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