have responded to whichever group was making the most noise at the moment rather than following a consistent and thought-out line of policy.113
These political conflicts helped to shape the institution, just as the practice of imitation and the process of constant revision did. But behind it all is the simple fact that institutions, like organism species, must adapt to their environment or die. Policing, as an institution, did a great deal better than just survive. As it adapted to the social conditions of the early- and mid-nineteenth century, it became not only the product, but also the producer of social change.
The Policed Society
As policing changed, it grew in importance, and in turn changed the society that had created it. The development of modern police facilitated further industrialization, it consolidated the influence of political machines, it led to the creation of new bureaucracies and advances in municipal government, and it made possible the imposition of Protestant moral values on the urban population. Also, and more basically, it allowed the state to impose on the lives of individuals in an unprecedented manner.
Sovereignty—and even states—are older than the police. “European kingdoms in the Middle Ages became ‘law states’ before they became ‘police states,’” David Bayley writes, meaning that they made laws and adjudicated claims before they established an independent mechanism for enforcing them. Organized police forces only emerged when traditional, informal, or community-maintained means of social control broke down. This breakdown was in each case prompted by a larger social change, often a change that some part of the community resisted with violence, such as the creation of a national state, colonization, or the enslavement of a subject people.114 It is at the point where authority is met with resistance that the organized application of force becomes necessary.115 Each development detailed here has conformed to this general pattern—the creation of the offices of the sheriff and the constable, the establishment of the watch, the deployment of slave patrols, the transition to City Guards, and finally the rise of the modern police.
The aims and means of social control always approximately reflect the anxieties of elites. In times of crisis or pronounced social change, as the concerns of elites shift, the mechanisms of social control are adapted accordingly. In the South, the institution of the slave patrol developed in stages following real or rumored insurrections. Later, complex factors conspired to produce the modern police force. Industrialization changed the system of social stratification and added a new threat, or set of threats, subsumed under the title of the “dangerous classes.” Moreover, while serious crime was on the decline, the demand for order was on the rise owing to the needs of the new economic regime and the Protestant morality that supported it. In response to these conditions, American cities created a distinctive brand of police. They borrowed heavily from the English model already in place, but also took ideas from the existing night watch, the office of the constable, the militia, and the slave patrols.
At the same time, the drift toward modern policing fit nicely with the larger movement toward modern municipal government—best understood in terms of the emerging political machines, and later tied to the rise of bureaucracies. The extensive interrelation between these various factors—industrialization, increasing demands for order, fear of the dangerous classes, pre-existing models of policing, and the development of citywide political machines—makes it obvious that no single item can be identified as the sole cause for the move toward policing. History is not propelled by a single engine, though historical accounts often are. Scholars have generally relied on one or one set of these factors in crafting their explanations, with most emphasizing those surrounding the sudden and rapid expansion of the urban population, especially immigrant communities.
Urbanization certainly had a role, but not the role it is usually assumed to have had. Rather than producing widespread criminality, cities actually produced civility; as the population rose, the rate of serious crimes dropped.116 The crisis of the time was not one of law, but of order—specifically the order required by the new industrial economy and the Protestant moralism that supplied, in large part, its ideological expression.
The police provided a mechanism by which the power of the state, and eventually that of the emerging ruling class, could be brought to bear on the lives and habits of individual members of society. Lane reflects:
The new organization of police made it possible for the first time in generations to attempt a wide enforcement of the criminal code, especially the vice laws. But while the earlier lack of execution was largely the result of weakness, it had served a useful function also, as part of the system of compromise which made the law tolerable.117
In other words, the much-decried inefficiency and inadequacy of the night watch in fact corresponded with the practical limitations on the power of the state.118 With these limits removed or overcome, the state at once cast itself in a more active role. Public safety was no longer in the hands of amateur watchmen, but had been transferred to a full-time professional body, directed by and accountable to the city authorities. The enforcement of the law no longer relied on the complaints of aggrieved citizens, but on the initiative of officers whose mission was to prevent offenses. Hence, crimes without victims need not be ignored, and potential offenders needn’t be given the opportunity to act. In both instances the new police were doing what would have been nearly inconceivable just a few years before.
It was in this way that the United States became what Allan Silver calls “a policed society.”
A policed society is unique in that central power exercises potentially violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely diffused throughout civil society in small and discretionary operations that are capable of rapid concentration.119
The police organization allowed the state to establish a constant presence in a wide geographic area and exercise routinized control by the use of patrols and other surveillance. Through the same organization, the state retained the ability to concentrate its power in the event of a riot or other emergency, without having to resort to the use of troops or the maintenance of a military presence. Silver argues that the significance of this advance “lay not only in its narrow application to crime and violence. In a broader sense, it represented the penetration and continual presence of central political authority throughout daily life.”120 The populace as a whole, even if not every individual person, was to be put under constant surveillance.
The police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens. Put this way, the characteristics of modern policing may come to sound more ominous—the specialized function, the concentration of power in a centralized organization, the constant application of that power over the entire city, the separation of the police from the community, and a preventive aim. While in some ways a more rational application of traditional means, the organizations that developed in this direction were fundamentally different from the ones they replaced. With the birth of modern policing, the state acquired a new means of controlling the citizenry—one based on its experiences, not only with crime and domestic disorder, but with colonialism and slavery as well. If policing was not in its inception a totalitarian enterprise, the modern development of the institution has at least been a major step in that direction.
4: Cops and Klan, Hand in Hand
And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.
—James Baldwin1
In the later nineteenth century, as political machines, industrialization, and the modern police reshaped urban society, politics in the South faced additional complexities in the aftermath of the Civil War. There, many of the trappings of machine politics were present—corruption, abuses of power, favoritism, and street brawls—but with a difference. The status of the newly freed Black population became the
