The politicians and political parties that controlled large American cities now had a force to be reckoned with. No longer would it fall to state militias to repsond to urban disturbances. How much control did politicians exert over the municipal police forces? In Philadelphia each officer received an appointment from the mayor and served at his pleasure. Civil Service had not yet been adopted, and officers were often replaced when new mayors were elected.1 Sprogle wrote of Captain Thomas Brown, Commander of Philadelphia's First Police Division in 1887:

Politics has commanded a great deal of Captain Brown's attention, though never to the neglect of his duty, and twice he has served his ward in the city committee and for four terms he served as chairman of the ward executive committee.2

"Proposed Uniforms-NYPD-1840's"
It is difficult to imagine a system, described as "perfect" by Sprogle, that would make a police commander more subservient to political control. Sprogle neither condemns this practice nor describes in any detail the downside of political appointments. His work offended no one, and his anaylsis stopped short of an examination of police effectiveness. He also gave scant attention to the issue of corruption, mentioning it when speaking of the creation of the Detective Bureau. He marveled at the ability of detectives in avoiding shady practices to enrich themselves, and he excused those who did by explaining how they were subjected to temptations that the average person would have found hard to resist. He noted that none of the past offenders were currently on the force in 1887.3

         Sprogle did not provide much detail on the everyday work life of Philadelphia police officers. He mentioned that police stations housed the tramps and the indigent and fed the poor in their soup kitchens. The practice was ended in 1872. 4 He listed the entire force by name, and he provided a short biography on each officer. The biographies included important arrests made by each officer and the sentences given. It's immediately apparent that most arrests involved minor crimes.5 Roger Lane, whose work is cited later in this essay, found that most arrests during this period were for minor offenses such as theft, drunkenness and vice related activities.6 Sprogle complimented the readiness of the force when the volunteer fire companies were disbanded in 1872. The city feared their actions would be met with rioting, and Sprogle attributed the lack of problems to the success of the department in discouraging illegal gatherings. He also complimented the force for their actions during the 1877 Pennsylvania Railroad strike, noting that "the whole force of the department was concentrated" on the strike and commented that they "used their clubs with such telling effect" that they did not have to resort to the use of firearms on the strikers.7 Twenty-six people had been killed during the same strike in Pittsburgh when Philadelphia National Guard troops fired on the crowds. 8

         Sprogle did not address policing of the black community in Philadelphia. The city's black population had increased to 22,000 by 1860. Philadelphia had the largest black population of all US cities outside of the Slave South, with the exception of Baltimore.9 Sprogle did address the police role in enforcing vice laws, but not in relation to the community where its it was most prevalent. Roger Lane felt that Philadelphia was two distinct cities, one white and one black.10 Sprogle ignored the black population, noting their presence only with the notation "negro" when describing certain arrestees.

          Sprogle's treatment of the Philadelphia Police, though lacking in the critical analysis demanded by historians, was an interesting presentation of the prevalent attitudes about policing in the 1880's. He saw no need for an evolution of the force, feeling it had reached its apex in an era that most historians identify as the seminal period for urban policing in America. Was Sprogle alone in his analysis of policing? What were other historians writing about the police? Not much, to be sure. Organized policing was still in its infancy, and those who found a need to record its history were not interested in any sort of critical analysis of its origin or role.


"Chicago P.D. 1903 City Railway Strike"
         John J. Flinn's, History of the Chicago Police: From the Settlement of the Community to the Present Time, was also written in 1887. The book was originally sold by subscription to raise funds for the Chicago Police Benevolence Association. Flinn, a lawyer and Chicago resident, wrote several guides to Chicago history. His work was more detailed than Sprogle's, but it also is best classified as a defense of the Chicago Police Department, especially of their role in the Haymarket Affair of 1886. He chronicled events at the Lager Beer Riot of 1855, the railroad riots of 1877 and the streetcar strike riots of 1885. He also spoke of their participation in the election riot of 1857, the bread riot of 1873, the Bohemian Lumber Shovers riot of 1876 and the McCormick strike of 1885. Mark H. Haller, in his introduction to the 1973 reprint of Flinn's work, explained the attention that Flinn devoted to group violence issues. Two important aspects of 19th century urban life were predominant.

The first is the degree to which many citizens perceived the city to be threatened by these uprisings- they felt besieged in their own city. The second is the depth of the cultural and class tensions, continually festering, which periodically erupted into violence. The fear of rioting was a major factor leading to the creation of a police department; and the continuing reality of group violence shaped much of the activity of the police as well as public attitudes toward them.11

          Flinn's addresses many of the issues encountered by Sprogle in Philadelphia. The Chicago force was almost exclusively native born. Like the Philadelphia force, the officers came from the working class. They were not very sympathetic to reformers demands for enforcement of vice and morals laws. Gambling, liquor and prostitution were common elements in the larger cities. Many officers used the enforcement mandate to make money by ignoring violations. All of the big city departments were expected to enforce the "saloon" laws. Temperance societies, targeting the Irish and German immigrants, demanded that the "evils of alcohol" be a priority of the police.12

         Flinn's work contains a comprehensive account of the day to day duties of police officers. By the 1880's, the functional division of large departments had created two distinct areas of policing. Detectives served to prevent and investigate crime, and beat officers were assigned to geographical foot beats. They were expected to assure the tranquility of their beat and control the residents. This basic method of operation, though influenced by technology, communication and science, remains the same in 2003.


"Chicago PD Officer-1899"
         Beat cops worked 12 to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week. They would walk their beat for eight to ten hours and spend the remainder of their tour in the station house in an "on-call" status to respond to large disturbances and riots. While on their beats, they were expected to address any problem which might arise. Crime, lost children, vagrants, fights and fires are some examples. They were also expected to respond to any other incident that might arise. They received little, if any, training and were required to purchase all uniform items. They were paid an average of seven to eight hundred dollars annually.13

         Beat officers were also expected to make arrests. Statistics in Chicago reflected the same patterns as in other larger American cities. Though politicians and police officials paid lip-service to the prevention of serious crime, the arrest numbers indicated otherwise. In the first quarter of 1874 officers made 5,000 arrests. Only five-percent involved any type of felony activity. Officers arrested 1,600 persons for disorderly conduct, 1,068 for drunkenness and over 600 for vagrancy. Over twenty-five-percent of those arrested were between the ages of ten and twenty years. Another thirty-three-percent were between twenty and thirty. Nearly forty-percent of those arrested were unemployed.14

         The beat responsibilites, including arrests, combined with the soup-kitchen and housing duties, put the police in constant contact with the underclass in American urban areas. Strikes, religious riots and nativist sentiments put them in conflict with the working class. The rapid urbanization and industrialization of the cities, fueled by immigration and economic factors, molded the police into an agency, that by default, was involved in all of the controversial aspects of 19th century American society.


"Chicago PD Officers, Haymarket Riot, 1866"
          One of the most controversial incidents involving police in the 19th century was a large labor riot in Chicago which has since been known as the Haymarket Affair. On May 1, 1886 industrial workers coordinated a series of strikes and demonstrations around the nation in support of the eight-hour workday. Workers in Chicago participated in the strikes. On May 3rd, during a strike of the McCormick Reaper Works, a violent confrontation resulted in police firing into the crowd, killing several strikers. A meeting of industrial workers was called for the evening of May 4th, where speakers condemned the police actions of the previous day. Chicago's Mayor, Carter Harrison, attended the rally and was surprised at the peaceful temper of both the speakers and the crowd. He departed before the end of the rally. Shortly thereafter, Police Inspector John Bonfield decided to disperse the crowd. A bomb was thrown from the crowd into the ranks of the police officers. Eight officers were killed by the blast and sixty were injured. The police immediately fired on the crowd . Wounded and dead were dragged from the scene by the crowds, apparently to conceal knowledge of participation. In the ensuing days eight Chicago "anarchists" were arrested and charged with the bombing. The incident resulted in America's first "red scare," fueling anti-labor sentiment and sympathy for the plight of police. A statue commemorating the police dead and wounded was placed at the site in 1899. Interestingly, the statue was almost destroyed on two occasions (1969 and 1970), when bombs were placed on its pedestal, allegedly by the Students for a Democratic Society's radical "Weathermen" faction. The statue was then moved to Chicago Police Headquarters. 15

"1907 "Veterans of the Haymarket Riot"
         What then was the role of the police in Philadelphia and Chicago? Were they an army who responded to social disorder? Was crime prevention a major responsibility? Should the housing of vagrants have rested in the hands of the police? Gene and Elaine Carte, in their work, Police Reform in the United States: The Era of August Vollmer, 1905-1932 immediately recognized the problem.

...there is no single function around which police operations may rationally be organized. Postal employees, firemen or sanitation workers have jobs with one overriding purpose...The policeman's job, on the other hand, lacks coherent function; it is the most poorly defined of the government services that organize and regulate life within a city...16

Policing became an institution best described as a miscellaneous function of municipal government which performed all the duties which were not assigned to other agencies. These duties included control of the lower classes. Police have historically been one of the only agencies in the urban bureauracy that the majority of residents, especially the lower classes, ever had occasion to deal with. Role identification, and most important the control apect, had a major negative influence on the lower and working classes' perception of policing. There also has been a simultaneous negative impact on those who have worn the badge.



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1 Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police, 138.
2 Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police, 326.
3 Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police, 273.
4 Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police,175.
5 Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police,Appendix.
6 Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 85.
7 Sprogle, The Philadelphia Police,160.
8 University of Houston, Gilder Lehrman Institute, The Great Railroad Strike, available from: http://www.gliah.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=224, 3-26-03.
9 Theodore Hershberg, "Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia," in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower Class Life, 1790-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973) 111.
10 Lane, Roots of Violence, 6.
11 John J. Flinn, History of the Chicago Police: From the Settlement of the Community to the Present Time (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1973, 1887) vii.
12 Flinn, History of the Chicago Police, 28.
13 Flinn, History of the Chicago Police, 37.
14 Flinn, History of the Chicago Police, xiii.
15 Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University's The Haymarket Dramas, available from: http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/overview/over.htm, 3-26-03.
16 Gene E. Carte and Helen H. Carte, Police Reform in the United States: The Era of August Vollmer, 1905-1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) 22.