Police and Late-Nineteenth-Century Social Welfare

The police in the nineteenth century experienced two transformations. The first was from approximately 1850 to 1885, the second in the 1890s. During the first period, the police abandoned the constable and watch system in favor of a centralized military organization and uniforms. The second transformation involved a change in police behavior rather than organization. Until the mid-1880s the police were as much social welfare agents as crime preventers. Thereafter, the scope of their dealings with the "dangerous classes" narrowed as they became agents against crime rather than for class control.

Police forces after the Civil War were arms of municipal administration, and their duties included tasks quite different from what they do today. The police, especially after their uniforms made them visible, performed what were then considered pressing social responsibilities: finding and returning lost children, discovering open sewers, and providing lodging for tramps overnight. In small communities children were never really lost unless physically away from the community, but in the sprawling and impersonal urban world of the era after the Civil War, a child could quite easily wander a short distance from home and become lost. Parents and friends did search on their own, but the police became active in these matters. The introduction of uniformed police in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Pittsburgh coincided with a sharp rise in the demand for help in finding lost children.

After about a generation in uniforms, the police were increasingly expected to perform the specialized function of preventing crime and enforcing criminal law, rather than offering social welfare services. Furthermore, by the 1890s specialized municipal agencies appeared whose duties included recovering lost children, freeing the police to engage in crime control.

Another important task of the early uniformed police was providing overnight lodgings for the homeless. When times were bad, tramps and poor people appeared at the doors of police stations, and the police accommodated them with a place to sleep and, in some instances, a meal. The police acted as agents of social class management, not just as preventers of crime. By the 1890s, however, this activity was attacked as incompatible with the more important function of crime prevention. As with lost children, the management of the dangerous classes passed from the police to new social welfare agencies. The police became just one more agency of government in which separate bureaus dealt respectively with recreation, planning, health, and welfare.

As the police withdrew from management of the problems of everyday urban life, they also became less active in arresting people. The overall police arrest rates dropped, and so too did the rate for public order arrests. Police ceased to take the initiative to deal with disorderly persons; they acted only when called on by the citizenry. Their energies flowed increasingly into solving "serious" crimes, such as homicide and burglary.

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The concepts of police professionalism and of rational administration took hold in the 1890s, a forerunner of even more sweeping developments in the Progressive era. There were two stimulants to greater professionalism. First, with police corruption a matter of public agitation, police leadership sought to put their own houses in order. The Lexow Commission in 1894 and 1895, for example, revealed that New York City police officers were complicit in vice operations, extortion of confessions through torture, and haphazard procedures for the accounting of public monies. Police chiefs banded together amid such revelations, founding in 1893 the National Chiefs of Police Union, which quickly became the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

Second, the police began to look beyond their own jurisdictional borders, seeking through cooperation to gain a hold on criminal activities that were nationwide in scope. The IACP, for example, had by the late 1890s established a central bureau of criminal identification, supported by subscriptions of individual police departments. There were even efforts in Congress, urged by leading chiefs of police, to establish a federally funded bureau that would coordinate and disseminate information. These efforts paved the way for the subsequent creation in 1935 of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Substantive Law of Crime

Lawmakers responded to the growing interdependency of nineteenth-century society and economy by passing more laws. They retained a fundamental commitment to the idea that statutes could guide human behavior. In 1822, for example, Rhode Island listed only 50 criminal acts; by 1872 the number had increased to 128. Indiana in 1881 specified more than 300 crimes, and they covered a panoply of human activities. After the Civil War especially, the states turned to criminal penalties to regulate economic and moral behavior, passing statutes that criminalized economic monopolies, abortion, and gambling. Downturns in the economic cycle spawned great numbers of unemployed people, and legislatures and city councils, seeking to preserve municipal order, passed a variety of vagrancy statutes, which the police in hard times enforced with special enthusiasm.

Despite the explosion in the numbers of statutes, the substantive criminal law changed less than did the institutional apparatus of apprehension and punishment. For example, antebellum reformers sought to abolish the death penalty. A wave of anti- capital punishment activity swept the nation in the 1830s, supported by such diverse figures as President John Quincy Adams and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Michigan in 1846 abolished the punishment for all crimes and by 1849 fifteen other states had abolished public executions. But the effort stalled with the Civil War, and a new attack on the death penalty did not come until the Progressive period.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 661