Enlarging the Jurisdiction of Police History

Slavery led to the creation of uniformed police in southern cities decades before New York and Boston established the forces which remain the accepted starting point for the history of the police in the United States. Dennis C. Rousey’s Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 should change how this story is told. Rousey argues that slavery forced New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and other cities in the South to start policing as early as the 1780s, a half century earlier and much further south than most historians assume policing began in the United States. Unlike the unarmed, untrained, and disparately attired watchmen on rounds in northern cities in the 1820s and the 1830s, armed City Guards in military uniforms marched in formation through city streets in the South. Slavery, according to Rousey, led cities in the South “to adopt a martial style of policing when their populations were no larger than about 10,000 people” (p. 14). By contrast, Boston had eighty thousand people when it established police in 1838, and New York had four hundred thousand people when the police were organized in the 1840s. Northern police were decidedly civilian. They patrolled alone (or occasionally in pairs) through widely dispersed beats and resisted wearing uniforms for over a decade. Southern cities had military-style police and often more than twice as many policemen per capita than northern cities. Rousey attributes this “extraordinary commitment of manpower” to slavery (p. 24). ¹

An insistence on the origins of the urban police in slavery is one of several important arguments in Policing the Southern City, an institutional history detailing the composition, work, and legal mandate of the nineteenth-century New Orleans police forces in six chronological chapters. Rousey offers the most thorough account of police use of force and police violence in a nineteenth-century U.S. city since Sidney L. Harring’s Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (1983). Eschewing the Marxian analysis of the state which bedeviled Harring’s American reviewers, Rousey defends his attention to the police use of force by arguing that “what is unique to policing as an occupation in American civil society is the broad authority and concomitant obligation of police to make arrests and—when circumstances require it—to use force that could be deadly” (p. 9).

Rousey demonstrates that throughout the nineteenth century, police in New Orleans regularly carried illegal weapons and used excessive violence, especially against enslaved and free blacks. In the 1850s, New Orleans was “virtually the dueling capital of the South, a major headquarters for career criminals, site of some of the most intense ethnic strife in the country,” perhaps “the darkest stain on the butcher’s apron.” Rousey closely analyzes the 1866 white riot against a Republican convention in which thirty-two people were killed and concludes: “Even the most favorable interpretation of police involvement would at least indict a large number of policeman for murder, attempted murder, and assault and battery.” At worst, the police planned the vicious attack (p. 118). Widespread arrests and violent harassment of blacks grew more severe in the 1880s and 1890s, and during those years for which sources exist (1863–1889), Rousey calculates that half of all police shootings were illegal. Throughout the nineteenth century, New Orleans “policemen killed members of the general public with something close to impunity” (pp. 180–83). Police stood by while unmasked men lynched eleven Italians in 1891, and the century ended with another major white riot in which the police did nothing to defend blacks (pp. 193–95).

Violent—yes; efficient—no. The number of police killings might have been higher had it not been for the force’s lack of professionalism. “Even as late as...