The early police forces in nineteenth-century America were modeled in part on the Metropolitan Police of London, formed in 1829 by Robert Peel (hence the nicknames "peelers" and "bobbies"). But American police came to differ from the police of other Western nations in several important ways. First, they have always been a part of local government, unlike other countries where the local police are a part of a nationally administered force. Second, because of their local roots, police departments appeared at different times throughout the nation. In general, big eastern cities created police forces first, with smaller cities lagging well behind. Third, as a part of the executive office of the city, police departments have been administered separately from state and county systems of criminal justice. Historian Wilbur Miller has argued that this final difference accounts for some of the more obvious contrasts between American and English police: American police have seen themselves as administering justice on the street; the English, as representing law, or the unwritten English Constitution.
The kind of police Americans knew in the early nineteenth century was descended from the medieval police of England--a constable and watch system composed of a volunteer night watch, who patrolled the city, and a daytime constable, who supervised the watch and charged fees for his services. Most night watchmen, however, were actually paid substitutes for volunteers and traditionally were drawn from society's unemployables. When Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing selects a night constable from among the watchmen, he picks "the most senseless and fit man," whom he orders, "You shall comprehend all vagrom men." As for sleeping on the job, Dogberry offers that he "cannot see how sleeping should offend; only, have a care that your bills [weapons] be not stolen." In this scene, Shakespeare ridiculed the notorious failings of the watch, which persisted through the nineteenth century: they drank, slept, and ran from any sign of danger. And constables were venal, illiterate Dogberries, intervening in crimes only when there was the promise of a good fee. In the United States, similar complaints were voiced about the watch and constables, but cities managed to survive under this loose system until they were quite large. New York had over a half million people before it got a permanent police in 1853, Boston about 175,000 (1859), and Philadelphia about 250,000 (1856).
Cities created their police forces for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was simply imitativeness: in the post-Civil War era, a city with any pretensions had to have modern police officers. This, however, is not to deny the usefulness of the new police. First, they were hierarchically organized and relatively accountable. The wearing of uniforms ensured that citizens could recognize police officers, and the city could try to keep them out of bars and on patrol. The latter innovation--regular patrol beats--incorporated the new organizational mode: patrolling in uniform, it was thought, would deter crime by scaring off criminals.
A second useful feature of the new police derived from their receiving regular salaries from the city government: they no longer needed to extract fees for their services, making them far more helpful to the poor. Salaries also provided a means for politicians to support their supporters; political machines hoping to mobilize the Irish vote would hire Irish police officers. Thus, early on, the ethnic and racial composition of the police force became a mirror of local politics. Police officers were also partisan workers for incumbent political parties, working to get out the vote or, sometimes, to prevent people from voting. Until their jobs became subject to civil service rules in the late nineteenth century, the police were intimately tied to city politics. And it was this tie that sometimes caused police to support strikers, say, or to refuse to implement morality legislation such as Sunday closing laws. In both cases, the police were partisans of the city government; when majority state governments enacted laws not supported by a local party, then police might well be on the minority side. Thus partisan conflicts became entangled with issues of ethnicity and working-class politics; states often tried to make the local police responsible to a state-level board in order to undercut city politicians.
Another, and unexpected feature of the new uniformed police came from the opportunistic use of their presence on the streets. They helped strangers find their way, took in lost children, boarded and sometimes fed the homeless (called "station house lodgers"), enforced health ordinances, and directed traffic. They became the front line in a long series of urban services that ultimately landed in specially created city departments.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, police departments began to hire blacks and women. Blacks were often employed to patrol black neighborhoods (the City Guard of New Orleans hired free blacks as early as 1814), but their chances of movement into white neighborhoods were negligible. By the mid-1960s most police departments had some black officers; Washington, D.C., had the most, with blacks composing about 20 percent of the force. Women were hired as "matrons" to oversee lost children, women's lodging rooms, and women prisoners. These matrons were sometimes funded by social welfare organizations rather than by the city, suggesting their status as social workers rather than law enforcement officers. Not until 1968 did women move full time into patrol, the city of Indianapolis leading the way. As a consequence of pressure from the civil rights movement and, later in the 1970s, the women's movement, police departments across the United States began to change their recruitment patterns.
The nature of the patrol officer's task was in part preventive and in part to provide on-the-spot service. But both duties kept officers from following up on complaints, and within twenty years after founding a police department, most cities added detectives to the force. Until now, the organization of the police had been modeled on the military, with officers' titles and similar uniforms (after the Civil War, blue became the color of choice). But detectives wore citizens' clothing, which helped some fall prey to police corruption. The lack of a uniform meant difficulty in supervision--something early police reformers had feared.
Police corruption followed and still follows certain structural faults in policing, faults present since the eighteenth century when Jonathan Wild claimed the title of "thief taker-general" in England. Wild, for a fee, would return stolen property to its owners, who would rather have their property than see someone go to prison. Obviously, the more involved he was in the original theft, the better able he was to "find" and return the stolen items.
Although there is some evidence of this sort of activity in the pre-police American constabulary, the structural corruption more common in the United States has come from so-called victimless crimes--vice. As criminologist Jerome Skolnick has demonstrated, it is very difficult for detectives to make arrests for these crimes: the "victims"--the buyers of drugs, sex, or gambling--are unwilling to complain. Therefore the detective must present other forms of evidence, which all too often is obtained by illegal means--bribery, threats, actual involvement in the crime. For instance, a prostitute might be persuaded to testify against a pimp for a bribe of heroin; or a drug dealer might have a drug planted on him by a narcotics detective ("framing a guilty man").
Sometimes when this form of corruption spread beyond a single police officer and became systematic, exposés and prosecutions followed. One such was that of the Lexow committee in 1894, which exposed police corruption in New York City. But such investigations, and the growing use of internal police investigation units in recent times, have never been able to attack the root cause of this kind of corruption: crimes in which the victim does not exist as an individual but is the larger society, as in prostitution, drugs, and gambling. Major investigations of police malpractice came about every twenty years after the Lexow investigation--in the Progressive Era, during the 1930s (the Wickersham Commission), in individual cities in the early 1950s, and most notably in the mid-1960s with the President's Commission on the Causes of Violence.
There is also a structural feature of policing unique to the United States--its multiple criminal codes and literally thousands of police departments. When, in the nineteenth century, crime or conflict ranged across jurisdictions, there was no single agency to turn to. Early forms of crime, for example, occurred on railroads, by their nature spread across policed cities, unpoliced countrysides and villages, and often across states, each with a different criminal code. Catching and prosecuting anyone stealing from a train conductor, or a conductor stealing from his employer, was difficult for local police, whose jurisdiction ended at the city limits. Similarly, a criminal operating across a broad district, such as counterfeiters, could easily avoid the local police.
Private detective companies--Allan Pinkerton's was the most famous--offered a solution to this problem for those with the money to hire them. Pinkerton exploited and gave a public relations spin to his operations in a series of thrillers, which he started publishing in 1874. Highlighting his radical activities in Scotland and his service to the Union during the Civil War, Pinkerton created a dramatic image of the intelligent detective versus the evildoer. But, as Frank Morn has shown, Pinkerton's business was much more mundane than the image he presented and less honorable. Since his time the essence of detection has been duplicity: a successful detective lies his or her way into the confidence of those with criminal knowledge and then turns them in. Working most often for large corporations and "testing" the honesty of employees by trying to get them to cheat (for example, offering a bribe to a train conductor in exchange for a free ride), Pinkerton's company earned itself a decidedly bad name by the 1880s and 1890s in its paralegal attacks on organized labor.
Just as employers found the police inadequate in labor incidents, public authorities could not always rely upon them in riots. One of the most famous riots in American history, the New York City draft riot of 1863, illustrates why. This eruption against New York City blacks raged for two days, with the police ineffectively trying to quell the mobs and their superintendent sustaining injuries to which some attributed his death a few years later. The police were unable to coordinate their maneuvers and lacked the training and discipline to confront moving bands of angry men. The riot was brought under control only with help from Union army troops from Pennsylvania.
The difficulties riots caused for police were most notable a century after the draft riots, over a four-year period from 1964 to 1968, when blacks in most major U.S. cities rioted. These riots, first in New York in 1964, followed by one in Los Angeles in 1965, focused attention on brutal police practices in minority communities. Almost inevitably, the police looked bad, both racist (even though by this time some forces were on their way to being integrated) and incompetent. The Left and the Right criticized the police, and the decade saw a series of federal initiatives aimed at making the police more efficient and more just.
In the Progressive Era, police were often the focus of reformers' efforts to end their corruption and their use of torture (calling it "the third degree" somehow made it seem less nasty) and to increase their efficiency. It is surprising to realize that prior to the period 1890-1920, there was no national coordination of identification other than through picture magazines like the Police Gazette and the Detective; nor did fingerprinting come into vogue until the first decade of the twentieth century. When a centralized National Identification Bureau was finally created at the turn of the century, it was only with voluntary funding from individual city police departments.
All of these historic elements culminated in the mid-1960s. A series of Supreme Court rulings on evidence (for instance, Mapp v. Ohio, 1961, and Miranda v. Arizona, 1966) placed more control on police discretion in gathering evidence and ensured that suspects had access to attorneys. Federal legislation funded additional, nonlocal support of policing via the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (1968). The leaa transferred millions of dollars to local police for training, communications technology, and weapons. It also funded a small amount of research, which resulted by the 1970s in growing sophistication in criminal justice research.
Yet, by the end of the 1980s, some of the tensions initially present in policing remained. Increased technological competence still left an open mesh rather than a dragnet for criminal catching; police officers retained considerable discretion; minority neighborhoods complained about police brutality and at the same time about inadequate policing; and nonalcoholic drugs troubled the society and the police as much as alcohol enforcement had a half-century earlier. Most of the discussion of these issues took place at the national level, as did most proposed solutions. Yet the distinguishing historical feature of American police, their local funding and control, added a special character to the national problems: they remain local, independent, and a part of city government.
