The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 by Sam Mitrani (review)

This book is about the development of the Chicago police department and how and why the city’s business elite was able to mould the police into an institution that would protect its interests. Mitrani locates the development of police forces in the United States in the mid-to-late 19th century. His main question is: why did police forces spring into existence when they did? He argues that the Chicago police department emerged from the alliance between the city’s political leaders and its capitalist class as both tried to create and maintain their vision of order and to protect capital’s interests in a rapidly growing, multi-ethnic city. Mitrani also seeks to understand the development of the Chicago police, and by implication, all big-city police departments, as a crucial step in the development of the American state. He demonstrates that by the end of the 19th century, the Chicago police “had developed professional leadership that removed crucial aspects of police policy from politics and portrayed their activities as a politically neutral municipal service.” (3) The Chicago police would act to protect capital’s interests, but the “deeper question of whether or not municipalities should maintain massive organizations of armed men to enforce order on the population was effectively removed from the political debate.” (4) Mitrani succeeds admirably in accomplishing his goals in a book that is clearly written and persuasively argued.

Mitrani sees the work that Chicago’s elites did to organize themselves to meet the challenge that a multi-ethnic and increasingly united working class posed as crucial for understanding the development of the city’s police department. Chicago grew rapidly from a small outpost in the 1830s to the second largest city in the United States by the 1890s. This swift development meant that the city did not have the entrenched elite that characterized Boston, New York, and Philadelphia when the Second Industrial Revolution got underway in earnest in the years after the American Civil War. While Mitrani charts the development of the Chicago police, he also shows how the city’s capitalists organized themselves as a class and exerted more and more influence over the city’s governance. In Chapters 4 and 5, for instance, he explores the new organizations the city’s capitalist class founded during the 1870s – the Committee of Seventy, the Citizens’ Association, and then the Chicago Commercial Club – to exert influence on who had authority over the police, what and who the Chicago police would police, and how the city’s government operated more broadly.

Mitrani also focuses on how Chicago’s working class perceived the police. He shows how the police helped break the 1877 railroad strike in Chicago, but also contends that by the late 1870s, the police “had yet to prove that they could attain the legitimacy and respect from the city’s workers that they needed to enforce everyday order. ” (133) Mitrani argues that Mayor Carter Harrison instituted reforms in the 1880s that were aimed at helping the policy achieve legitimacy. Mitrani characterizes Harrison as a machine politician who implemented civil service reforms aimed at professionalizing the police department as well as establishing a political alliance with the city’s working class. He directed the department to become more ethnically diverse in hiring and moved the police away from keeping order through the use of force and toward doing more social service work in the city’s neighbourhoods. Such work, however, created a different kind of coercion as the police became increasingly involved in enforcing anti-abortion laws and more generally enforcing middle-class and native-born ideas about sex, sexuality, and the consumption of alcohol. On the other hand, Harrison stopped using the police to break strikes. With this new policy in place during the first half of the 1880s, the city’s workers won several strikes, but Harrison then revoked this policy in 1885 as the city’s elite...