• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • HOME
  • NEWS+OPINIONS
    • NEWS TO US
    • COLUMNS
      • APPARENT HORIZON
      • DEAR READER
      • Close
    • LONGFORM FEATURES
    • OPINIONS
    • EDITORIAL
    • Close
  • ARTS+ENTERTAINMENT
    • FILM
    • MUSIC
    • COMEDY
    • PERFORMING ARTS
    • VISUAL ARTS
    • Close
  • DINING+DRINKING
    • EATS
    • SIPS
    • Close
  • LIFESTYLE
    • CANNABIS
      • TALKING JOINTS MEMO
      • Close
    • WELLNESS
    • GTFO
    • Close
  • STUFF TO DO
  • TICKETS
  • ABOUT US
    • 5 DOUBLE-U’S
    • MASTHEAD
    • DISTRIBUTION
    • ADVERTISE
    • SUBMISSIONS
    • PRIVACY POLICY
    • Close
  • BECOME A MEMBER

Dig Bos

The Dig - Boston's Only Newspaper

READ CURRENT STREET ISSUE

DIG Year End 2020

THE HISTORICAL PURPOSE OF POLICING

Written by BILL SHELTON Posted August 6, 2020 Filed Under: Essay, NEWS+OPINIONS, Op-Ed

"Paris, rue Ordener" by Jeanne Menjoulet is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
“Paris, rue Ordener” by Jeanne Menjoulet is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Bridging the chasm between law enforcement and justice, Part 3


Understanding the historical creation of police forces and their function in preserving the established order will go a long way toward explaining why police violence against the poor, people of color, and African Americans in particular persists. 

For the first two centuries that Europeans were in North America, police forces did not exist. In fact, the primary emotional driver of separation from Britain was arbitrary use of police power. Writs of assistance were the 18th Century’s stop-and-frisk, but applied to White people.

That police were not needed now seems all the more remarkable when one considers that close to half of European immigrants came as convicted felons, or as indentured servants who had usually been deceived or coerced into coming.

The simplest explanation is, opportunity. Virtually anyone who was not a slave or native could find gainful employment. And while indentured life was harsh, laws in most colonies obligated masters to provide for the economic sufficiency of servants when their indenture ended. 

North Carolina, for example, required that freed servants be given “freedom dues” of “fifty acres of land, three barrels of Indian corn, and two new suits.” This was probably the precursor to General Sherman’s post-Civil-War order that freed slaves be given forty acres of land and a mule, an order that President Andrew Johnson later rescinded.

So with low levels of inequality, the population’s days were occupied by work, and crime tended to be incidental. But where slavery existed, inequality was absolute. White people feared slave rebellions, and the direct antecedent to policing in the South was slave patrols, first formed in 1704 in South Carolina. Slave patrols’ three purposes were to capture escaped slaves, conduct organized terror to discourage slave revolts, and maintain slaves’ work discipline. 

In the North, Samuel Slater opened the first cotton mill in Pawtucket in 1792, marking the beginning of U.S. industrialization. As manufacturing spread, so did a growing industrial workforce, increasingly composed of non-English immigrants and freed Blacks, who earned meager wages and lived and worked in inhuman conditions. Resulting increases in crime were initially dealt with by for-profit policing agencies who contracted with merchants and industrialists.

But the monied interests were more concerned with “order” than with crime, which rarely affected them directly. “Disorderly” reactions to economic injustice ranged from public drunkenness, to spontaneous labor actions that the elites called “rioting,” to organized strikes. 

The creation of public police forces enabled the transfer of social control costs from the private sector to the state, while misrepresenting social control to the populace as crime control and the rule of law. That misrepresentation was supported by the promotion of perceptions that the underclass was biologically and morally inferior. The more different they looked and sounded from the dominant class, the more suspect they were. 

Transforming policing from responding to criminal acts to preventing disorder—now defined as “crime”—legitimized constant surveillance of populations, which continues today. 

Boston became home to America’s first professional police force in 1838, modeled on the London force created by British Home Secretary Robert Peel. He had, in turn, modeled London’s police on an occupying colonial force that he had created to suppress resistance in Ireland. By the Civil War, this solution had spread throughout urban America.

As these agencies’ primary purpose was maintaining order, they did not so much fight crime as regulate and profit from it. From their formation, they were corrupt and brutal. While protecting their commercial and political patrons’ operations, they took payoffs; organized professional criminals, trading immunity for bribes and information; bought votes and stuffed ballot boxes; and sold promotions.

Any organization that operates under such circumstances will inevitably develop a culture that is defensive, insulated from the public, resistant to scrutiny and regulation, and punitive in response to any perceived threat to their own. While the organizations’ activities may change over time, the culture will maintain great inertia.

As police forces expanded, public opinion opposed arming them with guns and authorizing the use of deadly force, but merchants and magnates favored it. And decision makers ultimately capitulated, since so many officers had already armed themselves and refused to disarm.

Following the Civil War municipal police departments were increasingly mobilized to prevent labor actions, using countless “public order” arrests and violently dispersing striking workers. Call boxes were set up and keys given to businessmen so they could quickly summon police enforcers of order.

Meanwhile, the doctrine of racial inferiority had also been used to justify the enslavement of those people whose work produced the wealth that, directly or indirectly, financed much of the young nation’s industrialization. By the end of the Civil War, the property value of enslaved humans was greater than all the nation’s railroads and factories combined.

To maintain that value, former slaves had to continue to perform exhausting labor for starvation wages. Slave patrols morphed into police departments charged with enforcing “black codes,” passed to restrict Black Americans’ freedom. After Reconstruction, black codes became Jim Crow laws, enforced by police departments and vigilante groups, which often included police as members.

Northern politicians feared the migration of freed Blacks and, through economic and regulatory methods, established ghettoes. In them, residents could be contained and pacified by police, using discriminatory law enforcement and excessive force.

The rise of the civil rights movement brought more repressive policing, brutal in the South and, initially, more nuanced in the North and West. But emerging groups that fought for systemic change, like the Congress of Racial Equality, Black Panthers, Young Lords, and American Indian Movement, brought more repressive responses, including assassination by police.  

As the civil rights movement was waning, a movement of a different sort was gaining force among the nation’s economic elites. It would come to be called neoliberalism, and it would have a profound impact on policing. 

Its core idea was that only capitalist markets could fairly allocate resources and reward individuals. So private enterprises’ only obligation was to maximize profit, and government must get out of the way by repealing business regulations, slashing taxes on the wealthy, privatizing as much as possible, and stripping the social safety net.

The ascendance of neoliberalism would require a substantial change to America’s political landscape. This began with Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which mobilized Southern White racial fears and White fear of crime and disorder elsewhere. The political shift accompanied government policies that crashed the economy in the 1970s, creating a permanent, disproportionately Black, underclass.

Ronald Reagan came to power exploiting the same fears and began implementing the neoliberal agenda in earnest, slashing regulations, tax brackets, and programs, and conducting war on organized labor. Bill Clinton continued the mission. Among his atrocities was the 1994 Crime Bill, which vastly expanded crime definitions, mandatory sentencing, the prison population, and police forces. 

So police were obligated to control and lock up more people for more things, even as crime rates fell. At the same time abandonment of welfare, social, educational, housing, workforce, and mental health programs created more “disorder” while dumping enormous and expansive new duties on the police, for which they could not be prepared. Poor communities were abandoned to savage market forces, and police were still charged with keeping them pacified. 

I have not been entirely fair in my recounting of police history. I have omitted the dozens of public commissions that were convened to reform policing, going back to 1894. Each reported, recommended, and disappeared, leaving little impact. 

I have omitted serious internal efforts within police departments, beginning in the 1950s, to “professionalize” them. Those efforts did have substantial and tangible impacts, but were strenuously resisted by police unionization drives that exploded in the 1960s. 

It’s also important to acknowledge that the endemic corruption that characterized early police forces has largely disappeared, while the quality of police recruits has immeasurably improved.

But the point of this column is not to described police departments’ good intentions, or the progress they have made in pursuing them. It is to demonstrate the ultimate purpose of policing, which confounds those good intentions.

From its outset in the U.S., policing has been about preserving the power relationships that define the existing “order.” There now exists an extensive body of research demonstrating that what gets defined as “crime” and targeted for enforcement is shaped by the management of racial and class inequality.

Police are obligated to be the interface between an exploitative and coercive political economy and its victims. As such, they must inevitably absorb resentment, resistance, and abuse from those whom they police.

Reforming, defunding, or abolishing police cannot resolve this structural conflict. Only transforming economic and political institutions that have long outlived their usefulness can do that, which is the subject of the next column.


READ THE WHOLE SERIES!
Bridging the chasm between law and justice

Part 1
Part 2
Part 4

BILL SHELTON

Bill Shelton lives in Somerville, where he sits on the Union Square Neighborhood Council and has been a trouble maker for 32 years.

More from author
  • BILL SHELTON
    https://digboston.com/author/bill-shelton/
    Income Inequality. Photo by mSeattle CC-BY-2.0.
    NO LEGAL JUSTICE WITHOUT ECONOMIC JUSTICE
  • BILL SHELTON
    https://digboston.com/author/bill-shelton/
    BRIDGING THE CHASM BETWEEN LAW ENFORCEMENT AND JUSTICE: PART 2
  • BILL SHELTON
    https://digboston.com/author/bill-shelton/
    BRIDGING THE CHASM BETWEEN LAW ENFORCEMENT AND JUSTICE
  • BILL SHELTON
    https://digboston.com/author/bill-shelton/
    Somerville power lines. Photo by Aaron Knox.
    SOMERVILLE: THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS... AND NEW FRIENDS

Filed Under: Essay, NEWS+OPINIONS, Op-Ed Tagged With: criticism, history, justice, law enforcement, opinion, Police, slider, sociology

WHAT’S NEW

2021 Biden inauguration Boston

PHOTOS & RECAP: “NO HONEYMOON FOR BIDEN” RALLY IN BOSTON

2020 Indian farmers' protest - On a truck. Photo CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain by Randeep Maddoke, randeepphotoartist@gmail.com.

OPINION: IS DISSENT ANTI-NATIONALISM OR PATRIOTISM?

WU ASSERTS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS IN HER CAMPAIGN

WU ASSERTS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS IN HER CAMPAIGN

STREET MEDICS BOLSTER PROTESTS IN MORE WAYS THAN YOU MAY REALIZE

STREET MEDICS BOLSTER PROTESTS IN MORE WAYS THAN YOU MAY REALIZE

HOW ONE MASS TOWN TOOK EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES TO APPEASE A CONTROVERSIAL COP

HOW ONE MASS TOWN TOOK EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES TO APPEASE A CONTROVERSIAL COP

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. HONORED, SPEAKERS ADDRESS RACISM

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. HONORED, SPEAKERS ADDRESS RACISM

Primary Sidebar

HEMPIRE FREEDOM PACK 25% OFF

FEATURED EVENT

Most Popular

  • APPOINTED SOMERVILLE OFFICIAL SPURS OUTRAGE WITH TWEETS FROM DC MOB SCENE by MARC LEVY
  • Aerial View Parkman Bandstand at Boston Common. CC BY-SA 4.0 2017 by AbhiSuryawanshi. NO HONEYMOON FOR BIDEN: 1/20 PROTEST ON BOSTON COMMON, 4 PM by MATTHEW ANDREWS
  • VIDEO: COP WHO BRAGGED THAT HE HIT PROTESTERS SHOWS HOW BAD APPLES THRIVE IN BOSTON by CHRIS FARAONE
  • PRISON HORRORS BY THE NUMBERS by SARAH BETANCOURT
  • IT’S HARDER THAN EVER TO FIND A BATHROOM IN BOSTON. WHAT’S THE CITY DOING ABOUT IT? by ZACK HUFFMAN

READ CURRENT MEMBER EDITION

DIG Member 1.9 – 11/26/20

READ CURRENT STREET ISSUE

DIG Year End 2020

Footer

digbos

“Trump was voted out. However, this is not a man “Trump was voted out. However, this is not a mandate for #Biden and #Harris.” https://digboston.com/photos-recap-no-honeymoon-for-biden-rally-in-boston/ #photo #rally #march #left #protest #inauguration #Boston #Massachusetts
OPINION: IS DISSENT ANTI-NATIONALISM OR PATRIOTISM OPINION: IS DISSENT ANTI-NATIONALISM OR PATRIOTISM? #Boston #protest for Indian farmers, Saturday 1/23/21, 12-1 pm at the #Massachusetts State House https://digboston.com/opinion-is-dissent-anti-nationalism-or-patriotism/ #India #politics #food #farmer #protest #justice #solidarity @monica_gill1
HOW ONE MASS TOWN TOOK EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES TO A HOW ONE MASS TOWN TOOK EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES TO APPEASE A CONTROVERSIAL COP https://digboston.com/no-justice-how-officials-in-one-mass-town-took-extraordinary-measures-to-appease-a-controversial-cop/ #ArlingtonMA #police #reform #cop #racism #controversy #BlackLivesMatter #Massachusetts
Ghost kitchens simply don’t have a need for host Ghost kitchens simply don’t have a need for hosts, servers, bartenders, bussers … What happens to those #jobs if virtual kitchens continue to flourish? https://digboston.com/ghost-story-virtual-kitchens-appear-to-be-the-next-big-thing-but-at-what-cost/ #restaurant #labor #work #Boston #Massachusetts #coronavirus #COVID19
“I don’t think we’re going to wake up on Jan “I don’t think we’re going to wake up on Jan. 7 in the same country we went to bed in on the 6th.” https://digboston.com/former-mass-gubernatorial-candidate-predicted-violence-before-assault-on-capitol/ #politics #Massachusetts #national #Capitol #WashingtonDC #MAGA
RADICAL AND RELEVANT: THE LIFE OF HARRY BRILL http RADICAL AND RELEVANT: THE LIFE OF HARRY BRILL https://digboston.com/radical-and-relevant-the-life-of-harry-brill/ #obituary #organizer #radical #sociologist #democracy #politics @UMassBoston @BklynCollege411 @UCBerkeley #Boston #Massachusetts #NewYorkCity #Berkeley #California
NO HONEYMOON FOR BIDEN: 1/20 #PROTEST ON BOSTON CO NO HONEYMOON FOR BIDEN: 1/20 #PROTEST ON BOSTON COMMON, 4 PM https://digboston.com/no-honeymoon-for-biden-1-20-protest-on-boston-common-4-pm/ #opinion #progressive #left #action #inauguration #Boston #Massachusetts
Light and sweet and hoppy, we’re loving this lat Light and sweet and hoppy, we’re loving this latest incarnation of a #beer that’s been in the making for months. https://digboston.com/video-jacks-abby-x-boston-celtics-pride-and-parquet-hoppy-lager-unboxing-tasting/ #fun #video #review #Boston #Massachusetts
Jostling for position and influence are the disadv Jostling for position and influence are the disadvantaged candidates, existing industry participants, and municipalities … https://digboston.com/the-road-to-home-delivery-pt-5-dogs-in-the-fight-identifying-the-players/ #cannabis #politics #analysis #Massachusetts
The candidates will be interviewed about the upcom The candidates will be interviewed about the upcoming race. https://digboston.com/wu-and-campbell-to-speak-at-mayoral-candidate-webinar/ #politics #mayor #campaign #Boston #Massachusetts
Load More... Follow on Instagram
Social Buttons

DigBoston facebook DigBoston Twitter DigBoston Instagram

Masthead

About

Submissions

Advertise

Privacy Policy

Customer Service

Distribution

About Us

DigBoston is a one-stop nexus for everything worth doing or knowing in the Boston area. It's an alt-weekly, it's a website, it's an e-mail blast, it's a twitter account, it's that cool party that you were at last night ... hey, you're reading it, so it's gotta be good. For advertising inquiries: [email protected] To reach Editorial: [email protected] For internship opportunities: [email protected]