the commission of crime and that they would deal with potentially serious crimes before they reached the crisis stage.”52 This crude notion of prevention developed into a more serious and ambitious program as time passed, and came to inform the expansion of police powers. In Boston, for example, in 1850 the police were authorized to order any group of three or more people to “move on” or suffer arrest.53
Of course, most of what the police did was still responsive, and most actual crime-fighting still took place after the crimes had been committed. But the preventive ideal was clearly gaining an articulation, and slowly techniques were developed to bring the practice closer to the principle.
The preventive ideal both prompted the expansion of police power and helped shape the specialized focus on crime. It is worth noting the tension between these two trends: if police powers expand over too large a range of duties, policing loses its character. The police come to resemble generalized inspectors, and enforcement of the criminal law becomes a secondary matter. But, if enforcement is overly specialized, the police are in effect replaced by a series of guards, traffic wardens, thieftakers, bounty hunters, and whatnot.
Constables, sheriffs, and marshals, as servants of the court or sovereign, were assigned general responsibilities. The slave patrols developed from the other end of the spectrum, beginning with a few select duties and accumulating responsibilities and power over time. This second path was the more straightforward route toward modernization because, rather than serving primarily as officers to the Crown or the court, the slave patrols existed solely as a means of preserving the status quo through the enforcement of the slave codes. As soon as they separated from the militia, they became law enforcement bodies, and new duties were added accordingly.
The tension between specialization and generalization did not vanish with the creation of the modern police. The police retained many duties that were quite remote from their alleged purpose of preventing crime and enforcing the criminal law. Robert Fogelson explains:
In the absence of other specialized public bureaucracies, the authorities found the temptation almost irresistible to transform the police departments into catchall health, welfare, and law enforcement agencies. Hence the police cleaned streets and inspected boilers in New York, distributed supplies to the poor in Baltimore, accommodated the homeless in Philadelphia, investigated vegetable markets in St. Louis, operated emergency ambulances in Boston, and attempted to curb crime in all these cities.54
In fact, even today, the police continue to hold duties quite removed from the enforcement of the law and the prevention of crime. In many cities cops still direct traffic, license parades, escort funerals, remove panhandlers, quiet loud parties, find lost children, advise urban planners, make presentations to civic groups and school children, sponsor youth sports leagues, respond to mental health crises, and perform other tasks quite apart from any concern about crime.
As Fogelson implies, this tendency developed in part because the police offered a means for the local government to impose its will, regulate the behavior of the citizens, and generally keep an eye on things with unprecedented efficiency and regularity. It thus became a constant temptation to use this power in new and expanding ways, often to the detriment of the specialized law enforcement function.
Further specialization then relied on the development of additional bureaucracies to take on these extraneous duties. As historian Roger Lane writes:
The police were valued especially for the flexibility which made them adaptable to new demands. But when better machinery was developed the government did not hesitate to transfer their responsibilities. The creation of the sewer, health, street, and building departments all diminished the role of the police in local administration.55
Policing is thus tied to a more general trend in government administration—namely, the rise of bureaucracies. The development of modern police both depended on and promoted the creation of other municipal bureaucracies. In the first place, the creation of other bureaucracies allowed the police to specialize. Second, the consolidation of police forces facilitated a more general move toward bureaucratization by providing a model for these same bureaucracies to adopt. For both of these reasons, the modernization of the police was a key component in the modernization of city government.56 But the impact of the new police was not restricted to its effect on municipal administration. Policing was also closely connected to the economic conditions attending widespread industrialization, and the consequent expansion of the cities themselves.
Urbanization and Industrialization
When the modern police first appeared, East Coast cities were experiencing a wave of expansion, fueled by industrialization. It is no accident that industrial society produced new means of social control, since it also created new risks for disorder. Put simply, in an increasingly complex society, there was more that could go wrong. While the sheer numbers and diversity of the population contributed to this complexity, specialization (especially in the production and distribution of goods) and increased social stratification were probably more important. These factors acted together to depress or reduce the standard of living for the greatest portion of the cities’ residents, creating conflict between economic classes and increasing friction between ethnic and religious groups.57 Seldon Bacon suggests:
These three factors of social change, the rise in specialization, the stratification of classes, and the lowering of standards and consequent limitation of activities brought about by increasing numbers, all created problems in the maintenance of a harmonious and secure society; the techniques of enforcement present in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were unable to meet these problems. The family, the local church, the neighborhood, and the existing governmental agencies could not cope with the situation. In fact, there is a good deal of evidence to show that the changes were weakening all these institutions, especially as they helped bring about the mobility and individualism so characteristic of American society.58
Cyril D. Robinson and Richard Scaglion argue along similar lines, placing the advent of modern policing in the context of the emerging capitalist system. They present four interdependent propositions:
(1) the origin of a specialized police function depends upon the division of society into dominant and subordinate classes with antagonistic interests;
(2) specialized police agencies are generally characteristic only of societies politically organized as states;
(3) in a period of transition, the crucial factor in delineating the modern specialized police function is an ongoing attempt at conversion of the social control (policing) mechanism from an integral part of the community structure to an agent of an emerging dominant class; and
(4) the police institution is created by the emerging dominant class as an instrument for the preservation of its control over restricted access to basic resources, over the political apparatus governing this access, and over the labor force necessary to provide the surplus upon which the dominant class lives.59
There is much to recommend this as a general scheme, though it seems to exaggerate the role of elite foresight and planning at the expense of after-the-fact opportunism. It does more to characterize the result than the process, assuming that the outcome corresponds with some original intention. Robinson and Scaglion’s account offers a useful outline of the preconditions necessary for the creation of the modern police, but the long and complex process of transition from pre-modern to modern policing suggests a more complicated picture than their theory would indicate, especially in regard to the relationship between economic elites and the state. While it is certainly true that the ruling class came to use the police as an instrument for the expansion and preservation of their power, it seems like a stretch to say that they created the institution for that end.
As we have seen, the first significant advances toward modern police appeared in the South, where elite attitudes about the state were characteristically ambivalent.
