Despite its initial plausibility, the idea that the police were invented in response to an epidemic of crime is, to be blunt, exactly wrong. Furthermore, it is not much of an explanation. It assumes that “when crime reaches a certain level, the ‘natural’ social response is to create a uniformed police force.” But, as Eric Monkkonen notes, that “is not an explanation but an assertion of a natural law for which there is little evidence.”74
It may be that slave revolts, riots, and other instances of collective violence precipitated the creation of modern police, but we should remember that neither crime nor disorder were unique to nineteenth-century cities, and therefore cannot on their own account for a change such as the rise of a new institution. Riotous mobs controlled much of London during the summer of 1780, but the Metropolitan Police did not appear until 1829. Public drunkenness was a serious problem in Boston as early as 1775, but a modern police force was not created there until 1838.75 So the crime-and-disorder theory fails to explain why earlier crime waves didn’t produce modern police. It also fails to explain why crime in the nineteenth century led to policing, and not to some other arrangement.76
Furthermore, it is not at all clear that crime was on the rise. In Boston, for example, crime went down between 1820 and 1830,77 and continued to drop for the rest of the nineteenth century.78 In fact, crime was such a minor concern that it was not even mentioned in the marshal’s report of 1824.79 The city suffered only a single murder between 1822 and 1834.80
Whatever the real crime rate, after the introduction of modern policing the number of arrests increased.81 The majority of these arrests were for misdemeanors, and most were related to victimless crimes or crimes against the public order. They did not generally involve violence or the loss of property, but instead concerned public drunkenness, vagrancy, loitering, disorderly conduct, or being a “suspicious person.”82 In other words, the greatest portion of the actual business of law enforcement did not concern the protection of life and property, but the controlling of poor people, their habits, and their manners.83 The suppression of such disorderly conduct was only made possible by the introduction of the modern police. For the first time, more arrests were made on the initiative of the officer than in response to specific complaints.84 Though the charges were generally minor, the implications were not: the change from privately initiated to police-initiated prosecutions greatly shifted the balance of power between the citizenry and the state.
A critic of this view might suggest that the rise in public order arrests reflected an increase in public order offenses, rather than a shift in official priorities. Unfortunately, there is no way to verify this claim. (The increase in arrests does not provide very good evidence, since it is precisely this increase the hypothesis seeks to explain.) However, if the tolerance for disorder was in decline, this fact, coupled with the existence of the new police, would be sufficient to explain the increase in arrests of this type.85
The Cleveland police offered a limited test of this hypothesis. In December 1907, they adopted a “Golden Rule” policy. Rather than arrest drunks and other public order offenders, the police walked them home or issued a warning. In the year before the policy was established, Cleveland police made 30,418 arrests, only 938 of which were for felonies. In the year after the Golden Rule was instituted, the police made 10,095 arrests, 1,000 of which were for felonies.86 Other cities implemented similar policies—in some cases, reducing the number of arrests by 75 percent.87
Cleveland’s example demonstrates that official tolerance can reduce arrest rates. This fact suggests an explanation for the sudden rise in misdemeanor arrests during the previous century: if official tolerance can reduce arrest rates, it makes sense that official intolerance could increase the number of arrests. In other words, during the nineteenth century crime was down, but the demand for order was up—at least among those people who could influence the administration of the law.88
New York City’s campaign against prostitution certainly followed this pattern. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the official view on prostitution transformed from one of complacency to one of moral panic. Beginning in the 1830s, when reform societies took an interest in the issue, it was widely claimed that prostitution was approaching epidemic proportions. Probably the number of prostitutes did increase: the watch estimated that there were 600 prostitutes working in 1806, and 1,200 in 1818. In 1856, Police Chief George Matsell set the figure at 5,000. But given that the population of the city increased by more than six times between 1820 and 1860, the official estimates actually showed a decrease in the number of prostitutes relative to the population.89
Enforcement activities, however, increased markedly during the same period. In 1860, ninety people were committed to the First District Prison for keeping a “disorderly house.” This figure was five times that of 1849, when seventeen people were imprisoned for the offense. Likewise, prison sentences for vagrancy rose from 3,173 for the entire period covering 1820–1830, to 3,552 in 1850 and 6,552 in 1860. As prostitutes were generally cited for vagrancy (since prostitution itself was not a statutory offense), the proportion of female “vagrants” steadily rose: women comprised 62 percent of those imprisoned for vagrancy in 1850 and 72 percent in 1860.90
This analysis does not solve the problem, but merely relocates it. If it was not crime but the standards of order that were rising, what caused the higher standards of public order? For one thing, the relative absence of serious crime may have facilitated the rise in social standards and the demand for order. Lane observes:
A fall in the real crime rate allows officially accepted standards of conduct to rise; as standards rise, the penal machinery is extended and refined; the result is that an increase in the total number of cases brought in accompanies a decrease in their relative severity.91
Once established, the police themselves may have helped to raise expectations. In New York, Chief Matsell actively promoted the panic over public disorder, in part to quiet criticism of the new police.92 More subtly, the very existence of the police may have suggested the possibility of urban peace and made it seem feasible that most laws would be enforced—not indirectly by the citizenry, but directly by the state.93 And the new emphasis on public order corresponded with the morality of the dominant Protestant class and the demands of the new industrialized economy, ensuring elite support for policing.
This intersection of class bias and rigid moralism was particularly clear concerning, and had special implications for, the status of women. In many ways, the sudden furor over prostitution was typical. As the social mores of the Protestant ruling class came to define legal notions of “public order” and “vice,” the role of women was re-defined and increasingly restricted. As Stephanie Coontz remarks, “Fond paternalistic indulgence of women who conformed to domestic ideals was intimately connected with extreme condemnation of those who were outside the bonds of patronage and dependence on which the relations of men and women were based.” As a result, women were held to higher standards and subject to harsher treatment when they stepped outside the bounds of their role. Women were arrested less frequently than men, but were more likely to be jailed and served longer sentences than men convicted of the same crimes.94 Enforcement practices surrounding the demand for order thus weighed doubly on working-class women, who faced gender-based as well as class-based restrictions on their public behavior.
At the same time, the increased demand for order came to shape not only the enforcement of the law, but the law itself. In the early nineteenth century, Boston’s laws only prohibited habitual drunkenness, but in 1835 public drunkenness was also banned. Alcohol-related arrests increased from a few hundred each year to several thousand.95 In 1878, police powers were extended even further, as they were authorized to arrest people for loitering or using profanity.96 In Philadelphia, “after the new police law took effect,” as historian Allen Steinberg has documented, “the doctrine of arrest on suspicion was tacitly extended to the arrest and surveillance of people in advance of a crime.”97
Police scrutiny of the dangerous classes was at least partly an outgrowth of the preventive
