RM Vivas
US Veteran
One of the problems I have with what I do is what the military would term "mission creep".
Example: I'm trying to clean up the revolver records for 1942-1946. For the names that are mostly illegible I consult copies of The City Record.
Each week the city record would publish the Departments' Weekly Report; a list of who got fired, hired, promoted, demoted, transferred, disciplined, retired, etc. It is ok data for tying a legible name to an illegible name for purposes of cleaning up the revolver records.
However, it's supremely useful if you want to see what a specific officer was doing that year. If you were to look at 20 or 30 years worth of these reports, you could pretty much follow every official step in a mans career. Useful!
And so mission creep sets in and I find myself with another project: putting all the reports into a searchable database. Now, I type in a guys name and I can see across several years where he pops up in the records. I've only completed a few years but for tracking an officers career path, its great.
And as I'm going through I find that every year or so the department would publish a directory of every person employed by the Department. Not just cops but horseshoers, hostlers, painters, doctors, etc.
And mission creep sets in again. I just finished a project to enter the 1940 directory into a searchable database. What did I learn (aside from there is not enough time in the day and that OCD in a historian is not always great)?
The 1940 directory has approximately 19,660 entries.
The average patrolman made 3,000 per year and the new guys started at 2000 with a 250 bump every couple years until they were at 3000.
Policewomen made pretty much the same as Patrolmen.
The PC made about 9,000 per year. Department surgeons 6,000. LT's made 4,000 and SGT's 3,500.
A few cops provided their home address as a YMCA. A few lived in hotels. One fellow lived in the Ft. Schuyler lighthouse. There were a half dozen cops named John F. Kennedy. The Murphys were --WELL-- represented as were the Sullivans.
The largest precincts were the Traffic Precincts and that makes sense as the Departments primary focus before WW2 was more traffic control than actual crime fighting. Still busting muggers and such, to be sure, but a huge emphasis one keeping traffic moving.
The data points I used are as follows:
Rank
Name
Home Street Address
Home Borough
Date of appointment
Pay
Command
Some interesting potential here.
For example, one could list everyone by their appointment date and get a list of graduates of the class of 19xx who were still on the job. Then sort -that- list by rank and you could get an idea of how the members of that class were performing.
In my case I created an additional field for Trophy Gun winners and then did a search to see where the had arrived in the Department in terms of rank and assignment.
This really doesn't have a huge effect on my gun data per se but it does aid me in searching out career data for men who have already been identified with a specific revolver.
I started graduate school last week nd it is ......interesting. Shooting for a Master degree in Public History.
Back to the spreadsheets!
Example: I'm trying to clean up the revolver records for 1942-1946. For the names that are mostly illegible I consult copies of The City Record.
Each week the city record would publish the Departments' Weekly Report; a list of who got fired, hired, promoted, demoted, transferred, disciplined, retired, etc. It is ok data for tying a legible name to an illegible name for purposes of cleaning up the revolver records.
However, it's supremely useful if you want to see what a specific officer was doing that year. If you were to look at 20 or 30 years worth of these reports, you could pretty much follow every official step in a mans career. Useful!
And so mission creep sets in and I find myself with another project: putting all the reports into a searchable database. Now, I type in a guys name and I can see across several years where he pops up in the records. I've only completed a few years but for tracking an officers career path, its great.
And as I'm going through I find that every year or so the department would publish a directory of every person employed by the Department. Not just cops but horseshoers, hostlers, painters, doctors, etc.
And mission creep sets in again. I just finished a project to enter the 1940 directory into a searchable database. What did I learn (aside from there is not enough time in the day and that OCD in a historian is not always great)?
The 1940 directory has approximately 19,660 entries.
The average patrolman made 3,000 per year and the new guys started at 2000 with a 250 bump every couple years until they were at 3000.
Policewomen made pretty much the same as Patrolmen.
The PC made about 9,000 per year. Department surgeons 6,000. LT's made 4,000 and SGT's 3,500.
A few cops provided their home address as a YMCA. A few lived in hotels. One fellow lived in the Ft. Schuyler lighthouse. There were a half dozen cops named John F. Kennedy. The Murphys were --WELL-- represented as were the Sullivans.
The largest precincts were the Traffic Precincts and that makes sense as the Departments primary focus before WW2 was more traffic control than actual crime fighting. Still busting muggers and such, to be sure, but a huge emphasis one keeping traffic moving.
The data points I used are as follows:
Rank
Name
Home Street Address
Home Borough
Date of appointment
Pay
Command
Some interesting potential here.
For example, one could list everyone by their appointment date and get a list of graduates of the class of 19xx who were still on the job. Then sort -that- list by rank and you could get an idea of how the members of that class were performing.
In my case I created an additional field for Trophy Gun winners and then did a search to see where the had arrived in the Department in terms of rank and assignment.
This really doesn't have a huge effect on my gun data per se but it does aid me in searching out career data for men who have already been identified with a specific revolver.
I started graduate school last week nd it is ......interesting. Shooting for a Master degree in Public History.
Back to the spreadsheets!
...Ben
