[warmwaffles]

> This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves.

This is going to need a citation. Cursory searching leads me to Sheriffs being elected in the early 1800s in Ohio. Ohio was also a free state in 1803 when it joined the Union.

[kemayo]

Near as I can tell, it's reasonable to say that there were organized groups of state-empowered people in the slave states back as early as the 1700s, whose job was to hunt down escaped slaves. There were also some similar groups across slave and free states who were empowered in part to guard against / control Native Americans.

These early slave patrols / night watches then fairly organically became the "police department" when that concept became widespread in the mid-1800s. I don't think it looks like said spread is really linked to emancipation, but rather (as with the creation of Peel's Metropolitan Police in London in 1829) in response to increasing urbanization / industrialization. Given that the industrial revolution also fairly-strongly caused the US civil war and thus emancipation, we could say it's more a parallel trend than the implied causation.

The cities going "well, we have a somewhat organized group of people whose job is to enforce some laws... why don't we wedge them into this new trend and have them enforce more laws?" gets us that link.

This summary seems reasonable, though I feel it elides the Peelite influence: https://law.jrank.org/pages/1640/Police-History-Early-polici...