Introduction

Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This book examines the development of the Chicago Police Department from the 1850s through the 1880s amid class tensions and political and economic conflict in the city. During the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most violent, turbulent city in the country. From the Lager Beer Riot of 1855, through the Civil War, the 1867 strikes for the eight-hour workday, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the 1877 strike and riot, the May Day strikes and the Haymarket bombing, and the Pullman Strike, Chicago was the scene of the crises accompanying industrialization and the development of a wage labor economy. This book explores how the various political and economic groups in Chicago, particularly the business elite, shaped the Chicago Police Department, as well as how the police shaped the relations between those groups. The book demonstrates the crucial role played by state institutions in the rise of capitalism and how businessmen influenced these state institutions to meet their needs.

Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This book examines the making of the Chicago Police Department at a time when the city was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and its lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions. Tracing the Chicago Police Department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer Riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, the book demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.


Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department figured in the native-born Protestant elite's attempt to control urban life in the city during the 1870s. In the 1870s, it became increasingly clear that the promise of “free labor” would not be met. Native-born Protestant urban elites across the country felt as if the cities were slipping into the grasp of immigrant workers and unemployed vagrants. This chapter describes the efforts of Chicago's traditional native-born, Protestant urban elite to enforce stricter temperance laws, regulate economic life, especially construction, and gain tighter control over the municipal government itself. It begins with a discussion of the responses of Chicago's business elite and politicians, the city government, and the police to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 as well as to the fear of crime that gripped Chicago in the summer of 1872. It then considers the Committee of Seventy's attempts to control the police and their divided stance over temperance and concludes with an assessment of the power struggle in the Chicago Police Department that would continue through 1873.


Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This chapter examines the role of the Chicago Police Department in putting down the massive strikes that erupted in 1877 as well as the response of the city's business elite to the crisis. The strikes marked a turning point for the department and its response provides a vivid illustration of how the Chicago police reconciled democratic politics with the industrial capitalist order through violence. In these strikes, the most dramatic and disorderly they had yet to confront, the police seemed little more than hired thugs of the city's businessmen. In part, the police played this role because Chicago's businessmen organized themselves as never before. This chapter explores how the breakdown of ethnic solidarity and the beginnings of relatively coordinated working-class action pushed Chicago's businessmen to consolidate around a law-and-order program as never before by forming new powerful organizations, including the Citizens' Association of Chicago and the Commercial Club of the City of Chicago, that solidly supported law and order.


Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This chapter examines the conflicts that gave rise to the Chicago Police Department. Over the first half of the 1850s, elite Chicagoans confronted two interrelated problems of order that prompted them to create a police force: the need to protect their property and the property of visiting businessmen, and the need to enforce order more generally among a largely immigrant class of wage workers who were not bound by earlier forms of social control. It was in this context that Levi Boone's Law and Order Party won control of the city government and embarked on an anti-immigrant temperance policy. This chapter considers the creation of the Chicago Police Department on April 30, 1855 and describes the Lager Beer Riot as a founding moment for the department. It also discusses what the new police department did on a daily basis during its first six months, such as arresting a large number of working-class Irish and German immigrants for drinking.


Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This epilogue examines how the Pullman Strike of 1894 exposed the Chicago Police Department's still quite limited ability to deal with a mass strike of such magnitude. The Pullman Strike was the largest and most important strike of the nineteenth century, with Chicago as its epicenter. It revealed as a failure George Pullman's attempt to apply a modified earlier version of order, based on the pre-police idea that a paternalistic system of organization could embed wage workers within an ordered system controlled by their employer. This strike also revealed the limits of police power, since the Chicago Police Department did not have the will or the force to break it. The Pullman Strike was primarily broken by the army, with the police department playing only a supporting role. The Pullman Strike also shows that municipal police departments were just one set of institutions within the broader matrix of state power, including the state militias and the military, that was built to maintain the businessmen's order in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department dealt with the first May Day Strike of 1867 demanding employers to adopt the eight-hour day. In the period after the Civil War, a new working class emerged in the United States. By the 1860s, this working class was coalescing both because an increasing number of people worked for wages and because those wage workers were increasingly coming together in a variety of collective ways to address their common problems. Chicago was a key center of both aspects of working-class formation; workers both formed unions and pushed for legislative reform. The division between skilled and unskilled workers was the central dividing line in the Chicago labor movement throughout this period, and it largely correlated with ethnicity. This chapter first considers labor's reaction to the growth of a wage labor economy that stripped even skilled workers of their independence before providing an overview of the May Day March that saw the Chicago Police Department confront large crowds of angry workers calling for the implementation of the eight-hour law.


2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jade D. Petermon

When he began principal shooting in Chicago in summer 2015, Spike Lee assured audiences that Chi-Raq would engage the issue of violence on Chicago's South Side with intention and purpose. Chicagoans were skeptical because of Lee's use of the portmanteau phrase, which had been the subject of much debate in the city, as the film's title. Written almost entirely in verse, Chi-Raq is an adaptation of classical Greek playwright Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata that marks an extension of Lee's use of satire. Despite Lee's promises, he flails outside of his native Brooklyn. The film primarily adopts a didactic and reductionist view, blaming black Chicagoans for their own “self-inflicted genocide” and encouraging them to put their trust in the notoriously corrupt Chicago Police Department.


Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani

This chapter examines how the Eight-hour strikes of 1886 and the Haymarket bombing transformed the Chicago Police Department into a much stronger institution. It begins with a discussion of the Haymarket affair and how it led to massive strikes for the eight-hour workday that began on May 1, 1886. It then considers how the Haymarket bombing changed what it meant to be a member of the Chicago Police Department as well as the relationship between the police, the press, and the city government. It shows that the Haymarket and its aftermath consolidated a positive image of the Chicago Police Department in the eyes of the respectable citizens of the city. This shift facilitated some institutional changes that favored police officers, such as the allocation of funds for a pension, improvements in police buildings, and expansion of the force. But most of all, only citizens willing to risk being identified with the anarchists would criticize the institution itself.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Wood ◽  
Tom Tyler ◽  
Andrew V Papachristos ◽  
Jonathan Roth ◽  
Pedro H. C. Sant'Anna

Wood et al. (2020) studied the rollout of a procedural justice training program in the Chicago Police Department and found large and statistically significant impacts on complaints and sustained complaints against police officers and police use of force. This document describes a subtle statistical problem that led the magnitude of those estimates to be inflated. We then re-analyze the data using a methodology that corrects for this problem. The re-analysis provides less strong conclusions about the effectiveness of the training than the original study: although the point estimates for most outcomes and specifications are negative and of a meaningful magnitude, the confidence intervals typically include zero or very small effects. On the whole, we interpret the data as providing suggestive evidence that procedural justice training reduced the use of force, but no statistically significant evidence for a reduction in complaints or sustained complaints.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley M. Mancik ◽  
Karen F. Parker ◽  
Kirk R. Williams

Only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist, and the impact of community characteristics is mixed. In addition, community members are critical to clearances, but the willingness of residents to unite for the collective goal of aiding in investigations (via collective efficacy) remains to be tested. Combining data from the Chicago Police Department, Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of collective efficacy on homicide clearances in Chicago neighborhoods, while taking into account neighborhood characteristics and case composition. Results indicate that economic disadvantage, residential stability, and victimization significantly decrease homicides clearances, while collective efficacy increases clearances.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document