full-time policemen. It was the start of something extraordinary.
Berkeley has always been two towns joined at the hip. First came the commercial district of warehouses, working-class housing, and rough saloons clustered along the Bayshore. Soon after, the trustees of a small college in Oakland created a campus at the base of the Contra Costa hills, a public university to outshine the universities back east, partially funded by selling panoramic lots to middle-class householders. The prospect through the Golden Gate led one trustee to recall the line of Bishop Berkeley: "Westward the course of empire takes its way." Thus did Berkeley, famous for the proposition that objects exist only in the mind of God, give his name to what its founders hoped would be the "Athens of the Pacific." By the early twentieth century, the town of Berkeley was approaching its Athenian promise, without fully disengaging from its hard-luck neighbors.
Vollmer’s first move as marshal was to clean out the Chinese gambling dens. His logic was strategic; gamblers’ payoffs threatened to corrupt town politics. In his second year in office, the San Francisco earthquake struck. Vollmer organized an auxiliary force of 1,000 men (nearly every adult male in Berkeley) to maintain order among tens of thousands of refugees. He was reelected by an even larger majority. Then in 1909 he was appointed police chief, a post he held for the next twenty-three years, with only brief leaves of absence to transplant his methods to other cities. During those decades he introduced the various features of the "Berkeley system," the core tenets of American professional policing.
Though he was a workaday police chief in a university town rather than a social theoretician, Vollmer had a well-thought-out view of the police as guardians of democracy. He sought a middle ground between the narrow Anglo-Saxon view of the police as crime-fighters and the European continental view of the police as regulators of social life. Though he would have preferred his men to focus on property crime and personal violence, Vollmer came to recognize that it was more efficient to prevent crime, even if this meant inserting the police into the community’s messy life. The challenge was that most working-class Americans feared the police for their brutality, while the well-to-do considered them fools or knaves.
Vollmer’s lifelong goal was to dispel this blend of fear and contempt by raising the social, intellectual, and moral stature of police officers until they got the respect they deserved. This explains Vollmer’s embrace of scientific police work, his vaunted program of professionalization, and his rejection of police violence, corruption, and favoritism. It also meant doing something about America’s scandalous crime rate.
In the early twentieth century the rate of violent crime was four to ten times greater in America than Europe. Vollmer insisted that the police could not be blamed for this, yet he was determined to do better. The main obstacle was "politics," by which he meant the spoils system of the municipal machine: the way the police were hired, fired, or promoted on the basis of pull and patronage rather than competence. This explained why the police enforced the law violently and selectively; it gave them leverage to extract bribes and favors. Thomas Byrnes, New York’s notorious cop, is said to have coined the term "third degree"—perhaps a pun on his name—for his violent interrogations; and his colleague Captain Alexander Williams once boasted that there was more law in the end of policeman’s nightstick than in all the decisions of the Supreme Court.
Vollmer agreed that police officers had to exercise discretion; he just wanted them to enforce the law fairly and efficiently. Building on the reforms of Progressives like New York’s police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, Vollmer urged a managerial revolution in police work, one analogous to the revolution in