laws originally relied upon informal, universal enforcement requirements reminiscent of the frankpledge: every White member of the community had the responsibility to uphold the law. The Southern system of slave control underwent a full transition from this informal policing system, through various stages of specialization, to its apex in the creation of the quite modern Charleston police force.60 Clearly this transformation relied on social stratification, the existence of a political state, and the use of the policing function to maintain the racial and economic status quo (that is, to protect the interests of the slave-owners). However, while police powers were intentionally divorced from the community and invested in a specialized group, this change was not—as Robinson and Scaglion’s model might imply—instigated at the behest of the slave-owners, but to some degree accomplished over their objections and despite their resistance. It was instead political elites who created slave patrols as a guard against the (political) threat of revolt more than against the (economic) dangers of escape. While the state functioned in the interests of the ruling class, it was not yet an agent of the ruling class—but a competing nexus of power, and a challenge to the aristocratic pretensions of the slave owners.
In cities, industrialization and its accompanying entourage of social changes led to the breakdown of the informal means of social control that had proved (mostly) sufficient to that point.61 Cities thus produced advances in social control that the plantation system hadn’t needed and likely would have eschewed. In Southern cities like Charleston, the City Guards picked up where the patrols had fallen short, in the control of slaves (and free Black people) on hire. In Northern cities, industrialization produced similar needs to control the workforce. Rather than rely on personal authority and social deference (as on the plantation), or on the influence of the family and church (as in smaller New England towns), industrial cities of the North created governmental systems that were universalistic and routinized.62
Faced with similar challenges relating to urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of capitalism, elites in different cities responded in markedly similar ways—sometimes consciously borrowing from each other and sometimes unwittingly reproducing models and techniques that were in use elsewhere, keeping what succeeded and discarding that which failed to suit their purposes. And as this process advanced, they transformed the mechanisms of law enforcement and created a new, distinctive institution.
The New York Municipal Police came to define the type. But it would be wrong to think of the New York police as simply a modern watch, or as a Northern slave patrol, or as a set of American Bobbies63—though it was somewhat analogous to all three. In New York, as elsewhere, the police appeared when broad social trends intersected with local crises and the particular needs of the city. Of course, the authorities only responded to the crises on a rather shallow level, never acknowledging the underlying causes that produced them. Instead, local elites preferred to blame the problems of urbanization on the moral shortcomings of the poor, and the idea of the “dangerous classes” was born.
In the years preceding the rise of police departments in London and in the United States, [Richard Lundman notes,] middle-class and elite members of society attributed crime, riot, and public drunkenness to the members of the “dangerous classes.” The image was that of a convulsively and possibly biologically criminal, riotous, and intemperate group of persons located at the base of society. Their actions were seen as destroying the very fabric of society.64
The particular population identified with the dangerous classes varied by locale. In England, the dangerous classes consisted of the urban poor, vagrants, and prostitutes in particular. In the northern United States, it was the immigrant lower class; in Boston, the term was especially applied to Irish Catholics.65 The term was not used much in the South, but the dangerous classes found an analogy in the Black population, and especially the slaves. In addition to their association with crime and disorder, the dangerous classes also represented an alien presence, a group with different values whose behavior was therefore suspicious as if by definition.66 The Boston Council reported:
In former times the Night Watch with a small constabulary force, were quite sufficient to keep the peace in a city proverbial for its love of order and attachment to the laws and remarkable for the homogenous character of its population. But the rapid development of the system of railroads and of the means of communication, with all parts of Europe, together with other causes have brought among us great numbers who have not had the benefit of a New England training and who have heretofore been held in restraint rather by fear of the lawgiver than respect for the law.67
Moreover, criminal behavior was understood as a threat to the social order, not merely to its real or potential victims. Theft obviously challenged the sanctity of private property, but more to the point, drunkenness and vagrancy seemed to threaten the standards of diligence and self-control central to Protestant morality and crucial to an economic system dependent on regularity, predictability, and a disciplined workforce.68
Crime and criminality were thus constructed to reflect the ideological needs of elites. Criminality was less a matter of what people did than of what they represented.69 The idea of the dangerous classes was intimately tied to the prevailing economic order in each place, and had profound implications for the systems of social control they adopted. As Michael Hindus writes:
Slavery was not primarily a penal institution, though that was one of its results. In addition to its role in the southern labor and social system, the plantation kept under confinement and control the one class that was most threatening to the social order. Similarly, the prison was not primarily a labor system, but it mandated labor for rehabilitation, profit, and internal order. The prison adopted many features of the factory system and justified forced labor of convicts because of the moral uplift it provided.70
Both systems supplied large-scale, unpaid labor for the propertied classes, deprived the workers of their most basic civil liberties and political rights, and relied on corporal punishment and shaming for discipline.71 Furthermore, in both cases the economic systems created the class of people they were then at such pains to control—the slaves in the plantation system, and the immigrant working class in industrialized cities.
While elite anxieties about the dangerous classes supplied the impetus for new forms of social control, other concerns also helped to shape the emerging institutions. The modern police system, unlike less formal means of control, actually required very little of ordinary citizens in the way of enforcement, and exposed the respectable classes to almost no personal danger. And, though supplying an organized force under control of the government, it avoided the unseemly image of a military occupation, since police (in the North, at least) patrolled alone or in pairs, and were sparingly armed. Furthermore, an impersonal system was to be preferred over either a military model or a more informal arrangement because—ironically—it was less obviously a tool of the ruling classes.72
To the degree that industrialization and urbanization created changes related to the diversity of the urban population, economic specialization, and social stratification, they certainly produced new challenges of social control. But the question remains, what did those difficulties have to do with crime? Put differently, it might be asked: Were the dangerous classes criminal? Or were they criminalized?
The Demand for Order
It is generally assumed that the police were created to deal with rising levels of crime caused by urbanization and the increasing numbers of immigrants. John Schneider describes the typical accounts:
The first studies were legal and administrative in their focus, confined mostly to narrative descriptions of the step-by-step demise of the old constabulary and the steady, but often controversial evolution of the professionals. Scholars seemed preoccupied with the politics of police reform. Its causes, on the other hand, were considered only in cursory fashion, more often assumed than proved. Cities, it would seem, moved inevitably toward modern policing as a consequence of soaring levels of crime and disorder in an era of phenomenal growth and profound social change.73
I
