The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

by Gary A. Haugen

In France, for instance, the foundations of policing were actually laid by the monarchy when Louis XIV created the office of Lieutenant-General of Police in 1667 with a broad portfolio of duties for addressing just about anything that was a source of disorder in Paris—lighting for dark streets, aid to beggars, food supplies, public health, and responding to crime in a growing city.37 On the one hand, the establishment of a centralized government office for addressing urban crime (nearly two hundred years before the Americans or British) produced pioneering innovations in policing (e.g., deterrent patrols, the police station, surveillance methods and tools).38 But it also became associated with the heavy-handed rule of the ancien régime and was substantially dismantled by the forces of liberty that blew through Paris with the French Revolution of 1789.39 Famously, Napoleon the Emperor would reassert the mandate and machinery of centralized “high policing” in Paris and throughout France, which would lead to a form of policing in the late nineteenth century that was very useful for regime survival and protecting the “respectable classes” but not much use (and frequently the source of much harm) for