Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890-1940 (review)

David B. Wolcott has enlarged the substantial but mostly separate literatures on juvenile courts and policing by considering their intersection in three cities from the decade before the founding of the first juvenile courts until 1940. Reformers promoting these specialized courts wanted to minimize the police role in handling delinquents; cops, they believed, relied on fear, made arbitrary arrests, and—like existing courts—were uninterested in rehabilitating delinquents. In fact, Wolcott argues, police did better than reformers claimed. Pragmatically aiming to minimize crime and maintain order, cops exercised considerable discretion over criminal, disorderly and truant kids. Instead of uniformly marching them to court, police imposed a range of informal sanctions, including warning, intimidation, return of stolen property, detention, even referrals. In detailed analyses of Detroit arrests and arrestees, Wolcott shows that police arrested kids at much lower rates than adults, and in patterns sensitive to age and gender. Nor were delinquents simply thrown into jails together with older, presumably hardened, criminals; instead, most were segregated and sent to court quickly. Thus, Wolcott argues, police were ultimately protective of delinquents. Unfortunately, while much of the evidence for this relatively favorable portrait comes from the police themselves, delinquents' voices are largely absent. We learn relatively little about the extent or character of informal sanctions, and nothing of conflicting points of view about the meanings of "delinquent" behavior.¹ Nonetheless Wolcott pokes a large hole in the reformist criticism of the cops, and brings us much closer to a balanced portrait of police behavior. One implication is that the project of the juvenile court was based on a misconception of the existing state of policing.

Wolcott's study of Detroit shows that Progressive reformism left its mark on police handling of delinquents, beginning even before the Detroit juvenile court was set up in1907. As police specialized, a truant squad took over some duties of beat cops, and policewomen were employed to keep an eye on girls. The juvenile court law required police to bring all arrested kids before the Juvenile Court. The sensible exercise of police discretion was limited, and teenage arrest rates rose between 1898 and 1927. No longer trying to keep kids out of courts and police stations, cops become an intake to a growing social welfare establishment.

Wolcott turns to two much different cities to see how their political cultures, and police and court budgets and workloads led to much different results. A chapter on Chicago extends the literature on that city's famous juvenile court to include the police, who exercised broad discretion in sending cases to court or adjusting unofficially. Established in 1899, that court never had adequate resources, and to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases, it employed police as probation officers who made most decisions about intake. Thus, Wolcott argues, "Much of the real action took place not in courtrooms or reform schools but on the streets and in the station houses" (103). But the Chicago police department was decentralized, politicized, and riddled with corruption, especially in the 1920s, the period of Wolcott's focus. Police were reluctant to curb vice; policewomen, who might have kept children from entering saloons and brothels, were inefficiently assigned. On the street, the police net was quite broad, covering minor offenses, petty disorder, and status offenses. Most of these cases never went to court, but many kids were detained—itself a form of punishment—and police used other methods as well, from warnings to beatings. While the Detroit's police "offer[ed] their hands in friendship" [122], Chicago's were precisely the hostile, legalistic cops whom reformers feared. But much of the Chicago evidence comes from reformers and offenders, whose accounts—the most extensive descriptions of street-level interaction in the book—stress police violence and incivility. Without comparable evidence for Detroit, one cannot help wonder how much this discrepancy exaggerates the real differences. Still, there is...