How the "father of modern policing" tried to fix the system.
 | By Indrani Sen Culture Editor, Opinion |
"American police departments reflect our nation's darkest impulses toward organized violence and punishment," Annalee Newitz writes in a guest essay this week. "But they also reflect the aspirations of a society that believes in community service and protecting the innocent." |
Nowhere are those contradictory tendencies more evident than in August Vollmer, the turn-of-last-century California police chief hailed in the law enforcement community as the "father of modern American policing," Newitz says. |
Vollmer was a radical police reformer in his time — an advocate for a professionalized, educated police force that worked collaboratively with social service organizations to prevent crime before it happened. He is also, arguably, the father of the "abolish the police" movement. His first act as the head of the police department of Berkeley, Calif., in 1905 was to force all his deputies to resign and to replace them with college graduates, with the expectation that these highly educated officers, as Newitz notes, "would use their smarts to bring about social reforms that prevented people from becoming 'crooks' in the first place." |
But some of Vollmer's innovations planted the seeds of those darker impulses. For example, Newitz argues that there is "a direct line between his work and racial profiling," and points to Vollmer's role in militarizing American policing. |
Why have so many of Vollmer's more backward ideas lived on to shape American police departments, while his emphasis on educated officers preventing crime in collaboration with other community organizations has remained largely aspirational? It's a mystery worth pondering, to be sure. But it's not too late to find new ways to carry out his better ideas. |
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