This approach of monitoring and collecting information about immigrants is rooted in changes in policing and surveillance technology that came together at the end of the 19th century. Then, authorities sought to counteract what many in government called the “colonies” of immigrants, enclaves where English was far from the most commonly used language.
In places like Mulberry Bend in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, police sought to control the landscape and those who lived in it. In 1895, the city demolished the entire block and turned it into a wide-open park where it was nearly impossible to hide from law enforcement. It was a show of control over a population made up largely of new immigrants from Italy, Eastern Europe, and East Asia who were deemed as opaque and unknowable as the dense tangle of alleyways that made up the Bend.
Police continually looked for other ways to marginalize, brutalize, and control these communities by citing concerns that crime, political radicalism, and norm-defying sexualities could flourish in communities and spaces unknowable to police. Police used both surveillance and violence to discipline white immigrant communities, to push them to act "American." As NYPD Commissioner for the year 1904, William McAdoo, wrote, police do “far more important work, so far as the future citizens are concerned, than probably any other officials in this land.”
And so, the NYPD experimented with ways to subordinate immigrant communities in the first two decades of the 20th century. They created squads and staffed them with people who had been born speaking foreign languages and deployed them into their own communities as informants and spies. But in the end, the department found this approach unreliable and unsustainable.
Soon a solution came from technology used abroad. In the 1910s Raymond Fosdick, a former New York City police administrator, traveled the world on the Rockefeller family’s dime to study the problems of American policing. He concluded that the advanced and prolific European system of information collection and management was the future of policing. He brought back to the United States stories of how the Berlin police department had records on potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals which he believed greatly increased the ability of German police to find and identify people based on a whole suite of information like address, family history, criminal history, military records, and so on. If a fire had been set in a certain neighborhood, with barely any detective work on the street, police could cross reference the area with people with a history of arson and create a list of likely suspects. Technologies made talking to witnesses or interfacing with community members less necessary for solving crimes.