Marshals and first chiefs: the police before the modern line

1865 – 1956

The marshal: Before the city had a police department it had a marshal — the principal peace officer of the municipality, an elected working officer rather than a department head. The 1901 city history of Anderson and Cooley names Daniel Roof as the first marshal of the municipality. The marshal's succession after Roof is carried in that history's lists, but the names and years reach this section through a garbled optical scan of the 1901 text, and rather than print dates the scan may have corrupted, this section prints Roof's first-marshalship on the history's authority and names the early succession — the marshals of the 1860s and 1870s and the first chiefs of the organized department — as a gap to be closed from the printed page, not from the scan.

A fixed point, 1956: The Board of Public Safety's minutes give the department's command at mid-century exactly: on 1 January 1956 the chief of police of South Bend was J. Charles Dutrieux, and the fire chief Alex Andrejewski — the two names stand in the city's own record of its safety board, and Dutrieux's chiefship anchors the line between the marshal era this entry cannot yet roster and the modern succession the next entry documents from the 1970s forward.

Sources:

1. Anderson & Cooley, South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (Tribune Printing Co., 1901), read in the Internet Archive copy — Daniel Roof, first marshal of the municipality; the town marshal as the principal peace officer before the police department; the succession list in the 1901 text (its scanned years not relied on here).
2. City of South Bend, Board of Public Safety minutes, 1 January 1956 (city document archive) — J. Charles Dutrieux, chief of police; Alex Andrejewski, fire chief.