From 1915 through 1917, “preparedness” became a central tenet of Police Commissioner Arthur Woods’ department, whether it be for “fire, flood, cyclone, tidal wave, earthquake, or even foreign invasion.” Of course, preparing a police force for a foreign invasion also meant remaking it as a military force to be reckoned with.
Many New Yorkers looked on with anxiety as preparedness transformed the NYPD into what resembled a militarized occupation of the city. In one training exercise, police were sent to Staten Island in companies of 350 men, given military rifle and tactics training, and forced to defend a fort during a “sham battle.” On October 17, 1916, the NYPD paraded down Fifth Avenue in a fashion they had never done before. Gone were the signature blue uniforms, or the batons hanging from their belt. Now, New Yorkers saw their neighborhood police officers clad in khaki military-style uniforms with rifles on their shoulders and mounted machine guns being pulled on tripods. “We ask Commissioner Woods—WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THIS ARMY EQUIPMENT,” read one letter in The Call. “New York’s police are becoming more militaristic all the time. They are becoming more like cossacks. With the mounted cops, the machine-gun cops, the cops with rifles, New York cops are getting to look more like an army than a police force. WHAT FOR?”
One thing that had supposedly set the United States apart from their would-be tyrannical adversaries in Germany and Austria-Hungry was the alleged benevolence of its police force. Some units of the multi-faceted German police looked more like soldiers than beat cops and it was often their job to maintain order by use of violence, indefinite detention without a trail, and even torture. Despite the fact that the lived experience for many Black New Yorkers may not have been entirely different from the most brutally treated German citizens, law enforcement in the United States was still symbolically, if not legally, opposed to such extreme and militaristic tactics.
As men and as consumers, police were forced to perform preparedness in ways that effected both their wallets and their waistlines. It was during the years leading up to the U.S. entrance into World War I that gymnasiums were built in stationhouses around the city and department administrators obsessively attempted to manage the physique of their officers. Requiring police to cultivate slimmer more disciplined bodies served the dual function of demonstrating a more soldierly appearance while simultaneously promoting food rationing as healthy and eventually, patriotic.