August Vollmer - Law Enforcement

Law Enforcement

In 1904, he won fame as a local hero after he leapt onto a runaway railroad freight car on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley and applied its brakes, preventing a disastrous collision with a passenger coach loaded with commuters at the Berkeley Station. This event led to his election as town marshal on April 10, 1905.

In 1907, Vollmer was re-elected town marshal. He was also elected president of the California Association of Police Chiefs, even though, by title, he was not yet a police chief himself. In 1909, Berkeley created the office of police chief, and Vollmer became the first to hold that office.

Drawing on his military experience, and his own research, Vollmer reorganized the Berkeley police force. Vollmer had discovered that very little literature existed in the United States on the subject of police work, so he located and read a number of European works on the subject, in particular, Criminal Psychology, by Hans Gross, an Austrian criminologist, and Memoirs of Vidocq, by Eugène François Vidocq, head of the detective division of the French police in Paris. He then set out on a program of modernization. He established a bicycle patrol and created the first centralized police records system, designed to streamline and organize criminal investigations. He established a call box network. And he trained his deputies in marksmanship.

In the ensuing years, Vollmer's reputation as the "father of modern law enforcement" grew. He was the first chief to require that police officers attain college degrees, and persuaded the University of California to teach criminal justice. In 1916, UC Berkeley established a criminal justice program, headed by Vollmer. At Berkeley, he taught O.W. Wilson, who went on to become a professor and continued efforts to professionalize policing, by being the first to establish the first police science degree at Municipal University of Wichita (now Wichita State University). This is often seen as the start of criminal justice as an academic field.

Vollmer was also the first police chief to create a motorized force, placing officers on motorcycles and in cars so that they could patrol a broader area with greater efficiency. Radios were included in patrol cars. He was also the first to use the lie detector, developed at the University of California, in police work. Vollmer supported programs to assist disadvantaged children, and was often criticized for his leniency towards petty offenders such as drunks and loiterers. He also encouraged the training and employment of female and African American police officers.