Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [97]
It was common for police to run a sort of primitive welfare program. They collected and returned lost children; they gave shelter to the homeless.12 How much the police did seemed to vary a good deal from city to city. In 1880, in New York City, there were 124,318 “lodgers” in the station houses; in Philadelphia, 109,673; Cincinnati, with about one-fifth the population of New York City, housed 47,658 of the homeless; St. Louis housed none.13 In Philadelphia, the homeless usually got tea and crackers to sustain them. Not everybody was lucky enough to find a place in the station house, even in the generous cities; the “undeserving” could be simply turned away.
The crowd of ragged, hungry people “had a dreadful impact on the station houses”; they became filthy bedlams. There is a vivid description of tramps “crashing” in a Chicago station house in the winter of 1891: “an unventilated atmosphere of foulest pollution ... the frowzy, ragged garments of unclean men.... Not a square foot of the dark, concrete floor is visible. The space is packed with men all lying on their right sides with their legs drawn up”; the men used newspapers for mattresses, wet jackets and boots for pillows; the whole place was crawling with lice.14 Finally, toward the end of the century, cities began to build municipal lodging houses. Here conditions were often even worse; but at least it freed police stations from the job of serving as welfare hotels.15
Eric Monkkonen connects the end of the lodging-house era with a major overall shift in police function: from “class control” to “crime control.” At first, the police had been mainly concerned “with the orderly functioning of cities”; next, with the control of “the dangerous class,” which meant, not just criminals but a motley group of people from the lower orders, including the urban poor and tramps; then, finally, at the very end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, came the relative shift to “crime control.” The police withdrew from their intimate working connection with the poor and their neighborhoods. 16 This change in the basic tasks of the police was, perhaps, a kind of side effect of one aspect of progressivism, the movement to make the police more rational, bureaucratic, and professional.
As the police gave up (hardly unwillingly) their dirty and repulsive role as landlords of the homeless, their relationship to the community became more complicated—and more ambivalent. Police and public, as Samuel Walker put it, were in a situation of “mutual disrespect and brutality.” 17 The police were sometimes brutal on the streets; and they did not treat men in the station house with kid gloves, to put it mildly. Torture and brutality—the so-called third degree18—were common. The police had their ways of making people talk. We hear about the “sweat box,” after the Civil War. This was “a cell in close proximity to a stove, in which a scorching fire was built and fed with old bones, pieces of rubber shoes, etc., all to make great heat and offensive smells, until the sickened and perspiring inmate of the cell confessed in order to get released.” 19 The law books said nothing about sweat boxes; they were part of a police underground. There were even more direct methods of forcing and punishing: fists, blackjacks, clubs.
All this was only semisecret. The police were, in fact, proud of their physical directness. George Walling, a former chief of New York’s police, called the force “the finest organization of its kind, ... better trained, more athletic, more resolute and hardy”; it also enjoyed “unusual liberty of action.” He sneered at the British police, hamstrung