History of Violent Crime in America “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.” ----John F. Kennedy ( ), U.S. president

American Colonies During the 1700s, robbery and other violent crimes were already troubling the English colonies of the New World. Land was growing scarce. The English were fighting a series of wars and demanding high taxes from the colonists to pay for them. Colonists suffered high rates of unemployment and poverty. Crime flourished in this environment.

Adding to the problem, criminals from England’s jails, both men and women, were deported to America as indentured servants. Before the American Revolution, more than 50,000 of these lawbreakers had arrived. Some ran away immediately and joined the growing criminal population.

Colonial Philadelphia Philadelphia, one of America’s first important cities, was known as the “crime capital of the colonies” during the early 1700s. Robbery, rape, murder, and arson occurred with frightening regularity.

Colonial New York City By the mid1700s, New York City was challenging Philadelphia for the dubious title of “crime capital.” Its population was exploding and along with that came a rise in violent crime. A New York newspaper editorial complained, “It seems to have now become dangerous for the good People of this City to be out late at night without being sufficiently strong or well armed.”

In the countryside and on the frontier, gangs of thieves and robbers preyed on farmers. Gangs in North Carolina backwoods provoked citizens to take the law into their own hands. In 1767, citizens formed the first American vigilante group, which attacked and punished gang members.

Crime in the 1800s

During the 1800s, many American cities grew rapidly. Workshops and new industries attracted new immigrants from England and Northern Europe. By 1800, New York had passed Philadelphia and Boston to become the biggest city in the country, with 60,000 people. Further waves of immigrants came to escape famines and wars in Europe.

Many of the new immigrants had to squeeze into crowded tenements in urban areas. Cities like New York gained a reputation for overcrowding and criminal violence.

In the decade before the Civil War, more than 3,000 homeless children roamed the streets of New York. Many of them became pickpockets and street robbers.

Before the Civil War, few cities in America had anything like a police department to keep order. Boston had a night watch, but it was mainly a fire lookout. Watchmen were afraid to enter many neighborhoods at all. In some places, vigilantes were the only organized resistance to criminals.

More murders took place in New York than London, a far bigger city. One English traveler wrote, “Probably in no city in the civilized world is life so fearfully insecure.” The same fear plagued other cities. In Philadelphia during the mid-1800s, bands of robbers began to prey on wealthy citizens, stripping them of their cash.

In the West, men often wore guns wherever they went. Horse and cattle theft became a major problem. Los Angeles was only a sleepy village of about 8,000, but in one 15-month period in the 1850s, 40 murders occurred. In much larger San Francisco to the north, there were entire neighborhoods where few dared go after dark.

Ethnic Urban Gangs In many cities, jobless immigrants formed violent gangs in ethnic slum neighborhoods. In Philadelphia, lower-class Irish and black groups formed gangs. With names like the Bleeders, Garroters, Rangers, Tormentors, and Killers, the gangs sometimes fought bloody battles on a spot known as the Battle Ground. Gang members as young as 10 carried clubs, knives, brass knuckles, and pistols. They attacked lone pedestrians, younger children, or members of other ethnic groups.

Ethnic Urban Gangs In New York, well-organized adult street gangs controlled the immigrant areas of Five Points and the Bowery. Made up mostly of young Irish immigrants, gangs called the Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, and Shirt Tails grew famous for mugging people. In the nearby Fourth Ward, the Daybreak Boys murdered 20 people between 1850 and Political parties recruited squads of toughs from these gangs to intimidate voters.

Ethnic Urban Gangs “Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York” view video.