into the idea that the cops could prevent crime is the notion that they can predict criminal behavior. This preventive focus shifted their attention from actual to potential crimes, and then from the crime to the criminal, and finally to the potential criminal.98 Profiling became an inherent element of modern policing.
So, contrary to the crime-and-disorder explanation, the new police system was not created in response to escalating crime rates, but developed as a means of social control by which an emerging dominant class could impose their values on the larger population.
This shift can only be understood against a backdrop of much broader social changes. Industrialization and urbanization produced a new class of workers and, with it, new challenges for social control; they also produced opportunities for social control at a level previously unknown. The police represented one aspect of this growing apparatus, as did the prison, and sometime later, the public school. Furthermore, the police, by forming a major source of power for emerging city governments (and for those who would control them), also contributed to the development of other bureaucracies and increased the possibilities for rational administration. The reasons for these developments have been made fairly clear, but the means by which the police idea evolved and spread deserves further explication.
Imitation, Experimentation, Evolution
Studies of police history that focus on the experience of a particular city often inadvertently imply that the police in New York, for example, (or Philadelphia, or Boston) developed independently based on the unique needs and specific circumstances of that city.99 This perspective obscures a very important aspect of police development, namely the degree to which city administrators consciously watched the innovations of other cities, drawing from them as suited their needs. This system of communication and imitation explains the sudden appearance of very similar police organizations in cities all across the country, in a relatively short period of time. For though it took a very long time for the characteristics of modern policing to develop, once they crystallized into a coherent form, the idea spread very quickly.100
Of course, the practice of borrowing police models from elsewhere was not itself new. American cities borrowed their earliest law enforcement mechanisms from European cities, especially London and Paris.101 Georgia modeled its slave patrols on those already established in South Carolina, which were themselves copied from similar systems in Barbados; later it became common for towns to copy the patrolling techniques of others nearby.102 Thus it is not especially surprising that New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and Washington, D.C., all took inspiration from the Metropolitan Police of London.103
But, the English influence on American policing should not be overstated. Imitation occurred, but it was not total. Instead, Richardson argues, “America’s borrowing from England was selective. The general form of innovation came from England, although Americans modified and transformed English patterns to fit their particular culture.”104 Hence, the two countries prescribed very different relationships between the officers and the communities they patrolled. In England, the Bobbies were recruited from the countryside and from the lower ranks of the army. They were housed in barracks, denied the vote, and made accountable to Parliament rather than to the local authorities. In the United States, the police were expected to be a part of the communities they served. They were to act not only as police, but as citizens and neighbors as well.105 A more telling difference lay in the extent—and nature—of local political influence in policing. In America, Richardson writes, “Political parties contested vigorously to control police patronage and power, which … precluded American departments from following exactly their supposed model, the London Metropolitan Police.”106
American cities also looked to each other for ideas. When Boston resolved “to imitate, as far as may be, the system of London,” it also mentioned the reforms of New York and Philadelphia, and noted that Baltimore, Brooklyn, and other cities were moving in the same direction.107 And in 1843, the legislative committee investigating better means of policing riots in Philadelphia spent two months collecting ideas from other cities.108
While less well documented, innovations originating in particular districts, or in the countryside, came to be incorporated into the practices of city police. This certainly occurred in Charleston, where the police had a direct lineage from the rural slave patrols. A similar process took place in London, where the use of full-time officers, the system of beat patrols, the focus on crime prevention, and even a bureaucratic structure were all developed in the parishes under the watch system, and then consolidated in 1829.109
If the practice of imitation shows how cities came to create police departments that closely resembled one another’s, the process of experimentation helps to explain why they settled on the particular model they did. Because each city adjusted its organization in a number of ways, either in response to local pressures or based on innovations of its own, variations emerged that could then be tested by experience. Those judged to be successful were retained, and those that failed were abandoned. A kind of natural selection took place. Only the ideas deemed successful in one city survived to be reproduced elsewhere. In principle, this process could result in a diversity of policing mechanisms, and at times has done so (witness the contrast between the seventeenth-century plantation system and that of New York during the same period). But as cities faced similar pressures related to population growth, industrialization, increased stratification, and the like, they came to adopt shared measures of success. As a result, older models, which had survived in some places for a very long time, were suddenly outmoded and replaced.
When social changes caused the traditional means of control to fail, variations of enforcement were adopted. Generally these were aimed at particular populations (slaves, the poor, immigrants) or trouble spots (ghettos, plantations, saloons, etc.). Specialists in enforcement arose, and then unified into general enforcement bodies.110 The move from informal systems of racial dominance to slave patrol, to police, may be understood as following this pattern. In New York, policing developed along similar lines: the watch was expanded, the constable’s duties extended, the marshal’s office created, and eventually a modern police force replaced them all.
The new agencies drew heavily from their predecessors in matters related to organizational structure, methods, and purpose. By incorporating the best of the recent innovations, the new types out-competed the disparate organizations they first imitated and then replaced. But it would be wrong to think of such changes as only ever representing real progress. In fact the nature of experimentation practically guaranteed otherwise. Innumerable innovations were introduced, only to be abandoned a short time later. Reforms were implemented, and quickly reversed.111
It would be tedious to trace out every dead branch on this family tree, but to only consider the successes would run the risk of distorting the picture of development, presenting a circuitous route as a straight-away for the sake of preserving the neatness of our map. To make the point briefly, I will borrow Bacon’s taxonomy of the abandoned types:
Some of the variations in enforcement brought about by the failure of the primary groups, particularly the failure of the family, to maintain order and security may be noted: the use of religious officers, such as the tythingman and warden; the use of the military; the attempt to secure order by having legislators and justices act as police; the trial of policing by posse, by citizen watch, by citizen informer; the practice of employing special men paid by fee; the experiments with private police and substitutes … for the most part, these all failed.112
Experimentation moved cities from one type of law enforcement to the next, but we should not exaggerate the empiricist nature of the process. Far from following a carefully controlled program and employing the scientific method, progress occurred on an improvisational basis in response to short-term political considerations. Many adaptations were accepted, or abandoned, not on their practical merits but for strictly partisan reasons.
Americans have rarely if ever agreed on the proper scope and function of the police and … [Richardson notes] such conflicts have molded police performance
