[Peace-discuss] "Origins of the police" - by David Whitehouse

[Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss]

[...] "Even the time-honored tactic of hanging the movement'??s leaders 
began to backfire. An execution would exert an intimidating effect on a 
crowd of 100, but a crowds now ranged up to 50,000 supporters of the 
condemned man, and the executions just made them want to fight. The 
growth of British cities, and the growth of social polarization within 
them -?? that is, two quantitative changes -?? had begun to produce 
qualitatively new outbreaks of struggle.

The ruling class needed new institutions to get this under control. One 
of them was the London police, founded in 1829, just 10 years after 
Peterloo. *The new police force was designed specifically to inflict 
nonlethal violence upon crowds to break them up while deliberately 
trying to avoid creating martyrs. **Now, any force that'??s organized to 
deliver violence on a routine basis is going to kill some people. But 
for every police murder, there are hundreds or thousands of acts of 
police violence that are nonlethal - ??calculated and calibrated to 
produce intimidation while avoiding an angry collective response.**
***
When the London police were not concentrated into squads for crowd 
control, they were dispersed out into the city to police the daily life 
of the poor and working class. That sums up the distinctive dual 
function of modern police: There is the dispersed form of surveillance 
and intimidation that'??s done the name of fighting crime; and then 
there'??s the concentrated form of activity to take on strikes, riots, 
and major demonstrations." [...]


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[ufpj-activist] RESOURCE: Origins of the police
Date: 	Mon, 8 Dec 2014 08:21:50 +0000
From: 	Michael Eisenscher <m_eisenscher at uslaboragainstwar.org>
Reply-To: 	Michael Eisenscher <m_eisenscher at uslaboragainstwar.org>
To: 	UFPJ Activist List <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>



  Origins of the police
  <http://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/>


  Posted byDavid Whitehouse
  <http://worxintheory.wordpress.com/author/dwhouse57/>

December 7, 2014 
<http://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/>

When Black residents of Ferguson, Mo. decided to stand up and fight, 
they inspired action from others around the country, and they provoked a 
national debate about policing. I contribute this article to the debate 
in hopes of advancing the struggle. It is an edited text of a talk I 
gave in Chicago in late June 2012 at the annual Socialism conference. 
Audio of the talk is available atwearemany.org 
<http://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/wearemany.org>, 
but the text here corrects some mistakes I made back then. I'??m also 
preparing a more-developed and better-documented article to appear in 
the/International Socialist Review/ <http://isreview.org/>.

The Five Points district of lower Manhattan, painted by George Catlin in 
1827. New Yorkâ??s first free Black settlement, it became a mixed-race 
slum, home to Blacks and Irish alike, and a focal point for the stormy 
collective life of the new working class. Cops were invented to gain 
control over neighborhoods and populations like this. 
<https://worxintheory.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/five_points_by_george_catlin_1827-bigger.jpg> 


The Five Points district of lower Manhattan, painted by George Catlin in 
1827. New York'??s first free Black settlement, Five Points was also a 
destination for Irish immigrants and a focal point for the stormy 
collective life of the new working class. Cops were invented to gain 
control over neighborhoods and populations like this.

*In England and the United States, the police were invented within the 
space of just a few decades - roughly from 1825 to 1855.*

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it 
really didn'??t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most 
common way for authorities to solve a crime - before and since the 
invention of police -?? has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling 
elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by 
collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the 
police in response to large, defiant crowds. That'??s

-?? strikes in England,
-?? riots in the Northern US,
-?? and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

I will be focusing a lot on who these crowds were, how they became such 
a challenge. We'??ll see that one difficulty for the rulers, besides the 
growth of social polarization in the cities, was the breakdown of old 
methods of personal supervision of the working population. In these 
decades, the state stepped in to fill the social breach.

We'??ll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just one 
part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a day-to-day 
basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief in order 
to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of public 
education to regulate workers'?? minds. I will connect those points to 
police work later on, but mostly I'??ll be focusing on how the police 
developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and 
Philadelphia.

** * * * **

*To get a sense of what'??s special about modern police, it will help to 
talk about the situation when capitalism was just 
beginning.*Specifically, let'??s consider the market towns of the late 
medieval period, about 1,000 years ago.

The dominant class of the time wasn'??t in the towns. The feudal 
landholders were based in the countryside. They didn'??t have cops. They 
could pull together armed forces to terrorize the serfs -?? who were 
semi-slaves -?? or they could fight against other nobles. But these 
forces were not professional or full-time.

The population of the towns was mostly serfs who had bought their 
freedom, or simply escaped from their masters. They were known as 
bourgeois, which means town-dweller. The bourgeoisie pioneered economic 
relations that later became known as capitalism.

For the purposes of our discussion, let'??s say that a capitalist is 
somebody who uses money to make more money. At the beginning, the 
dominant capitalists were merchants. A merchant takes money to buy goods 
in order to sell them for more money. There are also capitalists who 
deal only with money-??bankers - ??who lend out a certain amount in 
order to get more back.

You could also be a craftsman who buys materials and makes something 
like shoes in order to sell them for more money. In the guild system, a 
master craftsman would work alongside and supervise journeymen and 
apprentices. The masters were profiting from their work, so there was 
exploitation going on, but the journeymen and apprentices had reasonable 
hopes of becoming masters themselves eventually. So class relations in 
the towns were quite fluid, especially in comparison to the relation 
between noble and serf. Besides, the guilds operated in ways that put 
some limits on exploitation, so it was the merchants who really 
accumulated capital at that time.

In France, in the 11th and 12th centuries, these towns became known as 
communes. They incorporated into communes under various conditions, 
sometimes with the permission of a feudal lord­, but in general they 
were seen as self-governing entities or even city-states.

But they didn'??t have cops. They had their own courts -?? and small 
armed forces made up of the townsmen themselves. These forces generally 
had nothing to do with bringing people up on charges. If you got robbed 
or assaulted, or were cheated in a business deal, then you, the citizen, 
would press the charges.

One example of this do-it-yourself justice, a method that lasted for 
centuries, was known as the hue and cry. If you were in a marketplace 
and you saw somebody stealing, you were supposed to yell and scream, 
saying '??Stop, thief!'?? and chase after the thief. The rest of the 
deal was that anybody who saw you do this was supposed to add to the hue 
and cry and also run after the thief.

/The towns didn'??t need cops because they had a high degree of social 
equality/, which gave people a sense of mutual obligation. Over the 
years, class conflicts did intensify within the towns, but even so, the 
towns held together -?? through a common antagonism to the power of the 
nobles and through continued bonds of mutual obligation.

For hundreds of years, the French carried an idealized memory of these 
early commune towns -?? as self-governing communities of equals. So 
it'??s no surprise that in 1871, when workers took over Paris, they 
named it the Commune. But that'??s jumping a little farther forward than 
we should just yet.

** * * * **

*Capitalism underwent major changes as it grew up inside feudal 
society.*First of all, the size of capital holdings grew. Remember, 
that'??s the point - ??to make smaller piles of money into bigger piles 
of money. The size of holdings began to grow astronomically during the 
conquest of the Americas, as gold and silver were looted from the New 
World and Africans were kidnapped to work on plantations.

More and more things were produced for sale on the market. The losers in 
market competition began to lose their independence as producers and had 
to take wage jobs. But in places like England, the biggest force driving 
people to look for wage work was the state-endorsed movement to drive 
peasants off the land.

The towns grew as peasants became refugees from the countryside, while 
inequality grew within the cities. The capitalist bourgeoisie became a 
social layer that was more distinct from workers than it used to be. The 
market was having a corrosive effect on solidarity of craft guilds -?? 
something I'??ll take up in more detail when I talk about New York. 
Workshops got bigger than ever, as a single English boss would be in 
command of maybe dozens of workers. I'??m talking about the mid-1700s 
here, the period right before real factory industrialization began.

There still weren'??t cops, but the richer classes began to resort to 
more and more violence to suppress the poor population. Sometimes the 
army was ordered to shoot into rebellious crowds, and sometimes the 
constables would arrest the leaders and hang them. So class struggle was 
beginning to heat up, but things really began to change when the 
Industrial Revolution took off in England.

** * * * **

*At the same time, the French were going through a political and social 
revolution of their own, beginning in 1789.*The response of the British 
ruling class was to panic over the possibility that English workers 
would follow the French lead. They outlawed trade unions and meetings of 
more than 50 people.

Nevertheless, English workers put together bigger and bigger 
demonstrations and strikes from about 1792 to 1820. The ruling class 
response was to send in the army. But there are really only two things 
the army could do, and they'??re both bad. They could refuse to shoot, 
and the crowd would get away with whatever it came to do. Or they could 
shoot into the crowd and produce working-class martyrs.

This is exactly what happened in Manchester in 1819. Soldiers were sent 
charging into a crowd of 80,000, injuring hundreds of people and killing 
11. Instead of subduing the crowd, this action, known as the Peterloo 
Massacre, provoked a wave of strikes and protests.

Even the time-honored tactic of hanging the movement'??s leaders began 
to backfire. An execution would exert an intimidating effect on a crowd 
of 100, but a crowds now ranged up to 50,000 supporters of the condemned 
man, and the executions just made them want to fight. The growth of 
British cities, and the growth of social polarization within them -?? 
that is, two quantitative changes -?? had begun to produce qualitatively 
new outbreaks of struggle.

The ruling class needed new institutions to get this under control. One 
of them was the London police, founded in 1829, just 10 years after 
Peterloo. The new police force was designed specifically to inflict 
nonlethal violence upon crowds to break them up while deliberately 
trying to avoid creating martyrs. Now, any force that'??s organized to 
deliver violence on a routine basis is going to kill some people. But 
for every police murder, there are hundreds or thousands of acts of 
police violence that are nonlethal - ??calculated and calibrated to 
produce intimidation while avoiding an angry collective response.

When the London police were not concentrated into squads for crowd 
control, they were dispersed out into the city to police the daily life 
of the poor and working class. That sums up the distinctive dual 
function of modern police: There is the dispersed form of surveillance 
and intimidation that'??s done the name of fighting crime; and then 
there'??s the concentrated form of activity to take on strikes, riots, 
and major demonstrations.

That'??s what they were invented for -?? to deal with crowds -?? but 
what we/see/most of the time is the presence of the cop on the beat. 
Before I talk about the evolution of police in New York, I want to 
explore the connection between these two modes of police work.

*******

*I'??ll begin with the more general topic of class struggle over the use 
of outdoor space.*This is a very consequential issue for workers and the 
poor. The outdoors is important to workers

- for work
-?? for leisure and entertainment
-?? for living space, if you don'??t have a home
-? and for politics.

First, about work. While successful merchants could control indoor 
spaces, those without so many means had to set themselves up as vendors 
on the street. The established merchants saw them as competitors and got 
the police to remove them.

Street vendors are also effective purveyors of stolen goods because 
they'??re mobile and anonymous. It wasn'??t just pickpockets and 
burglars who made use of street vendors this way. The servants and 
slaves of the middle class also stole from their masters and passed the 
goods on to the local vendors. (By the way, New York City had slavery 
until 1827.) The leakage of wealth out of the city'??s comfortable homes 
is another reason that the middle class demanded action against street 
vendors.

The street was also simply where workers would spend their free time - 
??because their homes were/not/comfortable. The street was a place where 
they could get friendship and free entertainment, and, depending on the 
place and time, they might engage in dissident religion or politics. 
British Marxist historian EP Thompson summed all this up when he wrote 
that 19th century English police were

    impartial, attempting to sweep off the streets with an equable hand
    street traders, beggars, prostitutes, street-entertainers, pickets,
    children playing football and freethinking and socialist speakers
    alike. The pretext very often was that a complaint of interruption
    of trade had been received from a shopkeeper.

On both sides of the Atlantic, most arrests were related to victimless 
crimes, or crimes against the public order. Another Marxist historian 
Sidney Harring noted: "??The criminologist'??s definition of '??public 
order crimes'?? comes perilously close to the historian'??s description 
of '??working-class leisure-time activity."

Outdoor life was -?? and is -?? especially important to working-class 
politics. Established politicians and corporate managers can meet 
indoors and make decisions that have big consequences because these 
people are in command of bureaucracies and workforces. But when working 
people meet and make decisions about how to change things, it usually 
doesn'??t count for much unless they can gather some supporters out on 
the street, whether it'??s for a strike or a demonstration. The street 
is the proving ground for much of working-class politics, and the ruling 
class is fully aware of that. That'??s why they put the police on the 
street as a counter-force whenever the working class shows its strength.

Now we can look at the connections between the two major forms of police 
activity -?? routine patrols and crowd control. The day-to-day life of 
patrolling gets police accustomed to using violence and the threat of 
violence. This gets them ready to pull off the large-scale acts of 
repression that are necessary when workers and the oppressed rise up in 
larger groups. It'??s not just a question of getting practice with 
weapons and tactics. Routine patrol work is crucial to creating a 
mindset among police that their violence is for the greater good.

The day-to-day work also allows commanders to discover which cops are 
most comfortable inflicting pain -?? and then to assign them to the 
front lines when it comes to a crackdown. At the same time, the '??good 
cop'?? you may meet on the beat provides crucial public-relations cover 
for the brutal work that needs to be done by the '??bad cops.'?? Routine 
work can also become useful in periods of political upheaval because the 
police have already spent time in the neighborhoods trying to identify 
the leaders and the radicals.

** * * * **

*Now we can jump back into the historical narrative and talk about New 
York City.*

I'??ll begin with a couple of points about the traditions of crowds 
before the revolution. During the colonial period, people got rowdy 
sometimes, but it was often formalized in ways that the colonial elite 
would approve or at least tolerate. There were various celebrations that 
fell in the category of '??misrule,'?? in which social positions were 
reversed and the lower orders could pretend that they were on the top. 
This was a way for the subordinate classes blow off steam by satirizing 
their masters -?? a way that acknowledged the right of the elite to be 
in charge on every other day of the year. This tradition of symbolic 
misrule was especially prominent around Christmas and New Year'??s. Even 
slaves would be allowed to participate.

There was also a yearly celebration of Pope Day, in which members of the 
Protestant majority would parade around with effigies, including one of 
the Pope -?? until they burned them all at the end. A little sectarian 
provocation, '??all in good fun,'?? all approved by the city fathers. At 
that point, Pope Day didn'??t usually lead to violence against actual 
Catholics because there were only a few hundred in New York and not a 
single Catholic church before the revolution.

These crowd traditions were loud and even riotous, but they tended to 
reinforce the connection between the lower orders and the elite, not to 
break that connection.

The lower orders were also bound to the elite by constant personal 
supervision. This applied to slaves and house servants, of course, but 
apprentice and journeyman craftsman also lived in the same house with 
the master. So there were not a lot of these subordinate people roaming 
around the streets at all hours. In fact, there was a colonial ordinance 
for a while that said that working people could be on the streets only 
when they were going to and from work.

This situation left sailors and day laborers as the city'??s rowdiest 
unsupervised elements. But sailors spent most of their time near the 
waterfront, and the laborers -?? that is, the class of regular wage 
workers -?? were not yet a large group.

Under these circumstances where most people were already supervised 
during the day, there was no need for regular police force. There was a 
night watch, which tried to guard against vandalism and arrested any 
Black person who couldn'??t prove that s/he was free. The watch was not 
professional in any way. All of them had day jobs and rotated into watch 
duty temporarily, so they didn'??t patrol regular beats -?? and 
everybody hated doing it. The rich bought their way out of it by paying 
for substitutes.

During the day, a small number of constables were on duty, but they 
didn'??t patrol. They were agents of the court who executed writs like 
summonses and arrest warrants. They did not do detective work. In the 
1700s and well into the 1800s, the system relied almost entirely on 
civilian informants who were promised a portion of any fine that the 
offender might have to pay.

** * * * **

*The revolutionary period changed a few things about the role of crowds 
and the relation between classes.*In the 1760s, beginning with the 
agitation against the Stamp Act, the elite of merchants and 
property-holders endorsed new forms of popular mobilization. These were 
new loud demonstrations and riots that borrowed from existing 
traditions, obviously in the use of effigies. Instead of burning the 
Pope, they'??d burn the governor, or King George.

I don'??t have time to go into detail about what they did, but it'??s 
important to note the class composition of these crowds. Members of the 
elite might be there themselves, but the body of these crowds was the 
skilled workers, collectively known as the mechanics. That means that a 
master would be out in the crowd with his journeymen and apprentices. 
People of higher social rank tended to view the master craftsmen as 
their lieutenants for mobilizing the rest of the mechanics.

As the conflict with Britain intensified, the mechanics became more 
radicalized and organized themselves independently from the colonial 
elite. There was friction between the mechanics and the elite, but never 
a complete breach.

And, naturally, when the British were defeated and the elite set up 
their own government, they had had enough of all this street agitation. 
There continued to be rebellions and riots in the new independent United 
States, but they were taking new shapes - ??partly because economic 
development was breaking up the unity of the mechanics themselves.

** * * * **

*I'??ll turn now to those developments that followed the revolution -?? 
changes that produced a new working class out of a conflicted hodgepodge 
of social elements.*

Let'??s start with the skilled workers. Even before the revolution, the 
division between masters and journeyman had sharpened. To understand 
this, we should look more closely at the lingering influence of the 
guild system; formal guilds did not exist in United States, but some of 
their traditions lived on among skilled workers.

The old guilds had essentially been cartels, unions of workers who had a 
monopoly on a particular skill that allowed them to manage the market. 
They could set customary prices for their goods and even decide 
beforehand how big the market was going to be.

The managed market allowed for some customary stability of relations 
among workers of the same trade. A master acquired an apprentice as an 
indentured servant from his parents in return for a promise of teaching 
him a skill and giving him room and board for seven years. Apprentices 
graduated to become journeyman, but often continued to work for the same 
master as long as there is no slot for them to become masters 
themselves. Journeyman received customary wages with long-term 
contracts. This meant that pay would keep coming in despite seasonal 
variations in the amount of work. Even without the formal structure of 
guilds, much of this customary set of relations was still in place in 
the pre-revolutionary period.

 From about 1750 to 1850, however, this corporative structure within the 
skilled trades was falling apart because the external relation -?? the 
tradesmen'??s control of the market -?? was also beginning to break 
down. Trade that came from other cities or from overseas would undermine 
the masters'?? ability to set prices, so workshops were thrown into 
competition with each other in a way that'??s familiar today.

Competition drove the masters to become more like entrepreneurs, seeking 
out labor-saving innovation and treating their workers more like 
disposable wage workers. Enterprises became larger and more impersonal 
-?? more like factories, with dozens of employees.

In the first decades of the 19th century, employees were not only losing 
their long-term contracts, but they also were losing their place to live 
in the masters'?? households. The apprentices found this to be a 
liberating experience, as young men got out from under the authority of 
their parents/and/their masters. Free to come and go as they pleased, 
they could meet young women and create their own social life among their 
peers. Working women were employed mostly in household service of 
various types unless they were prostitutes.

Outdoor life became transformed as these young people mingled with the 
other parts of the population that comprised the developing working class.

The mingling wasn'??t always peaceful. Irish Catholic immigration 
expanded after 1800. By 1829, there were about 25,000 Catholics in the 
city -?? 1 person out of 8. The Irish were segregated by neighborhood, 
often living alongside Blacks, who themselves were now about 5 percent 
of the population. In 1799, Protestants burned an effigy of St. Patrick, 
and the Irish fought back. These battles recurred over the next few 
years, and it was clear to the Irish that the constables and the watch 
were taking sides against them.

So, before there were even modern police forces, the lawmen were doing 
racial profiling. The city'??s elite took note of the Irish lack of 
respect for the watch -?? their open combativeness -?? and responded by 
expanding the watch and making its patrols more targeted. This went 
along with increasing police attention to Africans, who lived in the 
same areas and often had the same attitude toward the authorities.

Underlying the sectarian and racial divisions were economic competition, 
since Irish workers were generally less skilled and drew lower wages 
than craft workers. At the same time, masters were trying to de-skill 
the jobs in the workshops. In this way, Anglo apprentices became part of 
a real labor market as they lost their long-term contracts. When this 
happened, they found themselves just a rung above Irish immigrants on 
the wage scale. Black workers, who performed domestic service or worked 
as general laborers, were a further rung or two down the wage scale from 
the Irish.

At the same time, the older unskilled part of the wage-working class, 
centered around the docks and building construction, was expanding 
because trade and construction both expanded after the Revolution.

Overall, population expanded rapidly. New York was 60,000 in 1800, but 
it doubled in size by 1820. In 1830, New York had more than 200,000 
people - ??and 312,000 by 1840.

** * * * **

*That'??s a rough profile of the New York'??s new working class.*

*In these decades, all sections of the class went into collective action 
on their own behalf.*It'??s quite a complicated story, because of the 
number of actions and the fragmentation of the class. But we could start 
with a generalization that the most common form of struggle was also the 
most elementary -?? the riot.

Now some specifics. From 1801 to 1832, Black New Yorkers rioted four 
times to prevent former slaves from being sent back to their out-of-town 
masters. These efforts generally failed, the watch responded violently, 
and the participants received unusually harsh sentences. White 
abolitionists joined in the condemnations of these riots. So these riots 
illustrate popular self-activity despite elite disapproval -?? not to 
mention racial disparity in the application of the law.

There was also white harassment of black churches and theaters, 
sometimes rising to the level of riots. Poor immigrants were involved, 
but sometimes rich whites and the constables themselves took part. One 
anti-Black riot raged for three days in 1826, damaging Black houses and 
churches -?? along with houses and churches of white abolitionist ministers.

But there wasn'??t just/conflict/between Black and white workers. In 
1802, white and Black sailors struck for higher wages. As with most 
strikes during this period, the method was something that historian Eric 
Hobsbawm called '??collective bargaining by riot.'?? In this case, 
strikers disabled the ships that were hiring at the lower wages. 
Dockworkers also united across racial and sectarian lines for militant 
strikes in 1825 and 1828.

Job actions by skilled workers like journeymen didn'??t usually need to 
resort to such physical coercion, because they possessed a monopoly on 
the relevant skills. Journeymen nevertheless became more militant in 
these years. Strikes in the skilled trades happened in 3 waves, starting 
in 1809, 1822 and 1829. Each wave was more militant and coercive than 
the previous '?? as they targeted other skilled workers who broke 
solidarity. In 1829, the journeymen led a movement to limit the workday 
to 10 hours and created the Workingmen'??s Party. The party collapsed in 
the same year, but it led to the founding the General Trade Union in 1833.

While workers grew more conscious of themselves as a class, they also 
began to engage in more and more '??run-of-the-mill'?? riots wherever 
crowds gathered, in taverns or in theaters or in the street. Such riots 
may have had no clear economic or political objective, but they were 
still instances of collective self-assertion by the working class -?? or 
by ethnic and racial fractions of the class. In the opening decades of 
the century, there was one of these riots about four times a year, but 
in the period from 1825 to 1830, New Yorkers rioted at a rate of once 
per month.

One of these riots in particular alarmed the elite. Known as the 
Christmas riot of 1828, it actually happened at New Year'??s. A noisy 
crowd of about 4,000 young Anglo workers brought out their drums and 
noisemakers and headed toward Broadway where the rich lived. On the way, 
they busted up an African church and beat the church members. The watch 
arrested several of the rioters, but the crowd rescued them and sent the 
watch running.

The crowd picked up some more numbers and turned toward the commercial 
district, where they busted up the stores. At the Battery, they broke 
windows in some of the city'??s richest homes. Then they headed back up 
Broadway because they knew that the rich were having their own 
celebration at the City Hotel. There the crowd blocked the coaches from 
exiting.

A large contingent of the watch showed up, but the leaders of the crowd 
called a five-minute truce. This allowed the watch to think about the 
fight that they were about to get into. When the five minutes were up, 
the watch stepped aside, and the deafening crowd marched past them up 
Broadway.

This spectacle of working-class defiance took place in full view of the 
families that ran New York City. Newspapers immediately began calling 
for a major expansion of the watch, so the Christmas Riot accelerated a 
set of incremental reforms that finally lead to the creation the New 
York City Police Department in 1845.

The reforms of 1845 enlarged the police force, professionalized them, 
and centralized them with a more military chain of command. The watch 
was expanded to 24 hours, and policemen were forbidden from taking a 
second job. The pay was increased, and police no longer received a 
portion of the fines that were extracted from offenders.

This meant the cops were no longer going out on patrol looking for how 
they were going to make a living, a process that could lead to a strange 
selection of prosecutions. Eliminating the fee system gave commanders 
greater freedom to set policy and priorities -?? and thus made the 
department more responsive to the shifting needs of the economic elite.

That'??s how the New York police got started.

*******

*The story of police in the South is a bit different, as you might expect.*

One of the first modern-type police forces came in Charleston, South 
Carolina, in the years before New York force became fully professional. 
The precursor of the Charleston'??s police force was not a set of urban 
watchmen but slave patrols that operated in the countryside. As one 
historian put it, '??throughout all of the [Southern] states [before the 
Civil War], roving armed police patrols scoured the countryside day and 
night, intimidating, terrorizing, and brutalizing slaves into submission 
and meekness.'??

These were generally volunteer forces of white citizens who provided 
their own weapons. Over time, the system got adapted to city life. 
Charleston'??s population did not explode like New York'??s. In 1820, 
there were still less than 25,000 people -?? but half of them were Black.

The only way that the South could pull off any real industrialization 
was to allow slaves to work in wage jobs in the cities. Some slaves were 
owned directly by factory owners, especially in the South'??s most 
industrial city, Richmond. Most urban slaves, however, were owned by 
white town-dwellers who used them for personal service and '??rented 
them out'?? to wage-paying employers.

At first, the masters found the jobs for their slaves and took all of 
the wages for themselves. But they quickly found it most convenient to 
let their slaves find their own jobs and while collecting a flat fee 
from the slave for the time spent away from the master.

This new set of arrangements fundamentally altered the relation between 
slaves and their masters -?? not to mention among the slaves themselves. 
For long stretches of time, the slaves got out from under the direct 
supervision of their masters, and slaves could make cash for themselves 
above and beyond the fees they paid their masters. Many African 
Americans could even afford to live outside their masters'?? households. 
Slaves could marry and cohabit independently. By the first decades of 
the 19th century, Charleston had a Black suburb, populated mostly by 
slaves alongside some freedmen.

The South'??s white population, both in town and country, lived in 
constant fear of insurrection. In the countryside, however, Blacks were 
under constant surveillance, and there were few opportunities within the 
grueling work regime for slaves to develop wide social connections. The 
dramatically freer circumstances in the cities meant that the state had 
to step in to do the job of repression that the slavemasters had usually 
taken care of themselves.

The Charleston Guard and Watch developed by trial and error into a 
recognizably modern city-run police force by the 1820s, performing both 
day-to-day harassment of the Black population and staying on call for 
rapid mobilization to control crowds. It received a big push toward 
professionalization in 1822 when plans for a coordinated slave 
insurrection were discovered. They crushed the insurrection, and then 
they bulked up the force.

The Southern force was more militarized than in the North, even before 
professionalization. Mounted police were the exception in the North, but 
they were the rule in the South. And Southern police carried guns, with 
bayonets.

The specific history of police forces varied in all American cities, but 
since they were facing similar problems in repressing urban workers and 
the poor, they all tended to converge on similar institutional 
solutions. The Southern experience also reinforces the point that was 
already clear in the North: Anti-Black racism was built into American 
police work from the very first day.

* * * * *

*Toward the end, I'??ll say a few words about Philadelphia, but before 
that, I'??m going to draw out some themes that apply to all of these cases.*

First of all, we need to put policing in the context of a bigger 
ruling-class project of managing and shaping the working class. I said 
at the beginning that the emergence of workers'?? revolt coincided with 
a breakdown of old methods of constant personal supervision of the 
workforce. The state stepped in to provide supervision. The cops were 
part of that effort, but in the North, the state also expanded its 
programs of poor relief and public schooling.

Police work was integrated with the system of poor relief, as constables 
worked on registration of the poor and their placement in workhouses. 
That'??s even before the police were professionalized -?? the constables 
were sorting out the '??deserving poor'?? from the '??undeserving 
poor.'?? If people were unemployed and unable to work, constables would 
direct them toward charity from churches or the city itself. But if 
folks were able to work, they were judged to be '??idlers'?? and sent 
off to the horrors of the workhouse.

The system for poor relief made a crucial contribution to the creation 
of the market for wage labor. The key function of the relief system was 
to make unemployment so unpleasant and humiliating that people were 
willing to take ordinary jobs at very low wages just to avoid 
unemployment. By punishing the poorest people, capitalism creates a low 
baseline for the wage scale and pulls the whole scale downward.

The police no longer play such a direct role in selecting people for 
relief, but they do deliver a good deal of the punishment. As we know, 
lots of police work has to do with making life unpleasant for unemployed 
people on the street.

The rise of modern policing also coincides with the rise of public 
education. Public schools accustom children to the discipline of the 
capitalist workplace, including the submission to strict rules about the 
proper time to do things. The school reform movement of the 1830s and 
40s also aimed to shape the students'?? moral character. The effect of 
this was supposed to be that students would willingly submit to 
authority, that they would be able to work hard, exercise self­-control, 
and delay gratification.

In fact, the concepts of good citizenship that came out of school reform 
movement were perfectly aligned with the concepts of criminology that 
were being invented to categorize people on the street. The police were 
to focus not just on crime but on criminal types -?? a method of 
profiling backed up by supposedly scientific credentials. The 
'??juvenile delinquent,'?? for example, is a concept that is common to 
schooling and policing -?? and has helped to link the two activities in 
practice.

This ideology of good citizenship was supposed to have a big effect 
inside the heads of students, encouraging them to think that the 
problems in society come from the actions of '??bad guys.'?? A key 
objective of schooling, according to reformer Horace Mann, should be to 
implant a certain kind of conscience in the students'??so that they 
discipline their/own/behavior and begin to police/themselves/. In 
Mann'??s words, the objective was for children to '??think of duty 
rather than of the policeman.'??

Needless to say, an analytic scheme for dividing society between good 
guys and bad guys is perfect for identifying scapegoats, especially 
racial ones. Such a moralistic scheme was (and is) also a direct 
competitor to a class-conscious worldview, which identifies society'??s 
basic antagonism as the conflict between exploiters and exploited. 
Police activity thus goes beyond simple repression - ??it '??teaches'?? 
an ideology of good and bad citizenship that dovetails with the lessons 
of the classroom and the workhouse.

The overall point here is that the invention of the police was part of a 
broader expansion of state activity to gain control over the day-to-day 
behavior of the working class. Schooling, poor relief and police work 
all aimed to shape workers to become useful to -?? and loyal to -?? the 
capitalist class.

* * * * *

*The next general point is about something we all know, and that'??s this:*

*There is the law - and then there'??s what cops do*.

First, a few words about the law: Despite what you may have learned in 
civics class, the law is not the framework in which society operates. 
The law is a product of the way society operates, but it doesn'??t tell 
you how things really work. The law is also not a framework for the way 
that society/should/operate, even though some people hold out that hope.

The law is really just one tool among others, in the hands of those who 
are empowered to use it, to affect the course of events. Corporations 
are empowered to use this tool because they can hire expensive lawyers. 
Politicians, prosecutors and the police are also empowered to use the law.

Now, specifically about cops and the law. The law has many more 
provisions than they actually use, so their enforcement is always 
selective. That means that they are/always/profiling what part of the 
population to target and choosing which kinds of behavior they want to 
change. It also means that cops have a permanent opportunity for 
corruption. If they have discretion over who gets picked up for a crime, 
they can demand a reward for not picking somebody up.

Another way to see the gap between the law and what cops do is to 
examine the common idea that punishment begins after conviction in a 
court. The thing is, anybody who'??s dealt with the cops will tell you 
that punishment begins the moment they lay hands on you. They can arrest 
you and put you in jail -?? and never file charges. That'??s punishment, 
and they know it. That'??s not to mention the physical abuse you might 
get, or the ways they can mess with you even they don'??t arrest you.

So the cops order people around every day without a court order, and 
they punish people every day without a court judgment. Obviously, then, 
some of the key social functions of the police are not written into the 
law. They'??re part of police culture that cops learn from each other 
with encouragement and direction from their commanders.

This brings us back to a theme that I started with at the very 
beginning. The law deals with crimes, and/individuals/are charged with 
crimes. But the police were really invented to deal with what workers 
and the poor had become in their/collective/expressions: Cops deal with 
crowds, neighborhoods, targeted parts of the population - ??all 
collective entities.

They may/use/the law as they do this, but their broad directives come to 
them as policy from their commanders or from their own instincts as 
experienced cops. The policy directives frequently have a collective 
nature -?? say, to gain control of an unruly neighborhood. They decide 
to do that, and then they figure out what laws to use.

That'??s the meaning of '??zero tolerance'?? policies, '??broken 
windows'?? policies -?? policies that, in the past, might have been 
frankly termed '??uppity nigger'?? policies. The aim is to intimidate 
and assert control over a mass of people by acting on a few. Such 
tactics have been built into police work from the very beginning. The 
law is a tool to use on individuals, but the real goal is to control the 
behavior of the larger mass.

* * * * *

*I'??ll use my last few minutes to talk about some alternatives.*

One of them is a justice system that existed in the United States before 
the rise of the police. It'??s well documented for Philadelphia, so 
that'??s the place I'??ll discuss. Colonial Philadelphia developed a 
system called the minor courts in which most criminal prosecutions took 
place. The mayor and the aldermen served as the judges - ??the 
magistrates. Poor people would save up money so they could pay a fee to 
the magistrate to hear a case.

Then, as now, most crime was committed by poor people against poor 
people. In these courts, the victim of assault, theft, or defamation 
would act as prosecutor. A constable might get involved in order to 
bring in the accused, but that'??s not the same thing as a cop making an 
arrest. The whole action was driven by the victim'??s desires, not the 
state'??s objectives. The accused could also counter-sue.

There were no lawyers involved on either side, so the only expense was 
the fee to the magistrate. The system wasn'??t perfect, because the 
judge might be corrupt, and the life of the poor didn'??t stop being 
miserable when they won a case. But the system was quite popular and 
continued operating for some time even after a system of modern police 
and state prosecutors developed in parallel.

The rise of the police, which came along with the rise of the 
prosecutors, meant that the state was putting its thumb on the scales of 
justice. In court, you might hope to be treated as innocent until proven 
guilty. Before you get to court, though, you have to pass through the 
hands of the cops and prosecutors who certainly don'??t treat you like 
you'??re innocent. They have a chance to pressure you or torture you 
into a confession -?? or nowadays a confession in the form of a plea 
bargain -?? before you ever get court.

However unfair the system came to be as it was dominated by cops and 
prosecutors, the minor courts had shown Philadelphians that an 
alternative was possible that looked a lot more like dispute resolution 
among equals.

That'??s the key -?? we can make an alternative available again if we 
abolish the unequal social relations that that police were invented to 
defend. When the workers of Paris took over the city for two months in 
1871, they established a government under the old name of the Commune. 
The beginnings of social equality in Paris undercut the need for 
repression and allowed the Communards to experiment with abolishing the 
police as a separate state force, apart from the citizenry. People would 
elect their own officers of public safety, accountable to the electors 
and subject to immediate recall.

This never became a settled routine because the city was under siege 
from day one, but the Communards had the right idea. In order to 
overcome a regime of police repression, the crucial work was to live up 
to the name of the Commune -?? that is, to build a self-governing 
community of equals. That'??s still pretty much what/we/need to do.

* * * * *

Some sources.

*On law and order in the European Middle Ages:*

Tigar, Michael./Law and the Rise of Capitalism/. New York: Monthly 
Review Press, 2000.

*On the working class and the police in England:*

Thompson, E. P./The Making of the English Working Class/. Vintage, 1966.

Farrell, Audrey./Crime, Class and Corruption/. Bookmarks, 1995.

*For some history in the US and insight into the functions of the police:*

Williams, Kristian./Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America/. 
Revised Edition. South End Press, 2007.

Silberman, Charles E./Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice/. First 
Edition. New York: Vintage, 1980.

*The key source on the evolution of the police in the major cities of 
the US:*

Bacon, Selden Daskam./The Early Development of American Municipal 
Police: A Study of the Evolution of Formal Controls in a Changing 
Society./Two volumes. University Microfilms, 1939.

*Specific sources on New York, Philadelphia and the South:*

Gilje, Paul A./The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 
1763-1834./The University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Steinberg, Allen./The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 
1800-1880./1st edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina 
Press, 1989.

Wade, Richard C./Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-??1860./Oxford 
University Press, 1964.

*On the early years of public schooling in the US:*

Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis./Schooling In Capitalist America: 
Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life./Reprint. 
Haymarket Books, 2011.

Audio available at:
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/Article/36242/the-origins-of-the-police


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