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242 points LinuxBender | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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elzbardico ◴[] No.42172833[source]
The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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bcdtttt[dead post] ◴[] No.42172921[source]
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andrewla ◴[] No.42173193[source]
> They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.

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.

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bcdtttt ◴[] No.42173306[source]
While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting on distributing the cost of guarding their goods across the community.

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.

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adolph ◴[] No.42173433[source]
>>> That concept is from the mid 1800s. They evolved out of warehouse guards and slave patrols.

>> 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?

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WarOnPrivacy ◴[] No.42173775[source]
>> And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US.

> What is the source of this data?

https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=police+departments+were+conv...

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1. adolph ◴[] No.42175523[source]
Ok, first link in results contradicts "slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US":

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...