The King's Men
We might assume that the police force built up over time as cities built up over time. There’s a good correlation there as more and more people moved to the cities, police forces expanded to keep the peace over large groups of people living close together. Was the modern police force built up to keep rising city crime in check?
Let’s look at how this all got started and find out.
The first form of policing in the early days of the USA was volunteers running a Night Watch in Boston. Major cities organized these volunteers from 1636 to 1700, but it wasn’t really an effective crime deterrent. Sleeping or drinking alcohol on watch was common and many of the watch volunteers had ulterior motives like dodging the draft or choosing watch shifts over prison time. Day-time policing didn’t show up until the 1830s.
(Side note: This newsletter focuses on police formation in the non-slave states of America. As you might imagine, the formation of police in slave states was motivated by the need to control the growing population of slaves and was directly created to keep people enslaved.)
Not a coincidence
It turns out that at that exact time, the USA was ramping up into the industrial revolution. Factories were being built and wage labor was being brought in from the countryside. From 1800-1830, things started out gradually with the model of the “factory town”. One of the more famous/infamous of these was Lowell, MA, which opened 1823. It recruited young farm women exclusively because they could be paid less than men, due to having fewer job options. The exploitation of factory workers like these young women led to strikes from the 1820s onward, and even the tightly controlled factory towns like Lowell faced large strikes in the 1830s.
It turns out that the rise of publicly funded full-time police forces coincided with the rise of wage labor as more and more rural folks were drawn to the cities and towns to work at factories. From 1800 to 1850, the number of people in cities absolutely skyrocketed.
In 1800, there were 5 million people in the USA, and only 5% of them lived in cities – about 250,000 people.
In 1850, there were 23 million people, and 15% of them lived in cities – about 3.5 million people.
That means in 50 years, cities became 14 times bigger than they were before!
The trend only became stronger over the following 50 years. In 1900, there were 76 million people and 28 million in cities. That’s like if your dog grew from being as high as your waist to being as high as your 2-story house and then as high as a 20 story hotel – point is, it was something never seen before.
But… why didn’t policing start before the industrial revolution? You already had thousands of people living close together.
Well, the city population was exploding with a new type of citizen – the factory worker. Before that, who were the people who lived in the towns and cities? It was the wealthy – merchants, lawyers, and business owners who lived within walking distance of the docks, warehouses, offices, courts and shops where they worked. As the factory came into prominence, a huge new group of people were needed to work in those factories. Those people were paid as little as possible, and they had to live close to the factory. At the same time, the industry that was transforming the city brought improvements in transportation – railroads, streetcars, and trolleys meant that people (who could pay fare) could live farther away from their work. This allowed the wealthy to create separate neighborhoods for themselves, and speculators to create middle class developments while the city center piled on factory workers. Landlords took over the housing at the city center and subdivided those buildings into apartments or simply constructed low-rent apartment buildings.
The rich now lived in the suburbs and the poor near the center of the city. The city was now a crowded place of cheap labor that factories thrived on. People slept in beds in shifts – you had a home for 1/3 of the day.
There is little evidence of crime waves, but plenty of evidence of “disorder” perhaps more plainly described as “strikes”. Cities at the time were strictly run by profit-based interests, who through their political influence (money) supported the development of public-funded police. These “industry leaders” had a much greater interest in control over their cheap labor than they did in controlling simple crimes. They needed a stable and docile workforce for them to run their factories, or as they called it for the “collective good” – they really meant “my good”. By changing to publicly-run police, they would transfer the majority of the cost of that effort to the state (socializing the cost across all citizens) instead of having to fund private police (like the Pinkertons) for each factory.
This was the age of the poor, often recently immigrated Europeans, scrabbling for a foothold in rapidly growing American cities. The factory owners exploited these workers with long hours, low pay, and dangerous working conditions. Since local government was controlled by the wealthy factory owners, the only outlet for “voting” available to these workers was strikes, or “riots” as the wealthy called it. To answer this threat, the public police force provided the illusion that crushing strikes was simply “maintaining order” rather than forcing labor into submission with violence.
To make matters worse, a moral and racial propaganda was on the rise – that these laborers were biologically inferior.
These laborers were easily identified by the police since they consisted of the poor, foreign immigrants, and free blacks. The extreme focus on these groups in the 1850s to 1900s (and onwards) created a focus in police policy that persists to this day – namely the idea that policing should be directed toward “bad people”, rather than the conditions that give rise to crime.
To put it bluntly, this police force was created to keep poor people in line. It focused primarily on the easily spotted classes of immigrants and people of color to terrorize them into staying in line. The frequent motto “protect and serve” is marketing lies. Even the supreme court ruled in 2005 that the police have no duty to protect people from harm. The most enlightening part of that ruling is that there was no “property interest” in the protection sought in the case. The police exist to protect property interests – the interests of the wealthy.
State Police
This story extends into state police agencies as well. The PA state police were set up as an all-white, all-“american” paramilitary force specifically for breaking strikes in the coal fields and for controlling local towns made up of immigrants (Catholics, Irish, Germans, and Eastern Europeans, which were the “dangerous classes” of the day). Remember that at this time “White” only included the English-British, not even German or French were white enough.
(Side note: Similarly, the Texas Rangers were created to aggressively target native Mexican communities in Texas. Whoa it’s even worse than I thought – at the time of their founding in 1823, Texas was a territory of Mexico and the Texas Rangers were a force which destabilized the local Mexican government which led to the eventual secession and war between the USA and Mexico in 1846! Of course, the main reason President James K Polk was so hot to fight Mexico over Texas was that he was from Tennessee and really needed to get another Slave state added to Congress in 1846 to keep the slave money train rolling.)
In this sense, it’s inaccurate to say that the police were generally corrupt, because they were the tool by which political corruption was enacted, in service of the wealthy. They weren’t “corrupt” --- they intentionally are that way. It's not a bad apple, it is a normal apple.
If that seems extreme to you, consider that an investigation done in 1894 on police corruption found that promotion within the New York City police department required specific amounts of bribes for each promotion level. Even as recently as 1993, the Mollen Commission exposed rampant drug corruption, organized theft, and excessive use of force in that same New York police force 100 years later. Police are regularly linked to gambling, prostitution, racism, and excessive force in major cities, which should come as no surprise, given the above legacy.
I know a police officer though...
I am sure many of you personally know police officers, sheriffs, detectives, SWAT team members, etc. I do too! Am I saying that those people are bad people? No, I am only laying out the legacy of the institutions to which they belong, which are set up to oppress those most disadvantaged by poverty, and those most identifiable as the “dangerous classes” of labor – regardless of whether they are poor or not. When someone like Colin Kaepernick draws attention to the deadly inequalities in use of police force, it is something those good officers should agree with – do they want to uphold the law, or do they want to uphold the wealthy’s mission of “Scaring labor straight”? After 400 years of violent oppression in the USA, the objections of people of color to the separate code of law they are held to remains as valid as ever.
Let’s remember it wasn’t that long ago that being German, Irish, or Catholic would have gotten you the same treatment as that which Colin objected to. The only reason it doesn’t anymore is because enough members of those classes have joined the circle of the wealthy to shift the balance of the scales – and there are sufficient number of exploitable labor in other demographics.
The problem remains is that it’s impossible to eliminate the category of “dangerous classes”. As long as we rely on cheap labor to run our country, our society requires the existence of an underclass to supply that labor. People of color, kept in line with intentionally broken education systems (funded by local property taxes), intentionally disproportionate policing (the school-to-prison pipeline), intentionally racist laws (especially drug laws), intentionally diverting funds away from black communities, and legal process for mandatory sentencing – these people make up a large portion of this class.
That's why Civil Rights was such a hard road
This is why blacks marching in the Civil Rights Movement had firehoses, attack dogs, and rubber bullets fired at them. This is why they faced brutal physical attacks by police (and by white citizens emulating police). Because the nature of the system was that it sought to keep the “dangerous classes” aka “cheap labor” in line. This continues in the modern day with the huge difference in police behavior towards “white people” compared with “black people”.
Undocumented/documented immigrants are the source of impressive amounts of seasonal labor, which is also used as a political football – even today the media is driving a wedge into America over each and every individual crime committed by undocumented immigrants, never mind that the crime rate of (legal or illegal) immigrants is far lower than the general population of citizens. At that rate, if we are concerned with crime we should wish to completely replace citizens with undocumented immigrants! For those of you who may have heard “but even one crime is too many if they shouldn’t be in the country to begin with” remember that the only reason our country provides the comforts it does to citizens like you is because that labor is there for the wealthy to leverage.
This is also why policing of “white people” is culturally considered very differently. Take a look at the stats yourself, but the modern “dangerous classes” are far more likely to be ticketed and searched.
In conclusion, the public police force's first purpose is as an arm of the wealthy property owners. Its guiding objective is to protect that property, if necessary at the cost of human lives and especially if those human lives are the cheap labor that wealthy property holders need to exploit to be profitable. The people who control politics care more about profits than about the lives of millions of intentionally oppressed laborers, and the police are one of the ways they maintain the status quo in the name of order.
Links to more reading: (some are linked inline above)
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/willmodpol.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
General fact pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollen_Commission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States#Historical_population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_town
http://www.ushistory.org/us/22a.asp
https://www.theusaonline.com/people/urbanization.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Polk
https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing-evidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining