1) We all want a ____________ police force with highly trained officers who will hurry to our door and ______________.
2) When the first settlers came to America, there were no _____ police.
Communities policed themselves. Public___________ was one way to keep people in line.
3)The clash of cultures between settlers and native Americans ____________ muchof our early history.
4)The town crier would warn communities about external _________, too, includingthe arrival of British _________.
5)Though only _____________ slaves were brought to America from Africa, their number had grown to roughly 4 million by the 1860 census.
Script
Abrief history of POLICING in the UNITED STATES
To understand today, you often have to look at yesterday. So to grasp the challenges that contemporary policing faces, we need to explore a brief history of law enforcement in the United States. It's a story of a country continuing to struggle with the role of the police in a democracy. On the one hand, we all want a professional police force with highly trained officers who will hurry to our door and emergencies, whether the problem is crime or a catastrophe such as a tornado or flood, most people heave a sigh of relief when a police officer appears. But we are also a nation founded by rugged individualist who were suspicious of government power.
Our founding fathers feared creation of a national police force. Their devotion to individual freedom above all else, meant that they wanted police under local scrutiny on local control.
So our goal here is to look at how these conflicting attitudes toward police have produced the uniquely American system of policing we see around us. Along the way, we will return to some critical questions: What is the appropriate role of police in a democracy? What are the communities, rights, and responsibilities in promoting public safety? What kind of policing do we want and need in our post 911 world? Is it the friendly police officer in the Norman Rockwell painting, the one giving the lost child an ice cream cone Or is it the swat team ROBOCOP? Or is it both?
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When the first settlers came to America, there were no paid police. Communities policed themselves. Public disapproval was one way to keep people in line. Shunning is a tactic with the community deliberately refuses to acknowledge or interact with a person who has broken the rules. Controlling behaviour by casting out a person who disobeys is still practiced by some religious groups, such as old order Amish, Jehovah witness and members of the Baha'i faith.
This form of informal social control can be enormously powerful in tight-knit communities, especially when people must rely on each other for their varying survival.
The puritans enforce their strict rules through public humiliation and punishment. Here we see people locked in stocks in the town square. Instead of a secular justice system, cohesive religious communities would often decide for themselves what to do when someone disobeyed the rules.
In the early years of our country, threats from outside the community were viewed as far more dangerous than any threat from within. The clash of cultures between settlers and native Americans characterize much of our early history. The colonists also relied on each other to maintain order. Keep in mind that in 1720 there were fewer than a half million people in the United States.
New York city was still a small town of only 7000 people. In a community, this small a citizen watch made better sense than a paid police force. People volunteered to be town criers. They were part journalist, part police officer, and part neighborhood watch captain. These community volunteers would patrol the streets at night, keeping an eye on what was happening and spreading the news. Nine o'clock and all's well.
The town crier would warn communities about external threats, too, including the arrival of British troops.
The famous Wadsworth poem about the midnight ride of Paul Revere tells us how the famous silver smith road from town to town shouting one if by land and two if by sea. Revers message explained the lantern code used to tell the revolutionaries which route the British were using to bring in the soldiers who would later fight in Lexington and Concord.
Men in that era often use dueling to settle serious disputes. Though the practice had been outlawed in New York and New Jersey by them, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought their famous duel to the death in 1804.
Attempts to move personal conflicts into the formal court system often ran counter to the widely held belief that honorable men should settle their disagreements privately. Yet, as the population grew, communities often found that they could no longer rely solely on informal social control and unpaid volunteers.
By 1760, the number of colonists had grown to 1.5 million. And within the next 30 years, it had grown to almost 4 million. As the population exploded, people increasingly turned to a formal criminal justice system of paid police, prosecutors, and judges. At the same time, settlements outside the eastern seaboard cities face different challenges in maintaining public order and safety.
Westward expansion had its own dynamic. While eastern cities had police departments with police chiefs chosen by the mayor, the western sheriff were chosen by the people, instead of a paid police force, the sheriff would typically rely on persuading local citizens to join a posse when help was needed. The sheriff would then deputize the volunteers, temporarily giving them police powers, including a rest in the use of deadly force.
Corporations turn to private security firms like the Pinkerton to protect their interests. Founded by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, the firm kept the largest collection of mug shots in the country. Pinkerton detectives were routinely hired to track down gangs of bank robbers, such as Jesse James and his brothers and the wild bunch.
The Pinkerton’s power ultimately grew to the point where the state of Ohio, ban the firm for fear they would become a private army. It is also worth noting that it was the sheriff who routinely enforced gun control. In many western communities, visitors were required to leave their guns with the sheriff while they were in town. Yet, tales of gunplay also made the publishers of Dime novel’s rich.
These illustrated morality tales glamorized the violence of the old west, which many would argue the media have done ever since.
The institution of slavery consumed and corrupted justice in the American south. Though only half a million slaves were brought to America from Africa, their numbers had grown to roughly 4 million by the 1860 census. Today we shudder at the brutality it took to repress such a large group of people living among us. But institutionalized repression was the law of the land in the southern slave states until the civil war. This was certainly not the first time nor the last, that a government has misused police to enforce misguided laws and policies. The civil war and its aftermath spurred the growth of a paid police force nationwide as the nation struggled to come together and recover from the ravages of war.
Best estimates are that the civil war caused the death of at least 620,000 soldiers on both sides. This was at a time when the total population was roughly 31 million people. So this would be the equivalent of losing more than 6 million citizens today. For additional perspective, remember that the number of soldiers killed in the civil war is more than the total number of American soldiers lost in all the wars we have fought since then.
Yet in some ways, it is the legacy of violence and vigilantes of the Reconstruction era that echoes most today for at least a dozen years following the civil war. The federal government tried to undo the inequities of slavery, but freeing the slaves and giving them the vote, sometimes the majority vote sparked ferocious backlash among southern whites. Their anger erupted into violent vigilantism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. The KKK grew in numbers for the next half century, ultimately reaching a membership of four to 5 million men in 1920. That was 15% of registered voters back then when only men could vote. The post reconstruction era saw the rollback of rights for African -American citizens, southern sheriff for the most part, and forced the scandalous Jim Crow Laws. These were the laws that deprived former slaves of the rights that had been guaranteed them by the 15th amendment to the Constitution that was passed in 1870.
To understand the level of violence, consider that almost 5000 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. And 3 out of 4 of them were African-Americans.
Photographs of lynching all too often show police celebrating with the crowd rather than intervening to save the lives of the victims.
While racial tensions are also a fact of life in the North, the aftermath of slavery in the south continues to remind us how important it is to establish a system where police not only respect the rights of all people, but actively strive to protect them.
