In 1967, Roger Lane, Research Professor of Social Sciences at Haverford College, published Policing the City: Boston 1822 to 1885. Professor
Lane specializes in issues related to the history of crime and policing in America. He originally intended his book to be a study of policing's impact on civil liberties. He realized however, that any history of 19th century policing had to evolve into an examination
of the wider area of municipal history. The police were much too involved in everyday events to separate their past from that of the evolving metropolis.
Though Lane focused on Boston, he felt that policing in the larger American cities followed a similar development path. Immigration, economic factors and social standards were common experiences in the process of urban growth.1
Most cities would follow the lead of the larger and more established departments in New York and Philadelphia.
Lane noted the impact of politics on American departments. Officers were required to be registered voters, and local politicians contolled hiring and promotion practices. Officers were expected to support
the party in power. He contrasted American practices with the London policing model.
The English metropolitan police commissioners recruited their men from the pool of common labor
outside of the capital or from the lower ranks of the army. Once on the force, the officers were denied the vote. Bachelors were
assigned to barracks, married men restricted to designated neighborhoods. And in order to assure impartial execution of the laws,
the force was responsible not to the population it served but to Parliament.2
Lane also noticed a difference in the development of local government in Boston. The influence of its early years had an impact on its policing methods.
Throughout the 18th century Boston probably enjoyed the most vital local government in the English-speaking world. Consent and cooperation were assured through the meeting, in which suffrage
requirements based on taxation were widely met. All the town's officials...were elected there annually, a fact which enabled them to work effectively with a minimum of the means of coercion.3
By the early 19th century, the town meeting form of government was not satisfying the needs of a growing community. Expansion and diversity demanded a more complex arrangement with municipal authorities. In 1822 Boston voters chose to incorporate
as the City of Boston, and along with that action came changes in the agencies that had served the cititzen's needs. Boston did not encounter all of the development problems that faced other northeastern cities. Though the populace was concerned with public safety, it appeared to be a concern
for good government, rather than a desparate need to revamp their institutions.
Boston in 1822 contained no real class of professional criminals. Nor was it troubled by serious riots. The total number of criminal court cases, averaging about two thousand a year, was not rising markedly. The nearly fifty annual felony convictions, while relatively high
as compared with later decades, were not cause for public concern.4
Lane noted that though citizens victimized by serious crime could still have their needs addressed, "casual violence, petty larceny, and especially vice, which injured no individual in particular," presented a more serious problem for city police.
The force needed more direction and control. Citizens hoped that the act of incorporation would alleviate that need.5
Like other departments, the Boston police entered the gilded age steeped in controversy and reacting to the role confusion inherent in policing in that era. City residents, joined by outside reformers and influenced by wartime bravado, gave into the
"dormant urge to battle with sin at home."6 This urge conflicted with reality when dealing with a department whose officers were from the lower rungs of society, the very class of people whose lifestyle
prompted the reformers to act. Unable to tailor the recruitment system of American departments to the style of the London police, reformers sought another avenue of change, state control of police agencies. The New York City police came under state control in 1857, closely followed by Baltimore in
1860, St. Louis and Kansas City in 1861, Detroit in 1865, Cleveland in 1866 and New Orleans in 1868. Lane noted that emergencies, economies and the desire for patronage prompted some of these changes. He also included citizen dissatisfaction with their police departments.7
The social problems which had long distressed reformers still beset the city. In the North End each night dozens of spectators, "pickpockets," "petty kucks," and "females with vermillion cheeks," gathered in fetid rooms to make bets on the constestants in rat pits and dogfights.
In a tenement in another section there was "a room twelve feet square, where thirteen people live, and they are all drunkards, and keep rum in the place." The police chief acknowledged that scores of open brothels and dozens of gambling rooms catered to the passions of degraded residents...The police
were incapable of eliminating this viciousness because, of the eleven or twelve thousand citizens who participated regularly in municipal elections, "at least five thousand are pledged by instinct and interest against the enforcement of the most wholesome laws of the Commonwealth." The board of aldermen
(who had controlled the police) as a result, was merely "a standing committee appointed by the grog-shops of the peninsula."8
"Boston Police Strike-1919"
The City of Boston however, would not see state control of police until 1885. Several attempts were defeated in the 1860's. These attempts were prompted by the perception that officers were not
enforcing the established laws and they were too quick to identify with the people they policed. Many reformers saw the city itself as evil personified and felt state guidance was necessary to civlize the cities and their residents.9
Boston was a smaller city, both in area and population, than either Philadelphia or New York. It did not experience the same level of social violence. It's sentiments were anti-slavery during the period leading up to the Civil War. Boston's draft riot of 1863 was minor in comparison with other cities. The disturbances in Boston began on July 14th, a week after the riots in New York. A mob trapped a division
of police inside their station house, and the militia was dispatched. An attack on the troops was repulsed by cannon fire. The riot ended the same evening after police and militia regained control of the streets.10
Boston was also a better managed city, with an unually high tax rate and excellent services. Conservative in its outlook it hesitated to establish innovative programs, but its departments, including the police,
were extremely flexible and able to adapt to changing conditions. Never having been totally dominated by any one interest, the police department came closer to London's Metropolitan Police standards of law enforcement than any other city in 19th century America.11
"Boston Police Strike-1919"
In 1986 Roger Lane published Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900. The book was awarded the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. Few historians have addressed the issue of
policing in the black communities of the gilded age. Fewer still have examined the subject of criminal behavior in its historical context as it applies to African-American populations in urban areas. Though Lane did not focus upon policing, his observations and conclusions were related to social control in its most intense form. Lane asserted that 19th century
Philadelphia contained two cities, one white and one black. The police were agents of control in both areas, and Lane's observations were both surprising and well documented.
As past historians searched for answers concerning Irish social problems relating to the city, Lane wanted to know why the current rate of black criminal behavior in American's cities was
far beyond what one might predict, and why the behavior patterns have continued throughout the 20th century. Recognizing that there is no single cause of criminality, Lane advanced a thesis which would create some controversy.
Afro-Americans, who comprise little more than one-tenth of the population, have over the past fifteen years or so accounted for about half of the recorded homicides in the United States, and nearly three-fifths of the armed robberies.
This fact can be explained by black culture, which was the product of a peculiar and bitter history. That history began with slavery and, for most blacks, continued under other forms of agricultural dependence; but the patterns of criminality were most strongly
formed under the conditions of formal freedom, in the city.12
Lane felt that Philadelphia, having the largest black population outside of the slave south, was the best place to trace the development of
this black criminal subculture. He also felt that the black family, though subjected to much abuse and disadvantages, emerged from the institution of slavery as a relatively strong institution. The greatest problem to
face freed blacks awaited them in America's cities.
Their culture was distinctive from the first and continued to develop patterns of its own. Its specifically criminal patterns derived from the black economic experience,
which differed from the white and produced a distinctive social psychology. As a result, many blacks had a different experience with the line between legal and illegal activities...The white's new experience of school and work
served to regiment their behavior in ways that resulted in a marked decline in interpersonal violence...The great majority of blacks were explicitly denied the opportunity to participate in the new
age of industry and thus they continued to live lives filled with insecurity and tension, without benefit of the economic and behavioral changes experienced by their white neighbors.13
