Nation Topics - Police and Law Enforcement | The Nation

A budget crisis and a prison boom make the states a vanguard for drug reform.

Every day, DNA testing overturns another man's rape or murder
conviction.

Speaking at a conference this winter on Internet crime, eBay.com's director of law enforcement and compliance, Joseph Sullivan, offered law-enforcement officials extensive access to personal cust

On March 22, a few hundred peaceful antiwar protesters in Seattle who
had gathered around the Federal Building suddenly found themselves being
swept down streets by officers in riot gear and th

Emboldened by the "success" of its preventive war in Iraq, the Bush
Administration appears to be expanding its preventive law-enforcement
strategy at home.

The worse the state treats kids, the more the state's prosecutors chase
after inoffensive "perverts" in the private sector who have committed
the so-called crime of getting sexual kicks out of

When I was in college, I joined a court-watching project in Roxbury,
Massachusetts. We observed criminal trials, then interviewed judges,
lawyers and witnesses.

There's a joke circulating on the Internet: A grandmother overhears her
5-year-old granddaughter playing "wedding." The wedding vows go like
this: "You have the right to remain silent.

September 11 is being used as a reason to build up police intelligence
units.

The immediate causes of the civil unrest in Cincinnati this past spring
are clear enough: White cops had been abusing and killing black
civilians. But why such police racism; was it too few officers of color,
a weak civilian review process, racist media?

Or was it genetic? Is racist terror embedded in the political DNA of
American policing? After all, the basic patterns of harassment that
triggered the mayhem in Cincinnati are some of the oldest and most
consistent in US history. Typically the story of policing starts with
the village-watch systems of the colonial Northeast, then moves to the
formation of the first municipal constabularies in New York, Boston and
Philadelphia.

But the real origins of today's "Five-O," "Rollers" or "Po-Po" lie with
the slave patrols of the Old South. By the time of the Civil War, every
county of the South deployed patrollers--or "pattie rollers" as
African-Americans sometimes called them. These protocops, ubiquitous
posses of armed white men, were the frontline defense against slave
rebellions. They worked only at night, riding from plantation to
plantation, stopping black people, searching their homes for contraband
and whipping any slave caught traveling without a written pass.

As the immediate agents of a white supremacist state, slave patrols
imbricated violence and racism into everyday life. They were crucial to
the reproduction of slave society and slave labor power, and served as
ideological invigilators in the construction of a paranoid and
hate-fueled caste system that persists to this day. The patrols were
central to southern society, but only now do we get the first
book-length examination of this antebellum gendarmerie. Prior to Sally
Hadden's Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the
Carolinas there were only a few short monographs from the turn of
the century (which Hadden addresses) and a few chapters in a lost and
barely read book, Police and the Black Community, by Robert
Wintersmith (which, surprisingly, Hadden does not address).

Along with the obviously racist dynamics of modern policing, patrollers
left us some specific concepts, like the police "beat." Pattie rollers
had "beats"--defined areas of operation--and worked in small mounted
groups called "beat companies." While the patrollers' main task was
controlling African-Americans, this also required the control of whites.
In many Southern counties all white men were forced to serve in the
patrols, and in some counties all white men were required by law to stop
and check the passes of any black people they met on the road at any
time. This was nothing short of state enforced racism.

A fairly straightforward history, Slave Patrols begins with a
look at the policing of slaves on Barbados, where the very first patrols
were established in response to an aborted slave revolt in 1649. After
that many Caribbean planters decamped to the Carolinas, bringing with
them slaves and the political technology of slavery: curfews, passes,
patrols and militias. Fundamentally, the patrols were a premodern system
of surveillance and policing designed to restrict slave mobility--a
crucial source of African-American social power.

Along with maintaining familial and romantic ties, black mobility
produced a vast network of interpersonal connections--the circuitry of
resistance--through which flowed news, plans, supplies, weapons and
people. Mobility was also crucial to the sub rosa economy, of nighttime
reexpropriations from the master's stores, fencing pilfered goods,
trading produce for liquor with poor whites and practicing traditional
medicine. And restricting mobility limited slave contact with Native
Americans and the fugitive slaves who (at least in the colonial era)
lived as social bandits on the edge of the plantation world. Containing
and limiting this informal resistance and its enabling underground
milieu helped prevent formal organized resistance like escapes and armed
rebellion.

By 1680 Virginia had also instituted patrols and required both slaves
and white indentured servants to carry passes when traveling, and over
the next century the whole South became increasingly militarized.
Hadden's account of this buildup shows a cyclical escalation in which
slave revolts or plots led to white panic, ramped-up vigilance and a
reinvigoration of patrols. Heightened security was usually followed by
increased calm, declining vigilance and then more resistance.

The trend toward ever more organized control in the South accelerated
after the Revolutionary War (during which more than 3,000 escaped slaves
fought for the loyalist Lord Dunmore, who offered freedom in exchange
for armed service). In 1777 Vermont had abolished slavery; Pennsylvania
followed three years later. From then on the "peculiar institution" came
under increased attack, as European powers outlawed the slave trade and
more "free soil" and abolitionism emerged in the North. By the early
antebellum period, the patrol system had fully evolved throughout Dixie.

A typical night on patrol involved three to six armed white men on
horseback riding the country roads in search of black people, stopping
at farms and plantations where they were authorized, regardless of the
property holder's wishes, to search slave quarters for visitors,
escapees or contraband like weapons, liquor, books and excessive
provisions that might indicate plans to flee. Violation of local
regulations led to on-the- spot whippings.

In some jurisdictions patrollers were paid from local taxes; in others
they were paid with bounties for catching "truant" or runaway
bondspeople. More often, the patrols were a form of corv?e labor, forced
upon the whole white male population by the society's more affluent
members.

Before Hadden's book, numerous histories of slavery and black resistance
made passing mention of patrols, usually casting them as gangs of poor
whites, motivated as much by their own pathology as by legal structures.
This fits comfortably with America's official mock-up of the proverbial
racist: a blinkered, lowbrow hick. But Hadden takes that myth apart. For
example, in Norfolk County, Virginia, where in 1750 half the white
population owned no slaves, the bulk of patrollers were men of the solid
middle. Plantation plutocrats with twenty or more slaves frequently
bought their way out of service while poor whites tended to do as little
patrolling as possible. So, the bulk of patrollers were small-town
burghers like doctors, lawyers, printers and merchants, or they were
prosperous working farmers owning between one and five slaves. It is no
coincidence that this same class later formed the base of the Ku Klux
Klan during its first incarnation just after the Civil War, and even
more so during its infamous second rise just after World War I and into
the 1920s.

Hadden's history is very well researched and her writing is smooth, but
the book's most interesting political ideas remain only half-exhumed.
One wants more discussion of the patrols' cultural impact: They policed
"blackness" and the color line, but they helped construct the meaning of
"whiteness" as violently anti-black. In fact, some patrols were
instructed to attack whites who strayed across the color line: One North
Carolina law instructed patrollers to whip any "loose, disorderly or
suspected person" found in the company of slaves regardless of the
person's color. Unfortunately, Hadden does not thoroughly explore this
nexus of violence, the law, race and identity. What the book does offer
is a very detailed accounting of who patrolled, how, when, where and
under what sort of legal guidance. Embedded within Slave Patrols
is the theme of surveillance. The patrols were technologies of
observation and intimidation, while the attendant system of slave passes
and wanted posters were embryonic forms of identification.

Picking up this history of surveillance and social control, from a
different angle, is Simon Cole's Suspect Identities: A History of
Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cole's book is a
microlevel history of what Foucault called "capillary" forms of power.
In particular, Cole focuses on the state's evolving methods of
identifying deviants. He begins with the history of criminal
identification and judiciary record keeping in the Napoleonic courts and
jails around 1808, where convicts were simply listed alphabetically, a
system that provided no means to combat false identities. The 1839
invention of photography began to change all that. Starting in the
mid-1850s, once daguerreotypes were widely available, police in Europe
and America began creating "rogues' galleries" and photo albums
featuring known "criminals" and "degenerates." The NYPD, ever
innovative, led the way. By 1858 they had 450 "Ambrotype" photos on
file. Meanwhile, fingerprint identification was just beginning as an
administrative tool in colonial India.

William Herschel, chief administrator of the Hooghly district of Bengal,
first started experimenting with handprints on documents to verify the
identity of contractors and pensioners (he probably gleaned this
technique from similar ancient Hindu practices). His desire for greater
control over the local population was fueled in part by the massive
Sepoy Rebellion of 1857-8 and the resistance, chaos and widespread fraud
that followed in its wake. Herschel's prints helped create "real"
identities and thus shored up the power of colonial ledgers and files.
As in Hadden's story, we see the double helix of resistance and
repression developing together.

Along with Herschel, several other gentlemen were also "discovering"
fingerprints: Francis Galton, the father of eugenics and a cousin of
Darwin's, started studying fingerprints as part of his work on heredity
and race (he never did link print patterns to either), while Henry
Faulds, a physician working in Japan, first suggested using fingerprints
to identify criminals in an 1880 letter to the journal Nature.
Eventually, experts were able to divide all prints according to "loops,"
"whorls" and "arches." This allowed for simple storage and retrieval.
But "dactyloscopy"--as print reading was known--wouldn't become a
standard law enforcement tool for almost a generation more.

The height of criminological sciences in the late nineteenth century was
"Bertillonage," a complicated, and in retrospect rather silly, system of
body measurements developed in France by Alphonse Bertillon, son of one
of anthropology's founders. By the 1880s Bertillonage had proliferated
throughout the industrialized world, though the system's extremely
precise procedures and set of eleven bodily measurements were frequently
modified (or mangled) by local police departments and thus rendered
useless when exchanged between agencies. To simplify things,
fingerprints--infinitely unique and unalterable--got folded into the
Bertillon system as a convenience.

Police in India were the first to start fingerprinting, in 1897. By 1901
Scotland Yard had incorporated a form of fingerprinting into its
Bertillon system, and in 1906 the New York Police Department did the
same. From there, the technique soon eclipsed Bertillonage. By the early
1920s photos and prints made up the fundamentals of criminal
identification, and Bertillon had been almost completely discarded. Much
of Cole's book concerns itself with the ensuing techno-bureaucratic
intrigues and battles among a myriad of different print classification
systems and their proponents. These dry and politically pointless
sections would have been better left behind.

Interestingly, fingerprinting was always tied up with racism, but never
quite as racists hoped. For decades, eugenicists searched for racial
patterns within prints; what they found was a total lack of any such
distinctions. But following the lead of Herschel in India, white
administrators and police who "saw" Asians, Africans and Native
Americans as bafflingly homogeneous in appearance fell back on the
infinite uniqueness of fingerprints to control the poor, the deviant and
the subjugated. And throughout the development of modern identification,
people of color have often been the first targeted.

But what does all this mean? Cole, like Hadden, offers massive amounts
of research; but like Hadden, he is less than robust in his political
analysis. Suspect Identities is just a bit too straight. For
example, Cole briefly mentions ruling-class fears of international
anarchism during the 1890s as spurring on increased international
cooperation among big-city police departments and creation of effective
technologies of identification, but doesn't dig deep enough. The fact
is, fighting anarchists, reds and labor organizers played a very
important part in developing modern forms of identification and police
power. Likewise, the control and surveillance of immigrants and people
of color have always been tied up with the exploitation of their labor.
This larger political-economic context plays too small a role in Cole's
overly technical narrative. The result is something of a neutered
history that leaves readers feeling as if they are on a hunting trip,
only to discover that the gun is loaded with blanks.

To his credit, Cole is very clear and compelling about the implicit
racism associated with "biometrics." His last chapter brings the story
of fingerprinting full circle with an examination of DNA
identification's rapid spread. Like prints almost a century ago, DNA is
seen as unlocking biological truth, and in so doing it is reinvigorating
both the popularity of biological explanations for behavior and an
updated form of eugenics. Political complaints aside, both of these
books are empirically robust ventures into important, largely uncharted,
historical terrain.