Quotidien Policing

As policing joined the state's machinery, many of its functions blended into everyday life. Data gathering hummed along in the background. Secret police and informers did their work covertly, but information was also amassed openly, often with subjects' active help.

In the Middle Ages, self-governing towns and cities decided who could live there, just as guilds and other corporations chose who exercised the professions. We take freedom of movement and res­idence, Freizugigkeit, for granted, at least within each nation, but it was one of the first civil rights won—in France with the revolu­tion as intermediary organizations were abolished. But the state still wanted to know who lived where and worked as what. Deep into the twentieth century, localities could deny paupers residence.²¹¹ The duty to register home addresses, broadly imposed across the Euro­pean continent, helped police track suspects. Required to record visitors, hotels, too, were dragooned into the effort.²¹² With livrets and other work papers, police could monitor apprentices' and jour­neymen's movements as of the mid-eighteenth century. Passports did the same for border crossings.²¹³ Their analogues also allowed control domestically in nations such as the Soviet Union and China today that restrict freedom of residence. When in the midst of the Seven Years' War Mr. Yorick in Laurence Sterne's novel Sentimental Journey (1768) traveled without any papers from London to Paris, the modern reader is amazed by the sheer haphazardness of it all.

Security cameras and traffic monitoring gather petabytes of data, tamed into intelligibility by face-recognition and other order­ing technologies.

Computer-analyzed big data have begun to routinize the con­stant background surveillance of all citizens, suspects and inno­cents alike, begun by traffic monitoring. By uncovering patterns indiscernible to the naked eye, digital analysis lays bare what once was secret—criminal or not.²¹⁹ Indoor marijuana farms in bland suburbia have been betrayed in the days of incandescent lighting by exorbitant electricity bills. Insider trading has been revealed by analyzing stock sales patterns in the run-up to important corporate announcements.

Today's data-drenched surveillance technologies arguably reachieve on a global scale the transparency and lack of privacy once characteristic of the village community. Urban anonymity and the policing functions it required may turn out to have been a two- century blip in a longer continuity of panoptic self-policing. As more accurate information is gleaned from freely available observation, strengthened privacy may not suffice to shield citizens. Laws protect­ing privacy assume that legally enforceable ignorance of what you want to keep to yourself is a goal in itself, worth defending. In fact, privacy is but a crude and indirect means of achieving the real aim: ensuring that we do not suffer from others knowing what were once our secrets. When we no longer can hide information, privacy prom­ises little. Assuming instead that greater transparency is inevitable, whether privacy protections are beefed up or not, it is arguably better to protect against being persecuted by others who now know what once was kept under wraps. We achieve autonomy more effectively by strengthening other rights than by hiding behind an ever less opaque veil of privacy.

Policing has also been baked into everyday life by gradually hard­ening the environment against crime. Theft, for example, was once a different sort of offense. There were fewer things to steal, and they were more easily identifiable because hand-made and unique. Even coins were once—in medieval Iceland—individually identifiable.²²³ With the largely interchangeable artifacts of mass industrialization, however, theft is often not worth the bother of investigating. Wom­en's jewelry, its sentimental value often greater than its market value, is among the last kind of item we seek to retrieve, not just to replace. We have instead socialized theft's cost through compensa­tion or insurance, simply substituting largely fungible goods. Items whose return is worth pursuing we make even more unique by tag­ging them with serial numbers or other identifiers (and sometimes even by swabbing them with human DNA). Yet even with mass con­sumption, society seeks to make fungible goods less available. Early modern burglars often tortured their victims to reveal where valu­ables were hidden.²²⁴ Today safes and bank deposit boxes have the musty air of a declining technology. Muggers might force victims to reveal their ATM pin codes, but the amount and number of with­drawals that can be made are limited, anyway. Credit instruments have reduced the valuables in circulation. In the early nineteenth century, cattle salesmen who once carried cash began using checks, postdating them so that if they were stolen, the funds could be fro­zen.²²⁵ Stripping cash out of retail transactions has diminished the incentives for theft. In return, crime has gone cashless, too, target­ing digital repositories of value—identity theft, internet fraud, and the like.

Theft is now an increasingly socialized risk, yet it has also become more difficult. The early modern thief faced few obstacles. Today, there is more to pilfer, but it is harder to do so.

Making the environment crime resistant goes back almost as far as the lock itself. The Statute of Winchester in 1285 prescribed what current terminology calls “target hardening” of highways between market towns. They were to be broadened, with woods and hedges

pruned back on either side to eliminate hiding places for robbers.²²⁸ In the late seventeenth century, London required house owners to light public spaces by hanging lanterns in front of their homes between nightfall and curfew's onset. Only in the following cen­tury did that become a municipal task, centrally organized and paid by taxes. Robberies on highways were down, Edwin Chadwick cel­ebrated in the early nineteenth century, in part because street light­ing discouraged thieves.²²⁹ Just as sunlight is the best disinfectant, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis agreed, so electric light is the most efficient policeman.²³⁰ Lest we forget how terrifyingly crimo- genic darkness was in pre-electric days, recall that committing an offense at night was long considered an aggravating element—as late as in the Napoleonic penal code.

In our own day, ordinances in Florida hamper robbery by requir­ing late-night convenience stores to remove window ads, making their interiors visible from the street.²³² Shopping centers broad­cast high-pitched sounds audible only to young ears to discour­age teenagers from congregating. In the United States, post-9/11 federal buildings were built to resist bombs, while not resembling bunkers.²³³ Over the years, coins were made harder to shave, paper currency less easy to counterfeit, checks more difficult to forge.²³⁴ Credit cards once required signatures, then pin codes; phones needed pin codes, then finger prints or face recognition. Safes became harder to crack, cars more theft resistant. Ignition keys stopped thieves from starting cars, and steering-column immobilizers prevented them from being driven even if hotwired. Improved registries of owner­ship impeded selling stolen vehicles for parts. GPS technology can locate stolen automobiles almost instantly, and kill switches immobi­lize them. Thefts of cars have plummeted (by 96 percent in New York City since the 1990s), with only older models still targeted.²³⁵ A fully crime-resistant environment will eventually leave little to chance,

constantly supervise its residents, instantly monitor outsiders, and never allow offensive situations to arise. In other words, we will one day live in something akin to today's theme parks.²³⁶