The militarization of american policing: Enduring metaphor for a shifting context

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, many Progressive police reformers developed what came to be known as the military analogy to promote the professional model of police reform. The Progressives, social and political reformers active between the 1890s and early 1900s, wanted to clean up corrupt cities, and police forces seemed a logical place to focus their efforts; the military analogy’s model and its accompanying rhetoric provided an apparently quick-fix, depoliticized framework to rid police forces of graft and corruption, and remold police into model agencies to maintain law and order in American cities. The concept applied military-style organization, structure, practice, and purpose to the professional model of policing. Furthermore, professional policing emphasized decentralized local organization rather than national centralized authority, which had been popular in Europe but did not articulate well with the American tradition of localism.