Book Review

For decades, historians like Lawrence Friedman have called for scholars to analyze the law "on the ground," asking their peers to transcend doctrinal history to describe how American public officials have enforced the provisions encoded in statutes and precedents. Those who agree with Friedman may or may not welcome Richard C. Lindberg's To Serve and Collect, a comprehensive popular history of the Chicago Police Department and the controversies that have dogged it since its origins in 1855. Though the book is full of amusing anecdotes that show the vast distance between law-library ideals and street realities, it may disappoint those desiring an innovative historical analysis of urban criminal justice.	1
Lindberg entertainingly describes the history of the Chicago police and the many temptations its officers have faced. Almost from its inception, the force granted protection to gamblers, pimps, and machine politicians, allowing crime bosses like Michael Cassius McDonald to control whole wards. He also explains how ethnic organizations like the Irish nationalist group, Clan Na Gael, influenced the department and guided advancement within its ranks. Lindberg highlights the picaresque qualities of his subject, and he relates tales of scandal and degradation too often absent from dry legal history. This fact perhaps accounts for the book's popularity (it has gone through multiple printings and has been reviewed in many popular magazines) and suggests one possible direction for legal historians seeking to expand their audience.	2
To Serve and Collect also discusses those reformers and opposition politicians who pushed the police to enforce the laws as written. Officials intermittently promised to de-politicize the force by making merit rather than connections the prerequisite for professional advancement. Grand juries routinely convened to purify the department of its most venal employees. Lindberg argues that such efforts hardly inhibited malfeasance; indeed, he shows that many police commissioners actually used calls for change to remove their political rivals. Real reform, he claims, came only in 1960 when Richard Daley appointed Orlando Wilson commissioner. To Serve and Collect ends with Wilson's reorganization of the force, yet, contrary to Lindberg's contention, this reshuffling did not differ entirely from its hollow predecessors. Perhaps the Chicago police became more "modern" under Wilson, but their behavior during the 1968 Democratic National Convention showed that they remained both brutal and political.	3
Historians studying criminal justice in Chicago and other cities will profit from Lindberg's comprehensive set of vivid and usually footnoted stories. But other scholars may question the book's usefulness. The book's style is anecdotal rather than analytical, and this can exhaust the patience of academic historians searching for a point. Indeed, rather than constructing an argument about police corruption, To Serve and Collect presents a titillating but familiar narrative of scandal and reform. Such a trajectory tends to presume that definitions of proper police behavior have remained constant since the nineteenth century, despite evidence to the contrary. Lindberg might have delved more deeply into the history of laws defining police corruption itself, explaining how cities decided to eliminate common practices such as tipping, which tended to smudge the line between graft and legitimate fees. Rather than openly siding with advocates of professionalization, he could have described the contested rise of a more formal and administrative police procedure, uncovering competing approaches to criminal justice. To Serve and Collect lacks this rigor, making it an enjoyable but limited work that provides meat for future research on criminal law and police misconduct.	4
Andrew Cohen Syracuse University

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