Before Cape's police department was founded, security was privately provided

Before the Cape Girardeau Police Department was formed 150 years ago, law enforcement in town consisted of private security hired by local business owners to keep the peace.

When one of these security guards would arrest someone, usually for being drunk and disorderly, they'd generally toss the offender in the basement of the Common Pleas Courthouse until a justice of the peace decided on a penalty, usually a fine or public whipping.

That was when Cape Girardeau was a tiny dot on the map with no access to larger urban areas except through the Mississippi River. The town consisted of four blocks running parallel to the river, and the immigrant neighborhood known as Haarig, mostly where people would go for produce, farming supplies, drinking and carousing.

"Cape Girardeau was so small it couldn't really afford a policeman, and you didn't really need that because everyone knew everyone else," said Southeast Missouri State University historian Dr. Frank Nickell.

The town began to grow in the 1850s, and as it continued to expand, the need for regular police protection became greater, Nickell said.

"As the wealth of the community increased, there became more to protect," he said.

In March 1859, the city of Cape Girardeau passed an ordinance creating the first police department, an agency that consisted of a captain, a lieutenant and six officers. The ordinance allowed the identities of the officers in the department to remain a secret from residents in the community. Only the mayor of Cape Girardeau and the city marshal had a right to know who served on the police force.

They had the power to arrest anyone they caught violating a law and put them in the calaboose, or brick jail on the grounds of the Common Pleas Courthouse. The calaboose had iron rings attached to the walls and the whipping post stood nearby. For each arrest they made, officers received a fee of one dollar.

"It was very unofficial, very informal and not very professional," Nickell said of the original police department.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, law enforcement in Cape Girardeau was handled largely by Union soldiers, who occupied the town until the war ended in 1865. However, sympathies in Cape Girardeau tended to run toward the Confederacy. Many men left the city during those years to fight for the South, Nickell said.

"You can't be a military town for four years without some impact," Nickell said.

By 1865, Cape Girardeau's population had dwindled from 4,500 to about 1,200, Nickell said. Police officers were paid a small amount to walk the streets, but the town lacked sufficient resources in the years after the war to finance a professional police department.

The city's first real police and fire station, built in 1908 on Independence Street, was the first step toward that professionalization, Nickell said.

Back then, there was almost no communication between law enforcement in other towns, meaning that when one town had a bank robbery, the perpetrators often got away.

"No one ever caught them. They could make a clean getaway," Nickell said.

Communication improvements are just one example of the changes the department has undergone in the past 150 years. Today, there are 75 commissioned officers and four members of the department who hold master's degrees.

"I think that's a major accomplishment," Nickell said.

Though current chief Carl Kinnison has seen the department make key changes in its equipment and technology, such as upgrading to semiautomatic handguns instead of the six-shot revolvers they used to carry, the fundamentals of police work remain the same, he said.