Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the social history of crime an-long a variety of disciplines. This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets. This narrowed role hampered their ability to control crime, and, as modern social services developed and the police came increasingly to concentrate on crime control, they acquired a functional speciality at which they had never been particularly successful.

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Les historiens de la violence disposent dorénavant de douzaines, voire de centaines, de taux d'homicides de bonne qualité pour la plus grande partie de l'hémisphère occidental. Nous nous trouvons donc dans une situation qui, conformément à l'usage, implique d'entreprendre synthèse et généralisation. Un effort de ce type est méritoire et doit être poursuivi, mais il est temps de revenir à une recherche empirique beaucoup plus soigneuse, et les avancées significatives réalisées jusqu'ici devraient nous inciter à rehausser encore la qualité de nos recherches. Pour le dire simplement: si des recherches plus sophistiquées confirmaient les travaux antérieurs, ce serait positif. Si inversement, elles modifiaient nos résultats, nous devrions leur faire bonne figure et repenser nos grandes questions et nos analyses en conséquence. Historians of violence now have dozens, even hundreds, of high quality homicide rates for much of the Western world. We are now in a position which would, by custom, demand the beginning of synthesis and generalization. Such efforts are of merit and should continue, but it is time that we turn back to much more careful empirical research. Our substantive gains should give us the confidence to raise even higher the quality of our research. Simply put, if refined research efforts confirm previous work, this is comforting. On the other hand, if they change or modify findings, we should welcome the new results and rethink our big questions and analyses. T he study of personal violence has come a long way in the years since Ted Gurr and Alfred Soman wrote their path breaking essays synthesizing large bodies of scholarly work; the best internal critique of the oeuvre thus far has been articulated by Spierenburg 2. There are now hundreds of studies (over 300 according 1 Eric Monkkkonen is Professor at the University of California (Los Angeles). He is the author of five books on American cities, police, and crime. His most recent book is Murder in New York City (University of California Press, 2001), a study covering two centuries of homicides. Following his exhortations in this article, his research in progress is a reconstruction of age standardized homicide rates in the turn of the century (1900) United States. He holds joint appointments in the Departments of History and Policy Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). An earlier version of the paper was presented at the European Social Science History meeting, Amsterdam, April 2000. He is indebted to the panelists-Pieter Spierenburg, Manuel Eisner, Helmut Thome-and to the audience for comments which helped me sharpen some of the points. He wishes to give special thanks to David Eisenmann, M.D., and Susan Lambe, M.D. for their help in understanding the time to death data.

During the 20th century, both intentional and unintentional occupational police mortality rates were significantly greater in New York compared to London. These differences are likely from several socioeconomic, cultural, and occupational factors. The declines in police deaths in New York during the latter part of the 20th century indicate that at least some measures taken by the New York Police Department have been successful at significantly reducing the incidence of both intentional and unintentional police deaths.