 If you believe policing "used to be about serving and protecting," please know the institution was specifically created to maintain and control slave populations, and later used to enforce Jim Crow laws. The system is sadly operating exactly as intended. https://gen.medium.com/slavery-and-the-origins-of-the-american-police-state-ec318f5ff05b 7 comments
@batkaren - thanks for this. I was a Brit until recently, with a wholly different history of policing; I have never understood US cops, but this origin story does help enormously. I had no idea. @batkaren “Policing” as an institution wasn’t specifically created to control slave populations in the southern US. It took the form it did in the south because of the needs of the system in the south. The problem was the system, not policing in general. The choice is whether you want to grant a monopoly on violence to the state, or you want to have disorganized vigilante violence and retribution by individual citizens (eg lynching). Policing in the US doesn’t have to suck. @batkaren Urban policing in the northern industrial states was modeled on London metropolitan policing and was incredibly harsh on the Irish underclass. @batkaren “An early night watch formed in Boston in 1631, and in 1634 the first U.S. constable on record was Joshua Pratt, in the Plymouth Colony.” “In the Southern colonies, formal slave patrols were created as early as 1704” @batkaren If you have not read #1619project you should. There will be a series on Hulu discussing each topic covered in the book. |
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@batkaren get out of my head https://mas.to/@Rod_Rescueman/109764432947556962