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Personnel

In the twentieth century, there were major changes in police organization and personnel. We have already noted that police were put under civil service and made to pass tests and get training. For their part, the police began to form unions in some cities. In the late nineteenth century, there had been a certain number of “benevolent societies” and fraternal organizations among the police. But only in 1919 did the American Federation of Labor (AFL), under “grassroots pressure,” endorse the idea of actual unions for police. The AFL quickly chartered some thirty locals.19

But the course of police unionism did not run smooth. In Boston, the police, to the disgust of city officials, went over to the union. On September 9, 1919, most of the men walked off the job.20 This was the famous Boston Police Strike. It caused a tremendous furor. While the cat was away, some mice went in for looting and violence. Newspapers all over the country hysterically magnified what was happening in Boston. The San Francisco Examiner cried out “Gangs Range Streets, Women Are Attacked, Stores Are Robbed”; the Wall Street Journal went so far as to predict that “Lenin and Trotsky [were] on their way.”21In Boston, a volunteer force, including students and faculty from Harvard, tried to fill the gap, and Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the militia. The strike was smashed, the strikers lost their jobs, and Coolidge went on to the White House, where he compiled an enviable record of torpor. The union movement suffered a setback it took decades to recover from.22

In one important regard, police in the twentieth century did draw closer to local communities and the general population. For a long time, the stereotype of a policeman had been the Irish cop: very male, very white. In the nineteenth century, a certain number of “matrons” had been attached to the police; but women on the regular force were out of the question. Mrs. Lola Baldwin, of Portland, Oregon, early in the twentieth century, was apparently the first non-male to serve as a regular member of a police force. In 1910, Los Angeles took the plunge: Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells joined the department. Mrs. Wells took an active role in the national movement to add women to the ranks of the police. 23 By 1914, the Los Angeles department had eight policewomen.24

Many other cities hired women after 1910, but the numbers were typically very small, and nowhere were they accepted as equals of men. Mostly they worked with young offenders, or with women in trouble; sometimes they patrolled dance halls and penny arcades—places where young people might congregate. Mary Hamilton, the first policewoman in New York, wrote that “Danger lurks in parks, playgrounds, beaches, piers, and baths unless there is someone to watch over these pleasure haunts experienced enough in recognizing a devastating evil.”25 Women had “peculiar value ... as preventive agents in working with women and girls.”26 With such an attitude, of course, the movement stagnated. A survey in 1946 found that only 141 out of 417 key cities had any policewomen at all.27 In 1968, however, Indianapolis broke the final taboo: it assigned two women to regular patrol duty.28 Since then, there has been steady progress, but policing remains essentially a man’s job, and the world of the police remains a man’s world.

It was a slow process, too, to open up the force to blacks and members of other minorities. In 1930, blacks made up about 4 percent of the force in Philadelphia, 2 percent in Pittsburgh and Chicago, 1 percent or less in a number of cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, and New York.29 This situation seemed glaringly out of tune in the period after Brown v. Board of Education. The combination of a strong civil rights movement and the mass migration of blacks from the rural South finally brought about change in the composition of police forces, as we shall see.

Hiring women and blacks—and Hispanics, Chinese,