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.
4: Cops and Klan, Hand in Hand
And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.
—James Baldwin1
In the later nineteenth century, as political machines, industrialization, and the modern police reshaped urban society, politics in the South faced additional complexities in the aftermath of the Civil War. There, many of the trappings of machine politics were present—corruption, abuses of power, favoritism, and street brawls—but with a difference. The status of the newly freed Black population became the political question. The Republican Party, dominant following the war, developed a constituency among Black voters eager to assert themselves, and relied on the occupying Union army to suppress opposition. The Democratic Party aligned itself with disenfranchised Confederate veterans, deposed planters, former slave-owners, and the other reactionary remnants of the status quo ante, including many poor White people ideologically attached to the old order.2 The coercive force of the Democratic Party was embodied in secret terrorist societies and vigilante groups including the Black Cavalry, the Men of Justice, the Young Mens’ Democratic Clubs, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku Klux Klan.3 As the Klan gained a prominence in 1868, it concentrated on discouraging Black voters, intimidating Republican candidates, and defeating proposed radical constitutions.4 But the Klan’s defense of White supremacy quickly expanded beyond such narrow political goals.
Reconstruction and Redemption: Who Won the War?
During Reconstruction, vigilante actions and policing were often indistinguishable. The Klan—which saw itself as a force for order, especially against Black criminality5—took up night-riding, at times in regular patrols. Its members stopped Black people on the roads, searched their homes, seized weapons and valuables, interrogated them about their voting plans, and often brutalized them.6 In many places, the Klan totally regulated the social lives of the Black population, breaking up worship services, opposing the creation of Black schools (often with success), and establishing and enforcing a system of passes for Black workers.7
In less routine actions, White mobs sometimes attacked individual Black people, Black political assemblies, and White Republicans. These attacks often involved the police as participants, or even leaders. For example, in April 1866, after a crowd of African American Union Army veterans prevented the Memphis police from arresting two of their comrades, the cops led White mobs through the streets attacking Black people at random. Mounted squads headed by police rode through Black neighborhoods, beating anyone they found on the streets and setting fire to schools, churches, and homes. The attack lasted four days, until martial law was declared. Forty-six Black and two White people died; ninety-one houses, twelve schools, and four churches were burned.8
That July in New Orleans, the police led a military-style attack against a majority-Black convention of Union loyalists. On July 30, as the delegates gathered at the Mechanics Institute, crowds of White men collected on the streets, many cops and firefighters among them. As a procession of a hundred or so Black delegates approached the Mechanics Institute, a fight broke out. It is disputed what, precisely, led to the fight, but it is generally agreed that a White policeman fired the first shot. The delegates returned fire and hurried into the building. The mob, more than a thousand White people, surged in after them, breaking down doors, firing into the assembly hall, and clubbing those inside.9
A New Orleans Times reporter described the scene following the massacre:
Out of the Senate Chamber, once more in the cross passage, pass through the hall, here is the last step of the main stairway. Blood is on it. The white wall is smeared with blood in the track of what had been a live man’s shoulder leaning up against it. Blood on the next step. Blood marks higher up on the walls, blood and marks of sanguinary struggle from the