Fashion
‘Empire City’ Investigates the Forgotten Origins of the N.Y.P.D.
The podcast from Chenjerai Kumanyika reframes modern debates about the police by rewinding the clock to the moment in which the department was created.
Whenever Chenjerai Kumanyika finds himself near City Hall in Lower Manhattan, he thinks of his father.
“My dad got arrested right there,” he said, pointing to the steps of the French Renaissance-style building on a recent sunny afternoon.
Kumanyika, a professor, podcaster and activist, often heard tales about the episode as a child. His father, the civil rights leader Makaza Kumanyika, was detained by New York Police Department officers in 1964, after a highly publicized incident in which he attempted to place the mayor at the time, Robert F. Wagner, under citizen’s arrest.
“It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that the stories were true,” Kumanyika said.
The police have been a subject of fascination for Kumanyika for much of his adult life. Walking along City Hall Park, he pointed to a section of Park Row named after Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a Black schoolteacher whom police forcibly removed from a racially segregated trolley car in 1854. (Graham, represented by a young Chester A. Arthur, sued the trolley company and won.)
Graham’s story, and that of Kumanyika’s father, are both told in “Empire City,” his rigorously researched narrative nonfiction podcast about the N.Y.P.D. from Crooked Media and Wondery. The eight-part series, which will premiere Sept. 9, is a by-turns-panoramic and personal history aimed at untangling the mythology and influence of the nation’s largest police force.
Following a variety of characters from across the police department’s nearly 180-year history, “Empire City” challenges both those who believe that the institution has always worked to produce public safety and those who assume it can never be changed.
