History of Policing

Slave Patrols

In the early 1700’s, when slavery was the norm in America, there was a deeply-rooted fear ammong slave owners that their slaves would begin to band together in order to form a resistence against being enslaved. Given that Black persons were considered property at the time - property that rivaled land ownership - the fear was that Black slaves would fight back against plantations and violent conditions and that they would either refuse to work (by running away), or that they would work to overthrow the slave owners.

There were early incentives offered to white people at the time, desperate attempts from slave owners to cajole fellow white people into keeping an eye out for runaway slaves. However, people were focused on their own wealth and concerns with their own property, and more and more slaves ran away from their captors.

The solution to Black slaves running away - and to the growing resistance from slaves on plantations - was the formation of Slave Patrols, closely following the European model of Slave Catchers from the sixteenth century. Initially they were groups of men who gathered together for the express purpose of hunting down runaway slaves. In time, however, the law would begin to back the slave patrols and they were permitted legal weight, along with guns and whips.

Slaves were forced to subject themselves to questioning if they were discovered on their own, and if they didn’t have written passes from their white “masters” that granted them permission to be out on their own, they were hastily - and often violently - returned to the plantation. The purpose of the Slave Patrols was to instill fear into Black slaves and to suppress uprisings before they could happen. If the routes of communication were controlled and punished, Slave Patrols were confident that they could protect the supposed-property of White slave owners and dismiss the threat of uprisings.

The threat of being caught by the Slave Patrols worked as intended. Black slaves were terrified to run, because the punishment didn’t stop at beatings. Often, the threat was that the slaves would be ripped away from their families and that they would be sold, separating ‘problem slaves’ from the rest of them.

This formation of terror and white power remained in place until the 13th Amendment, but even after the Civil War, Slave Patrols evolved into something else.

Militia-style groups of white men would band together and use their collective power and control to control and deny access to freed slaves (NAACP, 2021). Men who disagreed with slavery being abolished grouped together and formed a militia - or mob - to hunt down freed slaves in any way possible. NAACP stresses that, “They relentlessly and systematically enforced Black Codes, strict local and state laws that regulated and restricted access to labor, wages, voting rights, and general freedoms for formerly enslaved people,” (2021)

This continued into the late 1800’s, and while Black Codes were eventually abolished, they were quickly replaced with Jim Crow laws. By the 1900’s, the first police departments in North America were established in order to enforce laws like Jim Crow, and police - the evolution of an anti-slave militia - were encouraged to brutally ensure that all African Americans followed Jim Crow laws.

Slave Patrols in the 1700's

Border guard on horseback whipping Haitian asylum seekers, 2021

Militia or Police?

The history of policing is rooted firmly in slavery and violence against Black people

To build a foundational, supposedly-essential government body around the idea that people are property to be owned, violated, abused, and killed is not something that should be so easily forgotten.

So, when we hear people talk about how the police are just now getting bad, or that there are a few ‘bad apples’ in the police force, we must remind ourselves that policing as an institution began with those ‘bad apples’. The rotten core of those supposedly ‘bad apples’ served as the foundation of the modern police department, and one cannot separate a violent, bloodied, horrible history from present-day policing.

The fact of the matter is this: police who attack and threaten and murder Black people indescriminately are doing what they have been trained to do for hundreds of years. Policing began as a way for White people to control and exert power and violence over Black people, and it has stayed true to its roots over the last few centuries. It will continue to do so in the future, as the foundation of violence, fear, power, and control has not changed.