Police, zoning, and charities served middle-class self-protection from the poor
Evidence
I am suggesting, then, that this not-so-rich middle class group, growing in numbers and power during the period under consideration, were crucial to the emergence of the spatial order. 14 I am suggesting that many of the instruments which created and which now maintain that order-the police, zoning, “humanitarian” organizations-were and continue to be the instruments of this group. I am suggesting that there is nothing coincidental about the fact that the first modern police force was created in England in 1829,15 that in England and the United States, “humanitarian” concerns and zoning regulations were nineteenth and early twentieth century phenomena, and that this is the same period during which the middle class was struggling to differentiate and protect itself from the “dangerous classes.” — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 347
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Catches the reader’s broader thread that spatial/social control institutions are class instruments, echoing the moral-panic literature’s finding that elite moralizing reflects class identity signaling.
- SEED: An essay angle: police and zoning as forms of civil inattention made physical — the state apparatus encoding the middle class’s refusal to acknowledge the dangerous classes while pretending to public service.