The Pioneer by John J. MacDonald in City Journal. The history of policing in America is being slanted to fit modern political needs, it seems. August Vollmer was responsible for improving American policing, but is now accused of ruining it along racial lines. It's a new story to me.
As is often the case with bad revisionist history, the narrative largely stems from a single scholarly article that credulous journalists have popularized. “The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century,” by the University of Chicago’s Julian Go, has received dozens of citations since its 2020 publication in the American Journal of Sociology. Go’s paper purports to find, through a study of Vollmer’s career, the essentially imperialist character of twentieth-century police reforms—and to “connect domestic race relations with colonial relations” overseen by the military.
4 comments:
"As historian Eric Monkkonen observed, the stark difference between the development of police forces in the North and the South during the antebellum period underscores a critical point: 'An unfree society cannot support a modern police system.'"
Leaving aside the question of whether 'a modern... system' is necessarily a better system, I wonder if that is in fact true. There are a lot of unfree societies with police. Is this a 'no true Scotsman' argument about whether those police systems are 'modern,' or is it in fact the case that an unfree society can't support a modern police system?
I know so little myself. In Romania the local police worked hand-in-glove with the military and both did also with the Securitate. The townspeople mostly knew them as corrupt, shaking down drivers and people in "wrong" places for their beer money.
I think it would be true now that the unfree societies would have huge conflicts with modern policing. But that is because of tyranny, not slavery. There were many slave societies in the past, I can't imagine they were all identically bad. Far enough back and people were either killed, marked, or expelled because societies couldn't afford to have 24/7 jails.
OTOH, the rise of the British modern police force does coincide with the abolition of slavery.
I suppose we'd have to ask the historian what his terms are. I do think that China, say, has a modern police system according to the ordinary meanings of the words: quite modern and sophisticated. (And not, thereby, better.)
Yes, the ability of a police force to turn invisible may be comforting, but a frightening "improvement." Vollmer wanted the policing military in the Philippines to not look like an occupying force, and one can see how that would be welcome. One can also see how that could become insidious. He meant it kindly, but others who come after might not.
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