Welcome back to another blog post. Today’s big topic is Part 1 of 3 on policing, discussing the history of U.S. police forces and the history of policing. Perhaps you are wondering why people are calling to defund the police? Or maybe you are unsure of what the U.S. might look like without a police force? In this mini info-series, we discuss a more in-depth look at the history of policing in the United States, integrating the police force, and what it really means when we say “defund the police”.
Centralized police efforts in the United States started in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1830s and were implemented in all US cities by the 1880s. The question of why the United States developed local policing efforts can be explained by a number of reasons.
In the 1830s, the initial function was not to control crime, but rather to control “disorder” which was becoming an issue as US cities grew exponentially during the 19th century. At the time, “disorder” was defined as people engaging in prostitution, public drunkenness, and mob violence, which more often than not was perpetrated by White youths against immigrants, freed Blacks, and other people of color. The disorder was also defined as rioting. The growth of the police occurred during the Industrial Revolution where dangerous factory work was mainly done by immigrants and people of color. Oftentimes these exploited workers resorted to rioting to protest their gross lack of human rights. It was the job of the police to work in the interest of the commercial elites running these factories to restore their stable workforce and control the rioting.
Pretty quickly, social control of factory workers became synonymous with crime control. Communities of color who provided the majority of hard labor for these factories soon became known as the “dangerous class.” They were described as products of biological inferiority who lacked education and stayed in poverty. As Kentucky professor Dr. Gary Potter wrote in his piece titled, The History of Policing in the United States:
“This isolation of the ‘dangerous class’ as the embodiment of the crime problem created a focus in crime control that persists to today, the idea that police should be directed toward ‘bad’ individuals, rather than social and economic conditions that are criminogenic in their social outcomes.”
In southern states, the history of policing differs from what occurred in the New England states in one fundamental way. In the South, policing primarily began as the “Slave Patrol” in the Carolina colonies in 1704. Their main function was to:
1. Chase down, apprehend and return runaway slaves to their owners.
2. To provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts.
3. To discipline slaves who violated plantation rules.
Around the same time, in Texas, a semi-official group of vigilantes was formed called the Texas Rangers. They similarly used their self proclaimed power to oppress non-White groups of people and were specifically tasked with suppressing Mexican communities and driving the Commanche people off their lands in this area.
After the Civil War, these vigilante groups turned into “modern” police departments with the primary function of enforcing “Jim Crow” segregation laws which denied freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system. As Keisha Bain, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, explained in an interview with NPR:
“...now, rather than upholding slavery, their job [was] to make sure that the black codes [were] being reinforced, which [were] the laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of black people.”
It wasn’t until the 1960s that there was a professionalization of police efforts under President Lyndon B. Johnson. During his presidency, Pres. Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” which not only provided formal training to police, but also militarized them. Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Act allowed for the “arming of police with bullet proof vests, helicopters, tanks, rifles, gas masks and other military-grade hardware'' that had been used in the Vietnam War. Many people only remember Pres. Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 which he passed in response to the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. However, it is important to note that his Law Enforcement Assistance Act was presented to Congress the day after the March 7th Selma-to-Montgomery march better known as “Bloody Sunday,” where police officers brutally beat peaceful protesters marching for voting rights.
As an institution, the police have not changed much since the 1960s. In March of 2015, Elizabeth Hinton wrote an article for the New York Times called, Why We Should Reconsider the War on Crime, just after the murder of Michael Brown by a White police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. Many people observed that responses to protests in Ferguson looked like a war zone, which is something we can relate to today as police forces use riot gear and tear gas to intimidate and control protesters.
Racism has been a part of policing since it’s foundation. Biased profiling and police brutality based on religion, sex, sexual orientation, race, social class, and/or country of origin are still massive problems specifically affecting communities of color today. This is a main reason why people are calling for a reallocation of some of the police resources to improve social services, lessen the public’s contact with police, and therefore reduce the likelihood of police violence.
Stay tuned over the next couple of days for our upcoming installments on policing, specifically police integration and current defunding efforts.
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Sources
New York Times Article Why We Should Reconsider the 'War on Crime' by Elizabeth Hinton - https://time.com/3746059/war-on-crime-history/
NPR All Things Considered Interview The History Of Policing And Race In The U.S. Are Deeply Intertwined by Michael Martin and Keisha Bain - https://www.npr.org/2020/06/13/876628302/the-history-of-policing-and-race-in-the-u-s-are-deeply-intertwined
The History of Policing in the United States by Dr. Gary Potter - https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf
CNN Article There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means. by Scottie Andrews - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/what-is-defund-police-trnd/index.html
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