3 - Tramps and children: the decline of police welfare

Summary

We are confident that the time is not far away when the police officer will have the sympathy and regard of not only the individual, but of all those interested in the proper keeping and disposition of the dependent classes.…

Col. R. Sylvester, superintendent of police, Washington, D.C., Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the National Prison Association of the United States (1902)

Overnight lodging in police stations

Other facets of urban police behavior changed along with the changes in arrest rates, but these other changes formed a more distinct shift in the function of the police in the city. To understand this shift, it is necessary to focus on a neglected side of nineteenth-century policing, the social welfare side. In the mid nineteenth century, as now, arrests composed only a small part of daily police activity. Unfortunately, to accurately quantify and aggregate the daily impact of police in the nineteenth century and to trace this over time would be nearly impossible. But the formal, recorded, and quantifiable side of the non-crime-related police function can be approached by examining carefully two important welfare services of the police, their provision of overnight lodging for the homeless and the return home of lost children. These two services are of interest both in themselves, for what they can show about the social services of the police, and also in what they can demonstrate by way of measurable changes.