Introduction to Robert M. Fogelson. Big-city police
FOR EXAMPLE;Robert M. Fogelson received a B.A from Columbia University in 1958 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1964. Fogelson was relevantly active in the 1960s and 70s when massive civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests ensued riots in major cities.(Panzarella & Vona, 2013,pp.217) Fogelson wrote Big-City Police, a historical study of police departments for The Urban Institue that Fogelson was a member of in the 1970s-1975. Panzarella and Vona (2013) explain big city policing as “anonymous policing in which the police and the people in a particular neighborhood are strangers who distrust one another.” (pp.218). In Fogelson’s book on Big City Police, he detected two major reform movements, the first being the reform of all aspects of the government. The second reform was by police administrators, turning policing into a profession. Fogelson talks about the majority of police posts were political favors given to local immigrants or the offspring of immigrants. Around 1890, middle-class clerics, businessmen, and social reformers started a movement to centralize the police. The term “war on crime” was established after adopting a military paradigm. By 1930, the majority of significant police agencies had implemented the centralized beat strategy, and a civil service structure had only begun. Overall the book discusses the effects of two significant police reform movements on racial and ethnic social mobility, the distribution of political power, the status quo in metropolitan America, and police professionalism.
