ED GLAESER: Urban proximity enables social interactions, some good and some bad.
When those interactions are voluntary, like sharing a meal or getting a manicure,
then the odds are that everyone expects to benefit.
Otherwise they'd stay home.
But some involuntary interactions, like a mugging or a murder,
can do great harm to the whole web of urban life.
Cities enable crime by making it easier for thieves or
bullies to have physical access to their victims.
Cities can make it harder to catch criminals by increasing the number of
suspects.
In a classic British murder mystery set in, perhaps a country estate,
the clever detective need only sort out the motives and
whereabouts of a handful of potential perpetrators.
If Hercule Poirot had tried to solve a mystery in a teeming London slum,
then the number of suspects would be vast
and finding the culprit might exceed the limits of even his numerous little
gray cells.
For millennia, cities had paid for
law enforcement professionals to keep city streets safe.
Indeed, the connection between police and cities is so deep,
that the very word police has its roots in the Greek word "polis," which means city.
Law itself is not a particularly urban thing.
The English Common Law evolved for
centuries focusing on the problems of protecting property rights for rural land.
But paying for
professional police only makes sense when they are protecting enough people.
Police are essentially a fixed cost that needs to be shared, and
sharing that cost requires sufficient scale.
Preventive patrolling only makes sense when enough people are being
protected to justify the cost of the patrolman's time.
Ancient Athens had something of a police force.
300 Syrian slaves, specialized archers, kept order.
This was a pretty small number relative to Athens population.
Which may have exceeded 300,000 by 430 BC, but
the Ascidians were used more to prevent riots than to prosecute criminals.
For normal crimes, Athenians had to press their own cases in front of 200 or
more jurors.
Augustus brought order to Roman chaos with two distinct forms of police,
three years after fire, damaged his own home.
The Princeps created a force of about 7,000 freed slaves in 6 AD to watch over
the Roman night.
They carried buckets to fight fires, but they also started fighting crime as well.
Augustus also relied on the cohortes urbanae and his Praetorian guard,
who provided a more military force to stop riots and serious public disorders.
When Rome fell, Europe returned to Agrarian ways and
organized public policing largely disappeared.
There were fraternal organizations like the Holy Brotherhoods in Spain, or
the Vehmic Courts in Germany, that came together to serve as vigilantes.
Towns might also have night watchmen armed primarily with a rattle to raise the hew
and cry in the event of disturbance.
The watchman might serve under a constable, but he was a local official,
not a patrolling police man.
Wealthy, private individuals, such as merchants or powerful clerics,
might also hire their own armed guards.
France is typically credited with being the birthplace of modern policing.
King Francis I instituted a roving military police,
meant chiefly to check the plundering of his own soldiers.
King Louis XIV centralized the French police force in 1666.
And his police would be particularly focused on Paris.
By the 18th century, Paris would have over 1,000 policemen.
And, one police chief boasted to Louis the XV that whenever three people speak to one
another on the street, one of these will be mine,
suggesting the repressive political role that police would also
play during the Bourbon monarchy.
The English feared that oppressive power and so
it wasn't until 1829 that Parliament passed
the Metropolitan Police Act to provide a modern police force for London.
English police have been known as both Bobbies and
Peelers after Sir Robert Peel who introduced the act.
Fears of police abuse have long kept English police lightly armed carrying
only clubs,
rather than the revolvers and automatic weapons that became the norm,
both on the continent and in a more dangerous United States.
America followed the English lead, in 1838 Boston instituted its police force,
which was organized into the Boston Police Department in 1854.
New York City organized its own police department in 1845.
Just as in many developing world cities today,
America's 19th century police forces were consistently accused of corruption.
Laws would be flouted and
payments would be made to police officers to turn a blind eye.
Some of the payments to individual policemen would work their way up
the system and end up enriching the coffers of political machines,
such as Tammany Hall.
Reformers would consistently try to fix the system and
some reforms did actually occur,
especially when state legislatures were politically opposed to local leaders.
In 1857, New York's overwhelmingly Republican state legislature decided
to disband New York City's corrupt municipal police force,
that served its Democratic mayor, Fernando Wood.
And to replace it with a metropolitan police force that would be led by a former
Whig Congressman.
Wood initially refused to disband his municipal police,
even after the State Supreme Court ruled against him.
The metropolitan police then attempted to take over City Hall, but
the municipals fought back in what became know as the Great Police Riot.
The metropolitan's were defeated and
they retreated to the Office of the City Recorder to tend their wounds.
Eventually, the seventh regiment stepped in and would surrender temporarily, but
the rivalry between the two forces continued.
And New York suffered a crime spree,
culminating in the deadly gang war known as the Dead Rabbits Riot.
After another adverse court ruling,
Wood eventually disbanded his municipal police force.
But the corruption in New York City's police department continued
during the 19th century heyday of Tammany Hall.
In 1894 republican state legislators again turn their gaze upon the democratically
controlled police force.
At an inquiry, the Lexow Committee exposed the enormous irregularities.
Alexander Williams, known as Clubber because of his strong arm tactics,
was a particular target of the investigation.
When Williams was appointed to the city's West 13th Street Station in 1876,
he relished the opportunities for
extracting bribes from the abundant saloons and brothels nearby.
He famously said, "I've been having chuck steak ever since I've been on the force,
and now I'm gonna have a bit of tenderloin."
Henceforth, the neighborhood would be known as the Tenderloin District.
When the Lexow Commission wondered how Williams could
afford his Cos Cob estate and his yacht, Clubber explained that he had earned his
great wealth by speculating in Tokyo real estate.
The Lexow Committee's revelations lead to the election of a reforming mayor,
William Strong,
who appointed the young Teddy Roosevelt to be a police commissioner.
Roosevelt started appointing officers based on merit, not political patronage, and
he prowled the streets at night to see if his policemen were awake and
doing their jobs.
His assiduous enforcement of the city's anti-alcohol blue laws actually helped
Strong lose his re-election bid.
There were just some laws that New Yorkers didn't want to have enforced.
The Regressive Era enacted numerous police reforms,
officers were increasingly appointed based on exams.
Professionalization and police rotation tried to break the ties between policemen
and local businesses that enabled corruption.
By the 1960s citizens became increasingly intolerant of police brutality.
And America's cops were criticized for doing too much, and too little.
As crime rates surged during the 1970's many observers thought that social
policies, not police, were the solution.
But crime couldn't be stopped with public largess alone, and so
under Rudy Giuliani New York again embraced a strong police force.
The cops began to target high crime areas and
followed a strategy known as "broken windows policing."
They targeted small quality of life crimes.
The city did become much safer and
New York now has a police force that is both effective and generally quite honest.
The pleasures of the city can now be enjoyed without fear both day and night.
The downside of that success is that too many have been locked up.
Thousands were imprisoned for minor offenses, and
ordinary New Yorkers chafed under strong arm tactics like stop and frisk.
The task of making city streets safe is only half finished.
Crime's a fraction of what it was, but we have not yet
figured out how to fight crime without imprisoning thousands of young men.