The History of Police in America

The History of Policing Before The End of Jim Crow

Many would not find it coincidental to know that the history of expanding policing in American society coincides directly with the history of black liberation. Each time Black Americans were on a new horizon of freedom, the authority of policing widened. In fact police did not exist as an official force of the state until the 1830’s when a wave of social reform began to captivate American culture compelling its citizens to form radical social movements that would directly threaten the social status quos including slavery.

As we discuss the history of policing, you will see that each time black access to democratic liberties grew, policing as a bureaucratic institution expanded with that growth. This is why many believe it’s inherently unequal and should be rethought. History truly proves it was really just a white supremacist reactionary system in the first place erected out of fear of black liberation during the abolitionist movement and after the end of slavery as well as Jim Crow.

If we’re looking at the beginning of policing as a state funded municipal institution aka designated enforcers of the law then the setting is the 1830’s when a white protestant christian movement is sweeping the nation. This “Second Great Awakening” led to an enlightenment among  Europeans and Americans who had previously held traditional classed notions about who God could hear. 

“For these Christians, this new enlightenment meant they had an urgent moral duty to reform all the evils of society that were corrupting humans from reaching their highest potential.”

Now-- Americans felt that God was equally available to all, leading northern Christians to feel a more compelling need than ever to abolish slavery. To put it bluntly the sentiment was if God could indeed hear the cries of slaves then it stands to reason that looking at the injustice he must be irate.

For these Christians, this new enlightenment meant they had an urgent moral duty to reform all the evils of society that were corrupting humans from reaching their highest potential. This Chistian movement stood on the right side of history providing the theological ethos as a growing radical abolitionist movement gained its legs. 

However this radical revelation of the humanity and equality of all races caused tensions between citizens to grow to a height as pro-slavers worried that their property might not be protected much longer from the rage of equality that was striking the nation. At this exact same time we create organized policing.

Previously to the 1830’s everybody’s safety was handled by independent “night watchers'' who would warn of and report danger for citizens to defend themselves and they literally only worked at night. They were normally community remanded or forced to ‘volunteer’ their security service in return for some petty offense they had committed themselves. 

Honestly, even then the most common nightwatchers were private watch outs for gambling and sex work to keep patrons from their ‘nightime activities.’ These nightwatchers were usually criminals or local rogue ‘enforcers’ if you will. I mean basically the local bully had to do some community service in return for being a drunken ass at the bar this weekend. This use of a labor pool of drunken bullies obviously was not a very effective system. 

By the 1840’s some of the first day watches were formed. At this same time a new radicalized movement for abolition challenged the public order and also led to a rise of class consciousness that questioned labor practices. Needless to say, the wealthy got a little nervous. Policing as a taxpayer funded institution in America that had began in the South spread to the rest of the nation in tandem with this increasing radical abolitionism, a rising population of freedmen, and a working class that was on the verge of rebellion. 

“The belly of mainstream American conscience had turned against slavery”

As public sentiment turned away from slavery white slave owners interested in maintaining their privileges used the state and the law to protect the faltering institution. Enslaved people were increasingly emancipating themselves by fleeing north and northern whites were conspiring. This led to a higher population of free black people in the north and a higher concentration of “crime” as fugitive slaves fleeing were technically breaking the law.

Eventually abolitionists grew radical and things got tense politically between liberal Republicans and racists calling themselves conservative Democrats. The community formed watch groups that had been traditionally charged with nightwatch in the look out for sex workers and gamblers were not going to enforce the fugitive slave laws or maintain apartheid. Elites needed someone who would. The inspiration was found in the south, hence the birth of American policing.

The belly of mainstream American conscience had turned against slavery but politics went as usual. Northern white liberal politicians still valued peace with racists over black liberation. Deals were made by politicians to keep the institution of slavery protected and return runaway slaves.

Furthermore, many northerners were still at least passive white supremacists who maintained a belief in the popular idea of white cultural superiority and so even they still wanted security from an increasing population of free blacks. State funded policing began it’s northern expansion by the end of the 1830’s at the height of the Great Awakening and the rising social tension around slavery.  Police with the force in the south also had this direct task: slave patrol. 

Deep southern slave patrollers were like bounty hunters. Their main duties included chasing down enslaved folks who had run away, leading organized terror that would dissuade slave revolts, and maintaining order as well as enforcing discipline for enslaved persons who challenged plantation rules. 

“To most citizens it had become clear that the police were here only as the henchmen and protectors of the capitalist property owners”

At the onset of policing in America, southern police were overtly on a mission to serve and protect solely slave owners, leaving enslaved folk who had no legal rights completely subject to the mercy of officers. Slave patrol officers had no interest in destroying the ‘property’ of their fellow white citizens as they may face consequences. Yet the police had the legal ability to deliver summary justice acting as judge, jury, and in some cases executioner whenever they wanted. Today the question for many is how could this legacy ever be undone?

At first policemen in America did not carry firearms--officially--though many carried their personal handguns. The arming of some policemen was met with widespread public fear amongst white citizens that the police had too much power. In spite of the outcry of common white people, policing power only intensified at the urging of their wealthier counterparts.

To most citizens it had become clear that the police were here only as the henchmen and protectors of the capitalist property owners who feared a revolution by the workers they had underpaid in the name of redistributing the fruits of their labor as corporate profits instead of wages. Public strikes over labor conditions were also routinely stomped out by an increasingly state supported policing industry in post Civil War America. 

Movements to better the lives of wage workers were destroyed by the police. Instead, the screams of the poor were drowned out by a “Gilded Age” of wealthy millionaires who insisted they were making America great while the police dealt with out any pro-labor movements arguing to the contrary. More than crime, police were charged with the duty of enforcing and patrolling the social order and preventing an overthrow of the status quo or the wealthy elite.

The role of the police continued to be maintaining business as usual well after the Civil War going into the 20th century. In the south, police were openly affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Enforcing a social order in a ‘new south’ after an abruptly ended reconstruction left newly freed former slaves alone with their former owners. Now police were enforcing Jim Crow and orchestrating public killings of black folks that would scare any ‘radical’ troublemakers who dare protest the reign of terror that was Jim Crow.

“The ‘military’ model of policing emerged as a bureaucratic and authoritarian institution in the 1950s at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. ”

Policing wouldn’t become a professionalized career long labor occupation until the Civil Rights Movement but by the end of the Civil War policing was now a national norm. Numerically speaking of course, extrajudicial killings of black people were equally as prevalent then as they have been in recent years. Due to unchecked policing power that still allowed officers to act with a license to kill, horrifying conditions of racial terror remained the climate for black people living in the deep south despite the Civil War. 

The 13th amendment outlawed forced labor except as punishment for a crime. This loophole meant the now institutionalized govermentalized police were a gun toting force ready to send black and poor people to work camps that only needed to pose as penal institutions. At the hands of fellow civilian citizens, Black people were still routinely subject to involuntary servitude through an institution called peonage where black folk (particularly boys and men) were picked up for little or no infraction at all to society and then sold off to chain gangs or plantations to work for free in prison camps. 

Fortunes were built with the continued free forced labor of black folk. Thanks to this loophole that allowed black bodies to be criminalized out of their previously gained civil rights, prison became the new for-profit system that capitalized on the stigmatizing of black bodies in replacement of slavery. 

Attempts to reform police had gripped the nation since its inception, but once the Civil Rights movement began to take off in the 1950s policing took an even more expansive turn into a career driven profession and became highly militarized. This professionalism of policing antagonized the tensions that had existed since the foundation of policing between the executors of force and the communities they police. 

Now police had an even more vested interest in maintaining the institutionalization of the status quo-- they would build their wealth from enforcing it. In this way police, instead of transforming communities with justice, were paid to stand in between movements and any meaningful change.

The “military” model of policing emerged as a bureaucratic and authoritarian institution in the 1950s at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. This militarized approach would aid white conservative citizens in antagonizing the many Black Power movements which were just now reaching their peak. 

By the 1960’s the charge of public safety had been completely taken away from citizens and police went from policing infractions of public order to being charged with “prevention” of these infractions. At this very same time The Black Power Movement was growing, and one of their main complaints was the rampant misuse of power by police authorities. 

“COINTELPRO was an undercover operation to “surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt” emerging Black Power Movements challenging the social order of white supremacy.”

According to the leaders of The Black Power Movement, police orchestrated the public brutal lynchings of black citizens. They often coordinated with the killers of black folk in turning a blind eye to their crimes and routinely opened jail cells for white mobs that dragged black folk out into the middle of the street so they could be publicly killed. Most notably in Alabama, visions of police brutality against black protestors gripped the screens of Americans nationwide. The nation watched as police ruthlessly beat, hosed, and released dogs on black folks peacefully demonstrating the violence inherent in enforcing social codes across the South. 

In the north and midwest police faced the growing Black Power Movement which they often derided as militarized radicals despite policing’s own newly adopted military model which radically detoured from the tradition of communally administered justice. With the recent formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation only a few decades prior, COINTELPRO was created and the police took on a goal of massive surveillance and infiltration to cause distractions within Black social movements. 

COINTELPRO was an undercover operation to “surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt” emerging Black Power Movements challenging the social order of white supremacy.  J. Edgar Hoover discharged the collective of spies with an order to ‘prevent the rise of a black messiah’ who could act as a charismatic or unifying leader of transformative change. As a direct result of this operation Malcolm X was killed, and countless other members of The Black Panther Party were also harassed, entrapped, and subsequently murdered in an organized fashion. MLK was also relentlessly spied on and sabotaged by COINTELPRO.

Fred Hampton was a 21 year old emerging Black Panther activist. He was young, charismatic, and on a mission of uniting the Black Panthers with other local grassroots organizations to become an interracial party. One night, Chicago police arrived at the apartment where he and his pregnant fiance had been staying in the name of conducting a raid for illegal weapons, which were not found. Still, police fired 100 shots into where they slept. During the raid police are reported in court documents as saying:

"That's Fred Hampton."

"Is he dead?... Bring him out."

"He's barely alive; he'll make it."

Two shots were then heard, which is when the officer fired point blank in Hampton's head. 

One officer then said:

"He's good and dead now."

After Jim Crow, here we are today.

Countless black leaders were killed by police and tensions with authorities grew heavier than ever before amongst the black community they claimed to serve as they instead squashed movements for change. After reconstruction ended suddenly, the descendants of slaves were left with both the institutions of power and the very citizens that had previously permitted as well as enforced slavery. 

Neither changed significantly and as a result the environment remained eerily anti-black. Jim Crow, segregation, public order violations, public intoxication, petty theft, protest, and minor victimless violations of social order made up the majority of police accusations against black citizens until the War on Drugs criminalized the trauma of poverty through targeting its most known side effect of chronic addiction.  

The label of criminal had always been ready and available to mobilize against black people who were in any form of resistance to the current social order even if they committed no real crime against humanity at all besides freedom, poverty, or blackness. After the end of Jim Crow, there was an institutionalization of an American social order which views both addiction and poverty as an affront to the compulsively productive capitalist way of life. Reagan’s new brand of conservatism launched a so called “War on Drugs” that would maintain a racist narrative in American history that views Black citizens as either liquid cash or lazy problems both destined for the penal system.

After slave patrols, Jim Crow, and the assassination of leaders in The Black Power Movement, history had made it clear that the police were here to arrest black people for any reason and violently attack any challenge to the racialized social order using the power of the state behind them. 

“Today the pattern continues and the history of policing is still evident. ”

After integration, the rise of neo-conservatism in the United States spoke openly against the changes made by the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Power Movement had directly challenged police and left a bitter taste in the mouth of law and order conservatives who sought to use policing to calm their anti-black imagination and anxiety rather than uphold equality under the law. 

In their rhetoric, law was here to maintain order not justice so when Reagan ran on his plan to “make America great” which included expanding the presence of police in black communities, increasing the police budget, giving surplus military gear to police, and criminalizing the public health crisis of drug use amongst impoverished communities white racists who ‘felt attacked’ by Civil Rights and the Black Power movements were completely on board. 

Today the pattern continues and the history of policing is still evident. Yet the fear of police has resolved into a hardened determination to see justice. Defund The Police is the 21st century’s mantra of resistance to the process of stereotyping black folks face in their everyday lives due to a penal system that profits from this stigmatization and justifies their forced labor. 

That’s why in the summer of 2020 citizens across the nation decried prison and immigrant detention as barbaric industries that profit from the institutional protection of white supremacy. 

“Moreover, police charged with ‘prevention’ are free to use their own biased perception to determine who’s about to commit a crime and punish whomever they please under threat of immediate imprisonment”

The mass incarceration caused by the War on Drugs lead to an overwhelmingly black and brown prison population which activists argue leads to a monstrous system with an insatiable bloodlust that demands in sacrifice for its maintenance one thing: black death. 

In 2014, every 28 hours Black people who have been accused but not convicted of any crime were being killed by police or vigilantes trying to bring fellow citizens into a for-profit penal system that doesn’t transform individuals or communities into being any safer for the rest of us. In fact, the professionalization and militarization of policing citizens as an approach to community safety led to much less safety and much more violent crime. Communities were destroyed by the mass criminalization and incarceration of the War on Drugs and peonage leading to more poverty, more addiction to cope, more desperation, and thus more crime.

Such an operation of policing has proven problematic since the stereotypes and stigmas surrounding black bodies disadvantage them in a system that deprives liberty (prior to their conviction by a jury of peers) even in accusations involving victimless crimes. Moreover, mass stigmatization of black and brown people is both justified by mass incarceration and justifies mass incarceration leading to a never ending circular cycle of anti-blackness.

This disadvantage is heightened by a militarized professionalized majority white male police force, a demographic fact of policing that has not changed since its inception as a slave patrol; furthermore, policing is still characterized by low barriers of education, minimal training, and no requirement for pro-social aptitude because it gives citizens a career investment in the incarceration of other citizens which is inherently antisocial. 

Moreover, police charged with ‘prevention’ are free to use their own biased perception to determine who’s about to commit a crime and theoretically can punish whoever they please under threat of immediate imprisonment without trial beforehand. Habeas corpus is instead sometimes interpreted far too literally meaning the accused are brought in dead or alive and accused citizens often don’t experience the right to bring their full selves to be presumed innocent before the court because they are murdered in the street. 

“Habeas corpus is instead sometimes interpreted far too literally meaning the accused are brought in dead or alive”

The history of policing has been a history of brutality, death, and unjust incarceration/criminalization against black people and the working class for the maintenance of social order and the profit of private individuals. Citizens have attempted to reform and roll back police power to no avail, in fact despite widespread outrage police grew more funded, more professional, and more military like every time black people gained more access to democratic rights.

A society where police occupy communities in an attempt to intimidate citizens in the name of public order is called a police society, and this institution is the true affront to American democratic principles of freedom that the constitution of this country says it seeks to actualize domestically which so many Americans insist is the worldwide model for civil living under self-governance.

Self-government is a principle which is in peril worldwide, and the routine violation of consent and democratic rights by a police enforced social order is not much of an example that anyone would be excited to follow. The state of policing in America makes it look as if democracy has not only failed, but is in actuality no different than fascism which is a dangerous idea to normalize.

The institution of policing in America arose to surveil, patrol, and intimidate resistance efforts by black people and has been ineffective in reducing crime. As a matter of fact, research proves increased police presence in communities increases crime. This is why the Movement for Black Lives has proposed a plan to defund and dismantle policing in favor of community efforts to restore justice. Which we’ll talk about in the next journal, solving the problems of policing in America.