zlacker

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+(OP)
That history is - surprise, surprise - closely related to the region's race and class relations. Boston has always been the flashpoint for such issues, more so than New York City, in part because of its smaller size and more pointed and concentrated relationship with the slave trade. The two great waves of Irish immigration meant tensions among the working and lower-middle classes, which had previously been largely black - tensions which were gladly encouraged by New England's wealthy. Incorporating Irish into the police force was a direct (and highly successful) attempt to foment interracial clashes; this preempted the forming of interracial bonds within those lower classes, which would have allowed them to demand more rights and a better quality of life from the elites. This is the same thing that happened with labor unions; Irish and black fraternization is bad for business, so court the Irish and foment bigotry against their black neighbors (to the point where they don't even want to be neighbors anymore).

The way that this dynamic extends into the busing crisis and the infamous racism of Boston sports fans should be obvious.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
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+sk
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Th US and the Caribbean have a slaver and white supremacists culture that didn't exist in the UK.

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WLovR6DgNFEC&oi=...

https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...

>>corebi+sk
> but Police are a concept that all of America inherited from the English roots of our governments.

No, they aren't. Because police weren't a thing in England when America split off from those roots.

>>corebi+sk
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.

>>corebi+sk
You are incorrect. Not all police departments started as slave patrols, in fact many of them did not. But to deny that it was a widespread event is counterfactual.

The first American police dept was founded in the 1850s, well after the split from England. The first police department in England was founded in the 1830s.

Prior to that, our communities either took collective action to regulate themselves and the 'spirit of the community', insisted on night watch duty as a rotating responsibility, paid a constable or sheriff (a word whose roots are 'shire reeve', meaning 'shire official'), or hired private guards to protect property.

In the 1850s, around the time of the first police departments in the US, the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced as law -- requiring officials to hunt and 'return' runaway slaves. This was adopted to a greater or lesser degree depending on the area, but it absolutely was a role of law enforcement across much of the US, and it's without a doubt a part of the roots of many police departments in the US.

>>Pfhrea+cD
I'm not denying slave patrols existed, I'm denying this rumor of them being the root of modern police because it's straight up not true.

The very simple historical trend that brought us the police we have today started with the King enforcing the peace, was delegated to sheriffs who enforced the peace among other things, was inherited in the colonies where the sheriff took on a primarily peace officer role in early states, and as the population grew and cities got bigger were augmented with more specialized and local peace officers. Slave patrols being the root of police is just propaganda.

>>x86_64+Dq
Your sources very accurately reflect the history that slavery was enforced by the legal system and peace officers upholding it. They don't lend any credence whatsoever to the notion that slave patrols morphed into modern police departments. The actual history is that police have slowly become more localized and detached from central authority (like the Kind or his officials - sheriffs, etc) over time as populations increase.

>>sudosy+3D
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.

>>dragon+ks
Keeping the peace was a concept in both countries when they split and was the duty of the sheriff which still exists in both countries and is actually still very functional in the US. That some localities with very large populations evolved an even more local office for keeping the peace is entirely consistent with the evolution of police tracing back to England before it existed as a modern concept. The simple fact is that slave patrols just did not morph into the general-purpose peace keeping organizations that today we call police.

>>corebi+sO
It's absolutely not just propaganda. The KKK was formed in the 1860s and there are many accounts of reconstruction era patrols being perpetrated by or with the aid of police at the time.

Enforcing the law required acting as slave patrols for well over a hundred years in the US. In 1757 Georgia, for instance, the colonial assembly required white landowners to be slave patrollers, and this continued well past the civil war.

There is over a hundred years of law enforcement, particularly in the South, acting as slave patrols. It's absolutely reasonable to trace the roots from modern departments back through the nation's unique history.

Not all police followed that path, like I mentioned above, police in the North were formed more out of an interest of protecting property and landowners. Places like Boston founded their police to try and prevent crime, rather than simply exact justice post-facto. That's a different historical root of American policing, and it did not involve slave patrols.

>>corebi+bR
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.

>>corebi+jQ
>.... The actual history is that police have slowly become more localized and detached from central authority

Policing has been a problem for the black community since before your "not racist" reason of detachment from central authority happened.

>>Pfhrea+(OP)
I missed this comment in response to mine and yes, I wonder about negative reactions to what is a relatively dispassionate recounting of historical events.