zlacker

>>danso+(OP)
I've lived here a long time and come to the realization through observation that the NYPD operates like a private security force for capital. Their primary concern is to defend private property, the people themselves come second. The "community outreach" they do is just enough to keep us from getting accusatory.

>>ixtli+2g
Historically, this is what police were in the Northeast US. (In the South, police trace their heritage to slave patrols. I'm sure they would argue that these patrols were also just defending property. Gross.)

Landowners and merchants hired private police to watch over their holdings. Over time, they convinced locals that it would be in the public good if the guards they hired were paid for by everyone.

In the 1850s, in Boston, they formalized this arrangement into the first police department in the country. (There's an interesting history here around the oppression and then incorporation of Boston's Irish population by the police force.)

Edit: Curious about the downvotes -- this is a review of US history.

>>Pfhrea+mA
It's become popular to regurgitate that bit about police and slave patrols but it has no real basis in reality. That isn't to say that there isn't some example of a slave patrol that was pressed into service as police, but Police are a concept that all of America inherited from the English roots of our governments.

>>corebi+OU
Police did not exist in England in the 1600s. The first professional police in England dates to the 1800s. Even in the 1700s, up until the American revolution, there were only patrols of citizens organized as the night watch, and only in big English cities.

>>sudosy+pd1
Police in england are an evolution of how the King's peace has been enforced, starting, very simplified, from when the King himself enforced it in very early days to delegating it to members of his court and his sheriffs, and ultimately to localities and special departments of the modern day. Cities did not generally have a "police department" but they had the sheriff and whoever the sheriff commanded into service to enforce the peace. As populations have increased the enforcement of these duties have evolved to be taken on by more local organizations that are modern police departments.

>>corebi+xr1
Sure. And the King's peace itself was only really the Crown's personal police force until around the late 1600s, but this was not the case in America. Even well into the 1600s your only shot at justice in the majority of cases was revenge.