LAW AND DISORDER

The Chaotic Birth of the NYPD

By Bruce Chadwick

Illustrated. 368 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press. $28.99.

I got mugged a bunch of times growing up in Brooklyn and thought I had it rough. But I didn’t have it nearly as bad as the German immigrant who, on a wintry night in the 1840s, took a walk through Battery Park. He was killed by robbers who then rifled his pockets and grew enraged when they found only 12 cents. So they hurled his body into the harbor. But it didn’t sink — it landed on the ice, where it remained in the morning, glowering at those who came to take in the view.

Tough town. And one reason was the lack of a police force. Instead, a loosely organized group of “constables” was responsible for public safety. They often got paid by the job and were routinely mocked, harassed and beaten by the many baddies who lurked in the alleys and packed the taverns and brothels of the roiling young city.

That’s the state of affairs in the opening pages of Bruce Chadwick’s “Law and Disorder: The Chaotic Birth of the NYPD,” which chronicles the haphazard beginnings of what is today the largest municipal police force in the United States. In colorful if somewhat workmanlike prose, Chadwick tells the story of New York in those murderous decades through the prism of how it policed itself, or at least tried.