Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [228]
A policeman in a car, moreover, was, for the most part, a “reactive” patroller. He went where he was “dispatched.” Mr. and Ms. Public called the police, perhaps on an emergency line. Headquarters radioed to officers in cars, telling them where they were needed. Consequently, the police spent less time “trawling” for drunks, disorderly persons, and the like.3 At the same time, the new communications technology made it easier for headquarters to control and to monitor patrolmen from a distance. Rank and file police drew closer to headquarters, but further psychologically and socially from the men, women, and children in the area they were supposed to patrol.4
This increase in social distance was in a way inevitable. Technology should not get all the blame. Americans have always been rolling stones. In the twentieth century, more and more, they tended to roll from the countryside into the big cities; and from neighborhood to neighborhood, and city to city. It was a transient population, more and more suspicious of authority. Police were especially distant, socially speaking, from the folks who lived in the most crime-ridden and problematic areas. They were also likely to be a different race.
This social distance was magnified by other ways in which the police became more professional: police had to be better educated, and they had to pass tests, like other civil servants. They had to know something about their jobs. In the first decades of the century, August Vollmer, Police Chief of Berkeley, California, was a leader in the movement to upgrade the quality of the police. In 1916, Vollmer developed the “first formal academic law-enforcement program,” at the University of California at Berkeley. The program began to turn out “college cops” for Vollmer at a time when most policemen did not even have a high school diploma.5
One of Vollmer’s most notable disciples was O. W. Wilson. He embodied the mixture of practical experience and university training that Vollmer pioneered. Wilson, the son of a Norwegian-American lawyer, started out as a patrolman in Berkeley. In 1928, he took over the police department of Wichita, Kansas, where he battled against corruption and preached the gospel of motorized patrol cars. At various times in his career he taught at Berkeley and Harvard, and served as a consultant to a flock of police forces.6 In 1960, in the wake of a police scandal that was sordid even by Chicago standards, Mayor Richard Daley appointed Wilson superintendent of police with the mandate to clean out the Augean stables of Chicago’s force.7
Professionalizing did not come easily; or at one great gulp. An important aspect of the process was to cut the cords that tied the police to local politicians. The days when aldermen simply signed men up passed into history. The police became part of the civil service in New York in 1883, in Chicago in 1895. By 1915, 122 of the nation’s 204 largest police departments were under civil service.8 Of course, the requirements of the job were not that onerous. In Boston, in 1930, a budding policeman had to be not less than twenty-five nor more than thirty-five years old, “not less than 5 feet 8 inches in height in bare feet,” and “not less than 135 pounds without clothing.” Boston also required at least an elementary school education, with extra points for anything beyond that. Of course, the policeman also had to pass a civil service exam.9
Despite these trends, the old problems still haunted the police: problems of discipline, graft, and corruption—and of police brutality. The Wickersham Commission, in its report on the police, more than thirty years after the Lexow Commission (see chapter 7), recommended an end to the “corrupting influence of politics”—a pious recommendation unlikely ever to be fully realized. The commission called for better training, advanced technology, good record-keeping, and state bureaus of criminal investigation and information.10 A lot was done over the years along