Week 1 Police History

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.

New Perspectives in Policing, Harvard Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety, 2015

In a report released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety, the case is made for addressing both the internal and external culture of police agencies in order to create a culture that supports a guardian mindset. “The old adage ‘So the station…so the street’ describes how the values demonstrated inside the organization have a powerful influence on police behavior in the community,” the authors argue. “The way leaders exercise their power inside the organization signals to officers how they are expected to use their power on the street. Strict military structure and protocols in many police agencies and training academies are at odds with the concept of internal procedural justice.” The report, titled “From Warriors to Guardians: Recommitting American Police Culture to Democratic Ideals,” is authored by Sue Rahr and Stephen K. Rice, and was funded by the OJP National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Rahr and Rice offer concrete ideas and outline a specific example of transforming the organizational culture of a police academy from a military ‘boot camp’ model designed to ensure strict compliance with rules and orders, to a culture based on developing critical-thinking leaders and institutionalizing procedurally just values – toward the mindset of a leader as a guardian. “The authors’ call for a shift in the police mindset from warriors to guardians of democracy is important and timely,” writes Tracey Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School. “Public trust is the cornerstone of public safety, and this brief provides a needed roadmap for agencies seeking to change.” Charles Beck, Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department comments that, “America's focus is on the legitimacy and efficacy of its police departments. This paper provides clarity to that focus as well as a path forward. I strongly recommend it as required reading for the police professional.”

Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice

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.

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.

Monthly Review, 2003

The history of the United States policing systems are storied with evolutionary roots in