Rioters and Vigilantes
Rioters and Vigilantes
This chapter presents an overview of the system of policing that existed in Baltimore during the early decades of the nineteenth century – before the city’s organization of a professional police force and the state’s introduction of a reformative penal system. It argues that Baltimore’s municipal government initially depended upon mobs of ordinary white men to police the city. Occasionally these men earned money for their policing, blurring the line between formal policing and vigilantism; occasionally these men ran amok, leading to riots. Whatever the case, by attempting to maintain order and combating crime, “good citizens” enacted their freedom in an otherwise unfree world. In early Baltimore, policing was above all a practice by which white men affirmed their political inclusion.
Keywords: Policing, Baltimore, Mobs, White Men, Vigilantism, Riots, Order, Crime, Citizen, Freedom
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