NYU journalism professor Chenjerai Kumanyika says the NYPD should be abolished. His new podcast, produced by Crooked Media, “Empire City,” bills itself as an “objective history” of the department. In practice, it’s riddled with factual errors, all in service of an exciting—but deeply misleading—piece of propaganda. I am also working on a two-part piece on my daily podcast, The Gist, discussing the claims he makes. You can subscribe to The Gist here.
This piece was originally published in The Free Press. Below is an excerpt, but you can read the whole piece here.
On the evening of April 22, 2024, New York University assistant journalism professor and pro-Palestinian activist Chenjerai Kumanyika was arrested for participating in a daylong protest at the school. NYU had repeatedly warned protesters to clear the area or face police action. Despite this, Kumanyika brought his 4-year-old daughter to the encampment, and posted an Instagram video of her cheerily singing “Free, free Palestine.”
Kumanyika recounts his arrest in Episode 4 of Empire City, his much-praised podcast recounting the origins and early history of the New York City Police Department. His young daughter, he reports, had told him that she thought the job of the police was to “keep people safe,” and he could not bear the thought that his child might regard New York City’s police as protectors. Kumanyika, the son of a civil rights activist, sees the NYPD as irredeemably destructive and wants to pass that view to both his daughter and his podcast audience. He succeeds, at least with her. After his arrest, Kumanyika says, she told him, “I don’t want to go to jail.”
Empire City was last year’s most lauded historical podcast, honored with just about every podcast prize there is, including Ambie, Signal, and Webby awards. It was produced by Crooked Media, best known for its Pod Save America podcast, hosted by four left-of-center former Obama aides. Kumanyika is a captivating storyteller who excavates shocking episodes from the distant past. (To my mind, the most shocking was learning that corrupt constables, prior to the Civil War, were kidnapping free black people to sell into slavery.) But Kumanyika wants to flat-out end the NYPD, and indeed, all police as an institution. He has admitted as much, though not in Empire City. To advance this ideology, Kumanyika makes numerous factual errors and engages in slippery arguments, drawing conclusions that do not follow from his premises. Thanks to the podcast’s dazzling production qualities and emotional force, most listeners—and awards judges—didn’t listen with critical discernment. So I did.
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I entered Empire City open-minded, but an early episode triggered alarms. Kumanyika places a call to the New York City Police Museum requesting an interview with former NYPD commissioner and museum trustee Howard Safir. The request is denied, with Kumanyika mispronouncing Safir’s name and struggling to offer the receptionist a reason for the call. But here’s what’s strange: Safir died in 2023, a fact that is never relayed to the audience. Why would the host of a 2024 podcast request an interview with a man who died the year before? On top of this, in Episode 6 of Empire City, Kumanyika visits Carol Safir, Howard’s widow—and still doesn’t disclose that Sarif has died.
Empire City makes a number of significant factual errors. The podcast claims that NYPD commissioner Francis Vinton Greene founded the Italian Squad after using native Filipinos to suppress uprisings in the Philippines, bringing colonial tactics home to New York. In fact, Greene’s successor, William McAdoo, founded the Italian Squad in 1904, documenting his straightforward rationale in his memoir Guarding a Great City: He believed that you needed Italian-speaking officers to police Italian communities.
Empire City says that when an enclave called Seneca Village was taken by eminent domain in 1857 to build Central Park, all of New York’s enfranchised black residents lost their homes. In fact, only around 10 African American voters (out of approximately 100 enfranchised blacks) lived in Seneca Village.
A 19th-century journalist, in a book Empire City dismisses as propaganda, is said to have whitewashed references to an intramural police riot to make the police look good. But in fact there is a description of the “armed policemen who attacked the newcomers. A fierce affray ensued.” It’s right there on Page 142.
Kumanyika also takes us on a tour of a building that was once the U.S. Custom House, where he says George Matsell worked before becoming New York’s first police commissioner. To understand Matsell’s racism, Kumanyika explains, one needs to consider a large statue representing the continent of Africa outside the building. According to Kumanyika, the Africa sculpture’s defeated posture demonstrates that “George Matsell understands” how businesspeople saw Africa as “a backward land to profit from.” The problem is that the sculpture was created between 1903 and 1907 and George Matsell died in 1877. That gap is never disclosed, probably because it sabotages Kumanyika’s point.
Then there is Kumanyika’s account of the Straw Hat Riot of 1922, which he describes as being triggered when a young black man grabbed a white NYPD officer’s hat in the afternoon, which caused the cop to feel “really humiliated” and which “escalates the situation.” The black man’s arrest led to community resistance against police abuse and the shooting death of a black bystander, according to Kumanyika. But this isn’t even close to what actually happened. The incident occurred around two in the morning when Officer Amanda Hayes was attacked by a gang of men while pursuing the thief of his hat. He suffered a broken jaw, and fired while “battling for his life.” As for Hayes’s “humiliation,” Kumanyika appears to have invented it for narrative purposes.
I found dozens of similar examples, some mendacious, while others just seemed to be the product of sloppiness. What is more troubling, though, is the way Empire City uses some of the darkest moments of the long-distant past to discredit the modern-day NYPD. In truth, no American institution can escape the weight of its own history. If the standard for institutional survival is an unblemished record stretching back 50, 100, or 150 years, then every court, cabinet department, commission, and constabulary in the country should be abolished. The military kept black and white soldiers in separate units until 1948 and waged campaigns of extermination against Native tribes. Public schools enforced segregation for generations. New York’s Department of Sanitation maintained discriminatory garbage collection policies well into the 1960s. You can compile a catalog of horrors against any department you choose: parks, fire, the housing authority. It becomes a prosecutorial trap that enables blanket condemnation in the present by invoking the many sins of the past. But if every institution bears this burden, then what correctives—short of dismantling—are even possible?
A solutions-oriented approach to the NYPD would acknowledge the many ways in which the police served all citizens well, even amid the racist attitudes of earlier eras. One such example that goes unmentioned is the 1862 Cobble Hill riot, when an Irish mob attacked black workers, smashed windows, and tried to burn down a factory. Police fought the mob for hours and put out the fire, with The New York Times reporting that “it was only by the most superhuman exertions of the Police that the lives of the victims were saved, the mob dispersed, and the ringleaders arrested.” During the Civil War, the NYPD led a parade through the streets of New York celebrating black troops joining the Union cause. Kumanyika’s conclusions are often subsumed by his politics.
He does not, and perhaps cannot, give a fair hearing to the idea of reform rather than abolition. Reform efforts like the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the integration of the police force, and the decline in graft and violence are all dismissed as failures that produced only backsliding.
But there is a strong story of reform to be told. Since 1971, the NYPD has maintained careful statistics on the use of force. Officers once fired their weapons at rates that would be unthinkable today. In 1972, there were over 2,000 shots fired by the NYPD, killing dozens. But public outrage demanded reform, and it actually occurred. By 2023—the most recent year with complete data—NYPD officers shot and killed seven people. All seven of those killed were armed.
Kumanyika has branded Empire City as “an objective history of the police.” But how does such a dramatic transformation simply vanish from an “objective” assessment? The answer is that the assessment was never objective. If your argument depends on proving that reform is impossible—that abolishing the police represents the only path forward—then you cannot acknowledge the textbook case of institutional change that stands directly in your path.
Kumanyika isn’t a reformer, he’s an abolitionist, though a slippery one. He admitted at a recent socialism conference that he couldn’t reveal the true ideological underpinnings of the podcast upfront: “If I start Empire City and say, ‘Hi, I’m Chenjerai, and this is an abolitionist podcast,’ I feel like I’m going to lose most of the people right out of the gate.”
Kumanyika would likely argue that his work corrects decades of police hagiography. (He did not respond to multiple interview requests.) But in 2025, the police are more often assailed than hailed. Academic discourse around policing has long since abandoned uncritical celebration. Rather than offering the promised “warts-and-all” history, Kumanyika presents only warts.
The awards establishment has endorsed this framing, lending institutional credibility to what amounts to agitprop. Then there’s the podcast’s provenance: Crooked Media, an explicitly political enterprise founded by Obama administration veterans who supposedly occupy the Democratic Party’s pragmatic left. When confronted with the complications arising from their party’s association with “defund the police” rhetoric, the hosts of Pod Save America have frequently cast it as a Republican-fueled smear.
In 2022, after praising President Joe Biden’s declaration that we must “fund the police. Fund them. Fund them,” Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer declared: “The vast majority of Democrats, if not every Democrat running for Congress—certainly if in a vulnerable district—does not support defunding the police. It is not a position of the Democratic Party.”
Yet, the same voices that regard “defund the police” as political poison for Democrats fund and promote a podcast advocating exactly that.
The interview that Pod Save America conducted with Kumanyika to promote the podcast committed more errors per minute of audio than any episode of Empire City itself. Kumanyika claims that the NYPD was under a consent decree. It isn’t. He describes police shooting a man in the subway for mere fare evasion, omitting that the man was armed with a knife and refused to drop it. Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor asserts that the NYPD spends 10 times more on officer overtime to patrol the subway than it loses to fare evasion—also false. Kumanyika claims that New York City was the first northern test case for slave patrols, which also is not true.
The segment concludes with Vietor thanking the journalism professor for his “truly excellent, truly, truly excellent” podcast that he—Vietor— was “so proud of.”
I would not recommend Empire City as a fair or factual account, nor would I be proud to be associated with the journalism it represents. It is the product of a man who expressed “panic” that his young child might view the NYPD positively—and who ensures that his listeners have no choice but to reach the same dark conclusion.
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