Bruce Smith (1892-1955), police consultant and criminologist, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a banker and real estate operator. He was regarded as something of a rebel, even from his first collegiate experience at Wesleyan University. While there he delighted in rolling cannonballs down the main street and in firing a shotgun from his dormitory window. He was expelled in his senior year for publicly ridiculing the college chaplain because he had conducted a prayer that went on for more than seven minutes—Smith had clocked him with a stopwatch.
Moving on to Columbia University, presumably a more serious student, he earned his B.S. degree in 1914. One of his professors, Charles A. Beard, also director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, acted as his mentor and convinced him to remain at Columbia for graduate study. In 1916, Smith was granted both the LL.B. degree and the M.S. in political science. After graduation he worked with Beard at the Bureau of Municipal Research, later renamed the Institute of Public Administration.
That same year he was assigned to study the police department in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Unfamiliar with police operations, he wondered why he had been chosen. About the Harrisburg experience he reflected, ”That’s how I got into police work. I was dragged in squealing and protesting. I knew nothing about cops. Boy, how I hated to leave those actuarial tables.”
Soon World War I intervened, and as a second lieutenant Smith served in the U.S. Air Force from 1917 to 1919. The war over, he returned to the Institute of Public Administration and quickly rose to the position of manager, which he held from 1921 to 1928. During those hectic years, he acquired invaluable knowledge collaborating with the Missouri Association for Criminal Justice, the National Crime Commission, and the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice. From 1941 to 1946 and from 1950 to 1952, he was acting director of the institute; in 1954, he became director until his death, thus fulfilling the promise Charles Beard had seen in him.
Throughout the second half of his life, Smith was associated with so many commissions on the administration of justice and on law revision that it would take a catalog to enumerate them, and a topic to cite his many contributions. But the keystone of his career was his monumental work in surveying police departments in about fifty leading American cities and in eighteen states, in creating the Uniform Crime Reports (1930)—devised after an exhaustive study of Western European practices and adopted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and in writing several police treatises, most notably Police Systems in the United States.
Smith, who never wore a police uniform, nonetheless earned the respect of the cop on the beat. In such statements as this about protracted entrance exams, he championed the recruit: ”I don’t care if a rookie thinks the duke of Wellington is a man, a horse, or a smoking tobacco . . . . What counts is a man’s character.” His sympathy for the job of policing ran deep: ”Rarely does a major piece of police work receive the accolade of general approval …. The environment in which police must do their work is therefore certain to be unfavorable.” And he saw clearly the obstacles to improvement: ”No police force . . . is ever quite free of the taint of corruption; none succeeds in wholly repressing or preventing criminal acts, or in effecting arrests and convictions in any large portion of the total offenses reported; many are deeply involved in political manipulations of various kinds.” So he fought for better methods of selection and training of personnel, a different system of promotion, increased discipline, and severance from political control and the Civil Service Commission, to name a few of his reforms.
Furthermore, he encouraged police departments to give civilians the desk jobs, thereby returning police to the streets. Interestingly, as a consultant to the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, he advocated the same tactic; because of him, 350 colonels were reassigned from offices to field duty.
But Smith did not always meet with success. Even though he was mostly welcomed by police departments, revered by the officers, and acknowledged as an authority, he became a Sisyphus-like figure. In 1923, he made sweeping recommendations for reform of the New Orleans Police Department; in 1946, upon his return, he found almost the same disgraceful situation in the department as had appeared earlier—a disheartening deja vu. In another instance, fourteen years after analyzing the St. Louis Police Department, when asked for further guidance, he suggested reform measures nearly identical to the ones he had offered before since little had changed. Often, in the case of Smith, it seemed that his sound advice went too much against the grain for the entrenched police departments to carry out.
Smith contributed regularly to professional journals, both American and British. He wrote the standard articles on police for the topic Britannica, topic Americana, Collier’s topic, and the topic of Social Sciences. In tribute, O. W. Wilson wrote, ”Smith combined the best qualities of policeman, executive, statesman, and scholar.” He was married in 1915 to Mary Rowell; they had two children. Late in life Smith purchased a yacht—the Lucifer—and indulged his passion for sailing. While aboard the Lucifer he was stricken by a lung ailment, later dying in Southampton Hospital in New York of a heart attack. At the time of his death he was writing a topic about British police, whose organization he wanted to elucidate for American police. He died a young sixty-three.
