Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [44]
Tukey’s exhibition was an extreme case, of course; it blotted out the difference between the mob and the professionals. True distance came somewhat later. But the rise of the police was nonetheless an event of huge significance. The police interposed a constant, serious, full-time presence into the social spaces of the cities. They were a force for order; a patrol, trawling the urban areas for drunks, brawlers, mobs, disturbers of peace.
Under the police regime, too, law enforcement became much less random, less haphazard. Prosecution, in the past, had depended very much on victims who made complaints. This, of course, remained true for some crimes; but the police took over for others. They became the real complainants—the prosecuting witnesses. This was very notably the case for “victimless crimes,” like gambling, where the participants were all equally guilty and nobody was minded to blow the whistle. Public drunkenness and prostitution fell into the same category.
This very fact exposed the police to the corrosion of money and corruption. The police could be a dangerous class themselves. The London bobbies carried truncheons—clubs. The Boston police, like those of most cities, did the same at first: they carried short clubs, tied to their wrists.l But by the middle of the century, the weaponry got more serious. In 1854, Philadelphia’s mayor told the police to go out and buy guns.34 In New York, in a fateful decision in 1857, the state armed the Metropolitan Police with pistols.35 The police were thus a powerful agency for crime prevention and crime control, but also a powerful force, a weapon, an armed body that could be used for suppression and oppression as well. We will return several times to this theme.
The Federal Framework
One major change that the Revolution brought about was the federal system. The American republic, especially after the Constitution of 1787 was ratified, was a federal union. Thus a national criminal justice system was piled on top of the state systems. To be sure, the states—then and now—had the lion’s share of the crime and punishment business. The federal government was a bit player, a spear carrier in the drama of criminal justice. The state courts were the exclusive venue for ordinary cases, ordinary offenses; the federal courts handled only special, “federal,” crimes. Criminal justice in the territories and the District of Columbia was also “federal,” of course.
In 1790, to be sure, Congress enacted a general Crimes Act, defining seventeen crimes against the national government. Some of these were simply ordinary crimes in a federal setting: for example, murder or other crimes “within any fort, arsenal, dock-yard, magazine,” or other place under federal control; or “upon the high seas, or in any river, haven, basin or bay, out of the jurisdiction of any particular state.” It was a crime to forge “any certificate, indent, or other public security of the United States”; or to commit perjury in a federal court. Other crimes—like treason, piracy, or violence to an ambassador—belonged more specifically to the federal sphere.36
In addition, several bits of constitutional text related directly to criminal justice. The Constitution gave Congress power to punish people for “counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States,” and for committing “Piracies and Felonies ... on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations” (Article I, section 8). Federal and state governments were both forbidden to pass any “Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law” (Article I, sections 9, 10). In federal courts, criminal trials were to be “by Jury” (Article III, section 2). The crime of treason,