Policing the U.S.

by Jack R. Johnson 03.2023

Like a number of recent high-profile cases of police brutality, the fatal encounter between Tyre Nichols and the Memphis, Tennessee police’s Scorpion unit began with what appeared to be a minor traffic infraction. Police brought the full force of the state against an individual whose sole crime appears to have been ‘driving recklessly.’ His family said that the police beat him so severely that he was unrecognizable. 

Years ago, after a similar incident with the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri, Governor Jay Nixon signed a broad municipal court reform bill. “Under this bill, cops will stop being revenue agents and go back to being cops,” But what does that mean, exactly? Was there a before time in which cops were simply ‘peace’ officers, like the classic Bobby from London streets?

There are two narratives of how policing historically developed in the United States.  Both are true.

In the first narrative, American cities copied English systems put in place overseas in the early 19th century. In 1829, London there was a great deal of labor unrest. After years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, Robert ‘Bobby’ Peel, the Irish Secretary persuaded Parliament to establish a Metropolitan Police force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”). They were organized like an army with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore uniform coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners eponymously came to call these men “bobbies” after Bobby Peel. Boston and New York City followed that design a few years later.

The other narrative starts centuries earlier. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law that pronounced “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” In 1680, a few years after Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes. These were extensive laws that limited an enslaved persons activities in very particular ways. They couldn’t carry weapons, they couldn’t depart from their plantations without written approval, nor skip out on their work or be out after sun down. To enforce these codes, so called slave patrols were created and used throughout the slave holding Southern hemisphere. South Carolina, founded by slave owners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. 

The patrollers (think patrol officers), sometimes called paddy, carried lethal weapons, whips and chains, and used dogs to track their prey.

What these narratives held in common was a militarized outlook for their vocation, something August Vollmer formalized in 1909. August Vollmer, first police chief of Berkeley, California, and the so-called ‘father of modern policing’ had served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were these enemies? Vollmer studied eugenic theories. In one essay, he writes about what could be done to prevent “defectives from producing their kind,” which he felt would reduce the crime rate.  According to the New Yorker, his enemies were, “Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.” Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896.

Public service, protecting individuals from harm to themselves or to others, might be a nice ancillary outcome of a police officer doing his job, but it’s never been required. In a landmark decision DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that “the Constitution does not impose a duty on the state and local governments to protect the citizens from criminal harm.” The United States Supreme Court, in the 2005 case Castle Rock v. Gonzales, upheld that decision and extended it to include a state or municipality’s police force– codifying what many folks in poorer neighborhoods had long suspected.

Not only are the police not necessarily here to protect individual citizens, but in the performance of their duty they may be more concerned with protecting themselves. According to ex-Officer, Seth Stanton, writing in the Atlantic Magazine, Rookie officers are taught what is widely known as the “first rule of law enforcement”: An officer’s overriding goal every day is to go home at the end of their shift. One slogan that is bandied about squad rooms sums up the mind set: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

This may be unique to the United States which has the most heavily armed citizenry in the world. Initially, the U.S. police forces imitated their European counterparts and carried no lethal weapons—with the exception of slave patrols-- but after the Civil War, police departments began arming themselves with hidden weapons (Colt made a special “Pocket Police” Model) and then wore them publicly. We have seen a comparable escalation in violence ever since. Seven years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the U.S. fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” Now American police are armed with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they interact with the most heavily armed civilian population in the world. 

Is it any wonder we don’t use the phrase ‘peace officer’ anymore?