Mandatory Foot Patrols

            In light of the current brouhaha about mandatory police department foot patrols to combat increasing violent crime -- much of which takes the form of drive-by shootings these days-- it might be useful to remember that this is not the first time the subject has come up.

            After several decades of moderate rates of criminal violence, crime in San Francisco, as measured by the homicide rate, began to ratchet upwards about 1910. Of major concern, not just in San Francisco but around the nation, was an unprecedented increase in armed robberies and robbery homicides.

            Prior to that time, foot patrolmen were reasonably effective in combating various types of street crime in America’s walking cities. Crime was generally a local matter and the foot beat officers knew everyone on their beats, including predatory criminals. 

            There were problems to be sure. Isolated on their sometimes remote beats, the officers were often the victim of hoodlum assaults. That problem was addressed by the late nineteenth century introduction of  telephone call box systems and horse-drawn patrol wagons which permitted an officer to call his station when in need, and summon reserve forces to assist him. Such innovations worked pretty well into the early decades of the twentieth century when crime began again to soar.

In reporting on national crime conditions at that point, a local newspaper listed as one of the reasons for the crime wave: “The inability of the police to cope with the increasing use of high-powered automobiles for the escape of bandits, and a more general use of death dealing weapons.” Sound familiar?

What the paper was reporting on was a profound change in the nature of predatory crime which has influenced the way police respond to criminal violence down to the present. With the introduction and proliferation of individually owned automobiles, criminals obtained a heretofore unimagined mobility, allowing them to pull a robbery and be well on their way before officers, almost all of whom were on foot, even knew that a crime had been committed. Police departments responded in the early decades of the twentieth century. by equipping themselves with automobiles. But prior to the advent of radio communications, the vehicles were often positioned at station houses from which they were dispatched in response to calls for service, much like the patrol wagons that preceded them.

Depending as it did upon telephoned notification from the public that a crime was in progress, followed by a telephone call from police headquarters to a district station so that a car could be dispatched, the system was only marginally effective. The culprits could still be on their way before the police mobilized to respond.

In response to a 1919 crime wave, San Francisco Police Chief David White ordered a change. Instead of keeping the vehicles standing by in the stations, he ordered them out to proactively patrol the streets from sunset to sunrise. Next, the department established mobile "shotgun squads," teams of shotgun-armed detectives who prowled the city in automobiles on the watch for emerging problems, with orders to keep in frequent telephone contact with their headquarters.

With the introduction of radio communications in the early 1930s, the radio patrol system, with radio cars dispatched from a central location in response to citizens’ calls for help – generally the same system we have today-- was pretty much in place.

Major declines in predatory street crime can be tracked almost perfectly against the successive introduction of improvements in vehicular patrol practices, and – correspondingly -- the decline in emphasis on foot patrols.

As we now embrace “community policing,” the current panacea for crime fighting, which revives the concept of the nineteenth-century foot patrolman as a day-to-day part of the community, this “militarization” of police departments in the 1920s is seen as having gone down the wrong path.

That is all well and good. But it is useful to remember that the police departments in the 1920s were confronted with a very real problem of motorized robbery gangs against whom the “community policing” techniques then in vogue were ineffective, and it was only by going mobile and engaging the bandits directly that officers dealt with them effectively.

In the current situation, there is a way to blend the various types of patrol in a way that best serves the needs of the public, but that should be an executive decision, best made by those who are familiar the various elements necessary to make a sound choice, and most certainly not in a politically charged legislative environment.

Retired Deputy Chief Kevin Mullen is the author of The Toughest Gang in Town: Police Stories from Old San Francisco. See also www.SanFranciscoHomicide.com.