Soon after the Second World War ended, Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover announced that the war had placed law-enforcement agencies on a new footing. “As we look to the future, we should also consolidate our gains,” he declared. Before the war, police “had a big job to do,” but “a bigger one faces us today.” Hoover indicated that the United States would establish no national police force; however, he pronounced the scale of the problems police confronted now to be beyond the limit of any single jurisdiction or “local police agency.”1 The war posed major challenges for police leaders, including deficits of police labor (or “manpower,” as it was then called) during and after the war due to police joining the military, new training and mission integration with soldiers and military police, and crime fears attendant to war and demobilization.
As Hoover indicated, addressing the war's challenges transformed policing by creating the capacity and experiences to turn police professionalization—fostering political independence, rigorous training and discipline, and consistent reliance on science and technology—from a local aspiration into a national mandate.2 Before the war, policing remained stubbornly resistant to change, and there were hundreds of local, state, and regional police enclaves. Their distinctiveness eroded after the war. A single, national institutional milieu emerged. The wartime mobility of thousands of officers disrupted the scalar stability and hierarchy of policing. Globally scaled activity produced national cohesion among locally scaled institutional actors. By catapulting police around the globe into war-fighting roles against implacable civilizational foes, war created new imperatives of interagency cooperation among different law enforcement agencies and between the police and the military. Later, the Cold War struggle against the communist enemy revivified some of the global and martial self-understandings police had begun adopting during World War II, as well as the imperative of interagency cooperation. In the process, a more nationally scaled identity for police was institutionalized in newly invigorated fraternal and professional organizations; greater standardization of recruitment, training, equipment, and weaponry; and social theories of crime and political theories of subversion demanding new types of policing knowledge and coordination.