Who invented law enforcement

Anecdotal accounts suggest increasing crime and vice in urban centers. Mob violence, particularly violence directed at immigrants and African Americans by white youths, occurred with some frequency. Public disorder, mostly public drunkenness and sometimes prostitution, was more visible and less easily controlled in growing urban centers than it had been rural villages Walker But evidence of an actual crime wave is lacking.

So, if the modern American police force was not a direct response to crime, then what was it a response to? These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state.

Gaines, Larry. Lundman, Robert J. Hindelang Criminal Research Justice Center, I t would be easy to think that the police officer is a figure who has existed since the beginning of civilization. In fact, the U. Policing in Colonial America had been very informal, based on a for-profit, privately funded system that employed people part-time. Boston started one in , New York followed in and Philadelphia created one in In cities, increasing urbanization rendered the night-watch system completely useless as communities got too big.

The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter.

In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system.

Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

In general, throughout the 19th century and beyond, the definition of public order — that which the police officer was charged with maintaining — depended whom was asked. For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce.

Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests. The irony of this logic, Potter points out, is that the businessmen who maintained this belief were often the ones who profited off of the commercial sale of alcohol in public places.

Prison, parole, and probation operations cost U. The relationship between law enforcement and our communities is fractured because of decades of a bad system that has let countless issues go unaddressed. We advocate for smarter, positive, results-based criminal justice policies to keep our communities safe.

These policies include issues that are very important to us: treatment for mental health issues and addiction, judicial discretion in sentencing, and an end to racial disparities at all levels of the system. Know the Issues Trending Topics. Action Alert: Voting Policy. Action Alert: Cancel Student Debt. Become a Member Renew Your Membership. Slave patrols The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the "Slave Patrol. More on race and justice policies.

Join the Fight Join millions of activists fighting for Black communities.