The kind of police/community relations problems we’re having now is nothing new for America. It’s solution, however, is staring us in the face. We’ve solved this problem before.
At one time, the chief criminal class involved in street crime were the Irish. Oh sure, there were organized crime gangs of every ethnicity, but they were organized to run rackets, on an almost nationalistic and military model, like the Mafia. But your basic street punk was Irish.
Today, the Irish are sentimentalized with leprechauns, “Danny Boy”, Olde Sod Emerald Isle shillelagh-bearing cuteness, all penny whistles and step dancing, St Paddy’s Day, Erin go bragh, and kindly Father O’Malley. Violence is only associated with The Troubles and the English back in Ireland, a long way off, safely across the pond. Except for a tendency to collect cash for the IRA and brawl a bit when in their cups, the Sons of the Emerald Isle and their pretty freckled colleens have established a meme of an all-American immigrant identity no other ethnic group has achieved. Its cool to wear the Green these days, but it wasn’t always so.
When the Irish came to America, they were desperate victims of famine, poverty and political oppression. So they came in huge numbers, imported because America’s new industry had a labor shortage and a surplus of light-skinned, fair, mostly English-speaking northern Europeans was just what the doctor ordered to keep wages down. They were herded into ghettoes and they survived in extreme poverty, and suffered extreme racism and prejudice. “Irish need not apply”, “No dogs or Irish allowed.” They were caricatured as apes and worse, the vicious cartoons depicting them in the press not to be duplicated until the Jew-baiting days of the Third Reich. The brutal racism of England followed them here, and it infected the mostly-English majority in the USA. Its no coincidence that police wagons were soon nicknamed “Paddy Wagons”, after their most likely passengers.
But the Irish are white, and once they lose the brogue, are indistinguishable from “real Americans”. And there were other ways of assimilating them. In America, you could at least vote, and their votes were bought by corrupt politicians with political patronage–mostly with jobs on the police force–hence the other great Irish stereotype, Officer O’Malley pounding his beat. There was resistance to this from the more established communities in American society, how can we put criminals in uniform? But what better way to get the hoodlums to police themselves and patrol their own neighborhoods?
“The country was up for grabs, and New York was a powder keg. This was the America not the West with its wide open spaces, but of claustrophobia, where everyone was crushed together. On one hand, you had the first great wave of immigration, the Irish, who were Catholic, spoke Gaelic, and owed allegiance to the Vatican. On the other hand, there were the Nativists, who felt that they were the ones who had fought and bled, and died for the nation. They looked at the Irish coming off the boats and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ It was chaos, tribal chaos. Gradually, there was a street by street, block by block, working out of democracy as people learned somehow to live together. If democracy didn’t happen in New York, it wasn’t going to happen anywhere.”
—Martin Scorsese on how he saw the history of New York City as the battleground of the modern American democracy.(From the Wikipedia article on the film)
