plsonline.eku.edu | 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.
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.
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