Atlanta’s contemporary police force first developed in the decade after the Civil War from the pre-war “City Marshall” office. After emancipation, Atlanta’s white leaders recognized that the City Marshall, which employed only a handful of deputies with a wide variety of duties, would be insufficient to govern the growing city that they hoped to create. On January 3, 1866, newly elected mayor James E. Williams told the city council that “suppression of crime . . . especially such as may be attributable to the changed station of the negro” should be a top priority. He argued that, without slavery, local government would have to take on the role of the plantation and control Black Georgians. “To this end,” he concluded, “it will be our highest duty—to have a police of the greatest possible efficiency. Upon this more than else depends the security of our persons and property, the good name and prosperity of our city.” Williams’s rhetoric would, in a sense, create the mold for generations of Atlanta’s white political leaders to come, who would as a matter of course connect white supremacist policing to economic growth and to Atlanta’s future as a shining example of the New South.
But change did not come immediately. Over the next eight years, Atlanta made piecemeal reforms to the City Marshall’s office, for example removing its duty to regulate weights and measures. Nevertheless, as the Savannah Daily Advertiser noted with some irony in 1871, Atlanta’s officers “receive a dollar for every offender they arrest, wear citizens’ clothes, and are poorly paid, which, considering that Atlanta is the chief city of the South, is not flattering.” A modern police force would not arrive until Atlanta received a new charter in 1874 that created the force that polices the city to this day.
The structure of the new police force answered the Savannah newspaper’s complaints. Policemen would now receive an increased salary, wear uniforms, and no longer receive fees for arrests. The most important change, however, was organizational. The new force was hierarchical, with a single police chief at the top, and devoted to discipline and to crime control. Although there was no legal requirement that police officers be white, the city did not hire its first Black policeman until 1948.
The police force grew in tandem with the city itself. In its first 15 years, the department expanded from 26 officers to 118, and Atlanta grew to be the largest city in Georgia and the second largest in the South. The city’s boosters frequently claimed that for Atlanta to become a regional leader, a strong police force was necessary to crack down on the crime that, in the words of the police chief, resulted from the fact that “our city is crowded with idle profligate negroes”—a statement legible within a white supremacist culture that promoted the racist stereotype that Black people are naturally idle, preferring crime to hard work.
After the creation of Atlanta’s modern police, arrests climbed rapidly, increasing 60 percent in the force’s first year. By 1900 the arrest rate for Black residents was roughly three times higher than that of their white counterparts. The disparity among women was even starker: Black women were approximately eight times as likely to be arrested as white women. The arrest rate for Black Atlantans peaked in 1901. That year, 11,502 Black men, women, boys, and girls were arrested, comprising 64.5 percent of total arrests. Atlanta’s Black population was approximately 36,000.