Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [66]
By the second half of the century, the police were in place as an army that could be mobilized in the struggle against the tramp. The police preserved the public peace; they monitored public spaces. They “trawled” the common areas of the city; and they tended to fasten their grip on drunken foreigners, on suspicious, vagrant men, homeless men, men who loitered, men who looked and dressed in a disreputable way; strangers, the unkempt, the unseemly. Thousands of arrests fell into the garbage-pail categories that made up the substance of vagrancy law.
The police also used vagrancy law, because of its very vagueness, as a way of harassing prostitutes or gamblers; or as a way to make preventive arrests. Thus, the Chicago police often hauled in “men whom they saw standing in the shadows on a street, or looking into store windows long after closing hours, or carrying bundles in commercial and residential areas after dark.”84 Nice clothes, community ties, and a middle-class manner were enough to buy immunity from these dragnets; if some innocent fish were caught in the nets of the law, the middle class was not likely to know or to care.
Industrial Labor
The police also played a role in the industrial wars that were waged in the late nineteenth century. They were an army of the status quo. They took the side of law and order, and this often meant the side of the employer, the factory owner, the boss. It would not exaggerate much to call the police, in some cases, strikebreakers plain and simple. In Detroit, three hundred special policemen were called out in 1877 during a strike at the Michigan Central Railroad.85 In Milwaukee, in 1896, car men struck against the streetcar company, asking for higher wages. The company brought in scab labor to run the cars; and the police chief, after consulting with the mayor, mobilized a force of his men to protect these workers; police were assigned to every car barn. Lower-level streetcar officials were sworn in as deputies, patrolmen rode the cars (they were accused of actually running them), and many strikers were arrested. The strike was soon broken.86 A similar tale could be told about strikes in many other American cities.
The police, in short, were invaluable agents of the employer side. The New York City police, according to one rapturous account of their role in late nineteenth-century strikes, “have held the mob in check and saved millions of property from destruction.” The police “[have] a great antipathy to labor strikes and the disorder that accompanies them, and when they come in contact with a striking mob they are not tender in the ways of handling it.” Strikes, after all, meant “long hours of duty and hard work.”87 But the main point, beyond a doubt, was more deeply ideological: the police ranged themselves on the side of the constituted order. They were the servants of power and wealth.
Criminal justice systems, on the whole, suffered from the same tilt; often enough, they looked suspiciously like so many strikebreaking cabals. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, it was a serious question whether the whole concept of organized labor was legal. If workmen gathered together, formed some kind of organization, and put collective pressure on an employer, was this some sort of “criminal conspiracy?” A few early court decisions answered with a resounding yes—for example, the famous trial of the Philadelphia Cordwainers,