The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Abstract

In contemporary times, social justice activists and scholars in the field of criminal justice have searched for reasons why police officers tend to arrest and to shoot and kill African Americans in stark disproportion to their numbers in the nation's population. In his study of race and policing in nineteenth-century Baltimore, Adam Malka has provided a historical perspective on how white male supremacy influenced the policing of African Americans and resulted in the development of a police force and criminal justice system that targeted and victimized African Americans. Malka traces the evolution of policing in Baltimore from the informal and vigilante mobs that regulated and controlled the city's streets to the development of a formal police force and prison for lawbreakers. He also shows how white men cooperated with the formal police force to police both free and enslaved African Americans. Malka explains that white men felt that it was...