Today police are a highly visible component of “the state.” Questions of the unchecked powers afforded to modern law enforcement, along with violence and discriminatory practices, sit at the center of debates over the issues with the modern police.[1] The scope and role for police has expanded over the past two centuries and played an ever increasing role in a myriad of state-building activities. In the earliest decades of the new nation, policing was not quite as visible. Police is a term that encompasses a range of actions and meanings.[2] Early policing in Boston represented a “patchwork” of governing actions.[3] Various duties of policing—from overseers of the poor to scavengers to watchmen—were a part of the state. Into the early nineteenth century, police was used only to describe the larger tasks of administration and improvement, closely aligned with its origins, the maintenance of the polis. The “police of the town” were not men but rather a collection of offices and officials tasked with the preservation of public safety, health, economy, morality, and property—the cornerstones of “a well-regulated society.”[4] My contribution to the JER forum on the local and early state-building illuminates the role of hyper-local aspects of the state such as the night watch. In the context of police brutality, mass incarceration, and ICE, most would argue that we have “too much” policing. While hard to imagine, in Boston in the 1790s the argument was made that they did not have enough. But what exactly was it that Boston’s citizens were asking for?

Organized in 1631, Boston’s watch patrolled only at night, monitoring the town to ensure the protection of property and persons. In the post-revolutionary period, Boston’s citizens voiced the desire for a more active and efficacious government to protect private property and combat issues of crime, nuisance, and vagrancy. Changes made to the “police of the town” resulted in the establishment of daytime police, new officers, and new methods such as the “patrolling watch.” Policing developed from the customary practice of keeping order to a professionalized institution over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not until 1838 that Boston established a municipal police force to offer services during the daytime and nighttime.[5] Undergoing a period of intense urbanization, Boston’s officials responded to increased immigration, crime, and unrest by increasing the number of men employed to patrol and monitor the city. For sixteen years, Boston’s municipal police and Boston’s watch remained separate entities that performed several overlapping duties: attending to fire, patrolling commercial areas, and monitoring for social ills and crime.

By the 1850s, a debate raged as to the efficiency of the dual system; once again, citizens voiced a desire for a more “energetick government” and police.[6] Debates emerged on the implications of creating a unified policing force. On a recent archival research trip, I was struck by a quote I read in an 1851 pamphlet on the matter. The author wrote, “The Police Department of a great city like Boston is a machine of vast power and energy. It may be so conducted as to do great good; and it may also be managed as to cover and perpetuate great abuses and evils.”[7] The pamphlet brought my thoughts to the broadside posted in Boston in 1851 at the height of tensions over the Fugitive Slave Act. Distributed by abolitionists in response to the provision of the Act that allowed local officials to act as “kidnappers,” the poster called for people of color to beware of the “Police and Watchmen of Boston.”[8] I wondered, could Boston’s town government or the men who called for the watch’s expansion and “more police” have imagined a “machine of vast power” or a need to fear “abuses” of it? Would the men who served in Boston’s colonial watch or in the early decades of the new nation have recognized themselves as agents of the enslavers or an entity that struck fear?

Boston’s watch was not a professional police force, nor would the men who served in the watch have seen the modern police officer as a kindred official. They did not practice preventive policing; in other words, they did not patrol in an effort to prevent crimes before they happened, nor did they seek out individuals and populations suspected of criminal behavior. However, acts of policing were still central to how people encountered and interfaced with governance not only in Boston, but throughout the American colonies and later the United States. Variables in populations and the character of urban and rural environments shaped the forms of policing that emerged. This was especially true for vulnerable populations targeted by governing bodies as persons of interest to control such as women, free and enslaved people of color, and the poor. The role of local policing entities as agents of state has changed so dramatically over time, from a patchwork of actions performed by non-professional watches to a highly visible form of regulation by armed, uniformed law enforcement. As I suggest in the forum, Boston’s watch, officers of the “police of the town” were the most common ways in which ordinary people interacted with the state, and arguably, this remains true to the present. And, of course, one that must be held accountable for its potential for “abuses and evils.”

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Endnotes

[1] For more see Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (New York, 2021); Jennifer E. Cobbina-Dungy and Delores Jones-Brown, “Too Much Policing: Why Calls Are Made to Defund the Police,” Punishment & Society 25, no. 1 (2023), 3–20; Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (Chapel Hill, NC, 2022); Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview,” Annual Review of Criminology 4 (2021), 261–86.

[2] I have found historian Alan Williams’s concept of police as “not an entity, but an act, or rather a group of actions” particularly useful when evaluating the meaning of police in the eighteenth century. Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1979), 7. As articulated by J. M. Beattie, the word police had a variety of meanings, and the “very instability of that meaning provides a clue” to the multi-faceted nature of the practice. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (OxfordUK, 2001), 77. F. W. Dodsworth draws on Marxist and Foucauldian interpretations of policing to argue that larger changes in the “mentality of government” led to a “changing the meaning of police from the condition of order to an institution.” Dodsworth, “The Idea of Police in Eighteenth-Century England: Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, c. 1780–1800,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (2008), 583–84.

[3] I borrow this term patchwork from Dodsworth who uses it to describe the officers that comprised English civil government. See “The Idea of Police,” 583–84.

[4] For well-regulated society, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996).

[5] For more on Boston’s nineteenth-century police, see Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1885 (Cambridge, MA, 1967).

[6] “Town Meeting Announcement, January 1792,” Broadsides 1792, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

[7] Remarks upon the Annual Report of the City Marshall, for January 1851: From the Prisoners’ Friend for March 1851 (Boston, 1851), 11, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[8] Caution!! Colored people of Boston, one & all, you are hereby respectfully cautioned and advised, to avoid conversing with the watchmen and police officers of Boston, for since the recent order of the mayor & aldermen, they are empowered to act. Boston, 1851.