Urban Police and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Interest in the history of police and crime has been strong over the past half generation. From the traditional historians' point of view, the resulting scholarship has grown not only in amount but in "sophistication," as sociologists and political scientists have contributed not only their work but often their methods and approaches. This development, however, seems to present problems as well as advantages. The history of police, as first outlined in rather traditional case studies of nineteenth-century Boston and New York, has clearly benefited from the myriad of subsequent approaches. The original accounts have been not so much challenged, with few exceptions, as enriched by later ones which stress points that had been at least relatively slighted: cross-national comparisons with London, the search for legitimacy, class conflict, social control, battles over social values. Most disagreements appear to be matters of emphasis, the result of differing angles of approach, or perhaps of the differing times and places studied. With the history of "criminality," however, consensus breaks down. Traditional historical methods have yielded a reasonably coherent, nonquantitative picture of professional crime and vice in the previous century. But the attempt to measure the incidence of most ordinary common law offenses against persons and property, often using the "hard" methods of the quantitative social sciences, has resulted in much disagreement not only about methods but about values. While there is some hope that a scholarly consensus may soon emerge about the rate and direction of ordinary crime in both England and the U. S. (down through most of the nineteenth century, up from about World War II), there are other profound issues which seem beyond the reach of "social science." The issue of how properly to define "crime," the degree to which "deviance" is social or individual in origin, the degree to which authority may shape or contain behavior-all of these, as yet, seem immune to empirical demonstration.