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Fiscal policing—raising government revenue from citizens through fines, fees, and asset forfeitures—isn’t a modern phenomenon. Many legal historians trace it to the late 1970s, when cities faced a broad decline in federal and state aid; others point to earlier origins in the antebellum South’s slave patrols. But new research by Duke Law professor Mara R. Revkin and Gage Gramlick JD/LLM ’28 suggests a different origin story: fiscal policing was a core function of the Washington, D.C. police department since its founding in the first year of the Civil War. 

In The Civil War Origins of Fiscal Policing: Evidence from the District of Columbia, Revkin and Gramlick show that the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia began generating revenue in its very first year, reported a net surplus three years later, and continued to turn a profit after the war ended. Revkin says the agency’s success shows how an institution created in wartime used the conditions of war, including a constrained federal budget, to demonstrate its value and justify its continued existence.

“The Civil War had this really powerful effect of creating the need for a police force in the first place, and then accelerating its growth,” said Revkin, a professor of law and political science at Duke University whose research interests include armed conflict, peacebuilding, transitional justice, policing, and property law.

Civil war brings general chaos and population upheaval, creating opportunities for crime and violence and demand for policing, Revkin explained. Once a law enforcement agency is established, its ability to extract revenue from civilians by levying fines for discretionary charges (such as public drunkenness or disorderly conduct) lends it further legitimacy—and makes it valuable to the federal government as a source of revenue at a time when public coffers are depleted by the costs of war. This, in turn, allows a force to grow and request additional funding for amenities like station houses and higher salaries that burnish its standing even more, Revkin said.

That was the case for the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia, one of the nation’s first federally created forces. It was established by Congressional statute in August 1861, less than four months after the Civil War started, “in direct response to the population surge, jurisdictional uncertainty, and disorder that the war had already produced in the capital,” Revkin and Gramlick write. A surprising finding was that a substantial share of disorderly events involved Union soldiers, who made up 25.9% of arrests in 1862, the force’s first full year. 

The article is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original dataset compiled from the Metropolitan Police Board’s annual reports from 1862 to 1877—the first empirical analysis of these records—together with digitized newspaper accounts, congressional and city-council debates, and Board correspondence. 

Revkin started the project in 2021 as the pandemic put her international research projects on hold and resumed it five years later after conversations with Gramlick, who wrote his undergraduate and master’s thesis on a related topic and brought new insights to the role of soldiers in the political economy of fiscal policing in Washington, D.C. In particular, he noticed that while soldiers accounted for a large share of arrests, they generated no revenue because the police transferred them back to military authorities rather than fining them. 

"Many soldiers knew the draft meant death, so they fled to Washington, either as a respite from the frontline or to defect," Gramlick said. "In D.C. they drank copiously, frequented brothels, and generally caused chaos. The soldiers needed policing. And the police needed money.” 

While the D.C. police didn’t fine soldiers, it did fine civilians. The department started generating revenue from the start, collecting $32,532 in 1862 and nearly doubling that to $61,944 in 1865, when the Metropolitan Police Board reported its first net surplus to Congress. That profit was driven by an increase in fine cases from 31.9% of all arrests in 1862 to 43.4% in 1865. And it was rewarded: In 1866, Congress approved the hiring of an additional 50 officers, increasing the force to 200. 

The board “quickly recognized that surplus revenue from fines, forfeitures, and licensing fees was the performance metric most legible and persuasive to Congress and the city councils that controlled its budget—more so than improvements in public safety, which were harder to achieve and measure,” the authors write.

Targeting those who could pay

Analyzing Metropolitan Police reports from 1862 to 1877, and supplementing the data with accounts from newspaper articles, meeting records, and correspondence, Revkin and Gramlick found the police seemed to issue fines strategically, targeting those who could pay. 

“If you think about the efficiency and logic of policing, you don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort arresting people who are not going to be able to pay fines,” Revkin said.

Revkin and Gramlick hope their work inspires further research into fiscal policing in other cities with comparable archives to help determine whether the D.C. police department experience was unique and, more broadly, shed light on the effect of war on the development of such institutions. 

Revkin, who has conducted extensive research on post-conflict peacebuilding, transitional justice, and reconciliation in the Middle East and Africa, says the U.S. shares much with other countries that have overcome civil war—including the potential reemergence of previous internal divisions that were never fully resolved.

“The U.S. is a case where transitional justice never happened, and I think that’s part of why we see such high levels of political polarization today,” Revkin said.