I thought I'd write a thread today on the history of policing children on the streets of Chicago, the subject of my PhD. Let's start in the late nineteenth century

Unsupervised children were everywhere on the streets of Chicago, these were mainly white and the children of European immigrants. They worked, played, and got into trouble outside.

Middle-class Americans worried that the street lives of these kids would lead them to delinquency and, in the words of progressive reformer Jane Addams, the “murky fire of crime”. American society itself seemed to be hanging in the balance.

However, these progressive reformers believed these children could be saved if only they could be protected from unsupervised street life. Thus, in the early 20th C Chicago became the home of child-saving. Note, much of this response was classist and anti-immigrant

But it was also focussed on providing organised recreation for children. Soon the city had a vast parks and playground system that Teddy Roosevelt called “one of the most notable civic achievements of any American city.”

At the same time, the new juvenile justice system criminalised much of children's street use. The new juvenile court law included in its definition of delinquency, for example, 'wandering about the streets in the night time without being on any lawful business'.

With the start of the Great Migration, it became increasingly clear that progressive child saving was limited to white children. Within the Black Belt, the city opened just one playground before 1931 and it had far poorer facilities than those in white immigrant areas.

Meanwhile, police and white communities worked together to keep black children out of white areas. In the years leading up to the race riot of 1919, for example, whites attacked black recreation seekers at eleven parks, playgrounds and beaches just outside the Black Belt.

While some park police actively engaged in anti-black violence, most simply did nothing to stop it. In one report, for example, park police officers at Washington Park looked on as a white gang assaulted two black girls in 1918.

As the city became increasingly diverse, especially with the arrival of Mexican immigrants, ideas about the environmental causes of delinquency declined in influence. By WW2, they had been largely replaced by theories of individual and inherent deviance.

As inner-city youth became more and more synonymous with minority youth, the urban child seemed increasingly outside the realm of “saving” and middle-class white Americans responded to black and brown youth’s corner culture with intense policing and urban flight.

In fact, as Tera Agyepong has shown, far from being redeemable, black children were cast as inherently unfixable delinquents from whom white society needed to be protected.