Making the Police
Like the rest of the state's crime-fighting functions, policing was largely a modern invention. True, in ancient Egypt policemen patrolled marketplaces, armed with sticks and baboons trained to chase wrongdoers.
In Athens, a troop of Scythian slaves, brandishÂing whips and small sabers, was marshaled to guard public meetings, control crowds, and make arrests. Yet, their duties were rudimentary at best. In Rome, aediles could chastise citizens in specific remits— flogging actors, for example, because their duties included policing performances at the public games. The tresviri capitales were magisÂtrates responsible for public jails, executions, and order in the streets, but they lacked their own means of coercion.53 Only in the early modern era did recognizable police appear. Even in an ancient civiÂlization such as China, where the wealthy had kept private guards at least since the eleventh century, state policing is scarcely a century old. Arguably, it began only in the post-Mao period.54At first, the police were largely volunteers, citizens keeping order in their own communities. The sixth-century Frankish king Clo- thar sought to shift the burden of pursuing thieves from the famÂily to the larger territorial community, punishing those who did not pitch in.55 Thirteenth-century England set watches manned by constables—part-time volunteers who enforced the hue and cry. A crime discovered, the alarm was sounded. Pursuit followed, and if the culprits were caught and arrested, sometimes they were sumÂmarily executed.56 Local communities in medieval Spain formed cuadrillas, town leagues, to guard common pastures against interÂlopers while also keeping an eye on road traffic. In seventeenthÂcentury London, constables were male householders who served a year at a time, fulfilling the obligations of the Statute of Winchester (1285) to police their communities.
By the eighteenth century, the gentry were hiring substitutes to serve their time or paying fines, which were then used to employ others. The system's inherent amaÂteurism was thus mitigated as those who served at length acquired expertise.57Parishes also began imposing taxes instead to salary permanent watchmen. By 1800, the City of London's constables were hired men for the most part.58 At the time of the revolution, French policing was not yet entirely a governmental function. As of 1792, Parisian officers of the peace, armed with white sticks, arrested offenders and brought them before justices of the peace. Ordinary citizens could be ordered to help and jailed if they refused. Nor was policing yet professionalized in the United States, where a law in 1789 allowed marshals to compel local citizens to do their part on a posse comiÂtatus. Volunteerism lasted even into the era of professional police. Nineteenth-century Toulouse had dixainiers, local citizens who broke up brawls and reported disorder, alerting the official police. Unpaid and sporting no outward signs of authority, they were rewarded by exemption from national-guard service and billeting troops. Russian peasants mainly policed themselves, as did largely autonomous comÂmunities of Latvians, Estonians, Jews, and other minorities in the East European countryside.59
Informal policing remains even in our own day. Volunteer secuÂrity personnel patrol gated communities, organize block watches, and escort the elderly at night. And as new crimes have multiÂplied, ordinary citizens have begun serving as indirect enforcers: tenants who sue their landlords for unwarranted rent increases; the maligned for libel and defamation; consumers who win triple damages for prosecuting antitrust violations; retailers, hoteliers, and restauranteurs who police and enforce offenses against their businesses; citizens who sue fraudsters against the government.60 Class-action suits allow groups of citizens who share only their vicÂtimhood to enforce the law.61
Authorities also outsourced the legwork of policing: to knights in medieval Europe, hundreds in England, samurai in Japan, pot- waris in India, hans in China, and vigilantes in nineteenth-century America.
In the sixth-century French Merovingian kingdom, those helping track down thieves were given a cut of the goods retrieved. In sixteenth-century Florence, banditi killed or captured banned persons. Prussian Junkers administered justice—using the term loosely—on their estates until 1872, Russian landed aristocrats until 1918.62 Even when enforcement was authorized by the state, the perÂsonnel carrying it out often remained volunteers, with the restricÂtions that imposed. The justice of the peace in England, lansman in Sweden, and Schultheiss in Germany: all were legal amateurs acting as judges who had to herd their fellow subjects in the right direction while not poisoning their own reentry to civilian life.63In eighteenth-century England, thief takers—frequently former criminals—made a lucrative business of apprehending offenders and reaping rewards when they were convicted—often of crimes the thief takers themselves had instigated. Visiting Assisi in 1786, Goethe was shaken down by the sbirri, armed thugs who acted as agents of courts and were paid via fees and rewards. In 1798, London merchants prevented pilferage from the docks by financÂing a marine police force that was so successful it became a pubÂlic body two years later.64 Franςois Vidocq, who ran the Surete in the early nineteenth century, was a former criminal hired just for that expertise. In the American West, gun slingers such as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were employed to keep order as cowboys whooped it up on payday. The difference was often slight between them and proper outlaws such as John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Jesse James.65 In the early twentieth century, mining compaÂnies and other corporations broke strikes and enforced labor disciÂpline with private police. Having started by supplying security for presidents and the army, Pinkertons then worked for the railroads, which as inveterate border crossers were served poorly by territoriÂally organized policing.66 Even today, American bounty hunters are privateers fulfilling a public function when they track down bail jumpers.67
Indeed, private policing continues in robust health.
Far from having been displaced by their official colleagues, such forces are everywhere: university, school, and mall police; private and corÂporate guards; airline security; even mercenary quasi-military perÂsonnel sent into war zones.68 Despite the state's massive expansion into enforcement, so unquenchable is the demand for security that private forces today outnumber official police, often several times over—almost three in the United States.69 There are ten times as many private investigators and detectives as FBI agents. Twice as much money is spent on private policing in the US as on public. Even in statist China, a third of all policing is private, although these forces are owned by the Ministry of Public Security. In ShangÂhai, private forces are half as big as the official police; in Beijing, the numbers are largely equal.70 Not part of the state's monopoly of violence, private police are restricted in their powers—unless they are deputized or are regular police moonlighting. But nor are they hampered by the due-process limits imposed by criminal procedure or regulation. Private-security forces in the US are not subject to the same curbs on conduct as official police. As agents of property ownÂers, they can exclude or eject the unwanted from private premises in a way regular police cannot from public spaces.71Recognizably modern police forces were established in the late eighteenth century on the continent, followed half a century later in Britain and then in the United States. The earliest was perhaps in France in the mid-1600s.72 By the early eighteenth century, the marechaussee, mounted officers, had arguably become the first national police force—some three thousand men, doubled in size after the revolution. Paris in the late seventeenth and early eighÂteenth centuries was well policed by the standards of the day. In 1667, the traditional night watch was replaced with a professionÂalized uniformed force reporting to the central government.
CenÂtralized police became the norm already under Louis XIV. It was continued by the revolutionaries and the two Napoleons.73 By the late eighteenth century, some three thousand officers patrolled a city of six hundred thousand, the largest and best-organized force in Western Europe. Only about half were police in the modern sense. The rest were garbage collectors, firefighters, censors, archiÂtects, and the like.74 London became as well patrolled only half a century later.75Early on, police and army were scarcely distinguishable. Both served the ruler, putting down unrest and maintaining order— sometimes against external enemies, other times against domestic troublemakers. In autocracies, both forces were often made up of foreigners to avoid sympathy and fraternization when used domesÂtically. Vikings protected the emperor in tenth-century Byzantium. The Swiss Guards quelled unrest for the pope and the French king, among others. After the revolutions of 1848, the police in Vienna often were Czech or Moravian. In southern Italy, the carabinÂieri usually hailed from the North, sporting an inbred feeling of superiority.76
With nationalism and democracy, however, such disjuncture no longer worked. Citizens were now rallied for the patriotic cause against foreign enemies and recruited en masse to the military. The police, too, began reflecting the population they kept in line.77
Barracked officers were separated from civilians, but police generÂally lived like and among civilians when off work. True, Russian police were recruited heavily from the army and rarely natives of the region they supervised. London bobbies were deliberately enlisted from the provinces. But New York City cops were chosen from those they would police, leading to an informal rapport but also, predictÂably, more corruption.78 The gendarmes in France under Napoleon were supposed to know their local area so well that they implausiÂbly could go to any point in their districts with their eyes closed.79 More recently, radios and cars have centralized police, who swoop in only when summoned.
The backlash against such distancing has prompted a return to community policing. Foot and bike patrols in local neighborhoods now allow citizens and officers to cooperate in maintaining order.80Military and police have become separated. The peacetime BritÂish army in the eighteenth century fulfilled discrete functions: supÂpressing smuggling, putting down riots, and crushing insurrections.81 Only in extremis was the military—eventually an emanation of the nation, even when a professional force—marshaled against civilÂians. In the Peterloo massacre of 1819, constables, unable to control a crowd of sixty thousand demonstrators in Manchester, called in the hussars. When a dozen civilians were killed, the authorities realÂized that the old system of repression no longer worked. Victorian Britain used the military against civilians only twice: during riots against the ban on Sunday trading in 1855 and during the parliaÂmentary reform agitation of 1866-1867.82 In the early twentieth century, troops were deployed mainly in industrial disputes.83 The Emergency Powers Act of 1920 allowed the British army to protect food and fuel supplies. In the United States, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 restricted the use of the army for domestic policing duties, something that had become widespread in the South after the civil war.84
The separation between military and police took longer elseÂwhere. In the late nineteenth century, Russian authorities transÂferred cases to military tribunals if necessary for public order.85 In the early twentieth century, Budapest's uniformed police were still a military troop, armed and barracked like soldiers, ready for service at a bugle call. The Italian carabinieri, originally a sixteenth-century branch of the Piedmontese army, remained part of the military after Italy's unification. It reported to the Ministry of War and, for its more purely policing functions, to the Ministry of the Interior. Much the same held for the French gendarmerie and the SpanÂish guardia civil.86 In Germany, the Social Democrats proved disasÂtrously willing to use the Freikorps (demilitarized troops employed domestically) to suppress the revolution of November 1918. The Freikorps' murder of Communist leaders soured relations between the two major parties of the Left, later undermining hopes of a uniÂfied opposition to the Nazis. The Third Reich continued blurring the lines, turning the police into the “internal army.”87 In the developÂing world, militarized police are still used as, in effect, an occupying army, as when Brazil's federalized police invade favelas and battle drug gangs. Recent terrorism has also meant that semi-militarized gendarmeries have expanded, especially in border security.88
National guards bridged the gap between police and the miliÂtary, deployed in emergencies without seeming to pit army against citizens. In 1842, after riots were quelled by the army, Cincinnati created a reserve militia police guard.89 More recently, the police, locked in an arms race with offenders, have adopted military equipÂment and tactics, blurring the line again. Even as the state monopoÂlized violence, pacifying society, armaments technology forced it to weaponize at home as military battlefield kit leaked to criminals. Nineteenth-century police were armed with sticks and swords. London inspectors were allowed to carry pocket pistols as of 1829, and constables could draw revolvers from 1883 on.90 The British police still generally do not carry arms when on patrol, but they use body armor and updated weapons such as batons, rigid handcuffs, and incapacitating spray. Trained officers (5 percent of the force) are armed.91 German, French, and US police are armed as a matter of routine.92 Legitimized by the “war” against drugs and then terÂrorism, SWAT teams and other paramilitary units have been used against civilians.93 In the United States, deployment of such quasiÂmilitary teams increased fourteenfold in the late twentieth century, often for nonemergencies such as drug searches. Their tactics, weapÂons, and attitudes have been adopted by regular police forces, too.94
Crowd control upped the ante. Authorities fear mass unrest far more than individual crime. To deal with unruly crowds, violent crimes, hostage situations, and terrorism, police forces everywhere have ratcheted up their technological prowess, maintaining special units for emergencies. Water cannons and tear gas are used to disÂperse crowds. French forces especially have been armed to the teeth. Gendarmes use the army's standard assault rifles, submachine guns, and pump-action shotguns. In extreme situations, they marshal heavy weaponry, helicopters, armored vehicles with machine guns, and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear protection equip- ment.95 Since the late 1990s, the equivalent forces in the US have used surplus military hardware against civilian protests—armored vehicles, ballistic helmets, tactical vests, night-vision goggles. In the 1960s, Britain, too, developed paramilitary forces to control crowds, strikes, and riots. Deployed against striking coal miners in the mid- 1980s, they sported shields and helmets, later water cannon, tear gas, and plastic bullets, and eventually robocop armor.96 But there has also been technological de-escalation. Less-lethal weapons have been developed: stun guns and tasers, water and sound cannons, tear- and other gas. Hydraulic equipment and kinetic devices, stun grenades, and barricade-breaching technologies have joined the armamentarium. New technologies of crisis defusion have also been developed: mediation training and hostage negotiation.97