Why Was Law Enforcement Established?

The Connection between Law Enforcement, and the Economic Elite

When we think of law enforcement in the United States, we think of “protect and serve” to all people without bias. We call the police when we believe that there is harm, or if there was a burglary, or when there has been a murder, or someone is missing, to name a few. However, was that the focus when we established law enforcement? Was American policing about protecting the people and serving them? I will let you decide that.

Dr. Gary Potter, professor at EKU School of Justice Studies, explains how the early inception of law enforcement in this country was formed. In the beginning, “policing” was both informal and communal, and was often referred to as the “Watch,” or private-for-profit policing was referred to as “The Big Stick.” In the United States, policing was followed closely to that of England, as well as our criminal justice system.

The watch system was primarily composed of community volunteers who would warn of impending danger. When thinking of this, think of Patrick Henry’s warning the red coats were coming! The first policing efforts took place in Boston in 1636, and then came New York in 1658, and then Philadelphia in 1700. Unfortunately, the night watch was not effective in crime control. The watchmen slept or drank while on duty, and theoretically, they were volunteers, but these men were evading military service, forced into service by their town, or performing these duties as a form of punishment, and their duties weren’t taken seriously.

It wasn’t until the 1830s that a centralized municipal police department first emerged. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first modern American police force, which was followed by New York City, in 1845, Philadelphia in 1855, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, and Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ, and Baltimore in 1857. Municipal police forces were in all major US cities by the 1880s.

So, what was their purpose? Crime? Protect the innocent? All of these modern police forces shared similar characteristics: (1) they were supported publicly, and in bureaucratic form; (2) police officers were full-time employees, and not community volunteers; (3) these departments had policy, permanent, and fixed procedures; (4) the police departments were accountable to a central governmental authority. In the 1830s, cities were growing, and the informal watch or constable system no longer worked, especially with the increase in crime, mob violence, and violence directed at immigrants, especially African Americans by young white youth, as well as public drunkenness, and prostitution were more visible with the increase of population. Although, the modern police forces emerged to respond to “disorder” not because of crime.

In the 19^th century, those who defined social and public disorder were the mercantile, and through taxes and political influence, this was the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. Unfortunately, these economic interests had a greater interest in social control rather than crime control. This was the start of emerging commercial elites who needed a mechanism for a stable and orderly workforce, a stable and orderly environment to conduct business, and to maintain what they referred to as the “collective good.”

Workers who were exploited were referred to by the economic elites as rioters who were “rioting,” which was a primitive form of a union strike. They even raised a specter of the “dangerous class,” such as public drunkenness, crime, hooliganism, political protests, and worker riots, that these citizens were defined as biologically inferior, morally intemperate, and the unskilled and uneducated underclass. This “dangerous class” consisted of the poor, foreign immigrants, and free blacks. The common people were always snubbed by the elite and controlled by the elite.

In June 2005, the United States Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement didn’t have a constitutional duty to protect from harm, not even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order, according to the New York Times. As we have seen, law enforcement was not established to “protect and serve,” but to have societal control.