"It would be easy to think that the police officer is a figure who has existed since the beginning of civilization. […] however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered […] on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704." - How the U.S. Got Its Police Force http://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
"Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property." - A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
While most people today believe that they are “free” and “independent” the facts are that they’re still living in enslavement. The only difference is that they’ve been indoctrinated from early childhood to accept their slavery. And in the case of the police, they’ve been conditioned to accept the enforcers of their enslavement as something good and beneficial to themselves, when in fact, the police exist to enforce whatever the masters dictate and to protect the masters and their economic interests from the slaves. This fact is proven on a daily basis worldwide; whenever and wherever the slaves rise up against the current system of enslavement, the police rush in to suppress them. And yet, very few of the slaves take note of the obvious and ask themselves the question: who do the police really serve?
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-ho...
> New data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg, showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47 per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the early 19th century.
> Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year.
You can thank your local police department, among other institutions, for that dramatic decline in crime rates.