Historical Antecedents of Police Agency Creation: Dangerous Classes or Contagious Diffusion

• In Event: The Development of Police Organizations and Administrative Practices

Abstract

Police scholars have long studied the creation and formalization of police organizations in U.S. cities during the mid-1800s. One theory of police organization creation, diffusion of innovation, posits that new ideas spread through a population via a process of contagious diffusion. In essence, police departments formalize because they observe other, larger police departments formalize first. A rival perspective, social threat hypothesis, contends that police organizations were created and formalized in response to city-level differences in dangerous classes, such as immigrants and the poor. We compare support for these two rival theories with historical U.S. Census data and data about the inception and formalization of police agencies for 57 cities across America.

Authors

• Nichoals Andrew Salimbene, Sam Houston State University

• William R. King, Sam Houston State University