Standards of Dress. The police. A semi topical post

 

 Chicago Mounted Police, 1907.

I've done threads on standards of dress from time to time, as part of the general them of this page of tracking changes in the last century.  Probably the most specific one I did was on clerical dress, with most being of a more general nature. This is one of the specific ones, police dress.

I had intended to do one on service dress, but it's not really possible as that would include military uniforms which need their own category.  Indeed, that's several threads as the dress of the various services depart from each other, so we'll take up police dress by itself.  We intended to do this for some time now, but this is oddly topical due to the riots going on in Ferguson Missouri, which is reported on the news as being a "town", which it is, but it's a town that's a suburb of St. Louis.

Now, I'm not really going to comment on the Ferguson riots, and couldn't if I wished to as its one of those stories I haven't follows.  Wyoming is a long ways from there, and the news coming out of there is very foreign to us here in many ways. But it does tap into the topic here, and in a way to this topic nationwide, as apparently one of the things that happened in Ferguson is that the police came into the the distressed area with military equipment, and a military appearance, which relfects a nationwide trend that deserves some attention.

So, police uniforms.

I don't know when the first police adopted uniforms actually, but it's much more recent in general than people would suppose.  Indeed, police themselves are a more recent phenomenon that people suppose, and generally if we go back much past the mid 19th Century we tend to find that most policing was done by sheriffs, who have a different relationship to the sovereign than the police do.  Sheriff's are commissioned in a specific manner that really attaches them to the courts, or did, and sheriffs have not uniformly had uniforms at all, up until quite recently.  Policemen, on the overhand, tend to be a uniformed body and they're generally the law enforcement arm of municipal corporations.

American policemen have, traditionally, been dressed in blue uniforms.  The reason is that when New York City, which had one of the earliest and largest police forces in the United States, went to uniform its officers for the first time it relied upon the experiences of its members, who were largely Civil War veterans.

 

 Classic scene of urban policy.  New York mounted policemen, 1905.

New York had a large police force (and still does).  In the 1860s and 70s, a very large number of those men had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and the police uniform they adopted strongly resembled the last uniform they'd worn.  Indeed, not only did they rely upon the Army's uniform for inspiration, but they relied upon the Army for inspiration for almost everything at that time.  Tack for horses and firearms were also military inspired.  In terms of uniforms, that put New York's police force in blue wool trousers and frock coats, just as the Army's more formal uniform of the same period featured both as well.

Other police forces followed suit, and the blue wool frock coat and blue trousers became the American standard for police forces.  It's important to note that this was and is the American standard.  Other countries which began to uniform police had their own traditions and they tended not to follow the American tradition in regards to police dress.

 

 Typical early 20th Century police uniforms.  For the most part, these officers are dressed in blue wool, although they're wearing a type of coat referred to as a "sack" coat.  The sack coat was also an Army item originally, adopted by the U.S. Army during the Civil War to supplant the frock coat in field conditions, where the sack coat was more practical.  These men also wear a military inspired cap, reflecting the kepi style adopted by the Army in the later period of the 19th Century.  Some urban police forces adopted helmets in this same period, following the U. S. Army which adopted a Prussian style helmet for dress purposes in the 1870s.

While never identical to the uniform worn by the U.S. Army, in the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century, basic items very much followed the Army's patterns. Frock coats and sack coats were uniform standards.  Officers hardly ever appeared without a coat.  For caps, some police forces adopted the Prussian style helmet adopted by the Army in the 1870s, and others wore the late pattern Army kepi in to the early 20th Century.  At the same time, however, police uniforms featured distinctive features identifying the wear as a policeman and not a soldier. Early on, they never featured rank insignia of any kind, unlike the Army's uniforms. And they fairly uniformly featured a large badge identifying the policeman as an officer of the law.

 

New York mounted police in action, anarchist riot, 1908.

That set the standard of American police uniforms for decades, and it was an American pattern.  North of the border the national police, the NWMP which was formed in the 19th Century, based their uniform coloration on that of the early 19th Century British Army.  I.e, red.  South of the border the various Mexican police had their own colors and styles.  In the United Kingdom, when police came to be formed, they also wore blue, but in other locations styles were different, such as in Germany where policemen came to wear green.

 Washington D. C. mounted police, 1925.

In the early 20th Century the police, like the Army, wore coats that buttoned to the collar, and by the early 20th Century most police forces had adopted the Army's wheelhouse cap in blue as a police cap.  Helmets were abandoned.  Still, the large badges remained evident and by that time had come to be the identifier for individual policemen, with the policeman receiving a numbered badge as a rule.

 

Washington D. C. motorcycle policeman, 1932.

In the 1930s, when the Army went to an opened collared coat, with shirt in tie, in one of he worst field uniforms ever thought of for Army field service, police forces generally followed suit.  Most policemen then wore, on a daily basis, a wool coat with an open collar as well as a blue shirt with a blue tie.

Classic police officer uniform, captain of Washington D. C. police in 1930s, in a uniform typical for police from the 1930s through the 1970s in many locations.

Following World War Two the police uniform remained largely unchanged for decades.  One small change was that as most policemen came to be patrol officers, in cars, most forces abandoned the wool opened collared coat for regular officers and they normally wore, in warm weather, simply blue shirt and blue tie.  This was common by the 1950s.  In colder weather they almost all had jackets based on Air Force flight jackets, generally in blue, although some police force's, such as New York's, issued a leather flight jacket for cold weather use.  Here again, I suppose, they were following a trend first developed by the miltiary, although leather jackets came into common civilian use during the 1920s as well.

 Sheriff Of McAlester Oklahoma, 1930s. This sheriff is attired in a fashion typical of this and prior eras.  I.e., no uniform at all.

One thing I haven't noted, in all of this, is the uniform of other U.S. police forces, the most common of which are sheriff's departments.  For much of their history, U.S. sheriff's departments basically didn't have a uniform.  Sheriff's and their deputies were simply armed and carried a badge.  That's about it.  Starting about the turn of the century however, some sheriff's started wearing uniforms closely based on military uniforms, including their coloring.  It wasn't universal, however, and by mid 20th Century you'd often find the actual Sheriff simply wearing a coat and tie.  Deputies started to be issued uniform shirts, and sometimes uniforms, in this time frame, alhtough exactly when I'm not sure.  Post World War Two khaki became the common color for Sheriffs, with most Sheriff's departments adopting a khaki uniform shirt closely based on the World War Two officers khaki shirt.  Flight jacket type jackets also started to come in about this time.

Federal law enforcement officers, on the other hand, have mostly lacked a uniform for most of their history, although their history is fairly short.  There were Federal Marshall in the 19th Century, but their only identifier was a badge.  The FBI of mid 20th Century fame, and even up today for hte most part, dressed in business attire.  In the 1920s and 30s the use of "boaters" for hats was so common amongst FBI agents that the joke was that this was part of their uniform.  In recent years, however, this has changed so that Federal law enforcement officers do have a uniform in some instances, more of which will be mentioned in a moment.  In terms of daily wear, the Federal law enforcement officers most likely to wear a uniform are border agents and officers of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, both of which wear what we might regards as rural styles, the former somewhat recalling a sheriff's office and the latter one of a type that's common with a game and fish agency.

On game and fish agencies, these officers likewise didn't often have uniforms early on and it seems today there is a fair amount of variety in them.  The Wyoming Game & Fish at some point in the 20th Century adopted a uniform that was to make their officers visible in the game fields, the same being a red shirt in the era when read, rather than blaze orange, was the required color for big game hunters.  Other than that, Wyoming's game wardens simply wore blue jeans and a cowboy hat, both of which were official proscribed for them.

Well, what about now? This is a bland story, right?

Well, to some extent, this has been in the news recently, and the reason for that has to do with the appearance, in part, of the police.

How exactly it happened I can't say, but starting off about some ten or fifteen years ago, police departments started to acquire a lot of military equipment, and when they did, they also acquired a military look.  It really started some time prior to that, when they started to form "special", ie., SWAT, teams of special response groups, for particularly dicey scenarios, but its really gone from there.

These units within police forces, which in some cases seem to constitute entire police forces, bring a very military, i.e., combat troop, appearance to a lot of police forces, and that's not a good thing.

Policemen, like lawyers, or doctors, or teachers, are one of those occupations where people have a certain expectation of appearance, and in turn react accordingly.  If they look professional, but separate, but also part of us, as the classic "Adam 12" type policeman did, they receive a certain response.  On the other hand, soldiers are also a profession where people have a certain expectation of appearance and react accordingly.  If policemen look like combat troops, it's hard not to imagine them that way, and for most people, that creates a certain atmosphere of fear.

On military trends, police forces have gone from having no rank insignia to having the full military range of it, which also strikes me as odd.  Some big city police chiefs now wear the same insignia that Generals in the Army do; four stars. That's a bit much.  At one time, the police chief tended to wear suit and tie, which really sends a better message.

On the flip side of this, I'd note, some police forces have also become very casual in their daily appearance, which also isn't a good thing, in my view.  I've seen polo shirts introduced into policing, which I'm not sure what I think of.  If I were a policeman, I'd probably like it, so I guess I'm not complaining about it.  The Wyoming Game & Fish recently introduced polo shirts, I've noted, for some of its personnel, although I'm not sure if wardens are amongst them or not.  And I've seen blue polos in use for other law enforcement officers.

One thing along these lines I don't like is the adoption of baseball caps, but that seems to be something that is just so pervasive as to be inevitable.  They don't look professional for policeman, although I have less of a problem with them for game wardens and similar officers.

At any rate, while this would seem to be a minor matter, it really isn't for those enforcing the law, and those whose communities are being policed. The militarization of police seems to have gone too far, for example, and perhaps the trend towards casual has a bit as well.