Though history books may say otherwise, policing in the United States has its roots in the slave patrols in the South. The institution of policing, and the larger justice system, must reconcile its past in order to evolve away from its racist roots.
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There has been police ever since there has been a State, so for tens of thousands of years that we know of. Pretending that something didn’t exist for 99% of its own history just to call it racist is silly.
So, I just read the article.
Which line of it “pretends” policing didn’t exist before the American South?
Because I’m not seeing what you’re claiming.
The first line: “Jim Crow Origins of Policing”
Police and law enforcement have existed ever since laws existed. We have millennia of history of policing before Jim Crow came into being. Jim Crow demonstrably is not the origin of policing.
Jim Crow is used as a descriptor of a specific kind of policing. You seem to read this in bad faith, and that’s making you misunderstand what it’s saying.
You need to read the actual article, and not just the first line.
Your understanding of what is being discussed is woefully incomplete.
I’m with you. I expect something closer to literal accuracy before I take a statement seriously. It’s rather like being told that the phrase “defund the police” does not mean to actually defund the police. The fight against racism in policing is not helped with this type of purely metaphorical speech.
Counterpoint.
The article was clearly referring to American police, and pretending it was referring to the entire history of law enforcement is pedantic to the extreme.
Also, defund the police.
The article is not super thorough, its headline is not nuanced (big surprise), and it’s two and half years old, but there is a definite point there. Policing has a twin heritage in the US. On the one hand, you have the urban police departments founded on the model of departments in London and elsewhere in Britain. This of course traces back through town watches and detached Roman Legionaries and all the other developments we like to imagine as armchair historians.
On the other, you have policing in the more agrarian south that of course has the deeper roots in militias and posses that any rural community will throw together on an ad hoc basis, but began to become a persistent, organized law enforcement entity so as to specifically enforce runaway slave laws and black codes, and expanded their mandate from there.
Both systems evolved beyond their origins, both merged somewhat in their roles in America, and both have a dark legacy of classism and racism, like most institutions in the US. The point is that enforcing laws that immorally target black people are foundational to the American understanding of law enforcement’s role, and that history informs different communities’ relationships with LEOs, and vice versa. I tend to think that understanding can help us work to overcome some of the issues, and rethink what police can and should be to a community, but it absolutely must be addressed head-on, honestly, and particularly with the side that has a monopoly on state-sponsored violence being open to drastic change. Even then, I might still be a little too far on the Captain America optimistic side.
Law enforcement has been around since the dawn of laws. Jim Crow is millennia late to be the origin.
Clearly the article is not talking about the global history of policing, it’s talking about American history of policing. You can infer that because Jim Crow laws are American laws. They didn’t have Jim Crow in Sweden.
As for the history of American policing, again, the article acknowledges that American policing has 2 lineages that merged over time.
There are two narratives of how U.S. policing developed. Both are true.
The more commonly known history—the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course—is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing.
Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.There’s no one “origin” to American policing.
You lost me at “though history books may say otherwise”…
