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In the context of nineteenth-century municipal government, New York’s Tammany Hall was exceptional only in the level of its success. Similar machines emerged in nearly every American city. Powerful neighborhood bosses arose and affiliated, gaining control through a system of patronage and protection, keeping it through increased application of the same means, and administering civil affairs along lines that were not merely partisan, but personalistic as well. Favoritism became the central principle of local government.1

Under the machines, the resources of the government were the spoils of victory, belonging less to the public than to the reigning faction. Thus, quite removed from the ideal of deliberative democracy, elections were neither contests of principle nor gauges of the public will, but battles between rival cliques—battles fought as often in the streets as at the polls. And these battles determined the distribution of jobs, services, and graft. Elections decided who made the law, who supplied public services, and who controlled the city treasury. And more importantly, they decided whose friends would fill public jobs, which neighborhoods would receive attention or suffer neglect, which illicit businesses would continue operation, and whose palm would be greased in the process.

Political Machines: The Gang and the Government

The gang and the government are no different.

—Jane’s Addiction2

Corruption was the foundation and the defining characteristic of the political machine. Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson offer a formal definition: “A political ‘machine’ is a party organization that depends crucially upon inducements that are both specific and material.”3 Put more simply, “Machine government is, essentially, a system of organized bribery.”4 But perhaps even that puts too pleasant a face on it, for machines did not use only bribery to get what they wanted; they used whatever means were available to them, including threats, fraud, blackmail, and actual violence. Machines were concerned about power and resources, not principles—and certainly not democracy.5 Principles were espoused, of course, as justification for their actions, to differentiate one party from another, and to gain and maintain the allegiance of a constituency committed to such values. But it was typical of machine politics that principles were always secondary to the demands of power.

The privileging of power over principle meant that every aspect of the government’s activity was directed toward maintaining the ruling clique’s control. By the same token, every resource at the city’s disposal was available as a reward for the machine’s supporters. The police served in both capacities. Hiring, discipline, transfers, and promotions were all governed by the convenience of the machine organization. Hence, whenever control of the city government changed hands, turnover in the police department was sure to follow. Without regard for the qualifications of the individual officer, each party dispensed with the supporters of the other and replaced them with their own. Very nearly full turnover of police personnel followed the Los Angeles election of 1889, the Kansas City election of 1895, and the Chicago and Baltimore elections of 1897.6

In the 1907 Louisville election, when a Republican was unexpectedly elected mayor, every captain was reduced to a patrolman, and Republicans (many lacking in police experience) were appointed in their place. When the Democrats won in the following election, the process was reversed. Again in 1917, the Republicans gained control and fired 300 from a department of 429. Everyone above the rank of sergeant was replaced.7

In New York, positions were so sought after that appointments relied on political sponsorship or outright bribery, or sometimes both. Hence, from the first moment, the importance of political influence and bribes was made clear to new recruits.8 A patrolman’s position typically sold for $300 and required the approval of the district leader.9 Higher positions cost more. In 1893, Timothy Creeden paid a commissioner $15,000 to be promoted from sergeant to captain. As a captain’s salary was only $3,000 each year, it is obvious that he would need to rely on graft just to pay for his job.10

Even when civil service tests were instituted in the 1880s, conditions remained largely the same. Politicians circumvented civil service requirements by appointing partisan boards, administering the exams in essay style, or requiring the civil service commission to provide three qualified candidates for every open position and allowing police officials to choose among them.11 Experiments with state-level police boards proved equally unhelpful. The creation of state boards, a partisan maneuver by design, only transferred the control of patronage from one group to another—as indeed it was intended to do. Likewise, bipartisan boards, rather than eliminating political spoils, merely divided them between the two strongest parties, to mutual advantage.12

Nor did political interference end once an officer was hired. Police with powerful friends proved nearly impossible to discipline, no matter how corrupt, brutal, or negligent they might be. Even such routine matters as going on patrol and wearing uniforms were difficult to enforce.13

Since each officer’s career was politically controlled from beginning to end, the police became ardent supporters of their patrons. Police support was central to the survival of the machines: for much of the nineteenth century New York’s Board of Elections was under the supervision of the police board. The commissioners chose the polling places, drew up the voting districts, had the ballots and voter registration lists printed, and appointed the polling inspectors and clerks. The police department itself verified the registration lists, guarded the polls, and counted the votes. Mayor William R. Grace described this system as “a standing menace to the safety and purity of the ballot box, and tend[ing] to render the police of the city its masters rather than its servants.” Tammany police commissioner John Sheehan once bluntly stated that control of the police was more important than how the votes were cast.14

This power tended to magnify the significance of the administrative branch, and especially bolstered the influence of the mayor.15 The career of Boston’s Josiah Quincy anticipated the trend. Beginning in 1823, Quincy was elected mayor six times. In 1829, he was dubbed “The Great Mayor,” a title which probably reflected the extent of his power more than the quality of his performance. During his term, Quincy chaired every important committee, allowing him to build an efficient administration and, as importantly, consolidate power under his personal leadership. At the same time, Quincy maintained his influence in the wards with the assistance of the nascent police apparatus. Central to this effort was the creation of a new office—marshal of the city—which, lacking precedent and statutory limits, could be made to fit whatever demands the mayor placed on it. The marshal served as head constable, commanded the night watch, acted as the city’s chief health officer, prosecuted minor cases—and took on additional responsibilities after the creation of a day police in 1838.16

The marshal’s power reached its peak during the term of Francis Tukey, who took office in 1846. Within the first year of Tukey’s command the number of officers on the force was doubled, a detective division added, and a special night force created.17 But there were limits to how far this power would be allowed to develop. In 1851, the police voted as a bloc for Benjamin Seaver in the mayoral election, acting under the assumption that he would bar Irish immigrants from joining the force. Seaver won, but did not ban Irish police. Apparently the night police had crossed a line when they marched to the polls en masse. Seaver responded by firing all the night duty officers, dissolving that branch of the force, and leaving its patrols entirely in the hands of the barely existent night watch. Over the course of the next year, power was systematically moved away from the marshal and toward the mayor and the aldermen. In April 1852, the aldermen limited the marshal’s tenure to one year. Two months later, they replaced the position with that of chief of police. While Tukey was not fired outright, neither was he named the new chief. The Boston Semi-Weekly Atlas drew a comparison: “The Great Caesar fell for his ambition.”18 The lesson was clear: the police were a tool for the political machine; they would not be allowed to develop as a political force in their own right.

This balance could be difficult to maintain, though, since police were so central to the functioning of the machines. The police served the interests of political machines in three key ways: police jobs served as rewards for supporters; police controlled the elections; and police regulated illicit businesses, deciding which would be allowed to operate and under what conditions.19 As historian Robert Fogelson tells it,

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the police did not suppress vice; they licensed it. From New York’s Tenderloin to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast and from Chicago’s Levee to New Orleans’ French Quarter, they permitted gamblers, prostitutes, and saloon keepers to do business under certain well-understood conditions. These entrepreneurs were required to make regular payoffs, which ranged, according to the enterprise and the community from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per month, and to stay inside the lower- and lower-middle-class neighborhoods.…20

In this way vice laws, and liquor laws especially, proved a useful tool for political machines to enhance their power. Protection money provided a source of funding, and selective enforcement allowed political bosses to discipline their supporters and put their competitors out of business.21

In New York, precinct captains used detectives to collect protection money.22 In other places, the landlord would collect it as a part of the rent, then pass it on to the police. He would say to the proprietor of the saloon or brothel: “You can have this house for two hundred dollars, with police protection, or one hundred dollars if you take care of yourself.”23

Police detectives, like the thieftakers before them, were more interested in retrieving stolen property and collecting rewards than in catching crooks. Of course, the easiest way to get hold of stolen goods was to work with the thieves. In exchange for immunity and a portion of the reward, thieves would supply detectives with their loot. The detectives would return the stolen items to the rightful owners—minus whatever sum they claimed as a reward. Many professional criminals would not work outside of such a framework, and these deals could be quite profitable for the cops. Between January 1, 1855, and April 30, 1857, Robert Bowyer of the New York Police Department earned $4,700 in rewards—more than twice his salary for the same period.24

Sometimes, no effort would be made to retrieve the stolen property, or to return it to the victim. Pickpockets and con artists were generally allowed to go about their business unmolested so long as they cut the cops in on the action. The profits then worked their way up the political food chain. The Patrolmen were required to give a portion of their take to their commanders, the local politicians, and their affiliates, thus avoiding any punishment.25

Shakedowns weren’t restricted to illicit enterprises, either. Legitimate businesses could also be inconvenienced by strict enforcement of the law and were vulnerable to the disruption caused by routine harassment. Builders, bootblacks, produce merchants, and other peddlers had to pay off the beat cop, or else they might be taken in for blocking the sidewalks.26

The system of bribery and extortion that was nineteenth-century policing far surpassed anything that could be termed individual misconduct, or even organizational deviance; it resembled nothing so much as institutionalized corruption, state-sponsored crime. Graft and the abuse of power were not merely allowed, they were expected, required, and enforced—within the police department and throughout the city administration. The political machine may best be understood as an exercise in government of, by, and for corruption.

This fusion of government and criminality follows a certain kind of logic. In “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” Charles Tilly argues:

Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum.… [C]onsider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction. Governments’ provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are the consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket.27

The history of American cities gives concrete expression to Tilly’s ­theoretical claim. In the classic political machines, government agencies and organized criminal enterprises were not only moral equivalents, they often comprised the same people. Nineteenth-century policing did not just resemble racketeering, it was unmistakable gangsterism.

The police were a central component of this system. Both the protection schemes that ensured the cooperation of the underworld and the brawling gangs that controlled the polls on election day relied on—at the very least—the acquiescence of the police. In many respects the development of the political machines depended upon the simultaneous development of the modern police. At the same time, the modernization of policing made possible important advances in municipal government. In particular, the police provided the means by which the power of local government could be consolidated into a single coherent system. In this respect, the rise of political machines resembled the earlier rise of the state itself. A brief comparison of these processes may tell us something about the engineering of power and the uses of policing in establishing its claims.

Machine Politics, State Power, and Monopolies of Violence

In general terms, we can discern a common principle underlying the creation of local political machines and that of national states. As Tilly explains: “A tendency to monopolize the means of violence makes a government’s claim to provide protection, in either the comforting or ominous sense of the word, more credible and more difficult to resist.”28 He identifies four activities characteristic of states:

(1) making war (defeating external rivals);

(2) making states (destroying internal rivals);

(3) protection (defending clients from their enemies); and,

(4) extraction (acquiring the resources to do the other three).29

Cities have not, since the colonial period, usually been forced to contend with external rivals, and thus have not been concerned with making war. But the other three tasks find clear analogies in the processes of municipal government, especially during the machine period. And at both the national and the municipal levels “all [these activities] depend on the state’s tendency to monopolize the concentrated means of coercion.”30

Philadelphia’s history illustrates some more specific parallels. In the first half of the nineteenth century, urban growth had spread beyond the city’s jurisdiction, practically uniting it with nearby townships over which it had no authority. The urban area was divided between several municipalities, and these were themselves divided geographically into neighborhoods, politically into wards, and socially along religious and ethnic lines—with a strong correlation between these sets of divisions. It was nearly impossible to keep order. Catholics and Protestants fought in the streets, White mobs attacked Black people and abolitionist speakers, and the city government could do practically nothing, even within the limited area of its authority.31 The localized, ward-based system of city politics inhibited the government’s ability to enforce its will within the neighborhoods. Yet, in the course of a few years, Philadelphia was transformed from a fragmented megalopolis with only a nominal central authority to a modern city with a unified government, a citywide political machine, and a police system to enforce the will of each.

Much of the disorder in nineteenth-century Philadelphia was perpetrated by the city’s volunteer fire departments. Neighborhood-based fire companies adopted the ethnic and religious identities of their members, and often saw themselves as the champions of their neighborhood’s traditional culture and honor. Firefighting became a source of neighborhood pride, and offered an opportunity to settle scores against rival groups. Demographic shifts and overlapping jurisdictions led to frequent turf wars; firemen would often fight one another while a blaze continued unabated. When opportunities for battle did not present themselves, they were sometimes created: fire companies would set fires in other precincts and then ambush their rivals.32

These brawls became neighborhood affairs, involving large sections of the community. Many of the fire companies affiliated with youth gangs, some with names like “Killers,” “Rats,” and “Bouncers.”33 As the police at the time were also organized into separate ward organizations, they were ill-suited for suppressing such riots. Not that they were eager to: the cops generally felt little inclination to interfere with these battles, except in support of their neighborhood company.

This situation put conflicting pressures on the political system. On the one hand, it created demands for more centralization, such as government-run fire departments and a single police force capable of suppressing disorder. On the other hand, ward leaders saw the political potential of the fire companies and were quick to avail themselves of this additional source of election-day muscle.34 The balkanized state of the city therefore left local political bosses in a bit of a bind. Their personal fiefdoms were inextricably tied to the ward-based structure of government; it allowed them a distinct realm of influence and a base of support for pursuing their agenda in the citywide political arena. But the exercise of this authority relied on a certain minimum degree of public order—which this same ward structure, with its rivalries and fragmentation, constantly threatened.

The outcome of this dilemma is revealing. In 1850, a “marshal’s” police force was created for the entire city of Philadelphia. Police in the suburbs and the four city districts continued to act independently, but were also called on to cooperate with the marshal’s force. The first marshal, John Keyser, recruited the new police directly from the youth gangs associated with Nativist fire departments, reasoning that he could form a “strong-armed force prepared to slug it out with fire gangs.”35 By co-opting the most militant element of the fire companies and consolidating them into a single, citywide force, the marshal’s police organization afforded the new cops the opportunity to defeat their traditional rivals and greatly enhanced the power of the city government—as well as, for a time, that of the Nativist party machine.

Catholic gangs and fire companies, while overpowered, were not especially impressed with their rivals’ new authority. One gang, the Bleeders, told in a song of being attacked by “a band of ruffians … they called themselves Police.” And when the Nativists lost control of the city government, Keyser’s replacement—a Democrat—filled the force with Democrats, also recruited from fire company gangs.36

In 1854, the legislature revised the city’s charter to cover the entire contiguous urban area, incorporating outlying districts into the city.37 The new charter required a centralized police department and allowed for a city-controlled fire department as well. The mayor was given the power to appoint police officers and set the department’s rules, and the city council was responsible for determining the size and organization of the force. The council created an 820-man department, divided between fourteen precincts corresponding to the ward districts. One alderman was elected to serve as magistrate in each district, and a single marshal was appointed to oversee the entire operation.38 In effect, this arrangement put the new police directly in the service of the reigning political machine.39

But the consolidation of power may not have been everything the ward leaders had hoped for. In many respects, the beginnings of a central authority relied on a corresponding decline in local power. The survival of the central power structure demanded the eventual elimination of its potential rivals. So long as local political bosses could command their own sources of power, the central government as a whole was necessarily vulnerable. Again we find a parallel with the creation of the nation-state:

In one way or another, [Tilly writes,] every European government before the French Revolution relied on indirect rule via local magnates. The magnates collaborated with the government without becoming officials in any strong sense of the term, had some access to government-backed force, and exercised wide discretion within their own territories.… Yet the same magnates were potential rivals, possible allies of a rebellious people.

Eventually, European governments reduced their reliance on indirect rule by means of two expensive but effective strategies: (a) extending their officialdom to the local community and (b) encouraging the creation of police forces that were subordinate to the government rather than to individual patrons, distinct from war-making forces, and therefore less useful as the tools of dissident magnates.40

So, too, in Philadelphia: so long as the central government was dependent upon the cooperation of the ward bosses, the government’s influence was quite limited and no one faction could be assured of permanent dominance. Faced with difficulties resembling those of the early European states, Philadelphia’s local government followed a similar course.

[In England,] Tudor demilitarization of the great lords entailed four complementary campaigns: eliminating their personal bands of armed retainers, razing their fortresses, taming their habitual resort to violence for the settlement of disputes, and discouraging the cooperation of their dependents and tenants.41

In Philadelphia, all four aims were accomplished with one masterstroke: the creation of a citywide police force allowed the limited consolidation of the city government. The ward-based militants were either co-opted into the police or defeated by them. While no fortresses existed to be pulled down, the ward leaders were made increasingly vulnerable politically; their position came to depend as much on their status within the machine, citywide, as on their influence in their own ward. Inter-ward battles were either avoided by the new system or forcibly resolved by the new police. And the cooperation and loyalty of ward residents, once owed to their local boss, became attached to the new citywide machine.

Philadelphia did not become a nation-state, of course, or even a city-state. But the authority of the city government was produced by very similar means, and in this process the creation of modern policing played a central role. The new police were not simply one aspect of a modernizing city government; they also represented a means of consolidating power within the modernizing government. But as the city consolidated power, it embarked on the first of a series of adaptations that would strengthen the government itself at the expense of the local leaders, eventually leading to the decline of the machine system.42

Centralization, even in meager form, not only changed the distribution of power, but also tended to transform the institutions that shared power. The modernization of the police allowed for a major advance in the organization and efficiency of the political machine, and with it the power of the municipal government. With a single police force in place, power could be, if not quite centralized, at least somewhat solidified. This step proved a major boon to the reigning machine, and provided one means for the machine to exert influence in wards where popular support was weak. As it did, however, it began the process by which control was shifted both upward and toward the center.43

Inadvertently, the creation of a citywide police force both drew up the blueprint and laid the groundwork for the creation of other municipal bureaucracies, and for the eventual destruction of the ward-based machine system.44 While somewhat ironic, this turn of events represents a continuation of the trends that had shaped the development of law enforcement as it approached the modern period—specifically, the growing emphasis on prevention, the tendency to expand police duties, and the move toward specialized agencies. Each of these three factors contributed to the process of modernization, but the ideal of prevention occupied a special place as a guiding principle of police development.

The Preventive Ideal, Generalized Powers, and Specialization

The idea of preventing crime has long been the avowed aim of policing, but it has undergone significant revision over time. In the London Night Watch Acts of 1737 and 1738, crime prevention was explicitly cited as the goal of the watch, though it is unclear how the body was supposed to contribute to this aim.45 The instructions offered the Philadelphia Watch in 1791 were only slightly more explicit:

[T]he said constable and watchmen, in their respective turns and courses of watching, shall use their best endeavors to prevent murders, burglaries, robberies and other outrages and disorders within the city, and to that end shall, and they are hereby empowered and required to arrest and apprehend all persons whom they shall find disturbing the peace, or shall have cause to suspect of any unlawful and evil design.46

By 1800, the preventive rationale had been refined. The watch’s role was to ensure that criminals would be punished.47 To this end, in 1794, the St. Marylebone Watch Committee resolved unanimously “that in case any Robbery be committed within the Parish, the Watchmen in whose Walk the same shall happen be absolutely discharged.” Several other London districts adopted a similar standard, though eventually the limits of the system had to be admitted. A few months later, St. Marylebone’s committee relented, acknowledging that “many Robberies are committed within this Parish without the possible knowledge of the Watchmen.”48

Watchmen were thought to deter crime by their mere presence and they could detain people they suspected of criminal acts, but the watch was not a detective force and had no means for discovering the culprits after a crime was committed.49 The odds, then, were against apprehension. While the idea behind the watch was preventive, the watch’s methods were essentially reactive, and even their reactive capabilities were quite limited.

When Robert Peel created the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, the prevention of crime was singled out as the new body’s chief concern:

It should be understood, at the outset, that the principal object to be attained is ‘the Prevention of Crime.’

To this great end every effort of the Police is to be directed. The security of person and property, the preservation of the public tranquility, and all the other objects of a Police Establishment, will thus be better effected than by the detection and punishment of the offender, after he has succeeded in committing the crime.50

Nevertheless, the Metropolitans remained unsure of how to prevent crime. In the decades that followed, they essentially replicated the patrols of the watch, with even less success.51

In the United States, historian James Richardson tells us, “the term ‘preventive police’ was used frequently and loosely. Preventive seemed to mean that by their presence the police would inhibit the commission of crime and that they would deal with potentially serious crimes before they reached the crisis stage.”52 This crude notion of prevention developed into a more serious and ambitious program as time passed, and came to inform the expansion of police powers. In Boston, for example, in 1850 the police were authorized to order any group of three or more people to “move on” or suffer arrest.53

Of course, most of what the police did was still responsive, and most actual crime-fighting still took place after the crimes had been committed. But the preventive ideal was clearly gaining an articulation, and slowly techniques were developed to bring the practice closer to the principle.

The preventive ideal both prompted the expansion of police power and helped shape the specialized focus on crime. It is worth noting the tension between these two trends: if police powers expand over too large a range of duties, policing loses its character. The police come to resemble generalized inspectors, and enforcement of the criminal law becomes a secondary matter. But, if enforcement is overly specialized, the police are in effect replaced by a series of guards, traffic wardens, thieftakers, bounty hunters, and whatnot.

Constables, sheriffs, and marshals, as servants of the court or sovereign, were assigned general responsibilities. The slave patrols developed from the other end of the spectrum, beginning with a few select duties and accumulating responsibilities and power over time. This second path was the more straightforward route toward modernization because, rather than serving primarily as officers to the Crown or the court, the slave patrols existed solely as a means of preserving the status quo through the enforcement of the slave codes. As soon as they separated from the militia, they became law enforcement bodies, and new duties were added accordingly.

The tension between specialization and generalization did not vanish with the creation of the modern police. The police retained many duties that were quite remote from their alleged purpose of preventing crime and enforcing the criminal law. Robert Fogelson explains:

In the absence of other specialized public bureaucracies, the authorities found the temptation almost irresistible to transform the police departments into catchall health, welfare, and law enforcement agencies. Hence the police cleaned streets and inspected boilers in New York, distributed supplies to the poor in Baltimore, accommodated the homeless in Philadelphia, investigated vegetable markets in St. Louis, operated emergency ambulances in Boston, and attempted to curb crime in all these cities.54

In fact, even today, the police continue to hold duties quite removed from the enforcement of the law and the prevention of crime. In many cities cops still direct traffic, license parades, escort funerals, remove panhandlers, quiet loud parties, find lost children, advise urban planners, make presentations to civic groups and school children, sponsor youth sports leagues, respond to mental health crises, and perform other tasks quite apart from any concern about crime.

As Fogelson implies, this tendency developed in part because the police offered a means for the local government to impose its will, regulate the behavior of the citizens, and generally keep an eye on things with unprecedented efficiency and regularity. It thus became a constant temptation to use this power in new and expanding ways, often to the detriment of the specialized law enforcement function.

Further specialization then relied on the development of additional bureaucracies to take on these extraneous duties. As historian Roger Lane writes:

The police were valued especially for the flexibility which made them adaptable to new demands. But when better machinery was developed the government did not hesitate to transfer their responsibilities. The creation of the sewer, health, street, and building departments all diminished the role of the police in local administration.55

Policing is thus tied to a more general trend in government administration—namely, the rise of bureaucracies. The development of modern police both depended on and promoted the creation of other municipal bureaucracies. In the first place, the creation of other bureaucracies allowed the police to specialize. Second, the consolidation of police forces facilitated a more general move toward bureaucratization by providing a model for these same bureaucracies to adopt. For both of these reasons, the modernization of the police was a key component in the modernization of city government.56 But the impact of the new police was not restricted to its effect on municipal administration. Policing was also closely connected to the economic conditions attending widespread industrialization, and the consequent expansion of the cities themselves.

Urbanization and Industrialization

When the modern police first appeared, East Coast cities were experiencing a wave of expansion, fueled by industrialization. It is no accident that industrial society produced new means of social control, since it also created new risks for disorder. Put simply, in an increasingly complex society, there was more that could go wrong. While the sheer numbers and diversity of the population contributed to this complexity, specialization (especially in the production and distribution of goods) and increased social stratification were probably more important. These factors acted together to depress or reduce the standard of living for the greatest portion of the cities’ residents, creating conflict between economic classes and increasing friction between ethnic and religious groups.57 Seldon Bacon suggests:

These three factors of social change, the rise in specialization, the stratification of classes, and the lowering of standards and consequent limitation of activities brought about by increasing numbers, all created problems in the maintenance of a harmonious and secure society; the techniques of enforcement present in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were unable to meet these problems. The family, the local church, the neighborhood, and the existing governmental agencies could not cope with the situation. In fact, there is a good deal of evidence to show that the changes were weakening all these institutions, especially as they helped bring about the mobility and individualism so characteristic of American society.58

Cyril D. Robinson and Richard Scaglion argue along similar lines, placing the advent of modern policing in the context of the emerging capitalist system. They present four interdependent propositions:

(1) the origin of a specialized police function depends upon the division of society into dominant and subordinate classes with antagonistic interests;

(2) specialized police agencies are generally characteristic only of societies politically organized as states;

(3) in a period of transition, the crucial factor in delineating the modern specialized police function is an ongoing attempt at conversion of the social control (policing) mechanism from an integral part of the community structure to an agent of an emerging dominant class; and

(4) the police institution is created by the emerging dominant class as an instrument for the preservation of its control over restricted access to basic resources, over the political apparatus governing this access, and over the labor force necessary to provide the surplus upon which the dominant class lives.59

There is much to recommend this as a general scheme, though it seems to exaggerate the role of elite foresight and planning at the expense of after-the-fact opportunism. It does more to characterize the result than the process, assuming that the outcome corresponds with some original intention. Robinson and Scaglion’s account offers a useful outline of the preconditions necessary for the creation of the modern police, but the long and complex process of transition from pre-modern to modern policing suggests a more complicated picture than their theory would indicate, especially in regard to the relationship between economic elites and the state. While it is certainly true that the ruling class came to use the police as an instrument for the expansion and preservation of their power, it seems like a stretch to say that they created the institution for that end.

As we have seen, the first significant advances toward modern police appeared in the South, where elite attitudes about the state were characteristically ambivalent. The maintenance of slave laws originally relied upon informal, universal enforcement requirements reminiscent of the frankpledge: every White member of the community had the responsibility to uphold the law. The Southern system of slave control underwent a full transition from this informal policing system, through various stages of specialization, to its apex in the creation of the quite modern Charleston police force.60 Clearly this transformation relied on social stratification, the existence of a political state, and the use of the policing function to maintain the racial and economic status quo (that is, to protect the interests of the slave-owners). However, while police powers were intentionally divorced from the community and invested in a specialized group, this change was not—as Robinson and Scaglion’s model might imply—instigated at the behest of the slave-owners, but to some degree accomplished over their objections and despite their resistance. It was instead political elites who created slave patrols as a guard against the (political) threat of revolt more than against the (economic) dangers of escape. While the state functioned in the interests of the ruling class, it was not yet an agent of the ruling class—but a competing nexus of power, and a challenge to the aristocratic pretensions of the slave owners.

In cities, industrialization and its accompanying entourage of social changes led to the breakdown of the informal means of social control that had proved (mostly) sufficient to that point.61 Cities thus produced advances in social control that the plantation system hadn’t needed and likely would have eschewed. In Southern cities like Charleston, the City Guards picked up where the patrols had fallen short, in the control of slaves (and free Black people) on hire. In Northern cities, industrialization produced similar needs to control the workforce. Rather than rely on personal authority and social deference (as on the plantation), or on the influence of the family and church (as in smaller New England towns), industrial cities of the North created governmental systems that were universalistic and routinized.62

Faced with similar challenges relating to urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of capitalism, elites in different cities responded in markedly similar ways—sometimes consciously borrowing from each other and sometimes unwittingly reproducing models and techniques that were in use elsewhere, keeping what succeeded and discarding that which failed to suit their purposes. And as this process advanced, they transformed the mechanisms of law enforcement and created a new, distinctive institution.

The New York Municipal Police came to define the type. But it would be wrong to think of the New York police as simply a modern watch, or as a Northern slave patrol, or as a set of American Bobbies63—though it was somewhat analogous to all three. In New York, as elsewhere, the police appeared when broad social trends intersected with local crises and the particular needs of the city. Of course, the authorities only responded to the crises on a rather shallow level, never acknowledging the underlying causes that produced them. Instead, local elites preferred to blame the problems of urbanization on the moral shortcomings of the poor, and the idea of the “dangerous classes” was born.

In the years preceding the rise of police departments in London and in the United States, [Richard Lundman notes,] middle-class and elite members of society attributed crime, riot, and public drunkenness to the members of the “dangerous classes.” The image was that of a convulsively and possibly biologically criminal, riotous, and intemperate group of persons located at the base of society. Their actions were seen as destroying the very fabric of society.64

The particular population identified with the dangerous classes varied by locale. In England, the dangerous classes consisted of the urban poor, vagrants, and prostitutes in particular. In the northern United States, it was the immigrant lower class; in Boston, the term was especially applied to Irish Catholics.65 The term was not used much in the South, but the dangerous classes found an analogy in the Black population, and especially the slaves. In addition to their association with crime and disorder, the dangerous classes also represented an alien presence, a group with different values whose behavior was therefore suspicious as if by definition.66 The Boston Council reported:

In former times the Night Watch with a small constabulary force, were quite sufficient to keep the peace in a city proverbial for its love of order and attachment to the laws and remarkable for the homogenous character of its population. But the rapid development of the system of railroads and of the means of communication, with all parts of Europe, together with other causes have brought among us great numbers who have not had the benefit of a New England training and who have heretofore been held in restraint rather by fear of the lawgiver than respect for the law.67

Moreover, criminal behavior was understood as a threat to the social order, not merely to its real or potential victims. Theft obviously challenged the sanctity of private property, but more to the point, drunkenness and vagrancy seemed to threaten the standards of diligence and self-control central to Protestant morality and crucial to an economic system dependent on regularity, predictability, and a disciplined workforce.68

Crime and criminality were thus constructed to reflect the ideological needs of elites. Criminality was less a matter of what people did than of what they represented.69 The idea of the dangerous classes was intimately tied to the prevailing economic order in each place, and had profound implications for the systems of social control they adopted. As Michael Hindus writes:

Slavery was not primarily a penal institution, though that was one of its results. In addition to its role in the southern labor and social system, the plantation kept under confinement and control the one class that was most threatening to the social order. Similarly, the prison was not primarily a labor system, but it mandated labor for rehabilitation, profit, and internal order. The prison adopted many features of the factory system and justified forced labor of convicts because of the moral uplift it provided.70

Both systems supplied large-scale, unpaid labor for the propertied classes, deprived the workers of their most basic civil liberties and political rights, and relied on corporal punishment and shaming for discipline.71 Furthermore, in both cases the economic systems created the class of people they were then at such pains to control—the slaves in the plantation system, and the immigrant working class in industrialized cities.

While elite anxieties about the dangerous classes supplied the impetus for new forms of social control, other concerns also helped to shape the emerging institutions. The modern police system, unlike less formal means of control, actually required very little of ordinary citizens in the way of enforcement, and exposed the respectable classes to almost no personal danger. And, though supplying an organized force under control of the government, it avoided the unseemly image of a military occupation, since police (in the North, at least) patrolled alone or in pairs, and were sparingly armed. Furthermore, an impersonal system was to be preferred over either a military model or a more informal arrangement because—ironically—it was less obviously a tool of the ruling classes.72

To the degree that industrialization and urbanization created changes related to the diversity of the urban population, economic specialization, and social stratification, they certainly produced new challenges of social control. But the question remains, what did those difficulties have to do with crime? Put differently, it might be asked: Were the dangerous classes criminal? Or were they criminalized?

The Demand for Order

It is generally assumed that the police were created to deal with rising levels of crime caused by urbanization and the increasing numbers of immigrants. John Schneider describes the typical accounts:

The first studies were legal and administrative in their focus, confined mostly to narrative descriptions of the step-by-step demise of the old constabulary and the steady, but often controversial evolution of the professionals. Scholars seemed preoccupied with the politics of police reform. Its causes, on the other hand, were considered only in cursory fashion, more often assumed than proved. Cities, it would seem, moved inevitably toward modern policing as a consequence of soaring levels of crime and disorder in an era of phenomenal growth and profound social change.73

I will refer to this as the “crime and disorder” theory.

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 orientation of the new police. Built 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 in a variety of ways. Most police administrators 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.