Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

The militarization of law enforcement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

> 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.

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.

For the warehouse guards, to summarize, you're saying that night watchmen and city watchmen were de facto warehouse guards before the formation of professional police forces? That seems a far cry from "evolved out of warehouse guards". Police still put resources into protecting property, but this does not make them "warehouse guards" any more than resources put on petty crime make them "cutpurse chasers" unless you're just making rhetorical points.

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?

> For the slave patrol point, I would appreciate a single example of this phenomenon

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...

Did you read Platt? Its a mistake to grant any assertion as valid, especially given what we now know about academic fraud. The Platt article is freely available and does not reference slavery in any way that I can see from searching (the bad OCR) and quickly reading through the paragraphs.

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)

1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29766165

I have noted we have shifted from "I can't find a single example" to "I don't trust the first provided source", and yet there are plenty of other sources, if you're searching in good faith.

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).

https://naucenter.as.virginia.edu/blog-page/1761

Don’t “good faith” me with a reference that you claim supports your assertion but in actuality does not. You made an assertion and can defend it or abandon it.

If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link. You didn’t.

> If evidence for your claim was as plentiful as you claim, you would just add another link.

I gave examples of 3 southern states (and a link to one, detailing how the law enforcement was devolved to antebellum mores in Louisiana)

Did you post these under a different username? I see no evidence here:

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.