David Montgomery writes in _Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century_:
***** Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century the number of policemen in American cities grew more rapidly than the population (between 1882 and 1909 much more rapidly). Drink and disorder continued to dominate the arrest lists. Nevertheless, some important changes lay ahead. The discipline under fire demonstrated by New York's police in the draft riots of 1863 persuaded business and professional leaders throughout the land of the value of uniformed, professional officers. Although budget crises of the 1870s led many cities to reduce their forces, the pattern of growth resumed so rapidly in the 1880s that Chicago's police increased over the decade from one for every 1,033 residents to one for every 549, and Pittsburgh's grew from one for every 1,958 residents to one for every 816. Simultaneously, the uniformed police took over the tasks of reporting health hazards, advising travelers, and lodging wanderers, that had formerly been done by watchmen and magistrates. They also began to institute their own surveillance of workers' political activities. Chicago's Haymarket Affair was followed by raids on scores of workers' clubs and unions, and in New York uniformed policemen ostentatiously entered Cooper Union when Terence Powderly was scheduled to speak, leading the general master workman to adjourn the meeting rather than address Americans under the watchful eye of police.
Correspondingly, the conduct of police became a prominent issue in workers' political protests. Workingmen's parties from Lynn to Milwaukee promised to halt the cracking of hickory clubs against strikers' skulls and to dismiss obnoxious police chiefs. When Terence Powderly was mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he returned arrested drunks to their families rather than locking them up. At the turn of the century, mayors Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones of Toledo and Tom Johnson of Cleveland enlarged on that policy, escorting drunks home and releasing petty offenders on their own recognizance after inscribing their names on a Golden Rule book. By the 1910s fierce public clashes between socialist mayors and state-appointed police chiefs over the treatment of local workers had become commonplace.
(footnotes omitted, David Montgomery, "Policing People for the Free Market," _Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century_, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp.70-71) *****
From the documents of labor history and social history of radical movements on the Left, you can see that workers and advocates for workers used to be more conscious of the function of the police under capitalism -- which Montgomery sums up as "policing people for the free market" -- than they are now.
At 1:49 PM +0000 6/30/02, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>Besides, cops are necessary. I have been busy drafting opinions
>denying the habeas petitions of leaders of the Gangster Disciples, a
>6,000 strong Chicago drug gang on the South Side that had
>$100,000,000 a year business in the 90s, and ruled through fear,
>murder, intimidation, and torture. These are _really_ bad guys.
How to deal with drug gangs? More cops on the street or drug decriminalization?
There are instances where cops could play useful roles in theory (e.g., combatting violence against women), but under capitalism and sexist oppression, cops are more a problem than a solution even when they should be theoretically useful (e.g., cops themselves have a higher rate of domestic violence than the rest of the population do). -- Yoshie
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