Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855–1946

Abstract

As a professional and bureaucratically organized institution of social control, the police in the United States originated less than 150 years ago. Traditionally, this development has been explained as an inevitable response to a dramatic rise in felonious crime. According to this type of account, a criminal reaction was a natural by-product of such factors as urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Other investigators have disputed this interpretation, arguing that there is little evidence to support the occurrence of a crime wave. Rather, the municipal police in America originated as part of a larger class control apparatus designed to regulate working class social and political activities, including ‘subversive’ speeches, strikes, riots, and daily breaches of the ‘public order’. Those who argue that the ‘new police’ developed as a crime fighter typically neglect to discuss one of the oldest forms of professional policing in die nation, the private detective agency.