Police

Police. In colonial America, policing relied on community consensus and citizens' service as constables and in sheriffs' posses. Public punishments were the most important means of encouraging conformity and order. Modern American police forces, patrols to prevent and detect crime and maintain order, arose in the nineteenth century. Like their Colonial Era predecessors, they were adaptations of English institutions.

After the Revolutionary War, northern cities employed constables, who served warrants and acted as detectives, and night watchmen, who patrolled the streets calling out the hour. In contrast, southern cities (Charleston, South Carolina, first, in 1783) developed uniformed, heavily armed, military‐style forces primarily to control slaves.

Reflecting the democratic spirit of the 1830s associated with Andrew Jackson, New Orleans abandoned the military style for a civilian, plainclothes day and night patrol. It lacked central direction, however, so New York City's police force (1845) is considered the first modern one in America, modeled on London's Metropolitan Police (1829). Adopted after years of debate, the New York police system emulated London's centralization of day and night police. The policemen walked beats, and they had power to arrest without a warrant. They also performed services such as rescuing lost children or animals or lodging the homeless temporarily in station houses. Other cities, and later small towns, followed this model. The new forces were distinctly American: Originally appointed for limited terms by local politicians, they did not wear uniforms, but in New York by the end of the 1850s they were carrying revolvers as well as clubs. These developments in policing reflected the fears of vice and crime that accompanied rapid urbanization and the increasing cultural heterogeneity resulting from immigration.

The big‐city police forces themselves became a source of conflict, however. Reformers fought to eliminate political patronage and corruption through bipartisan commissions, civil service reform, and state control (in New York from 1857 to 1870, and in Boston from 1885 to 1962). Administration improved, but political interference proved difficult to eliminate. Reformers also sought to outlaw gambling and prostitution and to regulate or prohibit liquor. Such unenforceable laws only opened new opportunities for corruption. By the early twentieth century, reformers emphasized professionalization, a more military‐style organization, higher educational standards, better training, concentration on crime‐fighting over general service, and freedom from politics. However, professionalization sometimes widened the distance between the police and local communities.

Police technology steadily advanced. Mobility evolved from walking the beat to horse‐drawn patrol wagons (first introduced in Chicago in 1881) to motorcycles, automobiles, and helicopters. Communications progressed from rapping a club on the street to radios and computers. Uniforms (first adopted in New York City in 1853) identified the policeman to citizens and to fellow officers. Investigative methods progressed from mug shots to up‐to‐date crime labs (1930s), computerization, and DNA analysis.

American police operated within a larger urban culture often characterized by fears of racial minorities, immigrants, and the poor. Arbitrary treatment or brutality toward such groups sometimes resulted. In strikes and labor disputes, the police usually sided with employers (notable exceptions were small towns with prolabor mayors or police chiefs). In the twentieth century, courts increasingly regulated police conduct through standards of evidence‐gathering and suspects' rights, as in the landmark 1966 case Miranda v. Arizona.

The American police tradition also includes private policing. Vigilante movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the vigilantes of early San Francisco or the Ku Klux Klan, expressed fear of outsiders or minority groups. Formal private police forces, like the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police and the strikebreaking Pinkerton Detective Agency, founded in 1852 by Allan Pinkerton, served industrialists' interests in labor disputes.

State and federal governments did little policing until the early twentieth century. Pennsylvania formed a state police in 1905 for more efficient control of strikes. New York (1917) and some other states followed. The federal government always had a police system, made up of U.S. marshals. Marshals kept the peace in many western territories until statehood brought eastern‐style urban police forces. During the Reconstruction Era, U.S. marshals in the South struggled to enforce civil rights laws. Several federal departments of the late nineteenth century maintained small police agencies. In the Treasury Department, the revenue bureau tracked down excise‐tax evaders, while the secret service investigated counterfeiting. Post Office inspectors kept an eye out for obscene mail. The Immigration and Naturalization Service also has police functions. The army or National Guard acted as police, briefly upholding Reconstruction in the post–Civil War South, and later controlling strikes or riots and maintaining law and order following natural disasters. The premier federal police agency is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1908), which rose to prominence under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover.

With improved training, entry of minorities and women, and community‐relations programs, American police forces became more efficient and responsive to diverse communities. Yet an old problem remained: How are the police to mediate social conflict without contributing to it?
See also Censorship; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of the Treasury; Gambling and Lotteries; Prisons and Penitentiaries; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Racism; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

David R. Johnson , American Law Enforcement: A History, 1981.
Eric Monkkonen , Police in Urban America, 1860–1920, 1981.
Edward L. Ayers , Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth‐Century American South, 1984.
Peter C. Hoffer , Law and People in Colonial America, 1992.
Lawrence M. Friedman , Crime and Punishment in American History, 1993.

Wilbur R. Miller