Urban Police and Crime in Nineteenth-Century America (From Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Volume 2, P 1- 43, 1980, Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, eds. -- See NCJ-74239)

• NCJ Number: 163366
• Author(s): R Lane
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 43 pages
• Grant Number(s): 79NIAX0048
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice
• Sale Source: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This review addresses studies of 19th-century urban police and crime in the United States, because most historical research has focused on these areas.

Abstract

The review is divided into three overlapping parts. The first is a description of the origin and development of police, and the second is an account of various issues concerning their governance and purpose. The third part reviews current understanding of the nature, level, and direction of 19th-century criminality. The history of police, as first outlined in traditional case studies of 19th-century Boston and New York, has benefitted from the myriad of subsequent approaches. The original accounts have been not so much challenged, with few exceptions, as enriched by later ones that emphasize points that had been slighted: cross-national comparisons with London, the search for legitimacy, class conflict, social control, and battles over social values. Most disagreements are apparently matters of emphasis, the result of differing angles of approach, or of the differing times and places studied. With the history of "criminality," however, consensus breaks down. Traditional historical methods have yielded a reasonably coherent, nonquantitative picture of professional crime and vice in the previous century. The attempt to measure the incidence of most ordinary common law offenses against persons and property, often using the "hard" methods of the quantitative social sciences, has resulted in disagreement not only about methods but about values. Although there is some hope that a scholarly consensus may soon emerge about the rate and direction of ordinary crime in both England and the United States through most of the 19th century through the mid-20th century, there are other issues that seem beyond the reach of social science. The issue of how to define crime properly, the degree to which "deviance" is social or individual in origin, and the degree to which authority may shape or contain behavior all seem resistant to empirical demonstration. 64 references