October 11, 2010 – 11:08 am
Criminal Justice is a growing field in some of today’s leading industries. People are going back to school to get their Associate degree in criminal justice in an effort to help better serve and protect their communities. With a criminal justice degree, the door to the world of law enforcement is wide open. You can pursue a number of different career paths ranging from security guard to homeland security. However, pursuing a career as a police officer may be one of the most popular choices, but do you actually know the history behind America’s modern law enforcement system?
The history behind the modern American police force
Originally modeled after our ancestor, Great Britain, the U.S. Marshals Service was established in America in 1789 as a pioneer of U.S. law enforcement. The first U.S. cities to establish a police organization were Philadelphia in 1751, Richmond in 1807, Boston in 1838 and New York in 1845. The U.S. Secret Service was founded in 1865 and during that time was the core investigative source of the federal government.
One of the law enforcement systems that we inherited from England was the sheriff system (think of the Sheriff of Nottingham from the Robin Hood legends). As America continued to expand west, a sheriff was appointed in most frontier towns as the chief law enforcer. He was either recruited by the community (similar to today’s county elections) or, more often than not, he was appointed via reputation – the more notorious the figure, the more likely to be elected (Wyatt Earp anyone?). The sheriff system still exists in the criminal justice system today, but on a much more formalized, monitored and political scale.
Before the Civil War, police departments were headed by police chiefs who were appointed by and accountable to political bosses. As a result, corruption ran rampant and, in many towns, officers weren’t respected by the community. Policing continued to evolve and after the Civil War became very paramilitary with the emergence of uniforms and military ranks. Prior to the war, sheriffs’ offices had been non-uniformed organizations without a military-based hierarchy.
In the American Old West, policing depots were typically low quality. As a result, the Army often aided the poorly resourced sheriffs in policing efforts and organized posses – still in use in some of the Southern states today.
In the early and mid 20th century, the introduction of the police car, two-way radio and telephone transformed policing. Law enforcement focused on a reactive strategy rather than a preventive one by responding to citizens’ calls for service. From this point on, police forces began to professionalize by adopting new technologies and placing strong emphasis on training. As a result of this transformation, police command and control became more centralized. To limit corruption, police began employing strategies such as rotating officers from community to community, establishing an unbiased police boards to govern the force, developing strict merit systems for promotions within departments, and presenting higher salaries to attract more professionally qualified officers.
By the 1950s, law enforcement largely shifted to deal with felonies and other serious crimes. Following urban unrest in the 1960s, police began focusing on community relations and enacted reforms such as increased diversity in hiring hoping to help alleviate the tension.
Women started working in law enforcement around the start of the 19th century, but were mostly relegated to clerical or dispatch roles until the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. Popular television shows like ”Charlie’s Angels” and “Cagney and Lacey” bred a new form of female cops and detectives, and civil rights and affirmative action laws helped pave the way for women to assume law enforcement roles traditionally held by men.
In the 1990s, many law enforcement agencies started adopting community policing that called for community members’ help in identifying suspects, detaining vandals and bringing problems to the attention of police. New technology like CompStat was also developed in the ’90s as an information-based system for tracking and mapping crime patterns and trends.
Today, our 21st century law enforcement agencies are highly specialized organizations that promote ongoing training in order to meet the ever-changing atmosphere of crime. We have federal, state, county and municipal police that all work within their given jurisdictions. There’s no denying that the police officers we have today are just mere figments of the past. Our nation’s law enforcement has come a long way to meet the evolving demands of criminal justice, and they will continue to adapt well into the future.
*Police departments do not necessarily require a criminal justice degree for qualification as an officer, nor does a criminal justice degree qualify as the required police training. Police officers must complete the training requirements of their designated police academy to officially be deemed an officer of the law. However, an Associate degree in criminal justice can help open doors into law enforcement.
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