Question

Introduction to Robert M. Fogelson. Big-city police

Answer 1

Introduction to Robert M. Fogelson. Big-city police :-

This study provides a prudent and comprehensive history of twentieth-century urban policing. Based on a thoughtful reading of primary and secondary sources, Robert Fogel-son, an MIT historian best known for his history of Los Angeles, has written the volume most likely to become the standard work on its subject. In clear and direct prose the author traces the development of big-city police forces from their position as adjuncts of party machines at the turn of the century through two distinctive periods of police reform to the uncertainties of the present. The author's interpretations conform with the data, and the conclusions are sound. Overall, Fogelson argues, reformers have had mixed success in achieving their institutional goals, but have been more able to win ideological triumphs of major proportion. This record has made it difficult for blacks and other minorities to secure the place white, ethnic immigrants had on urban police forces. This has also seriously exacerbated police-community relations. The price of reform has been high. In making this broad argument, the author illuminates not only the history of big-city police, but also the general trajectory of municipal reform. The police forces that were the targets of municipal reformers in the early twentieth century were quite dif-ferent from their Western European counterparts. U.S. police forces were committed to local, rather than national, control; a civilian, rather than a military, orientation; and a style of policing that was responsive to the various mores of different classes and ethnic groups. Further, American police were set apart by their relationships with the political machine, especially with its decentralized ward organizations. Thus, a mutually beneficial exchange relationship developed between ward bosses and neighborhood police Reformers in the first three decades of this century were offended by this relationship and sought to alter it fundamentally. Largely drawn from the upper and middle classes, reformers of the Progressive movement attacked conventional police practices as an aspect of a larger campaign directed against local political organizations. This assault, Fogelson observes, was based on three closely related assumptions about society: "First, they believed that social mobility was an economic, private, and individual process, as opposed to a political, public, and collective one, and that success was a result of industry, frugality, integrity, and occasional good luck. Second, they held that political legitimacy was a function of the public interest, the common objectives of the entire community, and not of the parochial interests of particular neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and social classes. And third, they thought that American morality was based on a commitment to abstinence and respectability, and abhorrence of self-indulgence and deviance, and a willingness to employ the criminal sanction to distinguish the one from the other. The reformers rejected local control, political decentralization, cultural pluralism, and an emphasis on collective social mobility.