Читать книгу Police in America - Steven G. Brandl - Страница 63

In the face of corrupt and ineffective municipal police agencies, state enforcement agencies were created to assist local police departments with the new demands they faced. In 1905, Pennsylvania created the first state police agency. It was designed to provide a police presence throughout the state, to assist the local police, and to provide police services in less populated rural areas.³⁷ In 1935, the Texas Legislature created the Texas Department of Public Safety, which consisted of the Texas Rangers and the Texas Highway Patrol. The Bureau of Investigation, later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was created in 1909 and quickly became a powerful law enforcement agency. The FBI led the war against communists, gangsters, and kidnappers. The FBI developed a crime laboratory, collected crime information, greatly developed the use of fingerprinting as a method of identification, and created the FBI National Police Academy to provide advanced training to police leaders across the country.

Exhibit 2.1 August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson

August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson were two prominent police leaders who ushered in the reform era of policing.

August Vollmer was appointed police chief of the Berkeley, California, police department in 1907 (for two years prior he was the town marshal). He transformed the Berkeley department into a premiere, professional agency that was the role model for others worldwide. He hired police officers with college educations and recruited female and African American officers. He developed the country’s first university criminology program at the University of California, Berkeley. Vollmer instituted automobile, motorcycle, and bicycle patrols in his department; was responsible for putting two-way radios in patrol cars; and developed the first crime laboratory in a police department. He saw policing as a profession rather than just a job, and he was extremely concerned with how police chiefs could be easily removed from office on the whims of politicians.

In 1923 Vollmer was appointed police chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). He had limited success in reforming the LAPD given the widespread corruption that existed in the city at the time. In 1924, he returned to Berkeley. In 1931, he was the primary author of the Wickersham Report; the Wickersham Commission, which generated the report, studied Prohibition enforcement and related police practices and corruption. Vollmer retired in 1932 and died in 1955. He is known as the “father of American law enforcement.”

O. W. Wilson had been a student of Vollmer’s at Berkeley and was a police officer in Berkeley when Vollmer was chief. Wilson later became chief of the departments in Fullerton, California, and Wichita, Kansas, and during these tenures, he took many of Vollmer’s ideas and extended them. He was just twenty-five years old when he was appointed chief in Fullerton in 1925. He then served as a professor of police administration and as dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California, Davis, from 1950 to 1960. He wrote the book Police Administration, which was widely viewed at the time as the “bible” of police administration. Wilson recognized and advocated the value of motorized patrol and rapid police response in effective policing. In 1960, he was appointed chief of the Chicago Police Department and was given wide latitude to reform and improve it. He retired from the department in 1967 and died in 1972.³⁸

Photo 2.4 August Vollmer was one of the first leaders of the reform era of policing and the “police professionalism” movement. He is now referred to as the “father of American law enforcement.”

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Photo 2.5 A former student of Vollmer’s, O. W. Wilson became chief of the Chicago Police Department in the 1960s. Wilson advocated Vollmer’s beliefs and sought to institute reforms, such as motorized patrol and rapid response to calls for service.

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