Where do the police come from? What's the sort of historical moment within which
they emerge? What are they a response to?
Its it's all England's fault.
There's a kind of liberal narrative about the origins of policing that
always begins with the London Metropolitan Police in 1829
they're routinely pointed to as the sort of first example of a modern police
force which is less than 200 years ago. This is a fairly modern institution
But what's left out of that narrative, that standard liberal narrative that you
see in the policing textbooks etc is where this idea came from.
The London Police are created by Sir Robert Peel, Robert Bob, the 'bobbies' and
he got this idea in his previous job which was that he was in charge of the
English occupation of Ireland and he develops the Irish peace preservation
force to help manage a growing number ofwhat they called you know agricultural
outrages which were really peasant uprising against landlords and he could
not rely on the military to bail him out because they were tied up with Napoleon
and the Treasury was empty, and so he comes across this idea of a cheaper more
nimble community embedded sort of hybrid force that would allow them to act more
preemptively to kind of quell things before they got out of hand and also to
deal with things in a way that preserves some legitimacy for the occupation that
the use of the military often involves shooting on crowds, killing people that
further undermine the legitimacy and if policing could come in and calm things
out with less violence that would be good for the regime. He takes that idea
to England to manage this massive influx of folks coming from the countryside
who've been displaced by the enclosures who were drawn by the new industrial
economy and policing is needed to craft that population into a stable working
class. To put down the bread riots and the strikes,
and just crime and widespread disorder so it's about manufacturing a new working
class. In the US there are additional factors at work here, we have our own
colonial origins of policing in the US tied to the American occupation
of the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American Civil War, the Texas
Rangers and other Western police forces that are created to drive out the
indigenous population to make way for white settlement. But we also have the
role of policing in maintaining and managing slavery and I talk in the book
about the case of Charleston South Carolina, in the cities of the South
slaves lived and worked outside the home of their
owners in wharves and workshops and warehouses and policing emerges to
manage that mobile slave population. In fact the Charleston city guard and
watch is formed well before the London Metropolitan Police but it's never
talked about in these liberal narratives because their primary law enforcement
mission was suppressing the slave population.
Something I've noticed, I've written this in the script but it's
something I've noticed a lot actually is for instance when people talk about
neoliberalism, there's this story about neoliberalism through Europe, through
Hayek the Austrian school. There's this other school of James Buchanan and
at the end of desegregation, and it seems to me as you
just very lucidly highlighted, there's kind of this counter narrative
of where policing comes from deeply imbricated within the history of slavery
in the American South. There's a really nice way you put it which is that the
American police which if this kind of speculation of yours is correct it's
actually more of the sort of protean police force than what we have with the
Metropolitan Police Service or the Bow Street Runners their forerunner
it's this amalgam of northern technocracy and southern oversight of slaves
What precisely was bad about the northern bit? Because obviously in the
cliche understanding of the American North, American South we know why the
sort of, the relationships of
domination, oppression abound with the South, what was the bad features
of northern policing? Well let's keep it in mind that even even the precursors in
London were also about this beginning process of forming a capitalist working
class, you know that the Thames Wharf police were created to eliminate the
historical practice of gleaning, where workers took the spillage and the
overage home as part of their wages and capitalism can't abide that so they they
create this protean police force to try to put a stop to that and to create a
solely wage economy, and we see similar things happening in the northern United
States where policing emerges to bring this massive immigrant population that's
flooding into the United States and form them into an industrial working class
They were regulating how people wore their clothing, all kinds of regulations
about alcohol consumption, about public interactions that really had nothing to
do with with public safety issues or the law, it was about stamping people into
this new working class, and then I'll just give this example you know the
first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police
created in 1903. They were created because of the widespread strike and
labour actions that were happening in the Pennsylvania coal and iron fields and
local police were unable or unwilling to suppress those labor movements and so
they created a state police force modelled on the US occupation forces
in the Philippines to put down those strikes. Strikers at the time referred
to them as the 'Pennsylvania Cossacks' and so northern policing has
always been about a kind of racialised understanding of immigration, the
management of those blacks who are in the city and the suppression of workers
movements and really working-class lifestyles
you