NS-Rise+of+Modern+Police

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 The first studies to look into the birth of modern policing assumed that the modern police force was created as a result of rising crime. They assumed that the rise of police directly correlated with the rise of disorder. This sounds like it would make sense, but history tells a different tale. The modern police force in Boston was created in 1838, but through the beginning of the 19th century crime was on the decline and the city only reported a single murder from 1822 to 1834. Riots erupted in London in 1780 but the Metropolitan police were not created until 49 years later. The police were created in times of rising //order,// because in times of decreasing crime, standards of order rise and laws will reflect this. The police did not serve to prevent crime, but rather enforce the punishment of victimless crimes like public drunkenness, loitering, or disorderly conduct. Sidney Harring notes in //Policing a Class Society// that: "The criminologist's definition of 'public order crimes' comes perilously close to the historian's description of 'working-class leisure-time activity.'"  For the first time arrests depended more on the judgment of an individual officer than complaints from the citizenry. People expected the police to bring an increase in order but for them to do so would require them to shift focus from crimes to potential crimes and criminals to potential criminals. This style of policing is inherently discriminatory, it led to the modern police tactic of planting agent provocateurs among people suspected of committing future crimes. Kristian Williams in the essay //The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern Policing// writes: "…the greatest portion of the actual business of law enforcement did not concern the protection of life and property, but the controlling of poor people, their habits and their manners." Modern police came about at roughly the same time as the industrialization and urbanization of America. Industrial society produced new opportunities for social control, the police being one piece of the growing bureaucratization of the U.S.A. and most other nations at the time. "The police provided a mechanism by which the power of the state, and eventually that of the emerging ruling class, could be brought to bear on the lives and habits of individual members of society."