Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

push working-class immigrants out of politics. Because inunigrants generally livedtogether in distinct neighborhoods, they had been well placed to influence theward-based machines. So Progressive reforms replaced districted elections withcitywide contests and strengthened the mayor's office to the detriment of the wardcounci1ors.n The Progressive reforms thus practically limited popular access to governmenC3Meanwhile, other efforts were underway to restrict suffrage, assimilateimmigrant children, and regulate the numbers of new immigrants.74Progressive efforts encouraged legalistic administration and promoted transparency, but these gains were only really extended to the White, Protestant, nativeborn, English-speaking middle and upper classes. The transition, then, was froma populist gangsterism to an elitist republicanism. The Progressive movementreplaced machine politics with class rule.Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson explain this transformation:The machine provided the politician with a base of influence deriving fromits control of lower-income voters. As this base shrinks, he becomes moredependent on other sources of influence-especially newspapers, civicassociates, labor unions, business groups, and churches. "Nonpolitical"(read nonparty) lines of access to the city administration are substitutedfor "political" ones. Campaign funds come not from salary kickbacks andthe sale of favors, but from rich men and from companies doing businesswith the city. Department heads and other administrators who are ableto command the support of professional associations and civic groupsbecome indispensable to the mayor and are therefore harder for him tocontrol. Whereas the spoils of office formerly went to "the boys" in thedelivery [voting] wards in the form of jobs and favors, they now go in theform of urban renewal projects, street cleaning, and better police protectionto newspaper [public opinion] wards.7'The poor did not control, or especially benefit from, the political machines.But the machines required their participation and offered them something inreturn. 'The emerging bureaucracies of the Progressive Era, in contrast, weredesigned to limit their participation. The poor did not control these either, andthe new system offered them terribly little.Machine rule was replaced with the more subtle power of the capitalist class.Whereas before local government had been administered according to strictlymaterial incentives, it was now guided by administrative norms and the formalrules of bureaucracy, backed with the moral standards and political ideology ofthe Protestant bourgeoisie.1bis victory was ironic, in a sense, because Progressiverhetoric centered on "taking the police out of politics," and conversely, "takingthe politics out of policing." Though the reforms did grant police commanders afresh independence from the demands of politicians, the idea of taking the politicsout of policing was doomed at the outset-as ridiculous a notion as takingthe politics out of governmentFar from being mere administrative bodies that enforced the law, kept thepeace, and served the public, the police departments were policy-makingagencies that helped to decide which laws were enforced, whose peacewas kept, and which public was served. Much like the courts, schools,and other vital institutions, the police thereby exercised a great deal ofinfluence over the process of mobility, the distribution of power, and the129