NCJ Number
138799
Date Published
1992
Length
50 pages
Annotation
This review of the literature summarizes the origin, development, and characteristics of 19th century urban police and theories about economic, political, and class influences on policing; examines knowledge about 19th century crimes such as riot, prostitution, vice, and thievery; and identifies the formidable practical obstacles to efforts to determine whether the major common-law crimes were more prevalent in 19th or 20th century America.
Abstract
It is possible to reconstruct the history of police in ways that most historians and laypersons can recognize. This task becomes considerably more complicated with the study of crime because of ideology and political differences that make even definition problematic. An attempt is made to determine if there was more theft, robbery, assault, rape, or murder in the 19th century than now by restricting the question to a comparison of crime rates in the settled Eastern and Midwestern United States in the late 19th century with those in the same places now. The response is tentative. One guess is that there was less theft then than now but that simple assault was more common. Armed robbery was rare, but many other kinds of theft were common. Violent rape by strangers, or possibly gang rape, often was front-page news a century ago but rarely makes it out of the police reports of the 1990's. Sex forced on unwilling women or girls by authority figures certainly was common. The murder rate for white adults probably was roughly of the same order of magnitude in the 19th century as now, but increases in both the black population and the black murder rate mean that murder now is considerably higher for all adults. 60 references