Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people. To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated.
Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings.
In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns. Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in William G.
Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in , about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7. More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse.
Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in , three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations.
Border Patrol began in , the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.
More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L. Noire, a video game set in and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.
Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate.
The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. More Americans went to prison between and than between and , Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education.
By , eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads. The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes.
For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. The N. Bush, in In , it endorsed Bill Clinton. In , after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century.
Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.
For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests.
The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places. At the same time, the late 19th century was the era of political machines, so police captains and sergeants for each precinct were often picked by the local political party ward leader, who often owned taverns or ran street gangs that intimidated voters.
They then were able to use police to harass opponents of that particular political party, or provide payoffs for officers to turn a blind eye to allow illegal drinking, gambling and prostitution. This situation was exacerbated during Prohibition, leading President Hoover to appoint the Wickersham Commission in to investigate the ineffectiveness of law enforcement nationwide.
To make police independent from political party ward leaders, the map of police precincts was changed so that they would not correspond with political wards. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia. History society How the U. Got Its Police Force.
Boston Police watch over the Liberty Bell circa By Olivia B. Get our History Newsletter. The first night watch was founded in Boston in the s and then New York followed suit in the s.
During this time period, the wealthiest in the colonies also hired people for protection. Those hired for protection were mostly criminals. The first form of policing in the South was known as slave patrol , which began in the colonies of Carolina in The patrol was usually made up of three to six men riding horseback and carrying whips, ropes, and even guns.
The group's main duties included chasing and hunting escaped slaves, releasing terror on slave communities to prevent riots, and to keep plantation owners in check, according to Ben Fountain's book, "Beautiful Country Burn Again.
Immigrants from Germany and Ireland began settling in cities like Boston and New York between and This new group of immigrants clashed with original settlers from England and The Netherlands. As the original settlers argued that the new immigrants were ruining American society, crime began to rise. The cities saw mobs, public lewdness, disorderly conduct, and prostitution. By the s, almost every major city in the country had a police force. Each police department was public and bureaucratic , had full-time policemen, and reported to a governmental authority.
It wasn't until the s that the cities started developing detective units whose main jobs were to investigate crimes. At the time, America was a political machine, meaning local businesses and police forces reported to a single political leader in exchange for a reward. As Time magazine reported, this led to corrupt politicians and corrupt police officers.
For example, some politicians paid off officers to ignore certain groups' illegal activities. Allan Pinkerton was an immigrant from Scotland who created the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was made up of private detectives who stopped train robberies and prevented strikes.
The early s marked the beginning of a new police system. August Vollmer, "the father of modern policing," stressed the importance of sociology, social work, psychology, and management in police work. In this system, officers patrolled the neighborhoods they lived in on foot.
Vollmer also made sure policemen went to college and even created a separate system for juveniles to be tried and punished instead of trying them as adults. During Prohibition, cops were tasked with stopping the sale and distribution of alcohol. At times, the police would confiscate the illegal substance and dump it into sewage drains.
At the same time, organized crime began to take shape, and protests, riots, and petty crimes were also on the rise. The local police forces could not keep up. In response, the Department of Treasury created "T-Men," a group of 4, men who were charged with enforcing the laws of Prohibition.
State governments also started creating their own police forces in the early s to stop the spread of crime in cities. Instead of following Vollmer's model, which concentrated on social work and psychology, Hoover made sure local forces were fighting street crimes.
Under this new system, police officers were less connected to the neighborhoods they worked in as officers patrolled neighborhoods by car. During the s, African Americans began to challenge the way police were treating their communities.
To protest the treatment and racial profiling , riots, boycotts, and peaceful protests broke out in the US, mainly in the South. In response, the police used harsh tactics to keep order, including tear gas, high-pressure water hoses , and attack dogs.
Some of these events were televised nationally. In response, the patrons and neighborhood residents fought back, starting a riot that lasted six days. The fight against the police sparked the gay rights movement. Studies, like in Kansas City, Missouri , found that patrolling police cars in neighborhoods did not help reduce crime, nor did it ease people's fears.
In fact, it increased the community's dissatisfaction with police forces. In response to these findings, some departments attempted a return to community policing. This form of policing placed minority officers in minority neighborhoods.
This model also incorporated the community in helping police the neighborhood. The police officers were meant to become close and familiar with the residents in the community.
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