculations, rather than the ability of the candidates, determined the election of judges to the Police Courts and the decisions of the judges inevitably came to be seen as capricious and corrupt.   It happened more often than not that the arresting officer and the police justice colluded to extort large fines from the hapless defendant.  The defendant, moreover, rarely enjoyed the assistance of a capable attorney.  In 1873 the state legislature, in an attempt to end the corruption of the police justices, determined that the mayor and the common council should jointly appoint the police justices and, in an attempt to attract qualified candidates, raised the annual salary of a police justice from $1500 to $8000.

The 1873 reform had no discernible effect on the Police Courts; some of the police justices, according to the New-York Times, were more dishonest than the criminals in the dock.  The New-York Daily Tribune, reflecting that most New Yorkers with any experience of the city's legal system had gained it from their contact with the Police Courts, described the latter as "a virulent poison which has inflltrated the body politic and is steadily spreading corruption."

The Lexow Committee

In 1894 the New York State Senate appointed a committee, chaired by Clarence Lexow, to investigate corruption in the city's police force.  A steady stream of witnesses, including legitimate businessmen as well as brothelkeepers, gamblers, and saloon owners, testified that they had paid large sums of money to police officers to be able to remain in operation.  Other witnesses came forward to describe police brutality and violence so extreme that the police force appeared more as an army of occupation than an organiation to safeguard the public.  The revelations of the Lexow Committe had little permanent effect on the police department but did result in the forced resignation of the police justices and the abolition of the Police Courts.  Jurisdiction over misdemeanors in the city was henceforth transfrred to the newly established Magistrates' Courts.