The History of Policing in the United States

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2022

The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact, policing and crime are imperfectly correlated. Crime is understood as a socially constructed category that varies over time and space. Crime in the American city was produced by the actions of police officers on the street and the laws passed by policymakers that made particular behaviors, often ones associated with minoritized people, into something called "crime." Police create a statistical narrative about crime through the behaviors and activities they choose to target as "crime." As a result, policing the American city has functionally reinforced the nation's dominant racial and gender hierarchies as much as (or more so) than it has served to ensure public safety or reduce crime. Policing and the production of crime in the American city has been broadly shaped by three interrelated historical processes: racism, xenophobia, and capitalism. As part of these processes, policing took many forms across space and time. From origins in the slave patrols in the South, settler colonial campaigns of elimination in the West, and efforts to put down striking workers in the urban North, the police evolved into the modern, professional forces familiar to many Americans in the early 21st century. The police, quite simply, operated to uphold a status quo based on unequal and hierarchical racial, ethnic, and economic orders. Tracing the history of policing and crime from the colonial era to the present demonstrates the ways that policing has evolved through a dialectic of crisis and reform. Moments of protest and unrest routinely exposed the ways policing was corrupt, violent, and brutal, and did little to reduce crime in American cities. In turn, calls for reform produced "new" forms of policing (what was often referred to as professionalization in the early and mid-20th century and community policing in the 21st). But these reforms did not address the fundamental role or power of police in society. Rather, these reforms often expanded it, producing new crises, new protests, and still more "reforms," in a seemingly endless feedback loop. From the vantage point of the 21st century, this evolution demonstrates the inability of reform or professionalization to address the fundamental role of police in American society. In short, it is a history that demands a rethinking of the relationship between policing and crime, the social function of the police, and how to achieve public safety in American cities.

Monthly Review, 2003

Social Justice, 2020

hen I teach the history of US policing, I begin our survey by holding up one of the most widely used textbooks on policing, The Police in America by Samuel Walker and Charles M. Katz (2018, 33), first published in 1981 and currently in its ninth edition. I turn to a chapter of the textbook titled "The History of the American Police" and read the first sentence from a section on "The First Modern American Police": "Modern police forces were established in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s." I then quote from a facing page, in a section under the heading "Law Enforcement in Colonial America," which reads: Policing in the southeastern states where slavery existed had a distinctive institution: the slave patrol. Because the white majority was so concerned about slave revolts (of which there were many), and runaway slaves, they created this new form of law enforcement. The slave patrols, in fact, were the first modern police forces in the United States. The Charleston, South Carolina slave patrol, for example, had about 100 officers in 1837 and was far larger than any northern city police force at that time. (Walker & Katz 2018, 32)

Draft of chapter 23 published in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen (eds), 2016, pp 456-73.This chapter examines key developments in the historical context that shaped a very influential model of modern policing, while also attending to alternative models and effects. Section I considers the historical conditions for a new police in the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, with attention to the rapidly changing urban centres, and contemporaneous rural disorder in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Section II we look at the origins and mandate of the London Metropolitan Police (1829), as well as examining its legacy in diffusion of a policing model and ideological impact. Section III considers the way in which alternative approaches to policing were shaped in the gendarmerie model and its colonial expressions, while a concluding discussion in Section IV highlights the distinctive powers, functions and governance models that developed in the earliest phase of what we know as ‘modern’ policing.

Law and Society Review, 1987

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines police as a body of officers that represent the authority of government. The functions performed by police officers are known as policing. Some of the functions include enforcing the law, maintaining public order and safety, preventing and detecting crimes. This paper is a descriptive and assessment survey of American policing. It is an attempt to contribute to scholarship in the areas of the history of policing in America and in the areas of assessing the impacts of policing on the American communities.

2015

This cross-sectional research examined the deployment of police and security officers in the 300 most densely populated U.S. counties. Controlling for indicators of population structure, race, income, and the underclass, there is a clear and consistent relationship, albeit weak, between crime and the deployment of both the police and private security officers. Inconsistent with expectations, however, private security forces were more likely to be deployed in high crime counties than their public counterparts. This study also provides empirical support for the minority threat group hypothesis that posits that formal social control is used to regulate Black populations. Last, the presence of higher populations of the underclass was positively associated with both police and security officer strength. This study reveals that American private security officers have a significant role in augmenting the activities of the police by shaping urban social control. These results have implications for the study of private-public law enforcement, urban social control, and the regulation of minority populations and the underclass.

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