Episode 66: Minority Report and the rise of police in New York City with Matthew Guariglia

Historians At The Movies

This week Matt Guariglia drops in to talk about Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruises's Minority Report. We also discuss the history of policing in New York City and its impact on other cities. We jump into as eugenics, race and ethnicity in policing, gender dynamics, and the influence of World War I on the evolution of criminality in New York City and the rest of the United States as well as the Italian-American experience and the assassination of Joseph Petrosino. This is a fun talk about a somewhat overlooked Spielberg/Cruise collaboration. I hope you like it.
About our guest:
Matthew Guariglia is a historian and inter-disciplinary scholar serving as senior policy analyst for surveillance and technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) where he focuses on policy and advocacy related to how local & federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private corporations use technology. He currently holds academic affiliations in the Emory University Department of History and at Indiana University and the Institute of American Thought in support of research into the long history of how the U.S. government collects information on individuals and the relationship between information technologies and punitive state power and activism.

His first book Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York is out now from Duke University Press. He is also the co-editor of the Essential Kerner Commission Report (Liveright, 2021). He has a PhD in History from the University of Connecticut where my dissertation was awarded the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

He is also a researcher with years of experience with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requesting. His writing can also be found in the Washington Post, NBC News, TIME, Slate, VICE, MuckRock, and the Urban History Association's blog, The Metropole.