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History Of The Telegraph System

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Introduction From the night watch in Boston, to the present day policing, law enforcement has behind in the world of technology. As time rolled through the political era, professional era, and community-oriented era, police patrols would use the rapidly advancing technology in their favor. "Those were desperate times for policemen in a hostile country with unpaved streets and uneven sidewalks, sometimes miles from the police station, with little prospects of assistance in case of need.... It took nerve to be a policeman in those days," this was reported by Chief Francis O 'Neill of the Chicago Police Department in 1903. With only having a printing press and a multiple-shot revolver over a hundred years ago, the advancement in technology today has helped improve the policing methods in patrol quite significantly. However, technology would eventually out-run the police.
Political Era From the 1840s to around the 1920s, most police forces that had been established consisted of men who had been appointed for limited terms by local politicians. It was during the political era that in 1877, New York police started using the first form of communication known as the electronic telegraph to communicate long distances rapidly. Police officers were assigned a geographical area, known as a beat; that they would investigate while on duty. The telegraph system was a one-way form of communication originating in the police headquarters wherein an officer moved a dial with about

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