Reclaiming the Covert Gaze: NYPD Police Surveillance Films of the Civil Rights Era
Chris Nicols
Film & Audiovisual Archivist, New York City Municipal Archives
From 1960 to 1980, the New York Police Department (NYPD) Bureau of Special Services and Investigations (BOSSI) recorded over 1,400 black and white 16mm silent films surveilling a wide array of social and political activities in New York City. This was done in the name of ensuring the safety and security of the City during a period of social and political upheaval related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Over the course of two decades, the NYPD surveilled New York residents participating in activities including rallies, public demonstrations, concerts, parades, riots, and more. Some of these films document well known figures or events from the period, such as Malcolm X or the Apollo 11 ticker tape parade. Other films document more obscure chapters in New York’s history, like an anti-papal Catholic movement led by the Seer of Bayside, Queens. Among the most frequent of topics for surveillance were political actions taken in the name of civil rights for Americans of color.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the NYPD has conducted large scale, ongoing surveillance on NYC residents in various forms. Beginning as the Italian Squad under Detective Joseph Petrosino in 1906 to tackle organized crime[1], it evolved into the anti-communist Red Squad by the 1940s. In the 1970s, members of the Black Panther Party sought to prove in court that they were being unconstitutionally surveilled by the NYPD after they were accused of conspiring to blow up a police station. The Black Panther members were acquitted after the jury found that their first amendment rights had been violated by the NYPD during the investigation. This resulted in a consent decree commonly referred to as the Handschu Agreement[2] that places limits on the NYPD’s ability to investigate political activity. The films in this collection all predate the Handschu Agreement and were recorded on small cameras by plain clothes officers so as not to alert their targets.
As part of the Handschu Agreement, the NYPD agreed to eventually hand over to the Municipal Archives any and all BOSSI documentation deemed historically significant. However, only three films were named as part of the agreement, so the vast majority of the films remained with the NYPD. Years later in 2011, the NYPD contacted the Municipal Archives for assistance in disposing of potentially dangerous nitrate films. This led to the (re)discovery of the NYPD surveillance films in an unused basement of One Police Plaza. Municipal Archives employees then spent several days transporting the surviving 1,450 films to the vaults at 31 Chambers Street. In 2018, the Municipal Archives was able to secure funding for a film scanner and a part time salary through a Local Government Records Management Improvement Fund (LGRMIF) grant.
As the Film and Audiovisual Archivist for the New York City Municipal Archives, I was tasked with digitizing the New York Police Department surveillance films, 1960–1980 collection, a project which concluded at the end of 2019 with the publication of a finding aid to the collection. Most of the film cans had been unopened for decades and the reels inside needed cleaning, but were otherwise in relatively good condition. Looking back on it now, three sets of films stand out to me: the protests against the construction of Rochdale Village, the protests around school integration, and the many protests against police brutality.
Aside from the films, the only documentation in this collection is the surveillance assignments logbook that BOSSI used to order the creation of new films. Most films only had an ID number, date and location, with almost every film being silent, black and white and 3 minutes long. Content descriptions were brief and appeared on less than half the films. For the most part, this makes it virtually impossible for the Municipal Archives to identify and contact the subjects of these films, none of whom consented to or had any idea that they were being recorded by the NYPD. Following the Handschu Agreement, the NYPD was still allowed to continue mass surveillance of NYC residents. The Municipal Archives is in an ongoing effort to acquire more NYPD surveillance materials.
Rochdale Village
Although it was never part of the Jim Crow South, New York took efforts throughout the 20th century to combat the de facto system of segregation that impacted every aspect of City life. One such example was Rochdale Village, a cooperative housing complex designed to be a “city within a city” with a park-like setting and facilities of suburbia. At the time of its opening in 1963, Rochdale Village was not only the largest private cooperative housing complex in the world, it was also one of the largest integrated housing sites in the country[3]. Despite this, its construction site hosted one of the longest lasting NAACP and CORE protests during the Civil Rights era. Although the residents of Rochdale Village were to be both black and white, only white laborers were employed during construction.
For over two months, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) members peacefully protested and practiced civil disobedience in order to halt or delay construction, advocating to expand economic opportunities to all. Then head of the New York state chapter of the NAACP, William Booth, can be seen in several NYPD surveillance films, holding back protesters, talking with officers, and ultimately getting arrested. Booth would go on to sit on Mayor John Lindsay’s Human Rights Committee and later become a state supreme court judge for thirteen years. With over twenty arrests in a single day at its height, the Rochdale Village protesters’ efforts were documented by the very people tasked with carrying the protesters away.
From time to time, NYPD officers shooting these surveillance films would stop recording what they were assigned to and use the film to record something totally unrelated. Most of the time, they recorded what appears to be NYPD offices with police officers either going about their work or making funny faces into the camera. These juxtapositions between depictions of citizens in moments of social upheaval and the casual demeanor of the officers charged with keeping the peace can be jarring.
In this film, the officer recorded a group of NAACP and CORE protesters blocking a construction truck from bringing supplies to Rochdale Village. There are a large number of them at the intersection, some yelling in anger at the truck driver, others creating a human chain with their bodies while their children or younger siblings look on. Then the officer stopped recording this event, only to begin recording what appears to be a home movie on the same roll of film. That hard jump from the stoic faces of black children watching their families put their bodies in harm’s way, to a group of white children happily playing in their yard with a toy bow and arrow is a defining image in this collection to me.
Anti-School Integration
In 1954, the landmark civil rights case of Brown vs. Board of Education declared the system of racially segregated schooling in the United States to be unconstitutional, forcing states across the country to end the practice. Following this, New York City schools sought to integrate their white and black student populations through a variety of methods like school busing and school pairing that put children from different neighborhoods into the same classrooms. Although widely supported by New York chapters of the NAACP and CORE, as evidenced in several NYPD surveillance films, the practice met with a fierce and highly organized backlash. Leading this backlash was a new group of white and ostensibly pro-integration parents calling themselves Parents And Taxpayers, or PAT.
PAT was an explicitly pro-integration group that championed what they called neighborhood run schools, arguing that the methods pursued by progressive reformers in the ’60s would only lead to more segregation and an exodus of white families to the suburbs. Despite its pro-integration stance, there does not appear to be any non-white members of PAT in any of the NYPD surveillance films. During debate in Congress over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the arguments and actions by PAT were cited repeatedly by senators who opposed the Act and efforts towards integration more generally.
Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, PAT continued its efforts to prevent the NYC Board of Education from moving forward with its integration plan. This footage showing a PAT picket line was filmed in September of 1964, months after President Johnson signed the Act into law. In 1973, thousands of parents in the majority white neighborhood of Canarsie boycotted school for over a month, keeping their children home in response to the Board of Education’s proposal to integrate with mostly African American Brownsville. Five decades later, New York City schools remain one of the most segregated school systems in the country.
Protesting Police Violence Towards the Puerto Rican Community
Throughout the 1960s, protests against police killings of Americans of color can be seen in NYPD surveillance films, usually naming officers involved or the police commissioner in charge at the time on their sign. These killings often lead to days of unrest and rarely any kind of punishment for the officers, even when the officers’ accounts were contradicted by multiple eye witness statements. Something that sets this last film apart from previous examples is the large number of signs written in Spanish, often appealing directly to the Puerto Rican community living in New York.
While the NYPD recorded other events that featured Spanish-language signs and Puerto Rican residents, the films featuring protests against police brutality seem to have an especially large concentration of signs written in Spanish that appealed directly to the Puerto Rican community of New York. Starting in the early 1950s, migration from Puerto Rico to New York City accelerated at a rapid pace following the implementation of harsh censorship laws and economic reforms by the American federal government. Throughout the post-war era, Puerto Rican residents of New York were often subject to the same discrimination that African Americans experienced, such as finding themselves unable to get good jobs or attend good schools, and frequently the target of deadly confrontations by law enforcement. Indeed, an inordinate number of surveillance films focus specifically on Puerto Rican cultural events in the 1960s and ‘70s.
In 1964, NYPD officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen- year-old Harlem resident James Powell, setting off days of unrest. Protesters demanded the resignation of then Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy and officer Gilligan. Statements from Murphy to the community of Harlem, along with Gilligan’s description of Powell lunging at him with a knife, only inflamed tensions further, as witnesses maintained that Powell was unarmed and non-confrontational . The resulting riot left one person dead, hundreds injured and up to $1 million in property damages. Murphy would only resign one year later for unrelated reasons. Gilligan was cleared of all charges by a grand jury and remained with the NYPD.
The NYPD’s surveillance activities were intended to be invisible, both to those surveilled and the public at large. The transfer of these films to the New York City Municipal Archives and digitization of their contents for access has made tangible what was done in secret. One unintended consequence of the NYPD’s ongoing surveillance program was the creation of a trove of films documenting the efforts of civil rights activists, as well as Vietnam War protests, anti-school integration groups, the first papal visit to the United States, Nixon’s Halloween Rally, and a great many other subjects. Even the idiosyncratic moments reveal much about the social dynamics and cultural texture of the city’s past. By preserving these films for future generations, the Municipal Archives hopes to return these key historical moments to the people of New York City.
Chris Nichols is the Film and Audiovisual Archivist for the New York City Municipal Archives. He holds a masters from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. His work includes preserving collections containing NYPD surveillance material and original productions by municipal broadcasters WNYC-TV and Channel L. Outside of the Municipal Archives, he is an active member of XFR Collective, helping to provide A/V preservation education and services to artists, activists and community organizations.
References
- “NYPD Italian Squad: Topics in Chronicling America.” n.d. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-nypd-italian-squad
- Handschu, Barbara, et al. “71 Civ. 2203 (CSH): Memorandum Opinion and Order.” 1985. United States District Court, Southern District of New York. https://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20070215_nycruling.pdf
- Eisenstadt, Peter. “Rochdale Village and the rise and fall of integrated housing in New York City” n.d. (ca. 2004). NYC Commission on Human Rights. http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/justice/downloads/pdf/rochdale_village.pdf
