The Top Cop in 1802 Has a Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandson in the N.Y.P.D.
Jacob Hays was high constable. His descendant, Benjamin Singleton, crunches crime statistics at Police Headquarters.
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On
the 13th Floor of Police Headquarters in downtown Manhattan, there is
an ink drawing of a stern-looking man with a piercing gaze.
It is Jacob Hays, and his image is the first in a long series of framed portraits of the department’s police chiefs.
For
four decades before the Police Department was formed in 1845, Mr. Hays
served as New York City’s highest-ranking law enforcement official: a
now-defunct position known as high constable — a “top cop” post that
also required street-level patrol and detective work.
“You
could probably more accurately describe him as the whole Police
Department,” Edward Conlon, a communications director for the
department, said. “He was doing the job that cops and detectives do.”
The
department never had a photograph of Mr. Hays until recently, when a
faded image appeared on the desk of Benjamin Singleton, 28, director of
analytics for the department’s Detective Bureau.
Mr. Singleton, as it turns out, is Mr. Hays’s great-great-great-great-grandson.
Even
in a department rife with so-called cop families boasting generations
of service on the force, the connection between Mr. Hays and Mr.
Singleton might reach back the longest.
At
first glance, their law enforcement roles could not seem more
dissimilar. The physically fearsome Mr. Hays became high constable in
1802, when the city was essentially 60,000 residents clustered in Lower
Manhattan.
He was, as one contemporary newspaper put it, “the terror of rascals of every grade.”
The
less imposing Mr. Singleton, on the other hand, dresses in a suit and
tie and develops computer programs that identify crime patterns in a
city of more than eight million people spread across five boroughs.
But there are similarities. For one, neither man was a likely candidate for a career in law enforcement.
Born
in 1772, Mr. Hays grew up in a family of Jewish shopkeepers in rural
Westchester County with little education, while Mr. Singleton grew up on
the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended Regis High School and
Yale University.
His family members worked largely in finance, not law enforcement.
A
college law enforcement class helped spark an interest in police work,
as did this distant family connection to Mr. Hays, a mythical police
figure Mr. Singleton heard about often from his grandmother.
“It
just seemed serendipitous that I would go into law enforcement, having
an ancestor who was one of the forefathers of modern American policing,”
he said. “It was always in the back of my head and reinforced my
connection to law enforcement in the city.”
But
unlike his forebear, who was a law enforcement lifer, Mr. Singleton
never saw police work as a lifelong vocation. And after four years at
the Police Department, he is preparing to leave for an analytics job at
an airline.
With a desk in the chief
of detectives’ office, Mr. Singleton, a civilian in the department, has
spent those four years walking past the drawing of Mr. Hays. But in
December, his aunt found the old photograph of Mr. Hays — the only known
portrait of him — in a family collection.
The family connection came to the attention of Mr. Conlon, 54.
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Mr.
Conlon, a Harvard-educated author and former detective who writes
material for the department’s website, is a fourth-generation police
officer whose great-grandfather was a New York City patrolman a century
ago. He was fascinated by Mr. Singleton’s connection and began researching Mr. Hays, whose prominence in city history had been largely forgotten.
Mr.
Conlon got in touch with Patrick Bringley, a writer who in 2014 wrote a
thesis on Mr. Hays while at Hunter College in Manhattan.
Mr.
Hays also served as a captain of the city’s Night Watch patrol, which
kept a lookout for crime after dark. He gained international fame by
tracking notorious criminals, including counterfeiters, across state
lines and even into Canada.
For his longevity, he gained the nickname “Old Hays.” Parents used to warn misbehaving children that “Old Hays will get you.”
“Back
then, everybody in New York City knew who Jacob Hays was,” Mr. Bringley
said. “He was the dominant figure in law enforcement because his
institutional knowledge trumped everyone else’s by miles.”
Mr.
Hays had an exceptional understanding of the city’s criminal dynamics
and had such an uncanny memory for criminals that he could spot them
with a glance on a crowded street.
“Half a look is enough for old Jacob” was how one newspaper described it, Mr. Bringley said.
Mr. Hays, who is buried in Marble Cemetery in Manhattan’s East Village, has lineage that includes the novelist John Dos Passos and A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times.
Mr.
Conlon and Mr. Stapleton recently met Mr. Bringley at the Museum of the
City of New York in Manhattan, where they perused Mr. Hays’s personal
indexes of criminals.
Even
as an appointed high constable, Mr. Hays drew no base salary and had no
official authority over the other constables assigned to each
neighborhood.
Instead, the constables
vied for rewards, bounties and fees to make a living. Essentially
competing as individual freelancers, they were unlikely to share
information on criminals.
“Hays was
the top cop because he knew the most, and hoarded information on crooks
and their patterns in ledgers and in his head,” Mr. Bringley said.
“Nowadays you need a computer guy like Singleton for that and we call it
data.”
Since citywide criminal records were not compiled at the time, Mr. Hays assembled his own.
One of his notebooks was a list of offenders of Sunday laws enforced to promote religious days of rest. This included selling alcohol on Sundays, using firecrackers, fishing and driving a horse and cart faster than five miles an hour.
The notebook listed Mr. Hays arrest of a young Cornelius Vanderbilt for
ice skating on a Sunday, years before Mr. Vanderbilt would become a
shipping magnate and one of the country’s wealthiest men.
Then there was a prison ledger Mr. Hays kept with some 6,000 inmate names, ages and crimes and sentences.
“It
was kind of like his own intelligence ledger, his suspect book,”
recalled Mr. Singleton, who compared it to a contemporary database of
gang members and was struck that his forebear was essentially conducting
an early form of police analytics, albeit using less sophisticated
methods.
“All those things he logged
are still important to us today as well,” Mr. Singleton said. “Like him,
we try to filter out information in a systematic way to better
understand the people who are driving crime patterns. We have a fancy
database, but we still rely on the same techniques.”
Those methods include programs and algorithms developed by Mr. Singleton that analyze crime trends.
One algorithm identifies crime spikes based upon type and location of offenses.
Mr. Hays, who died in 1850 at age 78, maintained a leadership role in the constabulary until it was replaced by the Police Department.
“He had an extraordinary memory and recognition abilities,” Mr. Singleton said, “but data still mattered back then.”
Corey
Kilgannon is a Metro reporter covering news and human interest
stories. He was also part of the team that won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize
for Breaking News. @coreykilgannon • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Foiling Crime in the City, Just Like His Ancestor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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