The History of Policing in the United States – Police Studies

Loading...

Taking too long?

Reload document

| Open in new tab

The History of Policing
in the United States

Written by Dr. Gary Potter

The History of Policing in the United States

The development of policing in the United States closely followed the
development of policing in England. In the early colonies policing took two
forms. It was both informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch,”
or private-for-profit policing, which is called “The Big Stick” (Spitzer, 1979).

The watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty
was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a night watch in 1636, New
York in 1658 and Philadelphia in 1700. The night watch was not a particularly
effective crime control device. Watchmen often slept or drank on duty.
While the watch was theoretically voluntary, many “volunteers” were simply
attempting to evade military service, were conscript forced into service by their
town, or were performing watch duties as a form of punishment. Philadelphia
created the first day watch in 1833 and New York instituted a day watch in
1844 as a supplement to its new municipal police force (Gaines, Kappeler, and
Vaughn 1999).

Augmenting the watch system was a system of constables, official law
enforcement officers, usually paid by the fee system for warrants they served.
Constables had a variety of non-law enforcement functions to perform as well,
including serving as land surveyors and verifying the accuracy of weights and
measures. In many cities constables were given the responsibility of supervising
the activities of the night watch.

These informal modalities of policing continued well after the American
Revolution. It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal
police department first emerged in the United States. In 1838, the city of
Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City
in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in
1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring
1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984). By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had
municipal police forces in place.

These “modern police” organizations shared similar characteristics: (1) they
were publicly supported and bureaucratic in form; (2) police officers were full-
time employees, not community volunteers or case-by-case fee retainers; (3)
departments had permanent and fixed rules and procedures, and employment
as a police officers was continuous; (4) police departments were accountable to

a central governmental authority (Lundman 1980).

In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a
different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South
is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in
the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary
functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway
slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3)
to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary
justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the
Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern
police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were
now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing “Jim Crow”
segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the
political system.

More than crime,
modern police
forces in the United
States emerged
as a response to
“disorder.”

The key question, of course, is what was
it about the United States in the 1830s
that necessitated the development of local,
centralized, bureaucratic police forces? One
answer is that cities were growing. The
United States was no longer a collection of
small cities and rural hamlets. Urbanization
was occurring at an ever-quickening pace
and old informal watch and constable
system was no longer adequate to control disorder. Anecdotal accounts suggest
increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence
directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with
some frequency. Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes
prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban
centers than it had been rural villages (Walker 1996). But evidence of an actual
crime wave is lacking. So, if the modern American police force was not a direct
response to crime, then what was it a response to?

More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a
response to “disorder.” What constitutes social and public order depends largely
on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America
they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political
influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions.

These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime
control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-
specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed
a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly
environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they
referred to as the “collective good” (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile
interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own
enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.

Maintaining a stable and disciplined work force for the developing system
of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community for the
conduct of commerce required an organized system of social control. The
developing profit-based system of production antagonized social tensions in
the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly; the exploitation of workers
through long hours, dangerous working conditions, and low pay was endemic;
and the dominance of local governments by economic elites was creating
political unrest. The only effective political strategy available to exploited
workers was what economic elites referred to as “rioting,” which was actually a
primitive form of what would become union strikes against employers (Silver
1967). The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized
body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain
order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under
the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power.

Defining social control as crime control was accomplished by raising the
specter of the “dangerous classes.” The suggestion was that public drunkenness,
crime, hooliganism, political protests and worker “riots” were the products of a
biologically inferior, morally intemperate, unskilled and uneducated underclass.
The consumption of alcohol was widely seen as the major cause of crime and
public disorder. The irony, of course, is that public drunkenness didn’t exist
until mercantile and commercial interests created venues for and encouraged
the commercial sale of alcohol in public places. This underclass was easily
identifiable because it consisted primarily of the poor, foreign immigrants and
free blacks (Lundman 1980: 29). This isolation of the “dangerous classes” as the
embodiment of the crime problem created a focus in crime control that persists
to today, the idea that policing should be directed toward “bad” individuals,
rather than social and economic conditions that are criminogenic in their social
outcomes.

In addition, the creation of the modern police force in the United States also
immutably altered the definition of the police function. Policing had always
been a reactive enterprise, occurring only in response to a specific criminal act.
Centralized and bureaucratic police departments, focusing on the alleged crime-
producing qualities of the “dangerous classes” began to emphasize preventative
crime control. The presence of police, authorized to use force, could stop crime
before it started by subjecting everyone to surveillance and observation. The
concept of the police patrol as a preventative control mechanism routinized the
insertion of police into the normal daily events of everyone’s life, a previously
unknown and highly feared concept in both England and the United States
(Parks 1976).

Police systematically
took payoffs to allow
illegal drinking,
gambling and
prostitution.

Early American police departments shared two
primary characteristics: they were notoriously
corrupt and flagrantly brutal. This should come
as no surprise in that police were under the
control of local politicians. The local political
party ward leader in most cities appointed
the police executive in charge of the ward
leader’s neighborhood. The ward leader, also,
most often was the neighborhood tavern owner, sometimes the neighborhood
purveyor of gambling and prostitution, and usually the controlling influence
over neighborhood youth gangs who were used to get out the vote and
intimidate opposition party voters. In this system of vice, organized violence
and political corruption it is inconceivable that the police could be anything
but corrupt (Walker 1996). Police systematically took payoffs to allow illegal
drinking, gambling and prostitution. Police organized professional criminals,
like thieves and pickpockets, trading immunity for bribes or information. They
actively participated in vote-buying and ballot-box-stuffing. Loyal political
operatives became police officers. They had no discernable qualifications for
policing and little if any training in policing. Promotions within the police
departments were sold, not earned. Police drank while on patrol, they protected
their patron’s vice operations, and they were quick to use peremptory force.
Walker goes so far as to call municipal police “delegated vigilantes,” entrusted
with the power to use overwhelming force against the “dangerous classes” as a
means of deterring criminality.

In the post-Civil War era, municipal police departments increasingly turned
their attention to strike-breaking. By the late 19th century union organizing

and labor unrest was widespread in the United States. New York City had
5,090 strikes, involving almost a million workers from 1880 to 1900; Chicago
had 1,737 strikes, involving over a half a million workers in the same period
(Barkan 2001; Harring 1983). Many of the “riots” which so concerned
local economic elites were actually strikes called against specific companies.
The use of public employees to serve private economic interests and to use
legally-ordained force against organizing workers was both cost-effective for
manufacturing concerns and politically useful, in that it confused the issue of
workers rights with the issue of crime (Harring 1981, 1983).

Police strike-breaking took two distinct forms. The first was the most obvious,
the forced dispersal of demonstrating workers, usually through the use of
extreme violence (Harring 1981). The second was more subtle. In order to
prevent the organization of workers in the first place, municipal police made
staggering numbers of “public order” arrests. In fact, Harring concludes that
80% of all arrests were of workers for “public order” crimes (Harring 1983). In
Chicago, according to Harring the police force was “viciously anti-labor … On
a day-to-day basis it hauled nearly a million workers off to jail between 1975
and 1900 … for trivial public order offenses” (Harring 1981). In other cities
police made use of ambiguous vagrancy laws, called the “Tramp Acts,” to arrest
both union organized and unemployed workers (Harring 1977).

Anti-labor activity also compelled major changes in the organization of police
departments. Alarm boxes were set up throughout cities, and respectable
citizens, meaning businessmen, were given keys so that they could call out the
police force at a moment’s notice. The patrol wagon system was instituted so
that large numbers of people could be arrested and transported all at once.
Horseback patrols, particularly effective against strikers and demonstrators, and
new, improved, longer nightsticks became standard issue.

Three compelling issues faced early American police departments: (1) should
police be uniformed; (2) should they carry firearms; and (3) how much force
could they use to carry out their duties. The local merchants and businessmen
who had pushed the development of municipal policing wanted the police
uniformed so that they could be easily identified by persons seeking their
assistance and so they would create an obvious police presence on the streets.
Some police officers themselves opposed uniforms. They felt that uniforms
would subject them to public ridicule and make them too easily identifiable to
the majority of citizens who bore the brunt of police power, perhaps making

them targets for mob violence. Early police officers began carrying firearms
even when this was not department policy despite widespread public fear that
this gave the police and the state too much power. Police departments formally
armed their officers only after officers had informally armed themselves. The
use of force to effect an arrest was as controversial in the 1830s and 1840s as it
is today. Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order
laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed
slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on
the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized
to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who
had wanted organized police departments in the first place. The presence of a
paramilitary force, occupying the streets, was regarded as essential because such
“organizations intervened between the propertied elites and propertyless masses
who were regarded as politically dangerous as a class” (Bordua and Reiss 1967).

Because the police were
primarily engaged in
enforcing public order
laws against gambling and
drunkenness, surveilling
immigrants and freed
slaves, and harassing labor
organizers, public opinion
favored restrictions on the
use of force.

State police agencies emerged
for many of the same reasons.
The Pennsylvania State Police
were modeled after the Phillipine
Constabulary, the occupation force
placed in the Philipine Islands
following the Spanish-American
War. This all-white, all-”native,”
paramilitary force was created
specifically to break strikes in the coal
fields of Pennsylvania and to control
local towns composed predominantly
of Catholic, Irish, German and
Eastern European immigrants. They
were housed in barracks outside
the towns so that they would not mingle with or develop friendships with
local residents. In addition to strike-breaking they frequently engaged in
anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic violence, such as attacking community
social events on horseback, under the pretense of enforcing public order laws.
Similarly, the Texas Rangers were originally created as a quasi-official group of
vigilantes and guerillas used to suppress Mexican communities and to drive the
Commanche off their lands.

By the end of 19th century municipal police departments were firmly

entrenched in the day-to-day political affairs of big-city political machines.
Police provided services and assistance to political allies of the machine and
harassed, arrested and interfered with the political activities of machine
opponents. This was a curious dichotomy for an ostensibly crime control
organization. Political machines at the turn of the century, were in fact, the
primary modality through which crime was organized in urban areas. Politicians
ran or supervised gambling, prostitution, drug distribution and racketeering.
In fact, organized crime and the dominant political parties of American cities
were one in the same. Politicians also employed and protected the many white-
youth gangs that roamed the cities, using them to intimidate opponents, to get
out the vote (by force if necessary), and to extort “political contributions” from
local businesses. At the dawn of the 20th century, police were, at least de facto,
acting as the enforcement arm of organized crime in virtually every big city.

Police also engaged in and helped organize widespread election fraud in their
role as political functionaries for the machine. In return, police had virtual
carte blanche in the use of force and had as their primary business not crime
control, but the solicitation and acceptance of bribes. It is incorrect to say the
late 19th and early 20th century police were corrupt, they were in fact, primary
instruments for the creation of corruption in the first place.

Police departments during the machine-era provided a variety of community
services other than law enforcement. In New York and Boston they sheltered
the homeless, kept tabs on infectious epidemics, such as cholera, and even
emptied public privies. While this service function of police continues to
be important today, it is important to recall that in the context of political
machine, government services were traded for votes and political loyalty. And
while there is no doubt that these police services were of public value, they must
be viewed as primarily political acts designed to curry public favor and ensure
the continued dominance of their political patrons.

The advent of Prohibition (1919-1933) only made the situation worse. The
outlawing of alcohol combined with the fact that the overwhelming majority
of urban residents drank and wished to continue to drink not only created new
opportunities for police corruption but substantially changed the focus of that
corruption. During prohibition lawlessness became more open, more organized,
and more blatant. Major cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia has
upwards of 20,000 speakeasies operating in them. Overlooking that level of
publicly displayed crime required that corruption become total. But most