Mark
Journal of Social History, Winter 2001 v35 i2 p349(24)
"The Cop will get you": The police and discretionary juvenile justice,
1890-1940. David Wolcott.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Carnegie Mellon University Press
Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the police have been the
foremost public authorities who regulate juvenile crime and delinquency.
More often than not, police tactics have been portrayed as crudely punitive,
rather than sympathetic to children and youth. Child welfare reformers,
writing about the conditions in which adolescents grew up in turn-of-thecentury cities, regularly characterized the police as all-too-eager to
discipline teenagers for any offense, major or minor. They viewed
policemen as brutish, blue-coated enforcers who would arrest a young shoplifter or a truant unable to account for himself "just to keep him out of
mischief." (1) Parents and educators often portrayed the police as
bogeymen, warning children that if they did nor behave, "the cop will get
you." (2) Films about delinquency--ranging from Dead End (1937) to West
Side Story (1961)--regularly presented police officers as comic foils who
tried desperately, but failed in the end, to discipline disorderly youth. (3)
These characterizations rang true because they reflected popular
understandings that the police were the principal public agents responsible
for managing juvenile misbehavior on a day-to-day basis. At the same time,
these cartoonish images failed to capture the complexity of police
interactions with youth.
Surprisingly, the role of the police has often been forgotten in historical
studies of juvenile justice. In fact, the whole process of regulating
delinquency on the streets and of informally disciplining juvenile offenders
has received little historical treatment. The purpose of this essay is to
introduce themes and to suggest methods for analyzing how juvenile crime
and delinquency were regulated in the past, with special attention to
regulation "from the bottom up." Focusing on everyday interactions between
police officers and disorderly youth in three American cities between 1890
and 1940, I demonstrate how the exercise of discretionary authority by the
police shaped the operations of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century
juvenile justice.
Historical and Theoretical Considerations
Most historical studies of juvenile justice--the system of separate laws and
judicial, social welfare, and correctional institutions for children and youth-focus on how these laws and institutions developed and how they reflected
changing conceptions of childhood. Although a wide variety of public and
private reform schools and child welfare agencies were created in the
nineteenth century to treat delinquent youth, young people who were
arrested were still processed in the same courts as adults. In Illinois, for
example, the 1827 criminal code set the age of criminal responsibility at ten
years. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, courts and penal
institutions faced mounting criticism for treating children as if they were
fully-responsible adults. As an alternative, social reformers advocated the
creation of separate courts for juveniles. These would not only control
adolescent misbehavior but would also seek to determine the underlying
sources of delinquency and provide social services aimed at e liminating
these problems. Most famously, a coalition of Chicago reformers--including
the Chicago Women's Club, the Chicago Bar Association, and Jane Addams'
Hull House social settlement--successfully lobbied for the passage of the
Illinois Juvenile Court Act, establishing the nation's first juvenile court in
Cook County (Chicago) in 1899. Rapidly duplicated in other cities, juvenile
courts became the centerpieces of larger systems of juvenile justice designed
with the explicit intention of helping, rather than punishing, young
offenders. (4)
Early interpretations of juvenile court tend to portray it as an embodiment of
Progressive-era ideals that developed between the mid-1890s and the mid1910s. Scholars such as Herbert Lou and, more recently, Joseph M. Hawes
presented juvenile court as the result of an emerging Progressive social
philosophy that the state was responsible to intervene in children's social and
familial relations in order to rescue them from delinquency. These scholars
celebrated juvenile courts as the culmination of nineteenth-century reform
ideals. (5) Revisionist historians working in the 1960s and 1970s, however,
emphasized the paradoxical results of the Progressive agenda. They saw in
juvenile court's goal of intervening in troubled families a more repressive
agenda of exercising "social control." Anthony Platt, for example, argued
that the creation of juvenile court by elite reformers defined as criminal
much behavior characteristic of working-class, immigrant youth, and in
effect thereby invented the concept of delinquency . Similarly, David
Rothman maintained that Progressive-era efforts to rehabilitate delinquents-efforts resulting from the "conscience" of reformers--devolved quickly into
mechanisms to control young offenders more effectively and thereby served
mainly the "convenience" of law enforcement and correctional officials. (6)
Other historians--utilizing the internal case records of the courts themselves-have concentrated on issues of implementation, on how the ideals of the
juvenile court movement were put into practice. They have discovered that
juvenile court operations were shaped by a diversity of interests which were
not necessarily consistent with Progressive ideals. Steven Schlossman, for
example, argued that juvenile courts embraced a rehabilitative mission of
applying "affectional discipline" to the children who came before them.
However, his close analysis of the decision-making process in Milwaukee
County Juvenile Court revealed that, in practice, the court was prevented
from implementing its stated goal by conflicts among judges, probation
officers, and parents, as well as an overwhelming caseload. (7) Similarly,
Mary Odem stressed how the treatment of teenage girls in Los Angeles
County Juvenile Court was shaped by conflicts between juvenile court
officials--who were primarily concerned with protecting girls from the risks
of premarital sexuality--and parents, who often simply wanted juvenile court
to reinforce their authority over their daughters. (8) In addition, historians
have demonstrated that not only was there conflict within juvenile courts,
but that juvenile courts were also buffeted by external political conflicts.
Even the ideals of the juvenile court movement were more controversial
than earlier scholars suggested. (9)
In spite of the increasing attention paid to conflicts within and surrounding
the juvenile justice system, the focus is still overwhelmingly on juvenile
courts per se. Perhaps because juvenile courts generate extensive
documentation, they remain historians' standard unit of analysis and are
treated as the starting point from which all other decisions derive. This
perspective, however, often disregards other key elements of the juvenile
justice system. How, for example, did children reach juvenile courts in the
first place? What happened to children prior to their court appearances?
What role did the police, in particular, play in the process of regulating and
adjudicating juvenile delinquents?
Alternative models for understanding how juvenile justice worked can be
adapted from other scholars who study the criminal justice system. For
example, Lawrence Friedman and Robert Percival characterize criminal
justice in turn-of-the-century Alameda County, California, in terms of a
wedding cake, in which the cases were divided into informal graduated
layers. (10) Although they developed this model for the adult criminal
justice system, with its elaborate gradations of offenses and levels of
appeals, their framework can be applied to juvenile justice as well. At the
top layer would be a small portion of cases involving serious personal injury
offenses that result in long-term confinement or, in very rare instances, the
transfer of juvenile offenders into adult criminal courts. In the middle layer
would be routine delinquency cases, mainly involving theft, adjudicated in
juvenile court. At the bottom would be a wide range of complaints about
juvenile misbehavior handled by the police or referred to other trea tment
agencies. Almost all juvenile cases would enter the system at the bottom
layer of the "wedding cake," but successively fewer would proceed to each
of the higher layers.
The police exercised enormous discretionary authority over juveniles at the
bottom layer of the juvenile justice "wedding cake." When the police
encountered delinquents on the streets and in the station houses, they were
generally free to choose among several possible courses of action in making
two critical decisions: whether to make an arrest and how to proceed
following an arrest. Sociological studies of how the police exercise their
discretion--particularly in interactions with juveniles--help provide a
conceptual framework for exploring these questions historically. A number
of studies point to situational variables that often influence police decisions:
whether encounters were initiated by the police or by complainants; the
demands of victims and complainants; the reported offense; and the race,
gender, and demeanor of the accused. Although these variables were
developed in the context of modern participant-observer studies of police
behavior, they are also useful for historical analysis of police inter actions
with youth. (11)
This essay develops three themes in a police-centered model of early
twentieth-century juvenile justice. First, I show how children reached
juvenile court, focusing on the police role in the intake process. Second, I
examine how the police regulated delinquency in the streets and decided
whether to make an arrest. In encounters between cops and kids, the
demands of the public, the priorities of police administrations, and the
discretion of individual officers all routinely superseded the goals of child
welfare advocates. Third, I analyze how the police decided whether to hold
children in detention. Via detention, the police could impose their own
rough form of "treatment" on young offenders, regardless of what a juvenile
court judge might decide. In short, rather than re-examining the origins of
Progressive ideals or the internal operations of juvenile courts, I emphasize
the everyday work of the police and their exercise of discretionary authority
at the bottom layer of the juvenile justice wedding cake.
The Police and the Juvenile Court
The primary function of the police within the juvenile justice system was to
determine which children to refer (or "petition") to juvenile Court. Many
juvenile court advocates harshly criticized how the police handled young
offenders. For example, according to Denver's Judge Ben B. Lindsey, the
foremost juvenile court promoter, the police dealt with boys "based on a
doctrine of fear, degradation, and punishment."(12) Juvenile courts were
expected to supersede the authority of the police over children and
adolescents. In reality, however, early twentieth-century juvenile courts
lacked the institutional resources to do so, and had to rely heavily on police
departments to put their goals into practice. Juvenile courts were parts of
larger legal and administrative systems, and their operations were shaped
substantially by other agencies, particularly the police.
This was certainly the case in Cook County Juvenile Court. Probation
officers were to have been the key actors in the system, both investigating
initial court referrals and monitoring the progress of children under court
supervision. However, the Illinois Juvenile Court Act of 1899 did not allow
Cook County to pay probation officers from public funds. Probation officers
therefore had to be subsidized by outside sources. Philanthropic groups-
especially the Juvenile Court Committee of the Chicago Women's Clubraised subscriptions to pay some probation officers. More importantly, the
Chicago Police Department detailed cops to juvenile probation work,
assigning roughly one police probation officer (PPO) to each district. (13)
In the juvenile court's earliest years, police constituted the vast majority of
probation officers. In 1904, for example, the police assigned 21 men to
probation duty, in comparison to four officers supported by philanthropies.
In 1905, the state legislature amended the original Juvenile Court Act to
permit Cook County to hire its own probation officers. The number of courtappointed probation officers soon exceeded those appointed by the police.
Nonetheless, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the police department
continued to assign approximately 30 cops to probation duty, where they
performed many of the basic investigations that preceded court hearings.
(14)
PPOs themselves were recruited from the ranks of patrolmen. Like the
department as a whole, they came from predominantly ethnic, and
particularly Irish, backgrounds. (15) PPOs did, however, attempt to
differentiate themselves from other cops and to appear less intimidating to
children by wearing civilian clothes rather than uniforms. (16) But no
additional training distinguished them. They learned their jobs by experience
and observation. Consequently, their approaches to their duties varied
widely. Some were genuinely interested in delinquent boys and specifically
requested probation work. Others-often older officers no longer capable of
performing regular duties-regarded it as just an easy assignment. (17)
Advocates of the court were skeptical about using police officers for
probation duties. One observed, "Their social function makes them agents of
repression." In addition, the police often received their jobs through political
connections.
Using them as probation officers therefore raised the distressing possibility
that the court might become politicized. (18) Nonetheless, court supporters
eventually accepted the PPOs as part of the system, albeit grudgingly. One
1909 investigator reported that "the general character of these officers is
good. Care seems to have been exercised in their selection in order to get
men who were especially intelligent and at the same time courteous and kind
in their manner of dealing with children." (19)
PPOs' primary duty was to investigate complaints against children and
adolescents and to determine whether complaints should be petitioned to
juvenile court or adjusted informally. As a result, PPOs' referrals accounted
for the great majority of delinquency petitions to juvenile court. Data from
the first two decades of the court are unfortunately too sketchy to provide
reliable information. Between 1918 and 1926, however, PPOs introduced 82
percent of the juvenile court's delinquency cases. (20) The overwhelming
majority of delinquency cases were generated by the police, according to
chief probation officer Joel Hunter, because "the natural place for a citizen
to complain when an offense has been committed is the nearest police
station." (21)
What behaviors constituted delinquency? Serious offenses, including
robbery, burglary, auto theft, and weapons violations, accounted for just 11
percent of complaints investigated by the Chicago PPOs between 1919 and
1930. Misdemeanors such as larceny constituted another 21 percent.
Together, criminal offenses accounted for only 32 percent of delinquency
complaints. The remaining two-thirds of investigations primarily involved
lesser forms of non-criminal misconduct, family strife, and neighborhood
disputes. The police statistics vaguely labeled 45 percent of juvenile
offenses as "immorality," "incorrigibility," and running away. They
characterized another 23 percent of juvenile offenses as "miscellaneous."
(22)
After investigating these various types of delinquency complaints, PPOs
chose to adjust far more cases on their own than to petition juveniles to court
for a formal hearing. Between 1918 and 1930, PPOs petitioned only 11
percent of complaints to juvenile court; they decided 89 percent on their
own. Moreover, the percentage of complaints adjusted by the police changed
hardly at all over time--year by year, the standard deviation was just 2
percent. (23) In absolute numbers, the police unofficially resolved an
average of 15,503 complaints per year. In contrast, they filed court petitions
on only 1,962. (24) PPOs sought to resolve virtually all minor offenses-particularly those involving first-time offenders--using their own discretion.
One PPO explained that he did nor petition boys to court for crimes such as
petty thieving, window breaking, or running away "unless they had a
previous record." He even released boys caught "auto thieving" if the car
had not been damaged and the owner was nor anxious to prosecu te. (25)
Deciding cases on their own exposed the police to criticism from child
welfare reformers. As one investigator wrote, "... a large number of children
brought in are sent home after being questioned by the police probation
officer ... it usually happened that the Captain or the Judge had never even
seen or heard of these cases." (26) In fact, however, the PPOs' decisions
were consistent with juvenile court policy, which stated that they were to
"take the place of a court of first jurisdiction in a large majority of cases of
delinquency." If only due to the extraordinary number of investigations, the
court had to depend "upon the judgment of the police probation officers
whether or not a case shall appear in court." (27)
The Chicago PPOs adjusted an unusually large share of delinquency
complaints on their own, but their practice was hardly unique. One 1925
study of juvenile courts in ten American cities found that equivalent police
"juvenile bureaus" routinely investigated and adjusted substantial shares of
complaints without court hearings, sometimes even supervising youth under
informal "police probation." (28) The Detroit Police Department's Juvenile
Division, for example, disposed of 45 percent of boys arrested between 1920
and 1930, discharging them to their parents' custody or referring them to
private charitable agencies, and petitioned 55 percent to juvenile court. (29)
Likewise, the Los Angeles Police Department's Juvenile Bureau used its
discretionary authority to dispose of 61 percent of boys and 58 percent of
girls arrested between 1930 and 1940. (30)
In short, a substantial portion--often the majority--of juvenile delinquency
cases in early twentieth-century American cities were resolved without
juvenile court involvement. Historical interpretations of juvenile justice that
focus only on juvenile courts overlook the first and most important decisions
in the process of regulating delinquency. It was the police, not the courts,
that contacted youth initially, performed preliminary investigations, and
determined how to proceed with cases. Discretionary decision-making by
the police at the bottom layer of the juvenile justice wedding cake shaped
everything above it.
Police Regulation of Delinquents on the Streets
If police officers did not regularly petition delinquent children to juvenile
court, then what mechanisms did they use to regulate juvenile misconduct?
Most obviously, the police could and did arrest juveniles. But they could
also intimidate youth through their mere presence, hassle them on the
streets, detain them, and--less openly--employ physical force. Police
officers' decisions on how to handle juvenile delinquency were shaped
largely by situational variables such as the suspects' alleged offenses and the
demands of complainants. Police decisions, however, also varied by location
and time period. Early twentiethcentury urban police departments did not
embrace social welfare goals as vigorously as did juvenile courts, but many
did undergo their own process of reform in which they sought to become
more "professional" and "efficient." Characteristically, they sought to
centralize their organizational structures in order to minimize the influence
of neighborhood politics, adopt higher standards for job appli cants to
upgrade police personnel, and eliminate extraneous tasks so that they could
devote more energy to investigating and punishing crime. The result was
that, between 1890 and 1940, the primary function of the police shifted from
establishing public order to fighting serious crime. (31) Police approaches to
regulating juvenile delinquency differed accordingly. These differences can
be illustrated empirically, using two unique bodies of data. First, I will
demonstrate how police regulated delinquency prior to their
professionalization and the creation of juvenile courts--in this instance, in
Detroit in the 1890s. Second, I will contrast police practices after the
professional ethos and juvenile courts were well-established--in this
instance, in Los Angeles on the eve of World War 11. (32)
Before the Progressive Era: Detroit
An analysis of arrest patterns in the 1890s most clearly demonstrates how
the Detroit Police Department regulated juvenile delinquency prior to the
creation of juvenile court. The turn-of-the-century Detroit police arrested far
fewer juveniles than adults. They made 62 arrests for every 1,000 males,
whereas they made only 30 arrests for every 1,000 boys between 8 and 16.
(33) This finding comes as no surprise. Not only would we intuitively
expect teenagers to be arrested less often then adults, but also, until the turn
of the century, the function of the police was primarily to maintain public
order. This meant focusing arrests on victimless offenses that disrupted
social decorum, such as drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and the
like. (34) The Detroit police were no exception; in the 1890s, they arrested
73 percent of all male suspects for public order violations. (35) In contrast,
among pre-teen and teenage boys--less likely than adults to drink, gamble,
or visit prostitutes--public order offenses accounted for only 16 percent of
arrests. (36)
The Detroit police, however, arrested youths for crimes against property or
persons at a higher rate--20 arrests for every 1,000 boys between 8 and 16-than they did the general population for the same offenses--16 arrests for
every 1,000 males in Detroit. Criminal offenses accounted for 67 percent of
boys' arrests, in contrast to 26 percent of arrests for the male population as a
whole. (37) Children and adolescents disrupted public order by committing
petty thefts and larceny, not by becoming drunk and disorderly. Unattended
by parents or employers after school or work, boys regularly pilfered
cigarettes, candy, toys, and fruit from shops, stole bicycles, and removed
bottles and building supplies from yards and vacant lots. (38) As a rule,
victims' complaints--not police initiative-- provided the impetus for police
interactions with juveniles and ultimately led to most arrests. For example,
small shopkeepers like William Boyne frequently reported petty thefts by
boys. In 1896, Boyne informed the police that five boys had stolen four
pineapples from the front of his store and identified all five suspects. (39)
Citizens such as Mrs. Annie Landofski likewise demanded police action
when boys burglarized their homes. Her 1898 report that two boys had
entered her home and stolen $10.00 resulted in at least one arrest. (40)
The Detroit police often applied their own standards--rather than legalistic
ones--in deciding whether to arrest boys. For example, although formal
complaints occasionally required the police to arrest boys as young as age
six for assault, they generally did not make arrests when they came across
fights on their own and no one filed charges. They documented violence in
"Incidental Events" reports and transported the wounded to doctors, but they
mainly let boys resolve their own disputes. No one was arrested, for
example, when seven-year-old Rube McMillen struck six-year-old Fred
Stock on the head with a stove poker, or when ten-year-old Peter
Kajneirezak inflicted a minor knife wound on a fourteen-year-old. (41) In
contrast, the police regularly arrested boys for truancy or for being "juvenile
disorderly persons," misbehaviors that are today labeled "status offenses"
because they are contingent on children's age, or status of being juveniles.
Under Michigan's 1883 compulsory education law, the Detroit police were
authorized to arrest any child between seven and fifteen who habitually
skipped school, disobeyed teachers, or frequented public places during
school hours. (42) In the 1890s, over 5 of every 1,000 boys were arrested for
status offenses. These accounted for 17 percent of boys' total arrests. (43)
Status offense charges served not only as a legal justification to apprehend
runaways and to discipline boys who refused to go to school, but also to
give the police a means to impose an informal curfew. The police made 37
percent of "truancy" arrests between 8:00 PM and 2:00 AM, well outside of
school hours. (44)
Even prior to the creation of juvenile court, the 1890s Detroit police did not
arrest boys simply to haul them before the criminal courts. Instead, the
Detroit police frequently employed a rudimentary form of "diversion"--a
modern tactic of deciding juvenile cases without court involvement--to filter
young offenders out of the criminal courts. (45) The police disposed of a
substantial share of boys arrests--24 percent--at the station house without
ever transferring the boys to the courts (this contrasted with 9 percent of all
arrests). (46) As a rule, the police discharged boys who had been arrested for
crimes when complainants refused to prosecute, even after initiating police
action in the first place. Some complainants settled for the return of stolen
property and a verbal reprimand by the police. Although Mrs. Jennice
McMillan, for example, reported that several young boys had broken into
her store and taken a box of cigars and tobacco, she chose not to pursue the
case once the police arrested three of th e boys and she reclaimed her goods.
(47) The police also dispensed justice on their own to the majority (58
percent) of boys arrested for status offenses. Only if the children were
"habitual truants" or had been arrested many times previously would the
police refer them to court for status offenses. (48) Most unsupervised and
runaway boys were discharged to their families or enrolled in an ungraded
public school, or Truant School." Police administrators believed that the
Truant School gave them a mechanism to supervise and discipline disorderly
boys. According to Sergeant Henry Shomaker, " ... as the [truant] school
increases in numbers, juvenile crime decreases. This fact establishes the
usefulness of the school, as it prevents boys from becoming criminals, and
at the same time educates them." (49)
Prior to the turn of the century, the Detroit police arrested children as part of
their traditional mission of maintaining public order. The charges against
teenagers differed from those against adults because young people did not
disturb the peace in the same ways as adults. They caused trouble by
committing thefts, playing hooky, and gathering boisterously on the streets,
not by becoming drunk and disorderly. Arresting juvenile offenders was less
a means of introducing them into the criminal justice system for punishment
or rehabilitation, than of satisfying aggrieved citizens and of officially
reprimanding disorderly youth.
The "Crime-Fighting" Era: Los Angeles
In contrast, in the 1920s and 1930s, the priorities of many law enforcement
agencies-even those designed to deal with children--shifted toward an
agenda of aggressively enforcing the law and of punishing alleged
offenders. On the one hand, law enforcement officials and even juvenile
court advocates became increasingly skeptical about the ability of
correctional agencies to achieve any real improvement in children's lives.
(50) On the other hand, police departments professionalized themselves by
downplaying their traditional function of maintaining public order and
instead devoting their primary efforts to efficiently fighting crime. (51)
These dual changes reshaped police methods of regulating juvenile
delinquency. In Los Angeles, for example, the police increasingly targeted
serious crimes against property and persons. Offenses labeled "felonies"
became a much larger share of the LAPD's arrests of boys between 10 and
17. Whereas in 1930-31, felonies accounted for 35 percent and
misdemeanors for 46 percent of all boys' arrests, in 1940, felonies accounted
for 51 percent and misdemeanors for only 21 percent of boys' arrests. (52)
At the same time as the LAPD targeted serious offenses, they also arrested a
disproportionate share of minority youth. In 1940, Hispanics constituted 32
percent of all boys arrested by the LAPD, as opposed to an estimated 8
percent of the city's population. African Americans similarly were 12
percent of boys arrested, in comparison to 4 percent of the population. (53)
In short, by 1940, the LAPD did not use arrest as a catch-all method for
handling any sort of juvenile delinquency, minor or major. Instead, it used
arr est predominately as a mechanism to regulate boys who were darkerskinned and-allegedly--more often criminal.
Arrest statistics, however, reveal only part of the story. The internal
dynamics of arrests--the ways that the police actually regulated delinquency
on the streets--can be analyzed using juvenile court case records. I have
compiled a database from a sample of Los Angeles County Juvenile Court
case files in 1940. Although the database includes only cases that the police
formally petitioned to juvenile court--48 percent of boys' arrests in 1940--it
permits a more detailed analysis of police and juvenile behaviors than does
any other source. (54)
The LAPD was particularly alert to wrong-doing by groups of Hispanic
boys. In the context of 1930s Los Angeles, Mexican-American youth were
widely believed to be more likely to commit crimes--especially violent
crimes--than were other ethnic groups. (55) While this belief was based in
racial bias, it was also reflected in cases that the LAPD petitioned to juvenile
court. Hispanic youth were significantly more likely to be in juvenile court
for robberies and other offenses against persons (17 percent) than were
whites or African-Americans (6 percent together). (56) Put differently, over
half--54 percent--of all boys accused of offenses against persons were
Hispanics. (57) Hispanic youth also tended to commit offenses--and the
LAPD tended to arrest them--in larger groups than whites and African
Americans. Hispanic boys averaged 1.9 companions in committing their
alleged offenses, compared to 1.1 companions for non-Hispanics. (58)
According to the LAPD, moreover, 18 percent of Hispanic offenders were
involved in gangs, versus 5 percent of whites and African Americans. (59)
For teenage boys, group associations and gang involvement were often a
recipe for interpersonal violence. Thirty-nine percent of the boys accused of
offenses against persons had two or more accomplices and, according to the
police, at least 25 percent were involved in gangs. (60) For example, Albert
Del Grande, 13, Rick Cordova, 16, and a rotating assortment of eight other
Hispanic youths in the "Dog Town Gang" fought other groups of boys,
apparently to maintain their authority over a particular territory. In July
1940, they assaulted three Italian boys who were sitting in front of a grocery
on Lemar Street in their Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Only after a series
of similar encounters, though, were the Dog Town boys arrested by the
LAPD. (61)
Seeing Hispanic teenagers gathered in street-corner groups sent a message to
the police that the boys were ready to cause trouble. Clusters of Hispanic
boys thus became easy targets for police harassment. Sixty-four percent of
Hispanic boys had at least one official encounter with the police prior to
their first court appearance, versus 47 percent of other racial groups. (62)
Rather than make the (sometimes impossible) effort to sort out which
Hispanic youths were responsible for which alleged offenses, the LAPD
erred on the side of arresting them early and often and letting the juvenile
court decide how best to deal with particular individuals.
The LAPD was also especially alert to vehicle thefts. Among cases that
reached the juvenile court, they initiated 52 percent of arrests for auto theft
on their own without a prior complaint. (63) The LAPD, as well as other law
enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County, targeted groups of boys out
for a joy ride. The police routinely pulled over cars filled with adolescent
boys cruising around the city; often, the car turned out to be stolen. (64) For
example, Jack Vasquez, 15, Ricardo Veras, 14, Adam DiFilice, 13, and
Gilbert Velarde, 14--all under the legal driving age of 16--together stole a
1935 Willys coupe to go to a picnic in Pico Park. At the park, a highway
patrol officer noted the concentration of very young boys driving a fairly
recent car. Upon being questioned about the car's ownership, DiFilice
claimed that it belonged to his uncle. The policeman allowed them to drive
to the home of the supposed uncle, following on his motorcycle. At an
intersection, the boys leapt from the automobile and ran aw ay, abandoning
the car in the street. Three days later, all four boys stole another vehicle, a
1934 Oldsmobile Sedan. Again, a police officer noticed them driving
through Compton and pulled them over. Without giving them the
opportunity to talk their way out of the jam or to escape, LAPD Motor
Officer Ray Wiley arrested the boys and arranged for them to be detained.
(65)
Boys approached auto theft with a surprisingly casual attitude--they often
just took vehicles that they found unattended, drove them around for an
evening and abandoned them when they were done--but the LAPD treated
auto theft very seriously. Police officers consistently pulled over suspicious
groups of boys, arrested them, and petitioned them to juvenile court on their
own initiative. Auto theft represented a especially serious problem in
Southern California, where automobile ownership was much more common
than in the rest of the country. In 1940, one automobile was registered in
Los Angeles for every 1.4 residents, as compared to one car for every 4.8
people in the nation as a whole. In addition, the geographic sprawl of Los
Angeles and surrounding communities made automobiles a virtual necessity
for many residents to get from one place to another. Because owning a car
was not confined to the Los Angeles elite, the public as a whole pressured
the LAPD to make auto theft a high crime-fighting priority. (66)
Vehicle theft also differed from other forms of stealing in two important
ways. First, the property involved was more expensive. The median value of
property in a vehicle theft was $400.00, as compared to a $20.00 median
value for all other thefts by boys. Second, vehicle thefts were both
potentially dangerous--especially if boys did not know how to drive very
well--and highly visible. Juveniles who stole cars risked accidents and being
spotted by the police. The monetary value and safety threat posed by vehicle
theft encouraged police to intervene, while its visibility enabled them to do
so on their own initiative.
In short, by 1940, the LAPD retained little of the all-purpose, public order
function evident in the work of police in earlier decades. Nor did it
demonstrate much of a social welfare ethos by focusing intervention on atrisk youth. Instead, it mainly arrested serious delinquents, disproportionately
of minority backgrounds, and petitioned them to juvenile court to fight
crimes like auto theft that were of particular concern to the public. In so
doing, it placed police priorities and citizens' demands above the goal of
saving children.
Police and the Use of Detention
Police also exercised an often-hidden form of authority over young
offenders following arrest, but prior to disposition or petition to juvenile
court: they determined whether to place youths in detention. Jailing children
for a matter of days or weeks represents a crucial element in the juvenile
justice process, yet the use of detention has been generally overlooked by
historians. (67) Detention decisions were made largely by the police rather
than by juvenile courts. Typically, the police could hold alleged delinquents
either in juvenile detention facilities or even in local jails at their own
discretion, with, at most, nominal judicial supervision. The police could thus
use the new, separate detention facilities that were championed by the
juvenile court movement to penalize problem youth as they saw fit. Even if
juveniles were ultimately released, placed on probation, or given suspended
sentences, the police could still use short-term detention to punish them. The
decision about whether to detain an offend er represented the point in the
juvenile justice process where police exercised the greatest degree of
discretion.
In Chicago, for example, PPOs determined whether children whom they
investigated should be held in custody. As a rule, the police were
discouraged from detaining juveniles, in part because Cook County had only
limited facilities to hold them. Although the 1899 Juvenile Court Law
required that adolescents be detained separately from adults, Cook County
did not build a designated Juvenile Detention Home (as part of a new
Juvenile Court building) until 1907. (68) Even this new accommodation
quickly proved inadequate. By the late 1910s, overcrowding at the Detention
Home had become severe; some boys had to sleep on extra mattresses on the
floor. More disturbingly, the Juvenile Detention Home began to refuse
admission because of overcrowding. Then the police had no choice but to
hold them in station lock-ups condemned as "unfit... for prisoners or
policemen," let alone children. (69) Police and court officials temporarily
resolved this problem by reducing the Detention Home's intake, instructing
PPOs that "ordinar y boys' pranks should be reported to parents" but should
not be considered cause for arrest. Finally, an expanded juvenile detention
home was opened in 1923 as part of a newer and larger juvenile court
complex. (70)
Nonetheless, the police officers who controlled admission to the Juvenile
Detention Home still used it as if it were a jail, holding youth there as a
swift and secure form of punishment. Of boys whom PPOs confined at the
Cook County Detention Home, the great majority were discharged following
an investigation and never appeared in juvenile court. In 1926, for example,
the Detention Home admitted 7,115 alleged delinquents, but the juvenile
court only heard 2,265 delinquency cases. Moreover, 43 percent of all
children detained were released within two days. (71) This rapid-fire
turnaround seemed to function more to reprimand children than to facilitate
inquiry into the underlying causes of their delinquency, as the juvenile court
was nominally designed to do. As Harrison A. Dobbs, Superintendent of the
Detention Home, explained, "The Police Department assignment to the
Juvenile Court has cooperated excellently in the removal of children [from
the Detention Home, but] the great difficulty appears to be in the re gulation
of intake.... Certainly it is a dangerous technique...which places the child in
one or two days of detention and then offers a release without thorough
study and investigation." (72)
The LAPD likewise exercised extraordinary discretionary authority in
determining whether children should be held in detention. Formally, the Los
Angeles County Juvenile Court and its Probation Department, not the
LAPD, decided whether to confine a juvenile prior to his or her court
hearing. No child could be detained for a lengthy period of time without an
order from juvenile court. When juveniles were taken into custody,
probation officers were required to visit them within twelve hours, begin an
investigation, and present a written recommendation to the court for
approval as soon as possible; only then could a child legally be detained.
(73) In practice, however, the LAPD made the detention decision. When the
police arrested a youth and petitioned him to juvenile court, the LAPD's
juvenile officers also recommended whether or not to detain him. In 1940,
juvenile court officials followed the police recommendation in 96 percent of
boys' cases. (74) In effect, the court rubber-stamped the cops' judgment;
juven ile court formally decided which boys to detain, but the police largely
controlled the decision.
Three basic detention options were available. First, the police and juvenile
court could decide to release a child to his or her family until his court
hearing. Second, they could place a child in the Los Angeles County
Detention Home (a.k.a., "Juvenile Hall"). Operating in a secure, modernized
facility opened in 1928, Juvenile Hall accepted both boys and girls up to age
18, segregating them by sex and, to the extent possible, by age. Third, the
police and courts could also place boys between 16 and 18 in Los Angeles
County Jail, in a small wing separate from the regular adult population. (75)
Although the LAPD claimed to consider the question of detention very
closely--its spokesmen asserted in 1937 that "detention under any
circumstances may be definitely harmful"--they nonetheless recommended
detention for 61 percent of boys whom they petitioned to juvenile court in
1940. (76) Juvenile court implemented those recommendations, detaining 37
percent of the total in Juvenile Hall and 24 percent in the County Jail. (77)
Juvenile Court kept boys in detention for periods of time that were relatively
short, but still substantial enough to impact young lives, particularly if the
boys were in school or held jobs. Boys were held in County Jail for an
average of 16 days from their arrest to their court hearings; only 9 percent
stayed for less than a week. Boys were detained in Juvenile Hall even
longer, averaging over 22 days from the time of their arrest to their court
hearings; only 5 percent stayed in Juvenile Hall for less than a week. (78)
The use of detention varied significantly with a boy's offense. The police
and juvenile court detained only 35 percent of boys who committed
misdemeanor petty theft, and instead released the remainder to their parents
or guardians to await their hearings. (79) Boys accused of burglary were
treated with greater severity; 64 percent were detained in spite of the fact
that over half were under age 15. (80) Perhaps due to their young ages,
however, only 10 percent of burglars were sent to County Jail. Instead, 54
percent were detained in Juvenile Hall. (81) Finally, the police relied more
on County Jail to detain boys who posed a physical threat to others. Fifty
percent of boys arrested for offenses against persons were held in County
Jail (as compared to 22 percent of boys accused of any other offense). (82)
For example, seventeen-year-old Lee Reynoso, arrested for assaulting
anxother youth with a brick outside a party, was detained in County Jail for
14 days prior to his court hearing. Although the juvenile cou rt ultimately
granted Reynoso probation, holding him in detention for two weeks kept
him off the streets, gave him a chance to cool down, and, with any luck,
gave him enough of a taste of incarceration to deter him from further
violence. (83)
Boys' prior behaviors and neighborhood reputations also influenced police
decisions on detention. The more prior contacts a youth had had with police
or juvenile court, the more likely he was to be detained upon commission of
a new offense. Boys who were released immediately after arrest, for
example, averaged only 0.8 priors, whereas boys whom the police detained
in Juvenile Hall and County Jail averaged 1.3 and 1.4 priors, respectively.
Although many factors influenced how many prior police contacts a boy
had, priors represented a measure of the regularity of a youth's misbehavior
and a concrete basis for determining whether detention was appropriate.
More arbitrary factors like boys' attitudes also shaped detention decisions.
As a rule, boys whom the LAPD arrested were extremely cooperative.
Investigating officers described 80 percent of the bays they interviewed as
being more-or-less cooperative. (84) If boys cooperated, the police were
often more sympathetic to them. For example, when 13-year-old Joshua
Goldman was arrested for stealing a car, investigating officer L.M. Lake was
so impressed with his honesty that he wrote, "this boy is very courteous and
truthful and seems to be intelligent." Likewise, "both parents were very
cooperative." As a result, Lake allowed Goldman to stay with his parents
while he awaited his hearing in spite of the severity of his offense.
Ultimately, the juvenile court placed him on probation. (85)
In contrast, boys who did not cooperate faced harsher treatment. The police
requested detention in 74 percent of cases involving boys wham they labeled
uncooperative, in contrast to 58 percent of boys they considered cooperative.
(86) In addition, boys considered uncooperative were slightly more likely to
be held in County Jail (31 percent of uncooperative boys vs. 23 percent of
cooperative boys). (87) Sixteen-year-old Mitchell Posada, for example, fit
almost all the criteria leading to detention in County Jail. Accompanied by a
look-out, Posada had broken into the Norfolk Street School by shattering
two panes of glass and climbing in through a window to steal a $25.00
radio. Arrested following a lengthy investigation, the police detained Posada
in County Jail. Not only had he committed felony burglary, he also had a
history of two prior arrests. Furthermore, he "steadfastly denied the charge,"
"he was not cooperative in any way," and he "is the leader of a gang of
tough Mexican boys who live in the neighborh ood."
Not surprisingly, the police detained him in County Jail for 10 days before
the juvenile court heard his case and placed him in a medium-security
Forestry Camp outside the city. (88)
Detention was the most important mechanism by which the police exercised
authority over young offenders. To a certain extent, the use of detention
followed regular patterns determined by age and severity of offense. Police
were more likely to lock up 16 year olds who committed robbery than 12
year olds who committed petty theft. However, the police also utilized wideranging discretion in determining whether to detain boys, weighing subtle
factors such as boys' prior histories, attitudes, and demeanors. Via detention,
the police imposed harsh punishment on persistently delinquent boys before
the juvenile court had a chance to hear their cases.
Conclusion
Analyzing the role of the police in the juvenile justice system represents a
starting point for understanding how youthful misbehavior--and, indirectly,
public behavior as a whole--was regulated in late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century American cities. Historians have hardly begun to explore
what happened to children and adolescents at the lowest layer of the juvenile
justice "wedding cake." In fact, urban police exercised extensive and wideranging authority over young offenders in three key ways.
First, the police performed a filtering function, determining which problems
could be decided informally and which needed to be pushed up to the next
higher layer of the "wedding cake." The extent of this practice varied from
city to city, but the result was that police largely decided which boys would
appear in juvenile court and on what charges. In Chicago, only a small
percentage of cases ever reached that city's pioneering juvenile court
because the police resolved the vast majority of investigations themselves.
Second, the police regulated juvenile behavior on their own, primarily by
means of discretionary targeting of young potential offenders. Before the
creation of juvenile court, the turn-of-the-century Detroit police rounded up
boys and arrested them for petty offenses, using the process to reprimand
them, but then frequently diverted them away from formal punishment in
criminal courts. In the years following the creation of juvenile courts and of
police professionalization, police often came to prioritize fighting crime
over maintaining order or reforming offenders. Thus, between 1930 and
1940, the police in Los Angeles increasingly concentrated on arresting boys
for felony offenses more so than for petty crimes, focusing on minority
youth and on auto theft in particular. Arrest practices were influenced less
by the preventive and rehabilitative goals of juvenile court than by the
changing priorities of the police themselves.
Third, the police exercised unseen power within the juvenile justice system
itself by determining whether or not children should be detained. As in Los
Angeles, they imposed short-term, punitive incarceration on juveniles that
supplemented whatever disposition courts might later determine was
appropriate. Rather than simply consigning delinquents to the courts, the
police often preferred to take matters into their own hands, using their
discretionary authority to determine when and how youth were to be
disciplined.
In short, considering juvenile justice in terms of a wedding cake model
reveals that the juvenile court was only part of much larger legal and
administrative systems. Many of the routine--but critical--decisions within
these systems were made by the police. On their own and in tandem with
juvenile courts, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the police made
the juvenile justice system run. Further research into the history of juvenile
justice should focus less on juvenile courts in isolation, and more on the
police and other institutional actors in the complex process of regulating
adolescent crime and delinquency.
David Wolcott, "'The Cop Will Get You': The Police and Discretionary
Juvenile Justice, 1890-1940"
While urban police are the public officials who most directly regulate
juvenile crime and delinquency, their work has rarely been considered in
histories of juvenile justice. Most studies concentrate on Progressive-era
reform and juvenile court, not how kids got in trouble and entered the
judicial system in the first place. This essay addresses that gap. Focusing on
everyday interactions between police and disorderly youth in Chicago,
Detroit, and Los Angeles, it demonstrates how the exercise of discretionary
authority by the police shaped juvenile justice, both before and after the
creation of juvenile court. First, police performed a filtering function,
deciding which complaints against children and teenagers to handle at their
own discretion and which to refer to court. Second, the police regulated
adolescent behavior on their own by targeting potential offenders for arrest
based on the perceived problems of the day (larceny and truancy in turn-ofcentury Detroit, auto theft in Depression-era Los Angeles). Third, the police,
not the courts, decided whether or not to detain arrested youth prior to court
hearings. Thus, the police largely determined the intake of the juvenile court
and could discipline young offenders in their own fashion regardless of the
outcome of a case.