Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [131]
The Rise of the Detective
American society was a society of strangers, not all of them honest men. Some of the bad eggs were swindlers of various stripes, who assumed and reassumed identities, mostly false ones. Of course, most criminals were, as always, members of the “dangerous classes.” It was pretty obvious, from the way these people walked, talked, dressed, and behaved that they were not part of respectable society. In small, old communities, everybody knew (or thought they knew) all the good-for-nothings, the violent people, the lopsided. This same knowledge was difficult to obtain in a city, or in a new community of whatever size. Swindlers did not advertise themselves as swindlers; on the contrary, they imitated polite society; they could succeed only if they kept their criminal identity secret.
It took new and different techniques to fight this kind of crime. The man who used these techniques occupied a new social role: the detective. The nineteenth century invented the detective along with the policeman. Detective squads, or divisions, were organized in Boston in 1846, New York in 1857, Philadelphia in 1859, and Chicago in 1861.31
The detective, in some ways, has a fairly old lineage. One strand in his history goes back to the “thief-takers” in England or America. These were constables who had connections in the underworld; they were skilled at getting stolen property back, though usually at a price. The most notorious “thief-taker” was Jonathan Wild, who became rich and famous in England in the eighteenth century, before ending up on the gallows.32 There were constables who acted more or less like “thief-takers” in Boston and New York as early as 1820.33 Many victims of theft were glad to pay to get their goods back, no questions asked. Of course, this was a source of corruption and scandal. In New York in the 1870s we hear about dishonest detectives who “deliberately divide with thieves.” The owners regained about two-thirds of the “plunder”; the thief and the detective split the rest. “This business enables some of the force to wear big diamonds, and own and live in brown stone fronts, on a salary of $1,200 a year.”34 A number of Boston detectives were also out-and-out go-betweens; they were adept at getting back stolen bonds, cash, gold watches—but, again, the victim had to pay. Some noisome scandals were the result.35
In order to succeed, the “thief-taker” had to be well known in the underworld. But there was also his opposite number: the undercover detective—stealthy, sometimes in disguise, often worming his way into criminal circles through trickery. He was, in short, a kind of reverse con man. The detective, wrote George Walling in 1887, “must have, at times, histrionic traits, and must be able not only to wear a disguise, but to enact the personage he assumes to bet.”36
The uniformed police were obvious, overt, extremely visible. They patrolled social space, keeping order, preventing or squashing riots, arresting public drunks and brawlers. The detective was covert, sly, masked, underground—his domain was the secret crimes, the crimes of simulated identity, the swindles, the mysterious and the unsolved, the behavior in the shadows of great cities. The uniformed patrols, as Gary Marx points out, protected “concrete property rights” and policed “visible offenses.” But the “more abstract property rights and invisible offenses called forth invisible police and deception,” in short, the detective. 37
The detective, then, was the counterfoil to society’s hidden crimes and deceits. One of the most interesting accounts of the detective is a book called Knots Untied, an exploration of the “hidden life of American detectives,” published in 1873 and attributed to a New York detective, George McWatters. Much of the book is devoted to the exploits of McWatters, his triumphs, his amazing feats of detection. But in an interesting final chapter, McWatters paints