The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
replies(7):
This is not accurate.
The timeframe is not wrong; it is true that the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s. But saying it evolved from "warehouse guards and slave patrols" is ahistorical. Most modern police forces modeled after London's Metropolitan Police replaced night watch systems that have been around for literally all of recorded history.
I'm not saying the night watches didn't evolve into police departments, I'm saying the night watches were co-opted prior to them becoming uniformed departments.
And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US. I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
>> This is not accurate.
> I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.
What percentage of current police departments were conversions from slave patrols? What is the source of this data?
> What is the source of this data?
https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=police+departments+were+conv...
For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon. Is it the claim that there exists at least one professional police force that was created to replace a "slave patrol", which previously performed some subset of the civil duties of police officers? I have not been able to find an example; can you point me to one?
One of their predecessor organisations was the Bow Street Runners which was set up by magistrates with the aim of providing a less corrupt system than that of "thief takers" and a more professional one than parish constables.
There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US.
The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Peterloo Massacre [2] (where cavalry were set on a peaceful protest campaigning for more than 2% of people to be allowed to vote)
The Peelian model [3] is one of 'policing by consent' where the police focus their efforts on the sorts of crimes the average citizen wants solved - rather than on suppressing political dissent, or censoring books, or launching cavalry charges against protests. Peel's police aren't a military force, which is why very few of them have guns.
If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9#In_Napoleon... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles#The_nine_pr...
Potter, Gary "The History of Policing in the United States"[1] references Platt, Tony, "Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18"
1. https://www.academia.edu/30504361/The_History_of_Policing_in...
Should progressive academics declare all CATO papers invalid because they are ideologically misaligned with the institute?
While it is true that slave patrols were a form of American law enforcement that existed alongside other forms of law enforcement, the claim that American policing “traces back” to, “started out” as, or “evolved directly from,” slave patrols, or that slave patrols “morphed directly into” policing, is false. This widespread pernicious myth falsely asserts a causal relationship between slave patrols and policing and intimates that modern policing carries on a legacy of gross injustice. There is no evidence for either postulate.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...
Potter: The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982).
Potter: Platt, Tony, “Crime and Punishment in the United States: Immediate and Long-Term Reforms from a Marxist Perspective, Crime and Social Justice 18 (1982).
"CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: IMMEDIATE AND LONG-TERM REFORMS FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE"
Tony Platt
Crime and Social Justice, No. 18, REMAKING JUSTICE (Winter 1982), pp. 38-45 (8 pages)
The history of the United States is well documented - it was only for a brief period during reconstruction that policing was deracialized in the American South, and even saw a number of formerly-enslaved lawmen. There were numerous violent revolts against this, and in support of white supremacy in places like Oklahoma, Louisiana[1], Mississippi and elsewhere where egalitarian leaders were ran out of town, and the law enforcement (along other administrative leadership) was reconfigured against the then "new", post-civil-war ways.
Do you see any functional differences between slave patrols (membership free from white land owners or their nominees) and the group that overthrew and reconstituted reconstruction-era law enforcement (mobs drew from white landowners, or their hired grunts).
If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link. You didn’t.
The antecedent organizations to the modern Charleston police department, notably the Town Watch and the City Guard, were both dissolved in the aftermath of the civil war, while civil order was kept by federal forces until the end of reconstruction.
But regardless of whether we can chase down a chain of organizations that meets the colloquial meaning of "evolved", it does not appear that either the City Guard nor the Town Watch were principally slave patrols, although they did enforce the slavery regime as part of their policing functions.
An organization that participates in the suppression of slaves as part of its function is not a "slave patrol". If the statement "[modern police forces] evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols" is to be parsed as "modern police forces evolved out of earlier organizations that sometimes protected private property or enforced slavery laws" then I grant the accusation, but it is rather hollow and meaningless at that point.
I gave examples of 3 southern states (and a link to one, detailing how the law enforcement was devolved to antebellum mores in Louisiana)
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sangnoir
Again, if evidence was as plentiful as you claim, a person would add a link instead of typing about examples and links elsewhere.
Post-Belesiles [0], I would want to see a body of relatively objective records that can be independently verified in the form of adversarial cooperation. Say some significant number of individuals of slave oriented occupations moving into net new police-specific occupations.
Your use of the word “sheriff” is significant here because sheriff and constable are occupation terms that predate the Atlantic slave trade. These were civil enforcers for what represented law and justice in the English system. They still exist today in name and function. Moving from slave patrol to sheriff doesn’t necessarily support the thesis since sheriff and constable are not net new police forces.
0. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.016/--why-foo...