If you were a pickpocket working the crowded sidewalks of New York City in the 1930s, your worst nightmare didn’t wear a police uniform. Instead, she looked like an ordinary woman in a day dress and hat, perhaps holding the hand of a young child.
But beneath that unassuming exterior was Mary Shanley, an undercover NYPD detective who packed a .32-caliber revolver and had a sixth sense for spotting criminals. Over a 26-year career, this detective made more than 1,000 arrests, earned the nickname “Dead Shot Mary,” and became the first woman in the department’s history to use a gun to make a collar.
Blending Into the City Crowds
Born in 1896 and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Shanley joined the NYPD in 1931. At the time, she was one of about 140 female officers on the force. Shanley believed that police officers often shouldn’t look like cops. She worked the streets in plainclothes, using her ordinary appearance to trail pickpockets, looters, and illegal fortune-tellers.
Since she never married or had children, she sometimes borrowed her young niece to use as a stand-in child on patrol, making her look completely innocuous to unsuspecting criminals.
Catching Seat Tippers and Racketeers
Shanley had a specialized talent for catching “seat tippers” in darkened movie theaters. These thieves would sit behind a woman, tip the seat to knock her purse to the floor, and steal the contents. Shanley would quietly creep up behind the thief, place a hand on their shoulder, and whisper, “This is a pinch, honey.”
When she pursued a fleeing racketeer on the street, Shanley fired her weapon into the air to startle him into stopping. This act made her the very first female officer in the NYPD to use a firearm during an arrest. On another occasion, she crept up behind a murder suspect in Queens with her revolver drawn, instructing him to simply “drop that gun, boy.”
Pocketbooks and Barroom Gunfire
She did not always need her gun to stop a criminal. Outside a Macy’s department store in the summer of 1938, Shanley knocked out a suspect using her heavy leather pocketbook. When nearby patrolmen rushed over to assist her—assuming she was the victim of a mugging—she flashed her police badge and told them, “Well, I got him — and I can take him in myself.”
Her fondness for her firearm did cause trouble in 1941. While drinking off-duty at a bar in Jackson Heights, Queens, a man harassed Shanley about her Irish background. Intoxicated, she fired her gun inside the tavern, narrowly missing him. The NYPD arrested Shanley, suspended her, and demoted her from first-grade detective. She returned to duty just a month later, eventually earned her detective rank back, and worked until her retirement in 1957.