Police and Law Enforcement

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POLICE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT

Between 1754 and 1829 the institutional structure of American policing changed little. As in England, justices of the peace (JPs) bore the chief responsibility for keeping order, hearing complaints, and jailing malefactors. But for the most part American communities policed themselves.

Night watchmen guarded city spaces, but JPs expected citizens to identify criminals. Grand jurors sometimes informed themselves, identifying the persons they wanted indicted and thereby acting as a kind of citizen police force. State statutes authorized sheriffs and constables to keep the peace, especially in cases of riot or a major crime committed before their eyes. An 1812 New York digest of laws for sheriffs, coroners, and constables compiled by Joseph Backus explained that "when any felony shall be committed," and notice given, "fresh pursuit shall be forthwith made after every such felon, by sheriffs, coroners, constables, marshals, and all other persons who shall be by them commanded and summoned." New York also expected sheriffs and constables to suppress gaming, implying that they might actively seek out gamblers. More often, legislators expected ordinary citizens, acting as a posse comitatus or individually, to run down felons. Backus wrote that in cases of forcible entry, justices of the peace should go to the scene of the crime and offer a reward. "And all the people of the county" shall assist the JP in making arrests. Sheriffs and constables most often acted as process servers.

In the early national period, a more secular understanding of crime and misconduct changed how Americans viewed the detection of criminality. Colonials saw crime as sin, and all persons as sinners. Printed crime narratives came in the form of sermons, looking not at the crime or the judicial process but on the criminal's spiritual condition. Ministers asked what small sins, the sort committed by everyone, had led to the bigger sin? The clergy searched for clues not to identify the sinner/criminal, but to reveal the condition of his eternal soul. Americans after the Revolution set apart criminals from the larger population. Ministers' moral policing declined in importance. Published crime stories, especially murder narratives, now invited readers into secret worlds and treated the crime as a mystery with clues and motives to be unraveled. This new view of crime as mystery practically cried out for policing and detectives; but outside the South cities did not organize professional police forces until the antebellum era.

Nonetheless, the roots of modern policing can be discerned in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Institutionalized policing has its roots in American slavery. In seventeenth-century South Carolina, white colonists had passed laws against bartering with slaves and established a curfew for their slaves. Needing a police force to enforce these statutes, white South Carolinians created a night watch of constables and citizens to watch for fires, attacking Indians, and slave gatherings. Virginia organized slave patrols in the eighteenth century. Other states followed.

After the Revolution, the states regularized their patrol procedures. In most, county courts appointed patrollers. Town officials worried that patrols appointed by county government would not adequately patrol urban areas. Columbia, South Carolina, petitioned its legislature for an appropriation for a city "guard." Some towns incorporated so as to organize a "proper police," as Pearisburg, Virginia, officials put it. Historians have traditionally described patrollers as "poor white," but freeholders (estate owners) and slaveholders filled the ranks of these early police forces; from 1805 to 1830, New Orleans used free blacks in its city guard and patrol forces.

Slave patrols policed their jurisdictions. They stopped and interrogated suspects. They entered private homes, searching for evidence. They broke up gatherings they deemed unruly. They administered what a later generation might call "street justice": an unrecorded beating on the spot. They particularly looked for contraband and stolen objects. In rural areas patrollers made their rounds on horseback, in urban areas on foot.

Creation of a federal court system in 1787 changed American policing but little. Federal judges did not believe their jurisdiction included common law crimes. U.S. attorneys and federal marshals identified violators of the revenue laws. In 1802, when three white men murdered three Indians in the Northwest Territory, ordinary citizens identified the killers when the culprits boasted of their acts and displayed the dead Indians' property. As in state cases, detection of malefactors depended largely on the willingness of ordinary citizens to step forward. The appearance of an unaccountably dead body, or any crime committed with the assent of the neighborhood, rarely led to a warrant or an arrest.

In 1829, London established its police department, heralding a new age in crime control. Thereafter Boston, New York, and other cities put their own officers on patrol. Constables had collected fees by serving writs and warrants, acting only in response to citizen complaints. The new officers received a salary and sought out crime and criminals for arrest.