No, Modern Policing Did Not Originate with Slavery

N ikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times’ 1619 Project is at it again in her effort to paint everything in America as a product of slavery. This time, she is trying to tie “modern policing” to antebellum citizen slave patrols. This fundamentally misunderstands what “modern policing” means.

Here is what Hannah-Jones told CBS News, which framed her quote as proving that “what we’re seeing now has a disturbing link to the past:”

In certain parts of the country, modern policing has direct lineage to the slave patrols. The slave patrols deputized white Americans to stop, to question, to search any black person who was walking about, to ensure that enslaved people were not escaping, or going in places where they weren’t supposed to be.

When challenged on Twitter to offer support, Hannah-Jones cited a 2019 blog post by Chelsea Hansen on the National Law Enforcement Museum website:

When one thinks about policing in early America, there are a few images that may come to mind: A county sheriff enforcing a debt between neighbors, a constable serving an arrest warrant on horseback, or a lone night watchman carrying a lantern through his sleeping town. These organized practices were adapted to the colonies from England and formed the foundations of American law enforcement. However, there is another significant origin of American policing that we cannot forget — and that is slave patrols. . . . After the Civil War, Southern police departments often carried over aspects of the patrols. These included systematic surveillance, the enforcement of curfews, and even notions of who could become a police officer.

The problem with Hannah-Jones’s argument is that it entirely ignores what makes modern policing modern: the creation of professional, full-time, paid, uniformed, hierarchical police forces designed to replace citizen enforcement. The institution of police in America has a very different history from what Hannah-Jones told CBS News. To the extent that modern police forces took over the job of enforcing racist laws, that is simply because enforcing the laws is what police do. The fault for that lies in the laws and the people who make them, not in some idea that policing is tainted by having been preceded by slave patrols. In fact, modern policing has a distinct and well-known origin outside of the slaveholding South.

Policing in some form has existed for as long as there has been civilization, and it was typically led by a few government officers — a sheriff, a magistrate, a constable, perhaps a local feudal lord. But the old English tradition, which came down to the American colonies, relied heavily on community volunteers. Hansen’s post relied on an article by Gary Potter that begins:

The development of policing in the United States closely followed the development of policing in England. In the early colonies policing took two forms. It was both informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch,” or private-for-profit policing, which is called “The Big Stick.” . . . The watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a night watch in 1636, New York in 1658 and Philadelphia in 1700. The night watch was not a particularly effective crime control device. Watchmen often slept or drank on duty. While the watch was theoretically voluntary, many “volunteers” were simply attempting to evade military service, were conscript forced into service by their town, or were performing watch duties as a form of punishment. Philadelphia created the first day watch in 1833 and New York instituted a day watch in 1844 as a supplement to its new municipal police force . . .

As you can see, had Hannah-Jones actually read the sources she cites, she would not have sniped to critics on Twitter, “This was a news program about America, not England. Maybe the law enforcement museum is lying, too.” The English and American experiences are closely tied together, as the law-enforcement museum’s own sources acknowledge.

Professional police forces find their beginnings in France, which employed gendarmes as far back as 1700. But the creation of professional, uniformed police departments can be traced directly to British home secretary (later prime minister) Robert Peel, who introduced them in London on September 29, 1829. Indeed, the “bobbies” are called this even today after Robert Peel. Peel’s role is very well-known and well-documented in policing history. One can find references to Peel’s “nine principles” of policing today on the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Ottowa Police, and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Even the New York Times reprinted them in 2014, quoting New York City police commissioner William Bratton: “I carry these with me everywhere. My bible.” Those principles:

PRINCIPLE 1: “The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.”

PRINCIPLE 2: “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.”

PRINCIPLE 3: “Police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.”

PRINCIPLE 4: “The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.”

PRINCIPLE 5: “Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to the public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.”

PRINCIPLE 6: “Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.”

PRINCIPLE 7: “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

PRINCIPLE 8: “Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.”

PRINCIPLE 9: “The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.”

As you can tell, these principles were seen at the time as a great progressive step forward from policing by a deputized citizen-volunteer posse or by vigilantes — precisely the form of pre-modern policing that the slave patrols represented. The history of vigilantes and citizen lynch mobs is not one that Hannah-Jones would find to be friendlier to African Americans.

Historians are more or less unanimous on the direct influence of Peel’s innovations on the establishment of modern American police forces. As Jürgen Osterhammel writes in The Transformation of the World, his comprehensive global history of the 19th century, Peel’s model had global influence, including in the United States:

The police in the United States had its roots in England: first in the old tradition of community night watchmen transferred to the American colonies, then in the important modernization that gave rise in 1829 to the [London] Metropolitan Police Force and its uniformed bobbies. This basic model was adopted with a delay of two or three decades by large cities in the United States, and it was only in the 1850s that those in the East provided themselves with uniformed policemen on a permanent payroll.

Law-enforcement historian Eric Monkkonen’s “History of Urban Police” likewise explains the importance of Peel’s innovations:

Police are relative newcomers to the Anglo-American criminal justice system. The Constitution does not mention them. Early city charters do not mention them, either, for the simple reason that, as we know them, police had not been invented. Instead, cities had loosely organized night watches and constables who worked for the courts, supplemented by the private prosecution of offenders through lower-level courts. . . . The night watch and day constable, dating from the Middle Ages, were familiar comic figures in Shakespeare’s plays and were not replaced until the 1820s, when London police were reorganized by Robert Peel. The police precedent for the United States, as is well known, came from the establishment of the Metropolitan Police of London in 1829. Peel used his military experience in Ireland to create a social control organization midway between a military and a civil force.

The American adoption of police from Peel’s model began in the cities, mainly on the East Coast and including some southern cities:

New York City uniformed its police first, in 1853, after an earlier short-lived attempt in the 1840s. The cities of Savannah, perhaps Albany, Charleston, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Cincinnati, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Utica, New York, in that order, complete the list of those cities which followed in the 1850s.

As Monkkonen details, modern American police were distinct from the old system:

There are four important innovative features of the new police as created in the United States in the nineteenth century. First, the new police had a hierarchical organization, with a command and communications structure resembling the military. This gave them an ordered and centralized hierarchy. . . . Second, increasing functional differentiation in revised city governments located the police under the executive rather than the judicial branch–previously, constables and watches had been part of the lower courts. . . . Third, the uniforms made the police visible, hence accessible, to all, whether neighbors or strangers, and this essentially made them the first and, for a long time, the only officials easily seen by the public. . . . Fourth, the police were conceived to be active: that entailed patrol (they were expected to discover and prevent crime), regular salaries and lines in the city budget, and free prosecution of criminal offenders. Conceptualized as bringing regular and more effective crime prevention to the city, this new activity contrasted with the constables’ responsive, fee-based work.

These are precisely the characteristics that distinguished police forces, particularly in big cities, from citizen slave patrols. Of course, American policing has its own heritage as well. American police were employed mainly by local governments, not by the national government as in much of Europe. Regional disparities created space for private detective agencies such as the Pinkertons. America has a much longer history of vigilante action, especially in the West, where police were scarce. Keith Williams notes some of the distinctions, which led 19th-century American police to be tied to urban political machines:

American leaders knew a good thing when they saw it and, when faced with similar elements of social disorder, ‘borrowed’ some of the fundamental tenets of the London police. The early American police forces modelled themselves after the London police force, but not in its entirety. Deployment for preventive patrol carried over and was supposed to be the major facet for the US police. Apart from a few other parallels, such as a similar military-model structure and beat patrols, the police forces were dissimilar in all respects. Perhaps the most important difference was that the American police agencies found themselves to be reflective of the communities that they policed.

Monkkonen notes that antebellum southern states — unsurprisingly — used their new police forces to take over the jobs of the old slave patrols, but that they adapted their structure from elsewhere:

Clearly the major metropolises took the initiative in the creation of the uniformed police, New York and Boston explicitly imitating London. The early innovators not in the group of leading metropolises had two or three characteristics which account for what may be termed their premature change to the uniformed police. First, some of the early innovators were virtual suburbs of New York City — Jersey City, for instance. Other cities were regional centers with many of the characteristics of primate cities — Charleston or San Francisco, for instance. Finally, many of the early innovators were southern, slave cities, where the police were very much in the military mode of slave control. Richard Wade, for instance, has asserted that southern cities had virtual standing armies in the form of police to control slaves. This thesis deserves more research, for the early uniforming of non-slaveholding San Francisco’s police suggests that southern cities may have innovated more because of their roles as regional centers rather than for slave control alone. Nevertheless, this sequential list of cities suggests that the timing of innovation in urban police followed an important basic pattern in the urban network, determined primarily by size, but also heavily influenced by region.

History is rarely as simple as the sorts of narrative Hannah-Jones peddles, in which anything that was ever used by a slaveholder is transmuted into a creation and legacy of slavery. London-style policing, when imported into slave states, naturally adapted to the needs, desires, and worldview of slaveholders and slaveholding societies, just as it adapted to the needs, desires, and worldview of big cities with political machines run by Irish immigrants. But that tells us nothing about the “lineage” of “modern policing.”