In collaboration with our regional club partners, we encourage you to join the Columbia Club of Chicago and Dr. Chris Stacey for the first presentation in a series of three on the history of Chicago’s Police Department. Chicago’s early police force carried out functions that service organizations would later provide. Yet, over time the role of the police department in the city changed dramatically. By the late nineteenth century, Chicago was the most violent city in the country. This presentation looks at how concepts of order, class, and ethnicity intersected with organizations that set police policy, municipal patronage, attempts at civil service reform, the Protestant elites’ desire to regulate working-class behavior, and the formation of a law-and-order consensus. We will explore how various world views and local political, business, and cultural practices shaped the way policing took place in the streets of Chicago. We will examine a set of significant events to determine the influence of a large, powerful and armed institution on the daily lives of Chicagoans.

Events: Creation of a profession police force in the 1850s, Lager Beer Riot of 1855, 1867 Labor Strikes, Great Fire of 1871, 1886 Haymarket Bombing, and the 1894 Pullman Strike.

Please register through the Columbia Club of Chicago website to obtain the zoom link.