When was policing established

During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves. In general, throughout the 19th century and beyond, the definition of public order — that which the police officer was charged with maintaining — depended whom was asked.

For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce.

Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests. The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.

At the same time, the late 19th century was the era of political machines, so police captains and sergeants for each precinct were often picked by the local political party ward leader, who often owned taverns or ran street gangs that intimidated voters. They then were able to use police to harass opponents of that particular political party, or provide payoffs for officers to turn a blind eye to allow illegal drinking, gambling and prostitution. This situation was exacerbated during Prohibition, leading President Hoover to appoint the Wickersham Commission in to investigate the ineffectiveness of law enforcement nationwide.

To make police independent from political party ward leaders, the map of police precincts was changed so that they would not correspond with political wards. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia. Some of these events were televised nationally. In response, the patrons and neighborhood residents fought back, starting a riot that lasted six days.

The fight against the police sparked the gay rights movement. Studies, like in Kansas City, Missouri , found that patrolling police cars in neighborhoods did not help reduce crime, nor did it ease people's fears. In fact, it increased the community's dissatisfaction with police forces. In response to these findings, some departments attempted a return to community policing.

This form of policing placed minority officers in minority neighborhoods. This model also incorporated the community in helping police the neighborhood.

The police officers were meant to become close and familiar with the residents in the community. This became increasingly popular in the '90s. By the early s, two-thirds of police forces across the US implemented community policing policies. In the s, crime rates in the US started to decline, so that it had roughly halved by While the exact cause is not known, research cited by the Brennan Center for Justice found that hiring more police officers helped decrease crime — in fact, according to the research , up to 10 percent of the decrease in crime in the s was due to hiring more police.

Another theory is that technology used by police, such as their crime tracking system, improved in the s, helping them recognize and address trends more effectively.

On April 20, , two students opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 13 people. At the time, police responded by setting up a perimeter before going after the suspects. The response was widely criticized because of the amount of time the police took before moving into the school. Since then, the police have listened to the critiques and transformed their response to mass shootings. Now, one to four officers rush into a mass shooting site and follow the sound of the gun to confront the shooter.

This technique has been successful in a string of US school shootings over the past few years. Some police forces have been lauded for how they've handled active shooters, such as officers who were celebrated for their quick response to a shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice in First responders were called heroes for risking their lives and running towards danger.

The terrorist attack also affected the future of policing. The National Criminal Justice Reference Service found that departments "have evolved to include not only counterterrorism but also the adoption of an all-crimes approach, with the goal of striking a balance between criminal intelligence and intelligence related to terrorist threats.

John Conyers said in Martin Luther King Jr. Police departments also began tactics like New York City's stop-and-frisk , in which police officers stopped anyone on the street they deemed suspicious and patted the person down. But critics said the tactic was a form of racial profiling because the majority of people detained were young Black and Latino men. Evidence showed that police were disproportionately targeting minorities in these cases.

In , the mayor announced to reform the controversial policy. The officer put Garner in a chokehold and wrestled him to the ground. The United States was no longer a collection of small cities and rural hamlets. Urbanization was occurring at an ever-quickening pace and old informal watch and constable system was no longer adequate to control disorder. Anecdotal accounts suggest increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with some frequency.

Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban centers than it had been rural villages Walker But evidence of an actual crime wave is lacking.

So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to? These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. If a citizen complained, the sheriff would investigate the matter.

If evidence could be collected, an arrest would be made. There were no preventive efforts, and preventive patrol was not conducted. The United States has followed a different path than many other countries. Whereas many western nations have national police forces, the United States is still very fragmented. Policing is done mostly on the local level.

One term for this decentralized. While there are some rather abstract political advantages to a decentralized system of law enforcement, it is not without cost. Many critics call for the amalgamation and centralization of police forces, citing a wide variety of reasons such as preventing wasted effort and wasted resources.

The decentralized nature of modern American policing stems from its roots in the English past. The primary purpose of the Act was to do away with the ineffectual patchwork of policing measures then practiced in London, and establish an around the clock, uniformed police force charged with preventing disorder and crime. Peel is credited with many innovations that became standard police practice around the world. In other words, the focus of policing efforts shifted from reactive to proactive.

This shift meant that the new police force was tasked with preventing crime before it occurred rather than responding to it after the fact. A key element of this proactive strategy was preventive patrol. The city of London was divided up into beats , and the Bobbies were ordered to patrol their beats on foot. The idea was that the presence of these uniformed officers on the streets would deter crime.

He used a military-style organizational structure, complete with ranks like sergeant, lieutenant, and captain. While commonplace now, military-style uniforms were an innovation. Command and discipline were also conducted along military lines.

The main element of the British model that Americans rejected was the nationalization of police services. Americans at the time were still fearful of strong central authority, and elected to establish police forces on a local level. While arguably more democratic, decentralized police forces organized on the local level were not nearly as well insulated from local politics as their British counterparts.