The Past and Future of American Policing
One of the core beliefs of contemporary movements calling for the abolition of police is the notion that American policing had its origin in the slave patrols of the antebellum South. This interpretation has added fuel to existing tensions between police departments and minorities in inner-city communities. Though long contested among historians, the argument has moved from the activist fringe into mainstream discourse.
The NAACP's website states that the "origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the 'Slave Patrol,'" a legacy that has resulted in a "continuing bias" against black Americans in police enforcement and the criminal-justice system. Numerous academic research articles and books explore the slave-patrol model, such as Ben Brucato's Race and Police: The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions. The concept also features in university social-science and ethnic-studies textbooks. In Race and Crime, Shaun Gabbidon and Helen Taylor Greene write that slave patrols were the "first distinctively American police system."
The gist of the argument is that the persistent conflict and friction between the police and elements of the African American community — leading to the disproportionate incarceration of blacks and sometimes their brutal deaths — can be traced back to the racist origins of policing in America, beginning with the patrols that monitored the slave populations in the antebellum South. White authorities tasked these patrols with preventing the escape of slaves, capturing runaways, and deterring slave revolts. Given this pernicious lineage, anti-police activists and groups such as Black Lives Matter argue that no one should be surprised about the continued strained relationship between police and black communities throughout the nation. The tragic murder of George Floyd in May 2020, after a white police officer pressed his knee on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes, further galvanized the movement and led many to advocate "defunding" or "abolishing" the police.
The agenda of the anti-police movement is to brand police departments in America as the heirs of slave patrols and therefore institutionally racist, and to then pursue the reallocation of funding from police departments to other forms of communal support. Before we take these claims at face value, however, it is worth examining the actual history of policing in America. Such an inquiry will demonstrate that while slave patrols were a real and abominable feature of the South before the Civil War, their historical legacy and influence are more limited than activists peddling misguided ideologies would have us believe. Moreover, the use of this tendentious historical narrative to defame the role of modern police threatens to harm the very minority communities that anti-police groups claim to defend. If we are to secure a more just policing and criminal-justice system for all Americans and especially minorities, we must first approach our past in a more evenhanded manner.
POLICING ORIGINS
The origins of American policing lie in the British Isles. The early Anglo-Saxons engaged in self-policing in their small farms and villages, exercising what we would now characterize as vigilante justice. All members of the community assumed a collective responsibility for justice exemplified by the "hue and cry," a shout by villagers who witnessed the crime; this warned the offender and notified all those within earshot that a criminal was on the loose. Members were now summoned to pursue the culprit and bring him to justice.
Over time this English system of justice became more organized with the designation of public officers such as the reeve. Elected constables were organized into parishes and hundreds, while shires were overseen by the shire reeve, the origin of our word sheriff. Public safety became more complex and sophisticated with the introduction of innovations such as the watch and ward system, which provided citizens with around-the-clock day and night protection from wrongdoers. Similarly, the development of parishes and parish constables grew with the urbanization of British society, developing in the 19th century into the London Metropolitan Police under the guidance of Sir Robert Peel. It was Peel's concept of policing based on community service that was a forerunner of modern police agencies in America.
The earliest settlements in the American colonies adopted these British policing models. In addition to religious refugees, many of the early migrants to the colonies had been expelled because of criminal activity. Hence the early colonists recognized the need for law enforcement and civil order in their communities. Constables and sheriffs were soon elected to oversee issues of crime and disorder. In 1631 Boston established a six-man force to police the city from sunrise to sunset, along with a night watch to protect the city from crime and fires during the evening hours. Similarly in New York, originally called New Amsterdam, city officials formed a guard in 1643 to patrol and protect the colony. When the city came under British control, this guard became a uniformed force organized to protect the colony. These formations, however, were informal, part time, and weakly professionalized by modern standards, supplemented by private guards hired by wealthy individuals to quell drunken disturbances and thievery.
In the early 19th century New York City began to deploy paid watchmen, fire marshals, and guards to provide law-enforcement services. Because of street gangs and private-security groups depicted in Martin Scorsese's film Gangs of New York, the city instituted a uniformed police force that evolved into the modern-day New York City Police Department (NYPD). These police organizations in the northern states developed without a focus on slavery. In the South, armed citizens in the form of militias along with sheriff's deputies provided order and safety in this more rural region of the country. The greatest threat to public safety in the mind of southerners, however, was their large population of black slaves. This led to the development of slave patrols with the singular purpose of deterring slave escapes and rebellions.
SLAVE PATROLS
All slaveholding societies feared uprisings and rebellions, and the antebellum American South was no exception. The Roman Republic experienced no less than three major slave rebellions, called the Servile Wars, between 135 and 71 B.C. The last and most well-known was the slave rebellion of Spartacus that required numerous legions to suppress. In the Americas in 1791, black slaves in Haiti revolted, killed their masters, and declared their freedom by force. Many slave owners in the American South knew the history of ancient Rome, and the more recent rebellion in Haiti brought their fears into the present. These fears reinforced the development and expansion of slave patrols to prevent uprisings.
Beginning in the 18th century, southern slaveholders enacted slave codes that prohibited slaves from possessing weapons, gathering in unsupervised groups, or leaving plantations or farms without written notes or passes from their owners. The slave patrols routinely stopped, questioned, and inspected slaves whom they found off their plantations. The patrols used brutal force to apprehend slaves found without documentation, including beatings and whippings even to the point of death. The point was to deter escapes and suppress any rebellions.
The antebellum southern slaves did revolt. Rebellions were planned and led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner; while Vesey's 1822 revolt failed before it was implemented, Turner's uprising in 1831 resulted in the deaths of at least 55 white men, women, and children. Both slaves were apprehended by militiamen and executed, and these episodes brought a tangible reality to the fears of southern slaveholders that their slaves might rise up and kill them. The dread of such rebellions caused the slave patrols to go about their task with aggression and vigor. Black slaves who had no intention of rebelling or running away could expect harsh treatment in any encounter with the patrols. Free black people were always regarded with suspicion by local whites. Their existence to the slave-patrol militias was a beacon and message to slaves that there could be a life other than bondage; thus, their free status did not protect them from harassment by the patrols.
The aggressive enforcement of the slave patrols not only prevented escapes and rebellions but also preserved the racial caste system of the South. Even peaceful slaves could find themselves harassed by "patrollers," whether they were working or attending a church service. Patrols could stop slaves going from one location to another, and even slaves in their cabins could be confronted by patrollers who were vigilant in monitoring their behavior and activities. Men faced physical abuse by patrols, while women were subject to sexual harassment. The slave patrols were thus a constant reminder to slaves of their inferior status.
It should be noted, however, that slave patrols were not formations that resembled modern police forces. As historian Sally Hadden has demonstrated, they are better understood as extensions of the citizen militias common to the early colonies and states that formed after the American Revolution, with the singular purpose of subjugating the slave population. Southern counties appointed men to patrols as a civic duty; authorities could grant exemptions to judges, doctors, schoolmasters, or other respected persons, but men between the ages of 18 and 45 had to serve.
The appointment of citizens by justices of the peace to slave patrols showed the importance of repression of the slave populations in the antebellum South. The militia model obligated white men in the community to suppress the local slave population. Although local constables or sheriffs on occasion may have led or organized a patrol to apprehend escaped slaves, the slave patrols should not be thought of as a general crime-deterring police force in any modern sense of the term.
The end of the Civil War brought a small glimmer of hope and a temporary taste of freedom to newly liberated black Americans. The Republican Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, in theory providing full citizenship and legal rights to black people after centuries of bondage. The city of New Orleans even hired black police officers who functioned on near parity with their white colleagues for a brief period.
This episode of freedom was tragically short lived. Southern whites, through legislation and terror, worked to reestablish the antebellum racial hierarchy and return black people to their inferior status. Vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, initially composed of former Confederate soldiers, roamed the countryside; terrorizing, beating, raping, and killing newly freed blacks. The violence became so endemic that President Grant dispatched federal troops to the South to suppress the Klan.
The end of slavery was a threat to the plantation-based economy of the South, and the idea that former slaves were now the legal and political equals of their former slave masters was an abomination to many white southerners. Their answer was the implementation of Black Codes. The codes varied from state to state and from locality to locality, but the specific restrictions — limiting types of labor for black people, imposing curfews, arresting blacks for "idleness" or "vagrancy" — slowly but surely moved to return blacks to their former status of subjugation despite being legally free.
One of the most potent tools used to suppress and disenfranchise southern blacks was the convict-lease program, which allowed incarcerated black people to be lent to farms and landowners as laborers. This program returned blacks to a status close to slavery. The sight of chain gangs composed of black leased convicts, toiling away in prison stripes on farms, roads, and railroad lines in horrendous conditions, was common in the post-bellum South right into the 20th century.
In most instances the suppression of newly freed black people after the Civil War was by local southern police forces. Police and sheriff organizations enforced the Black Codes, arrested blacks, and submitted them to the convict-lease programs. Southern segregation, made legal by the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, was also enforced by local police and sheriffs.
It is undeniable that southern public officials, motivated by white supremacy, worked to deny voting rights to blacks and used local law enforcement to unjustly imprison them. At the behest of white Democratic leaders, white southern police and sheriffs were deployed to block the black civil-rights movement. In many southern jurisdictions, white police officers were members of the Ku Klux Klan or cooperated with it, and they made no effort to arrest or deter white vigilantes who terrorized civil-rights workers. A climactic moment was the "Bloody Sunday" incident in 1965, when Alabama police brutally beat civil-rights activists as they attempted to march peacefully from Selma, Alabama, to the state's capital in Montgomery, to petition for the constitutionally mandated right to vote.
As the history above demonstrates, the slave-patrol model did influence and evolve seamlessly into the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow era of policing in the American South. This was more a specific feature of southern policing, however, rather than the defining origin or characteristic of all police in America. A closer look at policing in other parts of the country reveals different models and challenges.
NORTHERN POLICING
Slave patrols were not an integral part of policing in the northern states. Starting in the late 18th century and into the early 19th century, the northern states abolished slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 did legalize the apprehension of escaped slaves living in the North, but abolitionist and northern politicians vigorously opposed it.
This is not to say that northern states were immune from corruption or racial bias. The political era of policing, in which unscrupulous politicians controlled the daily operations of northern urban police departments, is well known. In the 19th century the North experienced an influx of immigrants from Ireland and Central and Eastern Europe, including Jews. The police subjected the Irish to exceptional discrimination and harsh treatment. They were not Anglo-Saxon; and worse, they were Roman Catholics in a Protestant country.
The northern police were also involved in struggles in the early labor movement. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Pennsylvania authorities worked closely with private coal and iron guards to suppress striking workers. Many of the union coal-mine workers were white European immigrants, who were regarded with both suspicion and contempt by not only the mine owners but also the Pennsylvania state government.
Although initially discriminated against, European immigrants were able to eventually assimilate and reach a level of acceptance. The Irish, for example, began to join the ranks of police forces. The population of the northern states became even more diverse amid a phenomenon known as the Great Migration, where southern blacks began arriving in the North in search of less discrimination and greater economic opportunity. But they faced discrimination in northern states, too. Police often treated the black newcomers with suspicion, surveilling them and committing acts of brutality.
Urban crime rates began to soar in the second half of the 20th century. In response, major cities increased the size of their police forces; the NYPD, for example, grew 45% in the 1990s. This hiring spree included blacks, other minorities, and women, and was in part mandated by affirmative-action policies. In addition to the creation of larger and more diverse police forces, hundreds of thousands more offenders were put behind bars with longer sentences. Increased policing and incarceration had dramatic effects in major urban centers: In New York City, homicide rates declined by 43% from 1991 to 2001, and by 48% for young black males during the same period.
In sum, police departments in the North did not model their forces on southern slave patrols and evolved in response to different pressures, including immigration and labor struggles. Blacks who migrated to northern states certainly faced discrimination, but police there developed innovative strategies to protect black victims and reduce overall crime rates. Those strategies resulted in significant ongoing challenges such as larger prison populations, but they also produced real benefits in the form of lower crimes rates that should not be overlooked.
IDEOLOGICAL AGENDAS
If police departments outside of the South were not influenced by the slave-patrol model, and have had some success in protecting vulnerable black populations and reducing crime rates, why do activists continue to insist that all police are the heirs of the slave patrols? When one considers the tragic beatings and killings of black Americans by police officers in recent years, many of them caught on video, it is not hard to see why. Beginning with the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991, Americans have seen video or read reports of brutal police actions toward blacks. Their names have been memorialized in the national consciousness: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, Tyre Nichols, and the list goes on.
It was the fatal shooting of Martin by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in 2012, and Zimmerman's subsequent acquittal, that sparked the creation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This movement has drawn a straight line from the slave patrols of the antebellum South to today's police brutality toward blacks, viewing contemporary officers as the upholders of a racist lineage. BLM sees the police not as the people who are trying to maintain public safety and apprehend violent offenders, but rather as the actual source of violence in minority communities. Activists argue that there would be no need for police if their funding was transferred to non-profits providing services to those suffering from mental illness, poverty, and homelessness — in BLM's view, the real causes of crime and disorder. The BLM movement is particularly concerned about black persons killed by police, but they have paid less attention to the high homicide rates and victimization of black people by black offenders.
But beyond specific incidents of misconduct by police and the deplorable deaths of blacks, there is a broader ideological agenda behind the anti-police movement. BLM's website features language about "true revolution" and "the systems we are trying to abolish" — including police and prisons. It is no coincidence that these slogans mirror Marxist tropes. For BLM and its academic supporters, the historical struggle between black and white, between master and slave, and now between police and black victims, is all part of one narrative of oppression. This narrative fits easily into the neo-Marxist concept of conflict theory, where groups compete for resources, status, and power. In the minds of activists, today's conflict can only be resolved by a revolution that defunds and eventually abolishes the police.
Reform efforts are futile, according to BLM. They merely allow the police to maintain a racist power structure. They might metamorphose into a new organization with a new coating of paint, but they will have the same mission of racial oppression, as Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow. These beliefs owe much to critical theory, specifically the tenets described by Michel Foucault.
Michel Foucault, the 20th-century French historian and philosopher, has had a tremendous influence on critical theory by developing the concepts of genealogy and archaeology — a historical analysis where ideas cannot be accepted as self-evident or on face value, but need a closer examination revealing that they are tied to the struggle for power. His focus especially on penal or punitive power fits neatly into the anti-police movement's argument for the slave-patrol origin of police.
In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault provides a description of the cruel torture and death of a prisoner in the 18th century, followed by the later development of the more humane prison. While the modern prison treats prisoners better than torture methods, both seek the control and punishment of the individual. For Foucault, institutions such as prisons exercise a disciplinary power, surveilling prisoners and regulating their behavior.
One can see how Foucault's philosophy might be applied by activists to the historical evolution of American policing. It started with slave bondage and slave patrols so whites could exercise power over blacks. The punitive power of the white-led state then evolved from punishing the black body through slavery to controlling the body through modern policing and prisons. The slave patrol is unimaginably cruel, and the modern police are more humane. But they both have the same goal of maintaining the power and control of the racist, white-led police state. So, no matter how institutions such as police want to redefine or reform themselves, a historical analysis reveals that they will always seek power over black individuals.
Another Marxist concept adopted by anti-police activists is that of the lumpenproletariat. This is the portion of the working and lower classes with no class consciousness or revolutionary intent, and is especially useful as a paradigm for Hispanic or African American police officers. In the minds of activists, these minority officers are like slave foremen or concentration-camp kapos. They keep the residents of the ghetto in their place. Hence BLM can consider the 2023 death of Tyre Nichols, a black Memphis resident beaten and killed by five black police officers, as an extension of oppressive white power — carried out by black officers working in their service.
BLM's push to defund and abolish the police has found support among white progressives and corporations. Motivated by guilt, they are oblivious to the effect on poor minority communities of having their police protections removed. They have sympathy and compassion for black criminals under arrest, but no compassion for the black victims of crime in the same neighborhoods. If we want to reduce incidence of police abuse while also protecting all minorities, we need to look beyond the radical agendas of anti-police activists and embrace a more realistic perspective of the role and benefits of policing.
A BETTER POLICING MODEL
A core argument of BLM and other activists is that society can be made safer by defunding or eliminating the police and then addressing the root causes of crime: poverty and inequalities in health and education. All of this can be accomplished, they insist, without the police, who they claim exacerbate crime and disorder in minority communities by bringing their own brand of violence.
After the murder of George Floyd by an officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, many Democratic-run cities did defund their police departments and transfer the money to non-profits such as counseling and violence-intervention organizations. But the hoped-for reduction in crime did not occur. Minneapolis experienced an increase in carjackings, and a diminished and under-funded police force struggled to contain crime and a rising homicide rate. The decline in police operations in inner-city minority communities further victimized residents in high-crime neighborhoods.
Anti-police activists have rarely taken any responsibility for the effects of their movement on these minority communities. Their rhetoric has discouraged minority youth from joining police departments, frustrating the decades-long efforts of law-enforcement agencies to increase minority officers in their ranks. In addition, the reputations of the many black men and women working in law enforcement, including those in senior leadership positions, have been tarnished, as they are seen as cooperating with the "enemy." This further diminishes the relationship between the police and the black community.
Although anti-police activists have adopted Marxist concepts of historical progress, they refuse to acknowledge any progress in police-minority relationships. The city of Atlanta, Georgia, for example, hired eight black police officers in the late 1940s; it is now a predominantly black police department. Any person now traveling to the American South will see a multitude of black men and women serving in law enforcement, as well as black police chiefs and sheriffs. There is always more work to be done to build better relations between police and minority communities, but activists' ideology prevents them from acknowledging these real gains.
Moreover, activists fail to consult the views of the minority communities they claim to be protecting. The Pew Research Center found in 2022 that 74% of black adults think funding for police departments in their area should either be "increased" or "stay about the same," while just 23% say it should be "decreased." Similarly, a group of researchers wrote the following in a 2024 issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice: "Most black Americans said that even if crime was declining and new police reforms were not enacted, they would still prefer to maintain (or increase) police patrols and spending." African Americans would like to see better trained officers, including more accountability for police misconduct and de-escalation tactics, but they do not want their local departments to be defunded.
Here again, the NYPD is demonstrating how departments can institute reforms to better protect minorities and all residents. Under Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the city has seen record-low levels of shooting incidents, shooting victims, murders, and subway crime. Tisch has credited the crime reductions to the NYPD's "precision-policing strategy," which uses data to identify high-crime zones and assign uniformed officers to nightly foot posts. The department has also targeted gang-related violence and seized thousands of illegal guns. Rather than being distracted by activists' calls to defund or abolish the police, cities and departments across the country can look to the NYPD for a better policing model.
BUILDING A COMMON FUTURE
American Enterprise Institute scholar Samuel Abrams recently wrote that "how we understand the past shapes whether we believe the future can be built in common." This insight is directly applicable to the debate over whether modern policing originated in southern slave patrols, and how departments today should be altered. The slave patrols of the antebellum South are a historical fact, a disturbing reminder of America's long tortured relationship with race. Their role was to deter slave escapes and rebellions; they did not serve any law-enforcement function in the modern sense of policing, and thus their influence on contemporary departments is limited.
Modern police departments certainly need to be reformed if we are to avoid more tragic murders of black Americans like Floyd and others. But anti-police activists' mission to defund or abolish departments is divisive and counterproductive. It serves their ideological agenda but does nothing to actually defend vulnerable blacks. To better protect all citizens and especially black Americans, we need more well-trained police.