Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [227]
Of course, the programs, state and federal, have been largely exercises in futility. Sane voices speak out from time to time for a more rational course of action.145 But nobody listens. There is political capital in fighting a war on drugs. A number of states have relaxed their sanctions against use of marijuana.146 But few public figures dare speak out for legalization of hard drugs, or even for a healthy debate on the subject. Draconian force is the only language the drug enforcers speak. Mothers who smoke crack are arrested. Dealers and users by the thousands are swept up off the streets. Many people sincerely believe that addicts are responsible for most of our violent crime: they rob to get money for a high; and on this high they rape and rob and kill, wantonly, cruelly. Certainly, turf wars and drug deals add hundreds of victims to urban slaughter. Force generates force; war breeds counterwar. The prisons are jammed top to bottom with men and women convicted under drug laws. cx Is this really the only way?
16
THE MECHANICS OF POWER: SOME TWENTIETH-CENTURY ASPECTS
The Modern Police
The master trend in police history has been toward what we have called, somewhat loosely, professionalization. It is no longer the case that anybody who knows an alderman and is young and reasonably healthy can become a police officer. Even in the nineteenth century, there was a trend toward upgrading police work, training the men, and holding them to certain standards. This trend continued in the twentieth century. Police work has also become far more specialized.
The job itself got harder, more complex. For one thing, as time went on, there was more to it than strolling around the streets with a billy club. The old-time policeman or detective did not have to know much of anything about crime-fighting devices. There was no such thing as forensic science. There were no radios, no telephones, no equipment of any kind. Scientific detection was, essentially, a twentieth-century invention. The Bertillon system (as we have seen in chapter 10) came in toward the end of the nineteenth century in Europe; and fingerprinting followed close on its heels. A detective from Scotland Yard demonstrated the technique at the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. St. Louis established the first fingerprint bureau in America.1
The automobile also had an important impact on the policeman. The ordinary cop had once simply trudged his way through his “beat”; by the 1960s, he (or she) was far more likely to be sitting in a patrol car—so much so, that in the eighties there was a move to get the police out of their cars and back onto the sidewalks. Radios, telephones, and walkietalkies became standard equipment for police. In the early thirties, systems of radio communications were set up in cities all over the country. In 1934, Cincinnati established a modem crime laboratory, with ballistics equipment, X ray, and a polygraph, among other things. In 1935, the police department of Kansas City, Missouri, put two-way radios into patrol cars.2
Inevitably, such “improvements” changed the nature of police work. A cop on foot was a familiar cop, a neighborhood cop; he knew his beat, and the beat knew him. He was also pretty much on his own. Headquarters was far away; he was beyond its beck and call. But now a ton or more of steel separated the motorized officer from the community; police cruising in patrol cars were strangers to the dark, dangerous streets; these police tended to