Boston Police Strike Essay

How did the Boston Police Strike impact police culture? Well just about when the strike sprang up in 1919, there was what was called the professionalization movement. What this movement did was it wanted to recreate and define specific ideas that needed to be addressed. The ideas that needed to be addressed were a part of what was the reform agenda. The reform agenda has six key points. Number one was to define policing as a profession, meaning that the police will publicly serve and protect their communities. Number two was to cut or eliminate the potential influence with politics that it had on policing. Number three is a big one in my opinion, but inserting or hiring the properly qualified chief executives to lead each police departments going forward.

Number five was addressed simply to manage the principles that go on in a police department. This set up a centralized command and control for the type of personnel they tend to acquire as years progress. Then there is the last idea of creating special units to do different tasks that sprang up as crime happened. As police departments experience different kinds of crimes different units were created to handle the specific types of crimes. Now this movement had its pros and cons. The one major pro I as well as we can take away from the movement was that its goal was to establish a standard for modern policing, but this movement ran into more cons than pros. From the textbook “The Police In America” it say that “The most dramatic expression of the new police subculture was the emergence of police unions” (Katz). Now this is where the Boston Police Strike emerges. Policing was sought to be a career and there was a high demand for a salary that would suit their needs and