Police

Police forces are agencies empowered by some level of government—local, county, state, or federal—to maintain social order through legal means, coercion, or use of force. Police serve as the enforcement arm of the criminal justice system, which consists of police, the judiciary, and corrections.

Unlike many other countries, the United States has decentralized police forces. With localism distinguishing U.S. police forces since their conception, municipal government and police chiefs have been fundamental to shaping police activities, resulting in police forces in different places that are often quite different from each other. This legacy of decentralized police organization and lack of coordination among district, county, and state police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Secret Service was cited as problematic in The 9/11 Commission Report and led to the development of the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate with local police departments, although it still has an undefined jurisdiction over local police.

Although many textbooks still describe the first U.S. police forces as emerging in the mid-1800s in northeastern cities, many contemporary scholars of police studies cite police forces' initial emergence in southern cities near the turn of the 19th century. These forces, which often patrolled on horseback and in some cities lived in dorms, were paid, civilian, patrolling entities created to help contain the urban slave population. Their duties included checking slaves for passes allowing them to be out on the street, searching for runaway slaves, and monitoring the free African American population and keeping them from gathering or interacting with slaves. However, because these forces had jurisdiction to arrest any city resident and did so, and interacted with the courts, they are by definition police forces and thus push back the origin date of police forces in the United States to the first years of the 19th century and geographically to southern cities rather than northeastern ones.

Boston and New York developed police forces in 1838 and 1844, respectively, and did so under pressure from local populations for more social order in a time of civil unrest. By the end of the 19th century, nearly all metropolitan areas had police forces, and starting in 1905 in Pennsylvania (which organized its state police in response to the unrest around the Great Anthracite Strike), state police forces began serving rural areas. By the start of World War II, all states had statewide police forces.

The discontinuity of the inception of police forces speaks to the most prevailing characteristics of policing in the United States, namely, its history of local autonomy and organization, which has only recently begun to change. By the mid-to late 19th century, urban police forces were deeply tied to local political parties and machines. In many larger cities, such as San Francisco, New York, and New Orleans, police were so intimately connected to local political parties that if their party lost its majority in the city council, the police department would be purged and new officers brought in who were loyal to the prevailing party. Therefore, employment in the police was contingent on political connections, and there was rarely any kind of formal training or serious application process. Combine this with the facts that no preprinted secret ballot yet existed and that police officers marshaled elections, and one can see the origins of the prevailing violence found on Election Day in many large cities.

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