Most middle-class white Westerners regard the police as sheep do border collies: something they rarely encounter or need worry much about, so long as they stick to the center of the flock and do not tarry, dawdle, or stray.
Such people pass years, decades even, withÂout meeting uniformed officers face-to-face. If they do not drive, the frequency of their already rare interactions diminishes further.
If they do not live in neighborhoods targeted by zero-tolerance enforcement, that effect is amplified.1 Policing happens at sociÂety's margins, to the disenfranchised, poor, racial minorities, and the outcast. For them, the police are all-powerful and all-pervasive in their lives. Well-socialized burghers, in contrast, confront the state's enforcement arm infrequently because—policing themselves as part of the behavioral compact that assures their station—they rarely cross the invisible lines that trigger a statutory response.Yet policing did not always hover at society's periphery. It was once largely synonymous with government itself. The term policing shares its etymology, not coincidentally, with policy and polity, and they in turn with polis—or more precisely politeia, Greek for “govÂernance of a city.” As we have seen, crime used to encompass many behaviors that are now decriminalized: reclassified under private law, relegated to the private realm, considered merely sins or minor infractions—or redefined as normal, such as being Protestant or gay. In tandem, policing once also intervened much more broadly. The police used to administer activities that today are not regulated much or at all (sartorial strictures, Sabbatarian rules, morals, reliÂgion, usury) or that are now the province of other arms of governÂment (zoning, health and safety, child protection, social services, food and drug safety, transportation, animal control, competition).
In its older, all-encompassing mode, to police was to govern, to supply the basic infrastructure of a well-regulated society. Today, “police states” mean totalitarian dictatorships, unfettered by rule of law or due process.
In the early modern era, a police state meant the opposite. It was a tautology, repeating itself, a “state state.” In sixteenth-century France, police was defined simply as the governÂment of a republic.2 What the political theorists of absolutist govÂernment in seventeenth-century Germany called Polizeiwissenschaft is best translated as the “science of governing.” To police was to administer. An echo of this tradition lingers in the Anglophone notion of “police powers”—the quaintly antiquated public-order and welfare regulations that were once among the police's most important duties.3 But, on the whole, the English did not entrust the same sort of broad regulatory powers to their police as did the continent.4 In contrast, the Scots, the American colonies, and, later, the US federal states gave police powers a remit more akin to Europe. Nineteenth-century America used morals-related regulaÂtions to criminalize behavior of the sort once targeted in Europe by Polizei strictures.5 In that sense, the English police were both later and more modern—narrowly specialized in enforcing law and maintaining order—when first set up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.6On the continent, in contrast, early modern policing combined enforcing law and maintaining public order with a Noah's ark of regulation. The Romans had already pointed the way. Their city prefects kept order, but they were also responsible for fire hazards, public buildings, religious ceremonies, public meetings, prostitutes, beggars, and foreigners as well as more generally for health, safety, and morality. Only in the fifteenth century, with their first laws on
Polizei, did Europeans get back to that place.7 These laws entrusted the police with a groaning smorgasbord of responsibilities: potaÂble water; animal control; regulation of prostitutes, foreigners, vagrants, nonconforming religionists, and other undesirables; sarÂtorial and sumptuary laws; Sabbatarian and opening-hours rules; flood abatement; food supply and adulteration; weights and meaÂsures; manufacturing; hiring, firing, and behavior of servants; purÂchase and sale; guardianship; fire prevention; mendicancy; rubbish and waste removal; price controls and profiteering; usury; embezÂzlement; pawn brokers; public drunkenness; arms and weapons; cursing; adultery and concubinage; commerce; fairs and markets; street cleaning and lighting; passports; transport; building codes; public works; bridge maintenance; wet nurses; poor relief; illicit publications and censorship; public houses and amusements.
The police also enforced regulations to ensure salubrity: against immoÂrality, blasphemy, drinking, cursing, and gaming. Weddings were closely regulated: who could be invited, what to wear, how expenÂsive the gifts could be, how much food, drink, and music was per- mitted.8 When not otherwise occupied, local executioners pitched in to dispatch stray dogs and pigs and to enforce regulations against lepers and prostitutes, sometimes gambling, as well as public defÂecation and blasphemy. It would arguably be easier to list what did not belong to the police's remit, which included largely everything other than perhaps defense and foreign policy.9Nor did this panoply of functions evaporate entirely under modernity's sun. In early nineteenth-century Toulouse, the police still combined the functions of family court and counseling. OffiÂcers took evidence from complainants whose daughters had been seduced, whose husbands squandered their earnings, whose jilted lovers had stolen their wardrobes, and the like. The French gendarÂmerie helped out in times of natural or other disaster.10 In Denver in the 1860s, the city marshal removed a noxious slaughterhouse and tannery from the town center. Stray dogs occupied much police attention. Officers lodged the down and out and returned errant children. When the Russian police took care of abandoned children, even deep into the twentieth century, they had little choice but to welcome them into their own families.11 In the mid-nineteenth century, New York police counted cellar dwellers, inspected steam boilers, cleaned streets, and administered elections.12 The English phrase “If you want to know the time, ask a policeman” revealed that few people owned a watch in the nineteenth century but also cynically assumed that most bobbies had lifted a timepiece off a drunken reveler.13
Writing in 1915, an American visitor was astounded at the range of activity still pursued by German police.
Prussia had sepaÂrate police departments for insurance, mining, water and dikes, field and forest, cattle disease, hunting, fisheries, trade, fire, poliÂtics, roads, health, and buildings—among other things. Berlin had twelve police departments. Only two—uniformed officers and the detectives—performed functions also handled by their English law enforcement colleagues. The others supervised markets and sale of provisions; inspected foodstuffs; controlled public assemblies; abated nuisances; oversaw lodging houses, cafes, and amusements; regulated druggists, vets, and other professions; and kept watch on certain banks. Division Eight oversaw censorship of theaters, control of concerts and movie theaters, and the employment of child actors. Meanwhile, the Paris police inspected mushrooms as one of their duties, and it remained their task to check on buildings and factoÂries, scrutinize prices, and verify the quality of produce.14 To this day, the French gendarmerie collects meteorological data and reguÂlates veterinary clinics and abattoirs.15 The Chinese police, tasked also with public-health matters and census registration, investigated citizens' homes and backgrounds.16 Even the London police licensed chimney sweeps, shoeblacks, and messengers; kept tradesmen honÂest; inspected weights, bridges, and lodging houses; and enforced nuisance laws. They could even be asked to wake people in the morning for work.17Even today, the police continue to provide many services and comÂmunity functions—if only because no other institution answers the phone 24/7/365 but largely because most police work still involves maintaining order more than solving crime.18 The vast majority of calls today to the police do not report crimes at all, much less seriÂous ones.19 Many are requests for help in emergencies that might quickly deteriorate but do not yet involve law breaking: domestic disputes, children on the street alone at night, noises scaring an elderly couple, drug overdoses and miscarriages, and accidents of all sorts.20 The more developed the country, the more police respond to noncrime situations.
Arrest is only the third most common outÂcome of their interventions (after doing nothing and advising how to avoid repeating the incident), occurring some 14 percent of the time.21 Even when offenders are arrested, it is mostly over bread- and-butter stuff. Only 10 percent are charged with serious offenses. In the main, police interact with the public over drunkenness, disÂorderly conduct, assault, drunk driving, gambling, vandalism, and similarly pedestrian matters.22Nonetheless, policing has narrowed significantly from its blunÂderbuss role in the early modern era. The Enlightenment's reformÂers held that the state was to provide the legal framework, thereby defining the acceptable, and maintain order but not otherwise use its police powers to regulate the particulars of civil society. Citizens were left free to arrange matters as they saw fit within legality's parameters.23 Ensuring order, not promoting welfare, became the police's new role. In the Prussian general code of 1794, the police's tasks were to maintain public peace, security, and order and to preÂvent danger to the public.24 Though that remained a broad remit, many of the police's earlier duties gradually either were not reguÂlated at all or fell to other state agencies. The police's main role became to ensure order, prevent offenses, and solve those crimes not deterred.25 Having once been the state's Swiss Army knife, police became a rapier. Perhaps the closest they come to their earlier duties today is regulating traffic, which brings them into frequent contact with many different citizens. Yet policing as such has not diminished. Yes, it has narrowed its scope to the more precise modÂern sense of dealing with crime as violations of the penal code, but what this specific definition encompasses has expanded and draÂmatically deepened.
On its way to this new role, policing changed entirely. In Europe's old regimes, up through the eighteenth century, offending was widespread and common, committed by many, not just by an easily identifiable criminal class, and tolerated in large measure for lack of effective means to counter it. The interested parties themselves, not the authorities, did most enforcement.
Cases were often settled informally outside of court. If they reached trial, the unfortunate pendant to lax and indifferent enforcement was harsh deterrent punishment of the few who had been nabbed. Policing was spoÂradic, localized, and violent.26With the growth of official policing starting in the eighteenth cenÂtury and a judicial system able to handle the heightened throughput, enforcement became professionalized. Property-owning volunteer constables or their paid proxies were replaced by uniformed, salaried officers. Detecting crime and maintaining order became routinized, spreading into poor communities, too. Rather than making examÂples of a few, catching and sentencing as many offenders as possible were the new goals. Punishments were moderated but inflicted more regularly and predictably. Prosecution became the state's duty and the citizen's right, available to anyone who had been victimized, not just to those who could afford to pursue matters.
Policing had earlier enforced the authorities' will, suppressing not just mayhem and disorder but also unrest and revolt. Tsarist police in Russia were notorious in this regard. In early nineteenth-century
Austria, police still beat civilians for showing disrespect to the rulÂing house.27 The unrest that roiled European cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doubtless helped spur the authorities' plans for regularized police forces.28 In the French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the gendarmerie helped restore order—and was temporarily disbanded thereafter in acknowledgment of the unpopularity that act had won it.29 But in a longer view, in increasÂingly democratic societies the police could not be partisan. To avoid raising hackles, they had to maintain order and enforce the law impartially. That order and legality benefit those at society's pinÂnacle hardly needs mention; that they equally and possibly espeÂcially favor those with few other means to protect themselves from violence and chaos bears repeating.
From its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, the English police recognized the virtues of being unpartisan. Unlike the older continental European forces, established to shore up dynasties and regimes, English policing was instituted less to take sides than to enforce the king's peace.30 The bobbies were carefully controlled, largely unarmed, trained to win public sympathy, and subject to strict rule of law. They were citizens in uniform, not much more powerful than their civilian peers.31 Marinated in an atmosphere skeptical of standing armies and anything in uniform, the American police were at first scarcely an arm of the state at all and more an extension of civil society. Officers were selected to reflect the social, national, and ethnic composition of those they policed. They were closely tied to local machine politics. Second-generation residents of New York City suspected Irish officers of favoritism and invesÂtigated to see whether they were arresting their fellow brethren in due numbers.32
As policing became a regular feature, seeping into society's interÂstices, an implicit compact was struck between citizens and offiÂcialdom. The rule of law applied to police as much as to civilians. Punishing violations of the criminal code was their remit and their legitimacy rested on keeping to that. Rules on how to collect, proÂcess, and use evidence became detailed. Lettres de cachet of the sort issued by the French king before the revolution, locking up miscreÂants indefinitely without specified charges, were no longer tolerÂated. Most nations eventually forbade coercion, the third degree, unauthorized eavesdropping, and similar techniques.33 The job of the police was to uphold the law. If the law was fair, all citizens ben- efitted. When the police favored or persecuted some groups, their authority suffered. If anyone other than offenders felt victimized, the deal would be off. What counted as legitimate, enforceable law evolved as the state extended its powers yet took account of cusÂtom and habit. Social crimes such as poaching and gleaning ceased being enforced strictly on behalf of landowners. Laws that clamped down on workers' pleasures—drink above all—were policed only sporadically.
Police and citizenry needed each other. Short of an omniscient police state, civilian cooperation was crucial. Police were like fish swimming in the ocean of the people, as the current Chinese authorities have repurposed Mao's analogy of the People's RevoluÂtionary Army.34 The police did not just replace civil society's selfÂpolicing but also enlisted that function on their own behalf. Even in the modern era, most crime reporting originated with the pubÂlic, not with gumshoe detective work. Some crimes, such as domesÂtic violence, were likely to remain unknown if not reported. Tips, sightings, snitching, and reports were needed to resolve cases. According to one study, 93 percent of arrests were the outcome of citizens contacting the police. Unless victims or witnesses helped identify offenders, the likelihood of an arrest fell to 10 percent.35 The most-wanted posters (and their TV variants) that used to fesÂtoon post offices were emblematic: appeals to the public for leads. Hotlines to report crimes were widespread. Volunteer patrols helped the police. Even the supernatural pitched in through its mediums.36 And if citizens were not mobilized directly by the authorities, then they were indirectly by insurance companies, obliging them to lock their homes and cars, report thefts, and register stolen goods. Night watchmen in early modern Europe rattled doors, checking to see if they were locked as required by law.37 Today officers collect data from neighborhood-surveillance cameras to track suspects. WarnÂings against abandoned luggage alert the public on public transport to possible terrorist bombs. Open registers of sex offenders presume that their neighbors will—if they have not already driven them away—help police them.38
Indeed, self-policing has remained a cornerstone of police work. As far back as the thirteenth century, English subjects were required to report treasonous plans they knew of—not tarrying more than two days or attending to their own business beforehand. Medieval Christians were expected to report heresy on pain of being susÂpected themselves.39 Indonesia has updated this practice with Smart Pakem, an app allowing Muslims to denounce heretics from their smartphones.40 In the West, anyone who knows of crimes such as domestic violence, especially if victims are unlikely to report them, is encouraged to alert the police, “thus marking that these offences are not a private matter between the parties involved,” in the words of a Swedish bill.41 The German legal code criminalizes knowing of plans for serious crime without reporting it.42 The common law nations achieved much the same by defining accomplices broadly. Reporting requirements became standard for professions likely to see child or elder abuse.43 Banks have to disclose large cash transacÂtions, corporations disposal of toxic substances. Those who are not informers are accomplices—that is the logic.
A successful police system is one citizens want more of. Order and security are our first demands of the authorities. True, some forms of enforcement were inherently unpopular. Public support for the English police suffered in the early nineteenth century when they enforced laws that in effect targeted the poor for being poor—being drunk in public or sleeping in the open (thus classified as vagrant).
The working classes resisted bans on their pleasures: drinking on Sundays, street betting, gaming, dog- and cockfighting, hare coursÂing, rat baiting, and other animal sports (though fox hunting was of course not prohibited).44 Attempts to enforce Sabbatarian rules in New York City that had been passed in Albany by provincial lawÂmakers stretched the police beyond what they could or wanted to do and undermined their popular support.45 Today, the sense that ethnic minorities are singled out for unfair scrutiny and enforceÂment undermines support in their communities, hampering the compliance and cooperation on which successful policing necessarÂily rests.46
But laws that were not inherently biased have generally been popular. When the seventeenth-century English imposed bindingÂover orders on each other, which required good behavior on pain of punishment, they were yearning for more policing in an era before the state could deliver. Access to the law and its protection of their meager property were what the English poor desired in the eighÂteenth century. Many of the cahiers de doleances (list of grievances) drawn up before the French Revolution complained that small towns and villages hardly ever saw police patrols and demanded enlargement of the marechaussee (local mounted force).47 The PrusÂsian habeas corpus law of 1848 forbade house searches at night. Upright burghers protested that when they reported a theft, the goods were long gone by the time the police finally showed up the next day.48 Resisted at first, London bobbies soon became popuÂlar, the public complaining that they were not doing enough to maintain order. Assaults on police dropped by two-thirds during the late nineteenth century.49 At first, bobbies could arrest only for crimes they had witnessed. Londoners pressed for changes, which passed in 1839 and allowed police to take suspects into custody for broader reasons. As theft's main victims, the nineteenth-century poor were eager to prosecute their losses in court.50 Even though
they dislike tax increases, citizens have been known to vote to finance expanded police patrolling. Faced with neighborhood disÂorder and crime, most residents have supported foot patrols and other up-close forms of policing.51 Minority residents of US cities often receive unwanted and undeserved police attention, yet they have also backed more and stronger enforcement—of drug laws, for example.52 Just anecdotes, these stories nevertheless illustrate a truÂism: in stable modern societies, many more suffer from crime than from police misconduct.