In 1891 Bolton Rogers was appointed as chief of police in Seattle. In his report for the year, he includes this peculiar note to explain why he hadn't collected nearly as many fines as his predecessor: it was "the custom prior to my advent to collect fines once a month from all gambling houses and houses of prostitution, and in that way make the Police Department what was called "self-supporting," in other words turning the department into legal blackmailers, fining law breakers for breaking the law, and at the same time taking the fine as a license to allow them to continue to break the law."
Isn't this exactly what Michel Foucault was talking about in Discipline and Punish when he wrote that "the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency" (280)?
Rogers story is an interesting one. The mayor removed him from office just a few months after he wrote that report, because they didnt get along. Rogers bounced around for a while, started a private detective agency, was reappointed as chief of police, ran some gambling dens, then died of brain fever.
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Where do you find this stuff? The stories are interesting and I enjoy them but seriously. Do you rummage through century old files on purpose? I wouldn't even have the first clue about where to look for police reports from the 1800's in Australia. Heh.
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