The Rise of Municipal Police Forces essays

The Rise of Municipal Police Forces essays While the history of American policing can be traced to its English origins, the American system of policing evolved from an amalgamation of systems from England, France, and Spain. Many policing problems plagued the new cities of America. They included controlling certain classes, including slaves and Indians; maintaining order; regulating specialized functions such as selling in the market, delivering goods, making bread, packing goods for export; maintaining health and sanitation; ensuring the orderly use of the streets by vehicles; controlling liquor; controlling gambling and vice; controlling weapons; managing pests and other animals (Nalla These early police services had little to do with crime control, and were performed by volunteer citizens who served on slave patrols or Night Watches. Policing became formalize with the adoption of regular night watches, manned by volunteers that ultimately culminated in paid forces that provided service around the clock. These forces underwent reform that professionalized (bureaucratized) and attempted to depoliticize the police. In this process, police narrowed their mandate to crime-fighting, and motorized patrol replaced foot patrol with the police rapidly adopting more modern technology. The bulk of modern police history shows that each succeeding advance inadvertently distanced the police further and further from the people they ostensibly served. Each effort to improve police efficiency and effectiveness was a response to an obvious social problem, but few recognized the downside to each change was increasing isolation from the community. Though the system had serious flaws , night watches functioned fairly well as long as America remained primarily an agrarian society. However, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the drawbacks were becoming difficult to ignore. One major problem was that local watchmen were notoriously lax, ...