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