Police In Urban America Summary

During the turn of the nineteenth-century until the early beginning of the twentieth-century, there was period of anti-immigration stance in which the citizens of the United States of America perpetuated it and affected the governmental factors that plagued a lot of the urban cities. These urban cities were flushed into a period of isolationism, but also an influx of “different” immigrants in which they blamed all their problems on the new immigrants. The practice on the city level was broad in the essence of pushing these newly integrated immigrants into different sectors of the neighborhood (which led to things like; little Italy or Chinatowns), and would discriminate against them in terms of restricting their job opportunities. In the state …show more content…
Monkkonen. Monkkonen talks about how the police department was created and who it was based on. The American unified and uniformed police force was based on the French and English police force. Monkkonen describes the police department in American as an extension of the London division. His argument, abate a complex one, is organized as sections (chapters) as sections of the argument. In the book, it talks about the police in the context of urban history, issues in studying crime and the police in the past, The historical development of the police, Arrest trends in the 1860s-1920s and Tramps and children: the decline of police welfare. He goes into deep detail in explaining how these topics or situations show in the urban cities and how the police forced changed these crime rates. Using these topics, he examines the prompt emergence and spread of uniformed urban place throughout the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century up until the late 1920s. Monkkonen primarily talks about the transformations of the police behavior, function and attitudes at the turn of the century. He maintains that the police initially served as agents of both criminal and class control but in the beginning of the twentieth century, the police helped impose a discipline upon the chaotic social structure of the urban …show more content…
The lack of a unified police force caused many problems all over the world and the need for a unified police force is why during the late 1800s and the early 1900s one such police force was created. The lack of a unified police force also causes many problems in trying to change what crime actually is. Crime in itself is hard to describe and even according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of crime is “an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government or activity that is against the law : illegal acts in general or an act that is foolish or wrong” The definition of how to control the crime and who predominantly commits the crime are all depending on who is in charge, who the majority is. Crime at one point was only trying to “solve crime,” whereas during the unification of the police department it turned into trying to “prevent crime.” With this social definition changed, so did society as a whole dealt with people who committed crimes and how to deal with them. So with the idea of trying to prevent crime and the police department theoretically was created to control the “dangerous class” who the majority of citizens thought were coming such crimes. According to Monkkonen, he also said that the “goal of class control followed as an unintended consequence of the new idea of