Archives of Policing

How can we begin to understand the past and present of policing in America?

One way is by looking at the written records left behind by those who created and participated in different forms of policing. Archives, and the materials they contain, hold many treasures, but also pitfalls for their readers. Historian Arlette Farge cautioned that “the archives are not precise…nor do they reveal the secret source where the organization of truth might reside.”(1) Records of law and policing are artifacts of a particular time and place. They are also remnants of systems of power. The records exist solely because of the laws and individuals that organized their existence and allowed for their production. What is recorded or preserved is often a political act. Farge warns us that the words contained in such documents are “neither faithful to reality nor totally representative of it.”(2) Thus, it becomes the work of the historian to extract meaning from the tangle of details recorded over time.

Police is a term that holds many meanings. In an eighteenth-century context, police referred not to a group of uniformed officers but rather a term that encompassed a range of duties related to the maintenance of the polis. The phrase “police of the town” was used more frequently and encapsulated several duties including the attendance to public health, morality, order, public safety, and the environment. Men, in volunteer and paid capacities, performed the labor of the police of the town. Night constables and watchmen were among a collection of officers who contributed to the police of the town through their nightly duties. The earliest form of what we would recognize as “policemen” in Boston—the nightly watch—was established in 1631 and remained in operation until its dissolution and integration into the Boston City Police in 1854.(3) Boston’s watch walked the streets of the town nightly as residents slept.(4) The men carried a lantern to light their way and an hourglass to tell the time. They announced the hour and weather as they traveled. While on rounds, they looked for signs of fire and general disorder, enforced curfews, and hailed all persons out in the streets. Instructed to “suppress all routs, riots, and other disorders,” watch constables detained those found acting outside of the law and aided individuals in need of help.(5) While certain duties were expected from the nightly watch, much of the decision-making was left to the constables’ discretion. Each night constable kept a journal of notes during their rounds to account for their activities. Night constables relayed the information to the town selectmen through weekly oral reports and, most significantly for this project, monthly written reports. 

I have spent several years studying the reports written by night constables and thinking about early policing practice in Boston. Scattered throughout the Boston Town Papers, housed in Rare Books and Manuscripts at Boston’s Public Library in Copley Square, are the surviving materials on Boston’s watch system. When studied together, these materials comprise an archive of Boston’s early policing that included reports, petitions, depositions, and print accounts, along with other administrative and legal papers. I have poured over thousands of sheets of paper and photographed all the surviving reports written by ordinary men who walked the streets nightly in service of the town and recorded their observations and doings in the name of the town between 1763 and 1800. High literacy rates and the emphasis Boston officials placed on writing make this study possible. The written reports are rich and interesting, some full of detailed stories, others administrative information. No template or form existed for the constables to follow, resulting in submissions that lacked uniformity in appearance and content. Some were composed of small scraps of paper with tattered edges. Many reports show signs of exposure to moisture, perhaps dampened from being tucked close to their chest on a warm day. Other reports contained burn marks and evidence of writing by candlelight. They varied in length, depth, and attention to detail, and each constable had a unique reporting style. One example, Constable of the North Division Watch Isaac Townsend, wrote with a pleasant, neat script. He gave meticulous descriptions of the individuals he encountered and on occasion included details of personal hardships and thoughts. He used an epistolary style and signed most of his reports as “your most humble servant.” While the reports varied, Boston was the only city in the British Atlantic to institute the practice of writing watch reports in the colonial period and thus they offer us exceptional documentation often hidden from the historian’s view.

These records formed the basis of my dissertation project on Boston’s watch and sit at the center of my book manuscript-in-progress, and my Humanities Collaborative Project. The manuscript and project, “Set the Watch: Policing and Governance in Early America,” examines the evolution of law, policing, and governance in the colonial, revolutionary, and immediate post-revolutionary periods through the writings of ordinary night constables and the work of the night watch. The work situates watches within the patchwork of early policing efforts and the methods by which governments conducted surveillance, control, and care. Such efforts should be understood as a collection of actions that reflected the ideas and values of society; governing entities used personnel such as watchmen and units like the watch to exert authority in the form of welfare or public safety. I argue that the changing social and legal duties of nightly watches reveal the role policing played in espousing the meaning of governance at the local level during a period of transformation from colonial institutions to components of the new nation.

For this Humanities Collaborative Project, my undergraduate research assistant Zane Barker and I will be working with a collection of reports written by Boston’s watch between 1781 and 1799. Part of our work is to take the manuscript sources, transcribe their contents, and compile the information into a database. But more critically, we will be engaging with the greater meanings of policing, as an historical and current phenomenon. This research is driven by questions on the nature of government such as how it was conducted, why, and for whom; how ordinary people ordered and made sense of their lives, and how power affected this process. The history of policing and law is a topic of great concern that informs our conversations on the purposes and design of governance in the present day, particularly in matters related to the surveillance and regulation of vulnerable populations. In this endeavor, I am reminded once more of Arlette Farge and her wisdom regarding the act of writing history and examining such sources. Farge offered a guide in relating her own philosophy on archival work: “I have worked as closely as possible with what the archives have to say and with what they conceal, guided both by current questions and distrust…of the dangerous anachronisms which falsify history and send meaning off course.”(6)

Dr. Nicole Breault, Faculty Fellow, 2024-2025

The University of Texas at El Paso, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP

References

1.  Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1993), 4.

2.  Farge, Fragile Lives, 5.

3.  For more see Nicole Breault, “When did the police become a “machine”?” The Panorama: Expansive Views from the Journal of the Early Republic, August 2024,  https://thepanorama.shear.org/2024/08/13/when-did-the-police-become-a-machine/

4.  For the geography of eighteenth-century Boston, see The town of Boston in New England https://www.loc.gov/item/88693226/

5.  North Division Watch Appointment, October 1773, MS f Bos. 7, Boston Town Papers, 7: 287, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

6.  Farge, Fragile Lives, 285.

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El Paso Police Department's First Official Academy Class--1958

Source: El Paso Police Department Photo Lab

Uploaded by: El Paso Police Department

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