LAW

Police Styles

Police Styles

Introduction

The development of modern police forces in American cities exemplifies the enhancement and growing complexity of municipal authority. At the same time, it reveals a shift in the basis of community order from a general consensus on moral and religious rules to reliance on a criminal justice system—of which the police force is only a part—to control an environment viewed by many urbanites as inherently deviant and contentious.

The earliest police arrangements in the English colonies were European carryovers. Until the early nineteenth century, towns and cities relied mostly on constables and night watchmen. The former were usually appointed officials whose responsibilities included both criminal and civil matters. The night watch was a duty for which all adult males under the age of 45 were eligible to be called. Often more alert to the deadly threat of fire, night watchmen offered only a small measure of crime control. Overall, this rudimentary police system was not proactive, as officials usually responded only to citizen complaint or public outcry (Greene, 2007).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth and increased heterogeneity of city populations, along with street disorders and perceived surges in day-to-day crime, focused new attention on what were still minimal police arrangements. The model for the development of modern American forces was the Metropolitan Police of London, created in 1829. As American police forces developed during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, led by New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, they developed similarities to the English model. The constables and night watch were combined into a single force of uniformed men who were armed with a baton or mace, expected to keep order through regular street patrols, and given new meaning by the emergence of more well defined urban land use. However, unlike the English, Americans were wary of letting a distant regional or central office control the new police; instead, they placed control of police in the municipality, usually the ward-based city council.

Efforts to impose a system similar to London's did have a brief period of success during the second half of the nineteenth century with the establishment of a number of state-run “Metropolitan” systems including ones in New York (1857), Detroit (1863), San Francisco (1877), and Boston (1885). However, for the most part, these systems were short-lived, and by the end of the century most municipalities had reasserted control. At that point, modern police departments were being established in cities of small size but high aspirations and self-image. Having a police department was a badge of sophistication.

Because the new police officers represented local rather than regional or national authority, their work was caught up in the social conflict unleashed by the population diversity of American cities in the middle of the nineteenth century. Waves of foreign immigrants, particularly Irish and Germans, along with migrants from the American countryside, poured into cities. The resulting mosaic produced clashes—at the ballot box as well as in the street—over distinctive sociocultural behaviors and such issues as the opening ...