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