by Rosa Brooks
Compare these figures to rates of gun ownership and violent crime in other countries and the scale of America’s violence problem becomes clear. In Britain, there are only 6.6 guns per 100 people; in Germany and France, there are roughly 30 guns per 100 people. In the United States, there are somewhere between 88 and 112 guns per 100 people. The per capita US homicide rate also far outpaces other developed countries: it’s roughly three times higher than in France, four times higher than in Britain, five times higher than in Germany, and 13 times higher than in Japan.
The United States’ violence problem has obvious implications for American police officers and how they think about their on-the-job encounters. British cops can safely assume that most of the people they see around them aren’t armed. In the United States, police officers often assume the opposite, and given the astounding number of guns around, they’re often right to do so. In 7D, finding a gun is easy. It’s finding a way out that’s hard. See “Crime in the United States 2014: Murder,” FBI, ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/murder; “FBI Releases 2014 Crime Statistics,” FBI, September 28, 2015, www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2014-crime-statistics; “Crime in the United States 2014: Murder, Types of Weapons Used,” FBI, ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_7_murder_types_of_weapons_used_percent_distribution_by_region_2014.xls; Ingraham, Christopher, “There Are Now More Guns Than People in the United States,” Washington Post, October 5, 2015; Karp, Aaron, “Completing the Count: Civilian Firearms,” in Small Arms Survey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39–71; Karp, Aaron, “Completing the Count: Civilian Firearms, Annexe 4,” in Small Arms Survey; Morris, Hugh, “Mapped: The Countries with the Most Guns (No Prizes for Guessing #1),” Telegraph, October 22, 2016; and “Global Study on Homicide,” United Nations, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html.
But as the legal scholar: Cover, Robert M., “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95, no. 8 (1986): 1601–29.
In his 1992 book: Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017).
MODEL RECRUIT
Moral: people have had: Law is old, and crime and punishment are old, but no one really knows when the first police force came into being. The Bible tells us that Cain slew his brother Abel, and God punished Cain by sending him off to be “a restless wanderer . . . on the earth,” but as far as we know, God did his own detective work, and Cain accepted his punishment without need of police officers to drag him off in cuffs.
Most historians assume that early policing was essentially viewed as a collective responsibility; communities might punish those who violated significant norms, but there were no “professional” police. When force was required to stop or punish wrongdoing, the affected citizenry and their families or friends did what they considered necessary. As societies grew more complex and specialized, in many states professional soldiers occasionally performed what today we might think of as “law enforcement” functions, at the behest of the governing authorities. Similarly, private citizens and groups (merchants, priests, artisans) often paid others to serve as guards and gatekeepers, keeping watch over temples, storerooms, and marketplaces. In the United States, what we would today recognize as “police departments” emerged only in the midnineteenth century.
Later, the emperor Justinian: Like their modern counterparts, police in the ancient world were often accused of brutality and corruption. A papyrus from around 1000 BC advises Egyptian citizens to do whatever was needed to keep the cops on their side:
Befriend the herald [policeman] of your quarter,
Do not make him angry with you.
Give him food from your house,
Do not slight his requests;
Say to him: “Welcome, welcome here.”
No blame accrues to him who does it.
In ancient China, specialized criminal justice officers (distinct from the military) seem to have emerged by the time of the Shang dynasty (1783 to 1134 BC). By the Han dynasty period, cities and prefectures had police chiefs and officers—who were sometimes unwilling conscripts—and the behavior of Han dynasty officers seems frequently to have dismayed the populace. The Book of Han, written in the first century AD, tells approvingly of a provincial governor who solved the problem of police corruption and abuse by raising police salaries: after getting a substantial raise, the police finally “considered themselves important and did not care to violate the law or unauthorizedly arrest and detain people.”
The first known police officers in ancient Greece were enslaved foreigners. (This will perhaps not surprise today’s patrol officers, who may be inclined to feel that their own lot—at the mercy of an unfeeling bureaucracy, ordered around by hostile sergeants—has much in common with that of a slave.) Writing in the second century AD, Julius Pollux described the “Scythian archers” active in Athens in the fifth century BC. These were “public slaves,” with the task of “restraining those who behaved inappropriately and those who said what should not be said.”
In his comic plays, the Greek playwright Aristophanes paints an unflattering portrait of their capabilities: in Lysistrata, for instance, the Scythians, sent by a magistrate to arrest Lysistrata, prove no match for the band of angry women she summons to her aid: “Come out . . . you market women who sell grain and eggs, garlic and vegetables, and those who run our bakeries and taverns, to the attack! Hit them, stomp on them, scratch their eyeballs, smother them with your abuse! Don’t hold back!” The Scythian guards are quickly routed by the mob of women, and Lysistrata has to order her makeshift army not to add insult to injury by stripping the police of their weapons. In another Aristophanes play, a Scythian police guard watching a prisoner is easily persuaded to abandon his duties by the prospect of sex with an attractive dancing girl.
All this suggests, however, that one of the central paradoxes of policing has been with us for millennia: police function as enforcers for the establishment, but are locked out of the establishment themselves. From the earliest times, police have been charged with protecting the powerful from the hungry and powerless, but police themselves have no independent wealth or power; historically, they have been foreigners, slaves, and hired hands, creating a recipe for corruption and resentment all around. Only relatively recently did police come to view themselves as protectors of ordinary people and defenders of the rule of law, rather than merely as servants of those with power. (See: Dollinger, André, “Egyptian Merchants in the Old Kingdom,” Introduction to the History and Culture of Pharaonic Egypt, 2001, www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/trade/market_scene.htm [inactive]; “Tombs of Ancient Egypt: The Mastaba of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep,” Osirisnet, www.osirisnet.net/mastabas/niankhkhnoum_khnoumhotep/e_niankhkhnum_khnumhotep_02.htm; Dollinger, “The Police in Ancient Egypt,” Introduction to the History and Culture of Pharaonic Egypt, www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/law_and_order/police.htm [inactive]; Kemp, Barry J., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1992), www.amazon.com/Ancient-Egypt-Civilization-Barry-Kemp/dp/0415063469; Davies, Norman de Garis, The Rock Tombs of El Amarna (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1900), archive.org/details/rocktombsofelama14davi; Mark, Joshua L., “Police in Ancient Egypt,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, July 21, 2017, www.ancient.eu/article/1104/police-in-ancient-egypt/; Wong, Kam C., Chinese Policing: History and Reform (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), books.google.com/books?id=jjBTi-GEZe4C&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=the+%22book+of+han%22+police&source=bl&ots=P_rc_2_C6r&sig=LmrLKmK6kcR4d2gUwiuWZbfNd3Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXxJLf5IHdAhXNbZoKHcwEAhYQ6AEwE3oECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=prefect&f=false; “Alphabetical Glossary.” In Ku, Pan. Homer H. Dubs, translator. The History of the Former Han Dynasty, vol. 1. (Baltimore: Waverly, 1938), web.archive.org/web/20130117062103/http://library.uoregon.ed
u/ec/e-asia/read/Chp1-5FINAL_D.pdf; library.uoregon.edu/ec/e-asia/reada/crowell-chp8.pdf [inactive]; Benn, Charles, China’s Golden Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ile3jSveb4sC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=%22Gold+Bird+Guards#v=onepage&q=%22Gold%20Bird%20Guards%22&f=false, Aristophanes, Lysistrata, trans. Ian Johnson, Vancouver Island University, uofi.app.box.com/s/48etuhz2thdbzroq7sx1hp8fimokurjn, p. 30; “Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae,” Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0019,008:1222&lang=original.)
The colonies imported: In early colonial America, policing initially reflected the settlers’ English heritage. Appointed sheriffs were responsible for tax collection, the enforcement of court judgments, and a range of administrative tasks, and the detention of criminals was a relatively minor part of their job. In some cities and towns, sheriffs were supplemented by paid constables; in others, a town “watch” was formed, consisting of volunteers or townsmen more or less conscripted into serving. Town watchmen also responded to fires and external attacks, and often the watchmen and the local militia were one and the same.
On the whole, the evidence suggests that preventing and responding to violent crime was not a major preoccupation in colonial America, in part because towns were small enough and conditions beyond them frightening enough to the early settlers that communities had strong incentives to self-police. Early settlers depended heavily on one another, and exile was akin to a death sentence. Thus, the policing function was not viewed as separate from other colonial institutions designed to maintain order, and public safety was viewed as a communal responsibility.
Only as English-speaking settlements spread and inequalities in wealth grew did both property crime and violent crime become more common. Demands for policing increased accordingly. In the north, greater demand for policing was linked to rising inequality and, later, to industrialization, immigration, and the growth of cities; as communities became more populous and urbanized, the relatively informal mechanisms of social control that had prevailed in the early colonies began to be perceived by elites as inadequate.
In the South, the institution of slavery shaped the evolution of policing. By the early 1700s, several southern colonies created formal “slave patrols” charged with capturing runaways and putting down slave revolts. They were brutal enforcers of a brutal institution. As one patroller put it, their job was to “apprehend any negro whom we found from his home, and if he made any resistance, or ran from us, fire upon him immediately.” (See: Olson-Raymer, Gayle, “The Evolving Colonial Criminal Justice System,” History 110, Humboldt State University, gorhistory.com/hist110/unit1/criminaljustice.html; Williams, Kristian, “Foreword: Police and Power in America,” in Our Enemies in Blue [New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004], www.google.com/books/edition/Our_Enemies_in_Blue/QWNhCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=foreword.)
Thus the first: See Brooke, John L., Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Ellis, Franklin, History of Columbia County, New York. With Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia: Everts & Ensign, 1878).
Instead, Reserve Recruit: The British statesman Sir Robert Peel is usually credited with ushering in the era of “modern” policing, in which police officers are full-time, salaried employees of the state, working within a formal, centralized municipal or regional police organization, and charged specifically and solely with law enforcement duties. In 1829, at Peel’s urging, Parliament passed legislation creating the London Metropolitan Police force.
Peel’s vision of policing was in many ways a radical one. The police, he believed, should serve the people and not merely the powerful. The general orders given by Peel to all London Metropolitan Police officers contain nine principles of policing, which are still taught in police academies today. The purpose of the police, according to his nine principles, was:
To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary, of avenging individuals the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
and thence to: In the United States, the London Metropolitan Police became a model for the creation of new urban police departments, beginning with the Boston Police Department in 1838. New York created its first police department in 1845, and Washington, DC, followed suit in 1861 with the creation of the Metropolitan Police Department. But despite Peel’s idealistic principles, America’s early police forces were rife with corruption and brutality. In New York, Chicago, and other northern and midwestern cities, police departments quickly became tools of machine politics; in the cities of the South, police departments inherited many of the structures, attitudes, and even personnel of the pre–Civil War slave patrols.
The Justice Department: In the more than century and a half since the first US police organizations were formed, American police departments have expanded and professionalized—but the contradictions that have characterized policing throughout history remain visible today. Police are deployed by those with power to protect the existing social order, but officers rarely possess social or economic power themselves. They are both needed and despised by the populace; they enforce laws they do not make, and protect elites they are rarely able to join. At the same time, most modern police departments genuinely struggle to make good on the promise of Peel’s nine principles: to be protectors of the poor and vulnerable rather than predators against the weak, to prevent crime rather than simply react to it, to work in partnership with rather than in opposition to communities.
We could all talk: Even today, most of what I know about my mother’s emotional state at that time comes from her published writing, not from anything she has told
me directly. She has written about this period in a memoir, Living with a Wild God. Even today, it pains me to read that book and think of all the missed opportunities for connection, both on her side and on my own.
YOU LIVE WITH THAT FOREVER
Officially, we also: Government of the District of Columbia, Metropolitan Police Department Annual Report, 2016, mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/MPD%20Annual%20Report%202016_lowres.pdf.
We didn’t talk: Government of the District of Columbia, Annual Report 2016; “QuickFacts: District of Columbia,” US Census Bureau, www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/DC/RHI225218; Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, Racial Disparities in Arrests in the District of Columbia, 2009–2011 (2013), www.washlaw.org/pdf/wlc_report_racial_disparities.pdf.
At the federal level: Copland, James R., and Rafael A. Mangual, Overcriminalizing America: An Overview and Model Legislation for States (New York: Manhattan Institute, 2018), media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-JC-0818.pdf.
But we didn’t: “Rising Incarceration Rates,” in The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, ed. Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), 33–69.
We didn’t talk: “District of Columbia Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/DC.html; “New Prison and Jail Population Figures Released by U.S. Department of Justice,” The Sentencing Project, April 25, 2019, www.sentencingproject.org/news/new-prison-jail-population-figures-released-u-s-department-justice/.
