THE HISTORY OF PROACTIVE POLICING IN THE U.S.

SAMUEL WALKER

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT OMAHA

A PAPER PREPARED FOR THE

PANEL ON PROACTIVE POLICING

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

MAY 2016

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I. INTRODUCTION

Proactive policing, as that term is generally understood today, has almost no history prior to the late 1970s. There are a few exceptions to this rule, which are important because of the perspective they provide on mainstream policing. Proactive policing emerged roughly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in response to a series of social, political and legal crises that overtook American society between 1960 and 1975, along with some important developments within the realm of policing itself. Taken as a whole, all of these changes, in various ways, created a demand for innovative police strategies while also facilitating their development.1

For the purposes of this paper, proactive policing is defined as (1) a police-initiated activity, (2) designed to address a problem or problems of crime or disorder, (3) which is guided by strategic intelligence about crime, disorder, and the capacities of the police. The third component of that definition is crucial to understanding the distinctive quality of today’s proactive policing. Throughout

American police history, police departments did initiate some activities to address crime or disorder that went beyond routine patrol. By contemporary standards of police management, however, they were not guided by any coherent thinking regarding the nature of crime or disorder, or the specific problems they attempted to address, or any creative thinking about what the police can or might do to achieve the purpose of the activity. In plain English, the thinking about police initiated programs in the pre-1970s era

1 The author’s principal works, upon which much of this paper is based, include Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977) and Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

2 amounted to little more than “there’s crime out there; let’s go make some arrests.” Many of today’s proactive policing efforts, by contrast, are often labelled “smart” policing because of the critical intelligence behind them.

As will be explained in due course, there were a few exceptions to this paper’s conclusion that there was no proactive policing in the pre-1970s era.2 These efforts were part of the broader

Progressive Era reform movement (1900-1914), which attempted reforms in virtually every aspect of

American society, and achieved many reforms that today remain established laws, programs and practices.3 The police were also touched by the Progressive reform impulse, primarily through the police professionalization movement. That movement transformed policing over the next fifty years, and its basic agenda continues to shape police thinking today. One progressive era reform is relevant to the discussion of the history of proactive policing. A number of police departments created the first specialized juvenile units, and some staffed them with the first-ever women police officers.4 The exceptional nature of that effort, which came close to approximating today’s proactive policing, puts into perspective the absence of proactive efforts in mainstream American policing at the time.

Investigating the origins of proactive policing affords particularly valuable insight into the process of change in policing. The simplistic view might think of its origins in terms of a sudden “Big

Idea” model (the social science equivalent of the Big Bang Theory). To the contrary, this paper argues that proactive policing emerged out of a national political, social and legal crisis, consisting of several different dimensions, which impinged on American policing in the 1960s and early 1970s. Compounding the dramatic events external to policing were several significant developments within the world of

22 The time frame for the emergence of proactive policing is necessarily vague, as there was no single event that marked its “birth.” 3 John D. Buenker and Joseph Buenker, Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 3 Vols. (New York: Sharpe Reference, 2005). 4 See the discussion below at pp 16-19.

3 policing which, in different ways, both provoked a reassessment of fundamental operating principles and made facilitated the development of innovations, which included various programs that are understood as proactive policing. The key to understanding the process that led to proactive policing is the recognition that the police are not an institution isolated from society at large (as some simplistic political rhetoric suggests) but are an integral part of it, deeply influenced by external developments and in turn playing some role in shaping those developments.5

II. INVESTIGATING THE HISTORY OF PROACTIVE POLICING

Police History as an Underdeveloped Field

The claim that there was no proactive policing in the contemporary sense during the first 150 years of American policing is admittedly a bold one, and needs to be supported by the appropriate historical evidence on the history of the police. It is also a difficult claim to support because of the very limited nature of the documentary evidence that is available. The Original source materials are quite limited, in terms of both the quantity and the reliability of those sources.

Compounding the problem is the fact that the scholarly literature on the history of the police is quite small. This is especially curious because over the last forty years our understanding of American history has been enormously enriched by research on what we can call public controversy-driven issues.

Research on African-American history exploded as a consequence of the civil rights movement, and it remains a vital field of scholarship today. In a similar fashion, the reborn women’s rights movement in the mid-1960s has stimulated a rich body of scholarship on the role of women, and as scholars explored issues traditionally regarded as within the sphere of women, new specialties have developed on the

5 This model of change in criminal justice agencies is best presented in James B. Jacobs, Stateville: The Prison in Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), which has deeply influenced this author.

4 history of the family and the history of children. The Vietnam War stimulated a major rethinking of

American foreign policy, raising new questions about the dominant assumptions and the impact of

American activities around the world. The riots of the 1960s, and the underlying social problems, gave birth to a new academic field of urban studies. We could continue, but the point is made: public controversies have driven and greatly enriched historical scholarship.6

In this context, it is strange indeed that there is so little historical scholarship on the police, and for that matter the entire criminal justice system. The standard academic apparatus of courses, journals, professional associations, specialized conferences, and the like are hardly to be found. In the judgment of this author, the problem lies with two academic disciplines. Historians have been little interested in criminal justice,7 while criminologists have been little interested in history.8 On each side of that equation, a simple literature search will confirm this author’s judgement.9

Why public controversies have been such powerful stimuli for research in other subjects over the past forty to fifty years but not on policing and criminal justice remains an unsolved mystery. For our purposes in this paper, the seriously underdeveloped state of scholarship on the history of the police poses a major obstacle to research on the history of proactive policing. Nonetheless, a number of sets of original source material do exist, and the following section reviews them and their potential value.

The Principal Source Materials on the History of the Police

6 Providing a source or sources for each of the subject areas mentioned in this paragraph would unnecessarily clutter the paper. Anyone curious about one or more of the subjects can consult America: History and Life and note the trend in scholarly publications since the 1960s. 7 There is no journal devoted to the history of criminal justice or the police. Nor is there an active professional association devoted to either the history of criminal justice or the police. 8 There is no criminal justice or criminology journal devoted to the history of criminal justice or the police. Nor is there an active professional association devoted to the history of criminal justice or the police. 9 For criminology and criminal justice: Criminal Justice Abstracts. For American history: America: History and Life.

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This section reviews briefly the principal source materials on the history of the police that are known to be available, with an assessment of their respective strengths and weaknesses. (The qualification “known to be available” is necessary because it is not uncommon in the field of historical research for new and valuable source materials to be unexpectedly discovered.

Police Department Records

Police department records include personnel records, memoranda, letters, reports, and any other documents related to the activities of local police department. These agencies, however, were never driven by the felt need to preserve their records as were, for example, the U.S. State Department or War Department. Thus, there are no known troves of surviving documents about the activities of local police departments that would provide a revealing glimpse into anything that might resemble proactive policing. The nineteenth century records of the New York City Police Department, for example, were sold for “scrap” in 1914.10 Roger Lane, in his note on sources for his history of the Boston Police,

Policing the City, cites city council records, ordinances, various published city reports, but no internal police department documents.11 It may well be that the absence of such files has contributed to the reluctance of historians to undertake histories of police departments.

Police department annual reports.

Some annual reports for a number of police departments do survive, and are held in university libraries or historical societies.12 Unfortunately, the surviving reports are spotty in terms of the years

10 James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 291. 11 Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). It is worth noting that there is much valuable material on the police in published works on major public events, such as riots, which provide useful source material apart from police department files. 12 This author found useful collections of police department annual reports and other documents in the libraries at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Those collections are the result of the influence of the two most important leaders of the police professionalization movement in the twentieth century: August

6 covered, and grow somewhat more common in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the overall body of such reports is extremely limited.

Local and state investigations of police departments.

Policing was a hotly contested political issue in the nineteenth century, much as it is today.

Many of these controversies involved the alleged non-enforcement of laws related to the consumption of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution.13 These social issues became political controversies as, for the most part, local city political machines and police departments were controlled by Democrats who used the police as a source of patronage and graft. Opposition Republicans were not only morally outraged by the tolerance of vice through non-enforcement of the law, but also as a political issue to attack the established Democratic Party machines.14 (In truth, in a number of cities, the Republicans were no less corrupt in their use of the police than were the Democrats.)15

The reports of a number of these investigations were collected and reprinted in book form in the late 1960s and early 1970s and are readily available in university libraries.16 These reports are valuable as source materials about some law enforcement practices, but are in no way independent, objective, or comprehensive in their treatment of their subjects. Most important, investigations were generally driven by a “reformers” bias, which posited a conflict between “good people” and “corrupt politicians,” and cannot be regarded as objective inquiries into the police departments they examine.

Vollmer, Chief of Police in Berkeley (1909-1923), and O.W. Wilson, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and later Superintendent of Police in Chicago (1960-1967) (1939-195). 13 Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, pp. 3-31. Robert Fogelson, Big City Police (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 13-66. 14 The most famous such investigation Lexow Committee investigation of the New York City police in the 1890s: New York, Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York, Report and Proceedings, 5 Vols. (New York: Arno Press, 1971). 15 Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform. 16 This paper makes use of a number of books and reports reprinted by Patterson Smith and Arno Press.

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On those occasions when the reformers did capture control of city government, their attempt to suppress “vice” was limited to what today might be called “full enforcement:” a program of police raids to close down saloons and houses of prostitution and arrest the proprietors, bar tenders, prostitutes, and others. In today’s terms, these efforts were proactive, in the sense that they were not a part of routine police patrol, but they were not guided by any strategic intelligence beyond a simplistic belief that a large number of arrests was sufficient to solve the problem at hand. There is little evidence that local reform movements made any lasting impact on the quality of police services. (The best single example of this is the short and highly-publicized career of future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt as a Commissioner of the New York City Police between 1895 and 1897. His “leadership” consisted largely of grandstanding, through publicized walks in the city at night looking for on-duty police officers. In the end, he brought about no lasting changes in the police department.)17

State and Local Crime Commission Investigations

Beginning in the 1920s, there appeared the first in a series of state and local crime commissions that investigated police departments and in some cases other components of the criminal justice system.18 The model for these investigations was The Cleveland Survey, which included as experts such luminaries as Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter and Dean Roscoe Pound, two giant figures in American law.19 With such experts in charge, the crime commissions broke with the moralistic emphasis of nineteenth century investigations and embraced an objective scientific approach to the

17 Richard Zacks, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York (New York: Doubleday, 2012). 18 The best survey of the crime commission during this period is Virgil W. Petersen, Crime Commissions in the United States (Chicago: Chicago Crime Commission, 1945). See also Wayne L. Morse and Raymond L. Moley, “Crime Commissions as Aids in the Legal Social Field,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 145 (September 1929): 68-73. 19 The Cleveland Foundation, Criminal Justice in Cleveland (Cleveland: The Cleveland Foundation, 1922; reprinted as Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968).

8 study of the administration of justice. The Cleveland Survey established the model for subsequent surveys, including the 1931 Wickersham Commission and the 1967 President’s Crime Commission.20

Although largely forgotten today, the crime commission movement of the 1920s was quite extensive and well-established years before the 1931 Wickersham Commission (officially the National

Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement), the first national crime commission.21 The most important of the state-level crime commissions include the Missouri Crime Survey (1926)22 and the

Illinois Crime Survey (1929).23

The crime commission investigation of police departments were shaped by the agenda of the police professionalization movement: (department leadership, the problem of political influence, personnel standards, and record-keeping. The reports are a valuable source of information on those issues, and as will be discussed below, they provide good evidence on the absence of anything that might be considered forerunners of today’s proactive policing.

Memoirs of prominent police officials

Several prominent police officials from major cities published their memoirs, which appear to have been commercially successful and relatively widely read. As source materials on the history of the police, these memoirs must be read with great caution. On the one hand, they are self-serving and in no sense objective or comprehensive in their coverage of police issues. On the other hand, however, some

20 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (New York: Avon Books, 1968). The main report and nine Task Force reports were published in 1967 as government documents. 21 See National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Lawlessness in Law Enforcement (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931; reprinted as New York: Arno Press, 1971). See also the valuable Report on Police, principally written by August Vollmer. Samuel Walker, “The Engineer as Progressive: The Wickersham Commission in The Arc of Herbert Hoover’s Life and Work,” Marquette Law Review 96 No. 4, (2013): 1165-1197. 22 Missouri Association for Criminal Justice, Missouri Crime Survey (orig. 1926; reprinted Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968). 23 Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, Illinois Crime Survey (orig. 1929; reprinted, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968).

9 are extremely useful in providing considerable detail about the author’s department and various police activities.

Because these memoirs are self-serving, one might reasonably expect to find a proud description of any innovative activity that might be considered proactive policing. Yet, no evidence of any such activity is to be found in these memoirs, however.

Proceedings of the annual meetings of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)

The most valuable source of information on possible proactive policing efforts, at least in the twentieth century, are the proceedings of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).24 The

IACP was founded in 1893 (as the National Chiefs of Police Association) and in the first two decades of the twentieth century was an important forum for discussions of various reforms, innovative programs, and ways in which the police could contribute to the reform of society as a whole. In fact, as discussed below, they are a source of valuable information on the programs that are the exception to the rule that there were no proactive policing programs prior to the contemporary era.

The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology is today a highly respected scholarly journal. Few people realize that from its founding in 1910 and for several decades afterwards it also functioned as perhaps the most important journal of policy issues in the criminal law, criminology, and the criminal justice system.25 Considerable space was devoted to reports on important developments in the field, including policing. In some instances, the journal published what was little more than a news item about

24 International Association of Chiefs of Police, The Police Yearbook, 5 Vols., 1893-1930. 25 All issues beginning with V. 1 are available at http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/. In 1951 it became the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science. In 1973 police issues were largely, but not entirely spun off to the new Journal of Police Science and Administration, which ceased publication in 1990.

10 a new development, while in other cases there was a longer discussion of the program or practice in question.

It is reasonable to assume that any new program or practice resembling contemporary proactive policing would have been seen and touted as a great innovation, and as a consequence reported in the journal. Apart from the exceptions to be discussed below, however, there are no such reports to be found.26

III. THE LACK OF PROACTIVE POLICING, 1830S – 1980S

The Nineteenth Century

As noted above, the available source material on policing in the nineteenth century is extremely limited. Nonetheless, the materials that do exist clearly indicate an absence of any police activities that might be considered even remotely proactive in the contemporary sense.

Scholars are unanimous in characterizing the American police in this period as dominated by politics, corrupt, inefficient in terms of crime control, and marked by uncontrolled abusive practices against people on the street.27

It is important to understand that, despite the nominal quasi-military structure of police departments, the American police in the nineteenth century were in fact extremely disorganized. The heart of the problem was that the very limited communications technology of the period was a major obstacle for organizations primarily engaged in conducting the highly decentralized operation of patrol.

26 This author canvassed the volumes of The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology for the years 1910 through 1950 as part of the research for Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform. 27 Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Fogelson, Big City Police. Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform.

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Precinct captains have been described as commanders of their own fiefdoms, with little effective direction from their police chiefs.28 Patrol officers, meanwhile, conducted a decades-long cat-and- mouse game with their supervisors, developing new strategies to undermine each new generation of communications technology to evade meaningful supervision. (This author has argued that continuous supervision did not develop until the spread of the two-way radio in the late 1930s.)29

With little centralized direction from police chiefs, police commanders simply did not think about proactive efforts to address crime and disorder (and it should be remembered that American cities in this period, with large numbers of recent immigrants and high rates of transiency, were extremely disorderly). The few proactive efforts that occurred were periodic vice raids, through which the police sought to close down brothels and gambling dens.

The main reason for the absence of proactive policing was the prevailing understanding of the role of the police in society. Among local political authorities, the primary role of the police was patronage and graft. Beyond a simplistic belief that patrol deterred crime, however, there was no serious thinking about how the police might control crime and disorder more effectively. There was no effort devoted to professional police administration. Nor was there any criminological thinking with regard to crime and disorder. The idea that the police were public servants, with a broad mission to serve and protect, did not crystalize until the early twentieth century with the advent of the police professionalization movement. One manifestation of that development was the first book on police administration, which was published in only in 1909.30

The Twentieth Century and Police Professionalization

28 Fogelson, Big City Police. 29 The point is argued in Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, pp. 165-167. 30 Leonhard Fuld, Police Administration: A Critical Study of Police Organisations in the United States and Abroad (Orig. 1909; reprinted Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1971).

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The police professionalization movement that emerged in the early twentieth century had a powerful and long-lasting impact in transforming local police departments and routine policing. The movement had a clearly focused reform agenda that included: articulating a clear mission in society, as befits a profession; eliminating the direct political influence that had underpinned the corruption and inefficiency of the police in the nineteenth century; securing skilled administrators as police chief executives; introducing the principles of modern management to police organizations; and finally raising personnel standards with regard to recruitment, training, discipline and retention. (None of these subject, it should be emphasized, received any discussion in the nineteenth century.) In the decentralized structure of American policing, the struggle for reform was fought out city-by-city.

Depending on the local political climate, reform progressed relatively quickly in some cities and very slowly in others. In a number of instances, departments which achieved some national reputations for professionalism slid backward in later years.31

By the end of the 1950s, after 40 to 50 years of reform efforts, most police departments were far more professional than they had been in 1900 or 1910. Although significantly deficient by contemporary standards, they were better managed, with at least a nominal commitment to professional standards, better organized, and with rank and file officers who, despite many great deficiencies, were far more qualified that their earlier counterparts. Corruption, although still a problem, was no longer pervasive as it had been. As the turmoil of the 1960s and beyond quickly demonstrated, however, many problems had not been addressed. The most serious included racial justice and the control of officer discretion, particularly with regard to the use of deadly force, physical force, and equal justice in stops, arrests, and employment practices.32

31 To take but one example, the rise and fall of reform in Philadelphia in covered in Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, pp. 61-66. 32 See the findings and recommendations of both the President’s Crime Commission (1967) and the Kerner Commission (1968). Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, 2nd ed., pp. 180-201.

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The great changes that occurred during the nearly half century of reform, with some notable exceptions that are discussed in the following section, did not include the development of innovative approaches to the control of crime and disorder, of the kind we today associate with proactive policing.

Indeed, professionalization involved a narrowing of the focus of the police role in society, and a single- minded emphasis on crime-fighting. As many of the leading advocates of community policing argued in the early 1980s, this narrow focus was an inherent part of the professional model of policing.33

The impact of the professionalization movement are clearly evident from the major documents produced by its leaders from the 1920s onward. The recognized national leader in policing though the

1930s was August Vollmer, Chief of Police in Berkeley, California. He was the principal author of the

1931 Wickersham Commission Report on Police, which can be read as a restatement of the recognized principles for professional policing at that time.34 The major issues included good police leadership, improved personnel standards with respect to recruitment and training, adequate and up-to-date equipment, and a professional system of departmental records. One section of the report was devoted the “crime prevention,” which in the standards of the day included police responsibilities for juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and other social problems.35 An air of disinterest pervades the short section, however, which notes that there has been “little development” in the area and that there is no good definition of what crime prevention involves. If there had been little progress in the area, Vollmer himself stands as the primary culprit, given his national stature and primary focus on conventional crime-fighting (patrol to deter crime; criminal investigation to arrest criminal suspects).36

33 George L. Kelling and Mark H. Moore, “The Evolving Strategy of Policing, Perspectives on Policing, No. 4 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 1988). 34 National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on Police (orig. 1931; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1971). 35 Ibid., pp. 111-122. 36 August Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936; reprinted Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1971). August Vollmer and Alfred E. Parker, Crime, Crooks & Cops (New York: Funk

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The chapter on the police in the path-breaking 1922 Cleveland Survey, which established the model for the many subsequent state and local crime commissions, is nearly identical to Vollmer’s 1931

Wickersham report.37 The standard professionalization agenda of better leadership and improved personnel standards, is also followed by a brief and unfocused chapter on crime prevention (under the heading of the Special Service Division of the Cleveland Police Department).38

There were several police activities, at least in some police departments, which had specialized foci and can be called quasi-proactive. Beginning with the political repression accompanying U.S. involvement in World War I, an unknown number of police department established ideologically driven units to suppress radical political movements. The Chicago police, for example, had an Anarchist Unit in

1919,39 and the Los Angeles police created a “Red Squad” somewhere in the 1920s (the precise is not clear.40 The New York City Police Department’s “Italian Squad,” established in 1905, was prompted by the strong anti-immigrant passions that had begun to grow around 1900 and flourished well into the

1920s, and reflected the equation of Italians with crime.41 Political spying by local police departments largely ended in the 1970s as a result of exposes and law suits that were part of the Watergate scandal political climate of public outrage at the abuse of government power.

In the 1930s, public concern (some would say hysteria) over illegal drug use, particularly marijuana, led some police departments to establish special narcotics units.42 The activities of these

and Wagnall’s, 1937). Unfortunately, there is no biography of this extremely important figure in the history of American policing. 37 It was in fact written by Raymond B. Fosdick, who was an important police reformer in the first two decades, and the author of the influential American Police Systems (New York: The Century Co., 1920). 38 The Cleveland Foundation, Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Chapter IX, pp. 75-7. 39 “Force Communists to Remove Flags,” New York Times (September 2, 1919. 40 The best survey of the subject of ideologically-oriented police units is Frank J. Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 41 The New York History Blog, “Lt. Joseph Petrosino and the Italian Squad.” http://newyorkhistoryblog.org/2016/05/28/lt-joseph-petrosino-and-the-italian-squad/. 42 John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1932-1960 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware, 1990).

15 units, however, while proactive on some respects, were essentially little different from those of existing criminal investigation units. Beyond making arrests, there was none of today proactive thinking along the lines of long-term crime prevention.

IV. THE NOTABLE EXCEPTIONSTO THE RULE

The notable exceptions to the rule about the absence of proactive policing efforts in the first 150 years of American policing appeared around 1910, and were essentially part of the broader Progressive

Era reform movement of the pre-World War I years. The most important manifestation involved the creation of the first police juvenile units, and the employment of the first police women in the U.S. as a part of that effort.43 The interest in juvenile delinquency was part of the broader movement that involved the creation of the first juvenile courts and juvenile probation in the pre-World War I years.44

The first police woman in the U.S., Lola Baldwin, was appointed to the Portland, Oregon police force in 1905 as an experiment in the prevention of juvenile delinquency. Local civic activists were concerned that the Lewis and Clark Exposition would pose too many temptations for young people.

Baldwin was given a temporary assignment with the Portland Police Department to organize and lead the Department of Public Safety for the Protection of Young Girls and Women, staffed by volunteer social workers. The experiment proved to be a success and she was then given a full-time position with the police department as head of the Women’s Protective Division. 45

43 Women had been employed as police matrons in the nineteenth century, but they were primarily jail officials responsible for female inmates. 44 Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of ‘Progressive’ Juvenile Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 45 Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, pp. 85-86.

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The Portland experiment attracted national attention, and other police departments soon embraced its crime prevention approach. By 1915 there was an active nationwide policewomen’s movement, with a professional association, the International Association of Policewomen, led by Alice

Stebbins Wells of the Los Angeles Police Department.46 Mary Hamilton, the first policewoman in the

New York City Police Department, wrote the first book on the subject of women in policing in 1924.47

The new police juvenile unit efforts, and the involvement of women police officers, shared a number of features with contemporary proactive policing efforts. First, they were a proactive effort to prevent crime, in a way that had not existed in policing to that time. This associated the police with both a national social reform effort and local social service agencies, also in ways that had not been a part of conventional policing. Second, it had a clear “problem-oriented” focus on juvenile delinquency, on young girls in particular, and in some instances on prostitution (then generally referred to as “white slavery”). Third, it involved a non-traditional strategy: the use of women who, consistent with prevailing gender stereotypes, were believed to be more effective than men in dealing with juveniles. Fourth, it involved non-traditional police tactics. Policewomen would patrol movie theaters, amusement parks, beaches, pool halls and other locations or events that attracted young people, to look for juveniles who appeared to be engaging in or about to engage in illegal behavior.48 Their mandate was extremely broad. The head of the Detroit policewoman’s unit explained that “a patrol problem may be defined as any situation, arising in a public place, that is potentially harmful to a woman or child.”49 Policewomen did not wear conventional police uniforms and did not have arrest powers. Young people who appeared to be in trouble were taken to their families, social service agencies, or referred to juvenile court.

46 Ibid., pp. 84-94. 47 Mary Hamilton, The Policewoman (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1924). 48 Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, pp. 84-94. 49 Eleanor Hutzel and Madelin MacGregor, The Policewoman’s Handbook (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), p. p. 11.

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Although driven by a pioneering reform spirit (Mary Hamilton spoke of the “chance for women with ideas and initiative to do constructive, pioneering work – to make history in fact.”),50 its leaders were deferential to the established male culture of policing. Wells reassured the IACP in 1914 that “the policewoman is not going to take the place of the policeman.”51

A few other innovative, proactive reforms programs paralleled the new juvenile units.

Particularly notable was the Golden Rule policy initiated by Cleveland Police Chief Fred Kohler in 1908.

Kohler was deeply disturbed by the high volume of arrests the police made each year, particularly for minor offenses. “”I couldn’t see that these wholesale arrests did any good,” he declared. They not only

“did not produce good results,” he added, “they did harm.” The Golden Rule involved what experts would recognize as diversion, de-escalation, and mediation. No juveniles would be taken to jail, but instead would be taken home to their parents. Officers were direct to use “kindly efforts” to resolve domestic disputes. Finally, men who had broken the law because of “unfortunate circumstances” were to be given a reprimand rather than be arrested.52

In the long run, however, these innovative police activities did not last, and by the 1920s had been reduced to conventional police activities. The close connection to the broader Progressive era reform movements contributed to their undoing. The spirit of Progressive reform died in the tumultuous, conflict-ridden World War I years. In the 1920s, the dominant trend in police management was to narrower the mission of the police to crime-fighting. The once-exciting innovation of employing women as police officers to address juvenile delinquency was steadily reduced to a more conventional part of the police bureaucracy. August Vollmer, chief of police in Berkeley, California, and the most important

50 Hamilton, The Policewoman, p. 4. 51 Wells, IACP Proceedings, 1914, p. 129. 52 Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, pp. 94-98.

18 national figure in policing, played a key role.53 His books and reports repeated the standard agenda of police professionalization and gave little attention to crime prevention and no attention to the innovative programs of the pre-World War I years. The narrowed focus on crime-fighting, it should be noted, finally came under attack by the leaders of the community policing movement in the early 1980s.

V. RESTATEMENT: WHY WAS THERE NO PROACTIVE POLICING?

The central question at this point becomes, Why was there no proactive policing (apart from the exceptions noted) prior to the contemporary era? This paper has already noted the major factors, but it is useful to summarize them here.

As already discussed, American policing in the nineteenth century, and for most departments through much of the twentieth century, was thoroughly unprofessional. In the nineteenth century, police departments were dominated by local politics, and mayors and city council members saw the police as a source of patronage and graft. The police department offered jobs for party loyalists and the non-enforcement of laws regarding alcohol consumption, gambling, and prostitution offered abundant opportunities for systematic payoffs from businesses providing those services. It is noteworthy that in the many local political controversies surrounding the police during this period, the self-styled reformers at no time offered a coherent program involving an alternative approach to policing and police management. Their agenda was a moralistic one: replace the corrupt politicians who control the police with “good” people (like us) and we will ensure full enforcement of the law.54 There was no profession of police administration, with a coherent vision of professional standards and a commitment to

53 August Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936; reprinted Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1971). August Vollmer and Alfred E. Parker, Crime, Crooks & Cops (New York: Funk and Wagnall’s, 1937). 54 This point is argued in Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, pp. 25-31, 43-47.

19 improving the profession. Nor was there a science of criminology with an understanding of the causes of crime and how might be controlled.

In the twentieth century, the professionalization movement filled the void of professional leadership that had existed, along with a vision of the role of the police in society. As we have argued, however, that steadily became steadily more focused on crime-fighting. The idea of crime prevention fell into disfavor, along with the Progressive Era innovations that sought to implement that role for the police.

VI. THE ORIGINS OF PROACTIVE POLICING

The Legal, Social, and Political Crises of the 1960s

The origins of proactive policing were a result of the convergence of three different legal, social, and political crises that impinged upon the American police in the 1960s. Separately and together, these crises generated powerful demands for new approaches basic policing, demands which had conflicting expectations. The pressures on the police, meanwhile, were compounded by new research findings on basic strategies and tactics undermined traditional assumptions about police effectiveness. The net result was a policy and intellectual crisis for policing that provoked a search for new principles, strategies and tactics.

The first external crisis to strike the police was the emergence of the U.S. Supreme Court as an active watchdog of certain routine police procedures, most famously regard to searches and seizures and in-custody interrogations. The activist role of the Warren Court with regard to the police paralleled its famous activism with regard to race discrimination, separation of church and state, First Amendment

20 protections of sexually-oriented materials, among other issues, and was no less controversial.55 The court’s decisions in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) not only touched off a political firestorm but also provoked police chiefs to scramble to improve recruitment and training in order to have a rank and file able to cope with the new constitutional demands now required by the court.56 The

President’s Crime Commission’s 1967 Task Force Report: The Police, the best survey of the field, found police personnel standards related to education, supervision and accountability to be generally abysmal.57

The second crisis was the civil rights movement which challenged racially discriminatory practices in essentially every area of policing. The rising discontent among African Americans finally exploded in a series of major urban riots between 1964 and 1968, which created a national crisis over

“law and order” (compounded by the growing militancy of anti-Vietnam War protests beginning in

1965).58 Police leaders, already pressured by the new demands of the Supreme Court, now faced angry protests over unjustified shootings, patterns of excessive force, inadequate training and supervision, and discrimination in recruitment, assignments, and promotions. Additionally, civil rights groups demanded citizen oversight of the police with regard to citizen complaints of misconduct, which police chiefs almost universally regarded as a threat to their professional autonomy.59

The standard civil rights critique of American policing, which was shared by many other experts, included the argument that police departments had become closed bureaucracies, isolated from the communities they serve, and resistant to citizen input regarding basic operations. This argument

55 Bernard Schwartz, The Warren Court: A Retrospective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 56 Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, 2nd ed., pp. 180-193. 57 President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Police (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967). 58 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report (New York: Bantam Book, 1968). 59 The history of the citizen oversight movement is in Chapter 2 of Samuel Walker, Police Accountability: The Role of Citizen Oversight (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 2001).

21 challenged the very foundations of police professionalism, which envisioned the police as the unquestioned “experts” in their professional domain. Professionalism dictated that police chiefs should no more listen to community residents about how to deal with crime than medical doctors should listen to patients about how to treat cancer. (The latter argument was never stated so bluntly, at least not publicly, but it was implicit in the prevailing notions about police professionalism.)60 A tightly structured bureaucracy, meanwhile, had been one of the core principles of the professionalization movement, and reform-minded police chiefs in the 1960s were struggling to implement that principle.

The third crisis was the dramatic rise in major crimes that began in 1963 and continued for a decade. Crime had a major impact on public opinion and electoral politics. First in 1964,61 and then with full force in 1968, crime became for the first time ever an issue in presidential politics. Public demands that the police “get tough” with crime, however, generally pointed in directions that conflicted with the demands of both the Supreme Court and the civil rights movement.

In short, by the end of the 1960s police chiefs across the country found themselves caught in the middle of not just powerful new demands, but conflicting demands.

The tumultuous events of the 1960s provoked a palpable national crisis over policing, race, and crime, which among other things led to an unprecedented national scrutiny of the police. President’s

Crime Commission, appointed in 1965, delivered its reports in 1967. The main report and the

60 The Kerner Commission noted that some of the most serious problems of police conduct existed in departments that were among the “best led, best organized, best trained and most professional in the country.” National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report, p. 301. Most people in the police field understood that the commission was talking about the Los Angeles Police Department. And it is worth noting that the chief of the Los Angeles police, William Parker, was particularly belligerent in dismissing community critics as possible communists. And in response to a California Supreme Court decision imposing the exclusionary rule for the police in the state, he went so far as to have television producer Jack Webb develop a Dragnet show that attacked court restrictions on police crime-fighting procedures. 61 It is generally accepted that President Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 sensed the growing public concern about crime, and in 1965 created his President’s Crime Commission to head off conservatives and assert liberal Democratic control of the issue.

22 accompanying Task Force Report: The Police found systemic inadequacies in every aspect of policing and made a wide-ranging set of recommendations for reform. Additionally, the commission sponsored field research on police patrol, which ultimately had a major impact on the understanding of basic operations.62 The Kerner Commission, appointed to study the urban riots, delivered its report in early

1968, and it too found serious problems and made many recommendations for improvement. There were also numerous local investigations and reports, typically following a riot or some other crisis.63 The

American Bar Association published its Standards Relating to the Urban Police Function in (197__), with thoughtful commentary on the police role and its own set of recommendations for reform.64

The various investigations and reports on the police were only part of a burgeoning “research revolution” on the entire criminal justice system.65 The products of this new body of knowledge played a major role in the development of proactive policing.

The Impact of the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment, and Other Research

In the context of multiple crises involving an extraordinary complex brew of conflicting public demands, the world of policing experienced a major challenge to its fundamental assumptions about effective policing. The crisis was prompted by the famous Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment.66

Since the founding of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, modern policing had been grounded on the Peelian principle that the police could effectively control crime through visible patrol

62 Albert J. Reiss, The Police and the Public (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). Donald J. Black, The Manners and Customs of the Police (New York: Academic Press, 1980). 63 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report. 64 American Bar Association, Standards Relating to the Urban Police Function (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). 65 “Research revolution:” Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, pp. 206-208. See also the review of federal support for police research in Wesley G. Skogan and Kathleen Frydl, Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004), Ch. 2, pp. 20-46. 66 George L. Kelling, Tony Pate, Duane Deickman, Charles E. Brown, The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment: A Summary Report (Washington, DC: The Police Foundation, 1974).

23 dispersed through the larger community and organized in terms of assigning officers to specific police beats.67 The assumption was that a visible police presence would deter criminals from offending.

Additionally, dispersal of patrol throughout the community would make officers readily available to respond to problems they observed or were asked to deal with.

The basic Peeling principle of the deterrent effect of patrol was accepted virtually as gospel and never rigorously tested. (There were several experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, but the methodologies were deeply flawed.) The experiment did not actually test the basic proposition of whether routine police patrol per se deters crime. There were never any areas of the city that were by design completely free of a police presence for any meaningful length of time. The experiment did test whether increasing or decreasing the level of patrol had any impact on crime or on public perceptions of crime and their safety. The principle findings were that increasing or decreasing the level of patrol had no significant effect on either crime or public perceptions. The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, which quickly followed, found that the addition of foot patrol also had no impact on crime. It did, however, find that additional foot patrol did have a positive effect on residents’ feelings of safety, a finding that had an important effect on subsequent thinking about police strategies.68

The Kansas City Experiment findings were an intellectual and policy bombshell, challenging the fundamental proposition that patrol deters crime and that more patrol deters crime more effectively.

The police profession, and the growing number of academic experts on policing, faced the daunting question: If more intensive patrol per se has no impact on crime, what then can the police do to control crime more effectively? That question proved to be the germ of what became a broad rethinking of the

67 Richard A. Grant, Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (New York: Palgrave, 2010). T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972). 68 The Police Foundation, Newark Foot Patrol Experiment (Washington, DC: The Police Foundation, 1981).

24 fundamentals of policing, which eventually generated a host of innovative police strategies, one of which bears the label of proactive policing.

Nor was the Kansas City experiment the only challenge to traditional police thinking. Other studies in the research revolution in policing undermined two other cherished police assumptions. A

Rand Corporation investigation challenged traditional police assumptions about criminal investigations, along with popular myths about detectives. Most arrests were made by the responding patrol officers, and follow-up investigations by detectives were remarkably unproductive. Detective work, in fact, was a rather boring enterprise dominated by paperwork.69 Meanwhile, studies found that increasing the speed of police response to crimes had virtually no effect on increasing arrests and improving clearance rates.70

VII. INTELLECTUAL AND POLICY FERMENT: TOWARDS PROACTIVE POLICING

The crises of the 1960s created powerful public demands for new and more effective strategies for addressing crime and disorder. The research revolution, meanwhile, undermined the pillars of traditional police strategy, generating an urgent need to find new foundations for policing. The result was a period of extraordinary intellectual and policy ferment.

69 Peter Greenwood, Jan M. Chaiken, Joan Petersilia, The Criminal Investigation Process (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1977). See also the earlier, smaller study by the President’s Crime Commission: President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Police (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967). 70 Kansas City Police Department, Response Time Analysis (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 1978).

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The most important new idea to appear was the concept of community policing.71 The leaders of the movement explicitly rejected the norms of what was called the “Professional Era” of policing, and argued that police departments needed to reject their isolation, develop working relationships with community groups, reject the narrow focus on crime-fighting, address community problems which included disorder, and decentralize decision-making so that strategies to address crime and disorder could be tailored to the needs of individual communities.

Community policing was paralleled by the development of problem-oriented policing, initially conceptualized by Herman Goldstein.72 The police, Goldstein argued, should abandon the narrow focus on crime and disaggregate the many situations they routinely encountered into discrete “problems”

(and also disaggregate “crime” into separate crime problems). Each problem could then be addressed by strategies specifically tailored for it. The “problem-solving” process would involve developing working partnerships with community groups, “scanning” and “assessment” the nature of each problem, followed by a response or responses developed through community partnerships.73

Both community policing and problem-oriented policing were fundamentally proactive to the extent that, consistent with the definition set forth at the beginning of this paper, involved (1) police-initiated activities, (2) directed at specific problems, and (3) guided by strategic intelligence. The net result was, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing to this day, a steady flow of new police strategies for addressing crime and disorder. In addition to community policing and problem-oriented policing, and in many instances incorporated into them were directed patrol, broken windows policing, zero tolerance

71 Jack R. Greene, “Community Policing in America: Changing the Nature, Structure, and Function of the Police,” in Policies, Processes and Decisions of the Criminal Justice System, V 3(Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2000), pp. 299-370. 72 Herman Goldstein, “Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach,” Crime and Delinquency 25 (April 1979): 236-258. 73 Michael S. Scott, Problem-Oriented Policing: Reflections on the First 20 Years (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2000).

26 policing, hot spots policing, focused deterrence, COMPSTAT,74 most recently predictive policing, and all programs that are labelled “smart” policing. The term “smart” policing is particularly apt, since it highlights the elements of both strategic thinking and the utilization of systematic data.

New Tools for Policing

The external demands on the police, together with the impact of the research revolution, created the need for new police strategies. Several other developments that emerged in the same time period provided new tools that facilitated the development of today’s proactive policing.

Particularly important was the continuing research revolution in policing. The growth and maturation of the field of criminology and criminal justice, fueled by rising student enrollments, led to the enormous expansion of academic programs, including Ph.D. programs. This growth supported the development of a large body of academic expertise that far exceeded what had existed in, say, 1970.

The growing body of academic expertise in turn continued the research revolution in policing (and all of criminal justice), supported by federal research funds private foundations. The result was support for new thinking in policing, the development of innovative programs, and the evaluation of these innovations by first-rate researchers. All of these developments made the growth and development of various proactive policing programs possible.

Innovation in policing, meanwhile, was possible because of a dramatic change in the culture of police leadership in the U.S. Police departments had been extremely wary of academic research through the mid-1960s, particularly when it sought to investigate such highly sensitive issues as officer-involved shootings, police use of physical force, and corruption. Gradually at first, a new generation of police

74 COMPSTAT is included here, even though it is widely regarded as an internal management tool for police departments, to the extent that it focuses attention on area-level crime trends, places demands on area commanders to take actions to address adverse trends (actions that might involve one or more of the other new strategies), and relies on the collection and analysis of systematic data.

27 leaders recognized that independent academic research was important and indeed necessary if they were to address controversial issues. Perhaps the signal event in this transition was when the

International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) effectively disowned Patrick V. Murphy, former Police

Commissioner in New York City, when he publicly discussed the subject of police corruption.75 Murphy then helped to found the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), which as its name implied was committed to independent research. The Police Foundation, meanwhile, founded in 1970 by a grant from the Ford Foundation, also undertook a program of research (which included the Kansas City patrol study). By the mid to late-1970s, academic researchers found they could gain access to even the most sensitive police department files, such as officer use of deadly force reports.76

The research revolution, meanwhile, contributed new insights and contributed directly and indirectly to the development of proactive policing. Particularly important was the identification of “hot spots” of crime and disorder, and the recognition of the importance of “place” in crime, disorder, and police responses.77

Finally, advances in computer technology introduced the modern digital age. This not only facilitated large-scale research projects but also allowed police departments to collect systematic data on their operations in formats that facilitated academic research.78

VIII. CONCLUSION

75 Author’s personal conversations with Patrick V. Murphy, James J. Fyfe, Herman Goldstein, and others. 76 See, for example, James J. Fyfe, “Administrative Interventions on Police Shooting Discretion: An Empirical Examination,” Journal of Criminal Justice 7 (Winter 1979: 309-323). 77 Lawrence W. Sherman, Patrick R. Gartin, Michal E. Buerger, “Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the Criminology of Place, Criminology 27 (February 1989): 27-56. David Weisburd, Elizabeth R. Groff, Sue-Ming Yang, The Criminology of Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 78 The modern police department today has been characterized as “data-driven.” Samuel Walker and Carole A. Archbold, The New World of Police Accountability, 2nd ed. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2014), pp. 22-23.

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Proactive policing, as defined at the outset of the paper, had with but one notable exception no

history during the first 150 years of the American police. In the nineteenth century, the police were

dominated by local politics, and as a result were corrupt, inefficient, and routinely brutal. The

dominance of political interference meant that there was no profession of police leadership, which

could articulate a vision of policing as a public service and explore creative innovations in the police

response to the problems of crime and disorder.

In the twentieth century, the emergence of the police professionalization movement brought

professional leadership, a vision of policing as a public service, and a clearly focused agenda of

reform. As the movement developed, the professional mission of the police became increasingly

focused in crime-fighting, to the exclusion of crime prevention. As a consequence, the one exception

to the rule of an absence of anything resembling today’s proactive policing – the innovation

involving juvenile units and the employment of women police officers in those units—was crowded

out and reduced to a more conventional approach to policing.

The development of proactive policing, however, is a fascinating story, which provides valuable

insights into how large-scale change occurs in American policing. The idea that the police are

resistant to change is tired slogan favored only by the harshest critics of the police. Proactive

policing was a product – one of many products, in fact—of an extraordinary convergence of several

legal, social, and political crises that swept over American society in the tumultuous 1960s,

profoundly affecting the police along with every other institution. The crises generated new

demands on the police to improve both their capacity to address crime and disorder and their own

internal standards of accountability. Adding to the enormous pressures facing police chief

executives at the time, was the fact that different parts of these pressures pointed in conflicting

directions: on the one hand to impose more controls over police officer conduct, and on the other

to allow them freer range to control crime.

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The crises of the 1960s were followed several major research findings that undermined the basic

principles that had guided modern policing since Robert Peel. Most important was the finding that

adding police patrol did not increase the effectiveness of patrol in terms of either deterring crime or

improving residents’ feelings of public safety. The result was a period of intellectual ferment as

police chiefs, outside experts, and academics searched for new principles for police operations. The

search generated several innovative responses, the most important being community policing and

problem-oriented policing, that included a number of initiatives that constitute today’s proactive

policing: directed patrol, broken windows policing, hot spots policing, focused deterrence, and

others. Other important changes, the continued growth of academic research, a new openness of

police departments to independent research, developments in criminological theory, and the

explosive advances in computer technology, facilitated in various ways the development of

proactive policing.

In the end, change in the form of proactive policing came to the American police not through

the sudden advent of a new Big Idea within policing, but as a result of major legal, social, and

political changes external to the police. The crisis forced the world of policing to seek new answers

to the fundamental police question of how to control crime and disorder and achieve a healthy

society. With respect to understanding the process change in policing, therefore, it is necessary to

see the police not as isolated from its environment, but as an institution embedded in society and

subject to all of the turmoil and forces of change that affect all other institutions.

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