Stop Kidding Yourself: The
Police Were Created to Control Working Class
and Poor People
By Sam Mitrani
December 31, 2014 "ICH"
- "LAWCHA"
- - In most of the liberal discussions of
the recent police killings of unarmed black
men, there is an underlying assumption that
the police are supposed to protect and serve
the population. That is, after all, what
they were created to do.
If only the normal, decent relations between
the police and the community could be
re-established, this problem could be
resolved. Poor people in general are more
likely to be the victims of crime than
anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in
that way, they are in more need than anyone
else of police protection. Maybe there are a
few bad apples, but if only the police
weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out
policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so
afraid of black people, or shot fewer
unarmed men, they could function as a useful
service that we all need.
This liberal way of viewing
the problem rests on a misunderstanding of
the origins of the police and what they were
created to do. The police were not created
to protect and serve the population. They
were not created to stop crime, at least not
as most people understand it. And they were
certainly not created to promote justice.
They were created to protect the new form of
wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the
mid to late nineteenth century from the
threat posed by that system’s offspring, the
working class.
This is a blunt way of
stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes
nuance just serves to obfuscate.
Slave patrol badge,
1858. Slave patrols to hunt down escaped
slaves were the original police in the
South.
Before the nineteenth
century, there were no police forces that we
would recognize as such anywhere in the
world. In the Northern United States, there
was a system of elected constables and
sheriffs, much more responsible to the
population in a very direct way than the
police are today. In the South, the closest
thing to a police force was the slave
patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and
filled with mostly immigrant wage workers
who were physically and socially separated
from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who
ran the various municipal governments hired
hundreds and then thousands of armed men to
impose order on the new working class
neighborhoods.
Class conflict roiled late
nineteenth century American cities like
Chicago, which experienced major strikes and
riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each
of these upheavals, the police attacked
strikers with extreme violence, even if in
1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger
role in ultimately repressing the working
class. In the aftermath of these movements,
the police increasingly presented themselves
as a thin blue line protecting civilization,
by which they meant bourgeois civilization,
from the disorder of the working class. This
ideology of order that developed in the late
nineteenth century echoes down to today –
except that today, poor black and Latino
people are the main threat, rather than
immigrant workers.
Chicago police cast
themselves as the defenders of
civilization for a society ordered by
capitalist premises. After Haymarket in
1886, they contended that they stood
between civilization and anarchy.
Of course, the ruling
class did not get everything it wanted, and
had to yield on many points to the immigrant
workers it sought to control. This is why,
for instance, municipal governments backed
away from trying to stop Sunday drinking,
and why they hired so many immigrant police
officers, especially the Irish. But despite
these concessions, businessmen organized
themselves to make sure the police were
increasingly isolated from democratic
control, and established their own
hierarchies, systems of governance, and
rules of behavior. The police increasingly
set themselves off from the population by
donning uniforms, establishing their own
rules for hiring, promotion, and firing,
working to build a unique esprit des corps,
and identifying themselves with order. And
despite complaints about corruption and
inefficiency, they gained more and more
support from the ruling class, to the extent
that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen
donated money to buy the police rifles,
artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and
money to establish a police pension out of
their own pockets.
There was a never a time
when the big city police neutrally enforced
“the law,” or came anywhere close to that
ideal (for that matter, the law itself has
never been neutral). In the North, they
mostly arrested people for the vaguely
defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and
vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century.
This meant that the police could arrest
anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In
the post-bellum South, they enforced white
supremacy and largely arrested black people
on trumped-up charges in order to feed them
into convict labor systems.
The violence the police
carried out and their moral separation from
those they patrolled were not the
consequences of the brutality of individual
officers, but were the consequences of
careful policies designed to mold the police
into a force that could use violence to deal
with the social problems that accompanied
the development of a wage-labor economy. For
instance, in the short, sharp depression of
the mid 1880s, Chicago was filled with
prostitutes who worked the streets. Many
policemen recognized that these prostitutes
were generally impoverished women seeking a
way to survive, and initially tolerated
their behavior. But the police hierarchy
insisted that the patrolmen do their duty
whatever their feelings, and arrest these
women, impose fines, and drive them off the
streets and into brothels, where they could
be ignored by some members of the elite and
controlled by others. Similarly, in 1885,
when Chicago began to experience a wave of
strikes, some policemen sympathized with
strikers. But once the police hierarchy and
the mayor decided to break the strikes,
policemen who refused to comply were fired.
In these and a thousand similar ways, the
police were molded into a force that would
impose order on working class and poor
people, whatever the individual feelings of
the officers involved.
Though some patrolmen
tried to be kind and others were openly
brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not
a case of a few bad apples – and neither is
it today.
Graffiti, location
unknown.
Much has changed since the
creation of the police – most importantly
the influx of black people into the Northern
cities, the mid-twentieth century black
movement, and the creation of the current
system of mass incarceration in part as a
response to that movement. But these changes
did not lead to a fundamental shift in
policing. They led to new policies designed
to preserve fundamental continuities. The
police were created to use violence to
reconcile electoral democracy with
industrial capitalism. Today, they are just
one part of the “criminal justice” system
which continues to play the same role. Their
basic job is to enforce order among those
with the most reason to resent the system –
who in our society today are
disproportionately poor black people.
A democratic police system
is imaginable – one in which police are
elected by and accountable to the people
they patrol. But that is not what we have.
And it’s not what the current system of
policing was created to be.
Sam
Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police
Department: Class and Conflict,
1850-1894, available from University of
Illinois Press
If there is one positive
lesson from the history of policing’s
origins, it is that when workers organized,
refused to submit or cooperate, and caused
problems for the city governments, they
could back the police off from the most
galling of their activities. Murdering
individual police officers, as happened in
in Chicago on May 3rd 1886 and more recently
in New York on December 20th, 2014, only
reinforced those calling for harsh
repression – a reaction we are beginning to
see already. But resistance on a mass scale
could force the police to hesitate. This
happened in Chicago during the early 1880s,
when the police pulled back from breaking
strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried
to re-establish some credibility among the
working class after their role in brutally
crushing the 1877 upheaval.
The police might be backed
off again if the reaction against the
killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown,
Tamir Rice, and countless others continues.
If they are, it will be a victory for those
mobilizing today, and will save lives –
though as long as this system that requires
police violence to control a big share of
its population survives, any change in
police policy will be aimed at keeping the
poor in line more effectively.
We shouldn’t expect the
police to be something they’re not. As
historians, we ought to know that origins
matter, and the police were created by the
ruling class to control working class and
poor people, not help them. They’ve
continued to play that role ever since.
Sam Mitrani is an
Associate Professor of History at the
College of DuPage. He earned his PhD from
the University of Illinois at Chicago in
2009 and his book The Rise of the Chicago
Police Department: Class and Conflict,
1850-1894 is available from the University
of Illinois Press. ©
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