Professionalizing the Police

Seen in a long historical sweep, the likelihood of an offender being punished has moved from possible through plausible to at times even probable. The dark figure of undetected crime remains obscure—more so the further into the past we go.

How the justice system upped its game can be gauged by its grow­ing ability to deliver known offenders to their just deserts. Just 10 to 20 percent of accused killers were convicted in fourteenth-century Eng- land.⁹⁸ More than 40 percent of those tried in seventeenth-century Sussex were acquitted, 30 of them in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Norfolk and Suffolk. Figures for all of Eng­land from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries were similar.⁹⁹ Conviction rates in Bavaria in the early nineteenth century hovered between 40 and 50 percent.¹⁰⁰ By the nineteenth century in France, they had climbed to 70 percent.¹⁰¹ And modern judiciaries convict even more efficiently. In Japan today, 90 percent of those tried plead guilty, and acquittal rates are miniscule.¹⁰² In Europe and the United States, the percentage of prosecutions leading to convictions are uni­formly higher than 80 percent, sometimes significantly so.¹⁰³

The judiciary became more efficient in prosecuting criminals for reasons explored later in this chapter.

Even without juries to buffer an insistent prosecution, continen­tal Europe's inquisitorial systems had built-in circuit breakers in the form of pardons and amnesties. They were tripped when crime and sanction seemed out of synch or when the numbers of the indicted simply grew insurmountable. The Theodosian Code mentions thirteen amnesties granted between 332 and 413 CE. The Span­ish Crown's pardons extended even into the American colonies. When Louis XVI left Paris for exile in June 1791, he deplored how the National Assembly had stripped away his prerogative to pardon and commute sentences. His subjects, he lamented, would no lon­ger regard him as their common father.¹⁰⁴ Even in republican times, that tradition continues. The French prison population has largely been stable since 1988 thanks in part to a series of mass pardons marking national holidays or presidential inaugurations. Although the timing of their use differed from the Western experience, China had an even more luxuriant tradition of “great acts of mercy” by which entire cohorts of offenders were pardoned on a regular basis— every three years, for example, during the last four decades of Emperor Wu's reign, from 128 BCE on.¹⁰⁵ Overall, pardons today are rare, but they remain as a curiously patriarchal remnant of once-feudal relationships. As punishments aligned with offenses, the need waned for royal pardons (followed in republics by their presidential and gubernatorial versions) to take the edge off earlier barbarities.

Starting in the nineteenth century, police numbers and budgets marched steadily upward. Figures began being kept in the 1930s, showing that police ranks per capita have multiplied almost every- where.¹⁰⁷ Some nations centralized their forces; others left oversight to local entities. Regardless, the police slowly professionalized and bureaucratized. Having begun as volunteers, officers were first sala­ried and then subjected to modern bureaucracy's usual processes of examination, training, discipline, and meritocratic advancement. In the early nineteenth century, the Russian tsar's political police force was staffed by personnel so ill educated that they quite lit­erally could not understand the regime opponents they interro- gated.¹⁰⁸ That had to change.

Maintaining order, providing evidence to prosecute offenses, and preventing crime were, in that order, largely what police did. The medieval hue and cry did rouse citizens in immediate pursuit of an offender, but grappling with criminals in flagrante diminished as part of police work. Today, only about a tenth of radio calls to patrol cars raise even the possibility of law enforcement in the narrow sense—stopping a burglary, catching a prowler, making an arrest, or investigating something suspicious.¹⁰⁹ In New York, even in poor neighborhoods in the high-crime 1980s, 40 percent of patrol offi­cers made not a single felony arrest per year, and 69 percent made no more than three. In London, an officer might encounter a bur­glary in progress once every eight years. Direct crime work took up as little as 3 percent of patrol officers' working hours.¹¹⁰

In the twentieth century, the French police boasted an ability to find their culprit anywhere in the nation within twenty-four hours.

Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829. He wanted his bobbies regarded as but members of the public who were paid to give full-time attention to duties that were in fact incumbent on all citizens.¹¹³ In colonial America, attacks on constables and sheriffs were frequent, and they lacked any effective power to arrest sus­pects who resisted. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, officers who misused firearms (killing a fleeing suspect, for example) were arrested by their colleagues like any civilian. Citizens had much the same powers of arrest as any official.¹¹⁴ Both New York and Lon­don officers could be sued in ordinary courts for false arrest. In the United States, officers and citizens alike could arrest for misde­meanors committed in their presence. Both could arrest for felonies they had witnessed and for those they had probable cause to believe had occurred. But if the felony turned out not to have taken place, the civilian, but not the officer, was considered to have committed an offense.

In many US states today, ordinary citizens may still arrest for misdemeanors committed in their presence and for felonies they have probable cause to believe have occurred.¹¹⁶ Indeed, in certain respects, citizens retain greater powers over each other than do the police. Authorities are bound by due-process restrictions on search­ing and seizing evidence without warrants; citizens performing arrests are not.¹¹⁷ Even today in Britain, policing is theoretically a private matter, with the officer in principle but a uniformed citi­zen. In the mid-1980s, almost a quarter of criminal court cases were prosecutions by nonpolice agencies, such as local authorities or the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, as well as by individuals.¹¹⁸ Citizens also retain powers to use proportional force, though not to detain, by relying on the doctrines of self-defense, defense of others, and defense of property. The right of self-defense remains since even modern police cannot always be everywhere. Even today, citizens must take responsibility for their own safety.¹¹⁹ Ultimately, the modern state relies on a vestige of vigilantism.

And yet police were granted significant powers from the start. Constables in the late seventeenth century could arrest and imprison, break into houses, and disperse unruly crowds. Eighteenth-century London watchmen freely stopped odd people at night: a man selling cheese in the street at 3:00 a.m., for example, or carrying a sack of coal in the wee hours. Night watchmen looked out for suspicious people and arrested prostitutes and vagrants. Police in eighteenth­century Paris checked pedestrians at night and interrogated irreg­ular characters, especially if they carried packages of potentially stolen goods.¹²⁰ German cities were well policed within their walls, and it was the suburbs where delinquency flourished as authority petered out.¹²¹

Over time, such powers were enhanced.