Policing the Southern City
Subtitle: New Orleans, 1805-1889
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
Published: January 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9780807120460
Subjects: American history; Criminal investigation & detection; Local history; Police & security services; c 1800 to c 1900; Police; Louisiana - Local History; Police Science; History; History: American; USA; United States - State & Local - General; 19th century; Louisiana; New Orleans; Police administration
Description: In this first book-length study of the police in a nineteenth-century southern city, Dennis C. Rousey demonstrates that the distinction of introducing the first major reform of the traditional colonial police system belongs not to any of the large northeastern cities in the mid-1800s, as is generally understood, but to Deep South cities of a much earlier period.

As early as the late 1700s, Rousey argues, southern cities, including New Orleans, developed military-style municipal police forces to deal with their large concentrations of slaves, making the southern concept of the role of police markedly different from that of the North, whose forces at the time consisted mainly of unarmed constables and night watchmen.

Rousey's examination reveals a great deal about the city itself - its complex ethnic and racial traditions, its fluctuating economy, its politics, and its judicial organization and standards. A wealth of comparative data from Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile places the New Orleans police force within the context of law enforcement systems of this period this period throughout the Deep South.