[heavyset_go]

> The police were literally started in the late 1800s to protect capital and share the responsibility of cost across all people. (In the South, they were tightly related to patrolling for slaves, in the north they were predominantly helping wealthy merchants protect warehouses and other stores of wealth.)

This is a correct reading of the history of policing in America[1].

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

[manfredo]

Policing in America dates back well beyond the 1800s (let alone the late 1800s), and has it's roots in the medieval system of sheriffs and their deputies. Organized police in the US date back to the early 1600s at the latest. In fact police existed in New York back when it was called New Amsterdam: https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...

I'm serious baffled as to how people got the idea that police were created in the 1800s. Do people really believe that cities like Boston and New York existed for centuries with nobody to enforce laws?

[Pfhreak]

Night watches, tithings, posses, militias, and sheriffs are not the same thing as police departments. And even still, the vast majority of night watches were privately funded in America.

[manfredo]

My link provides direct examples of law enforcement organizations that were publicly funded, as early as the 1630s:

> Among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647.

Again, police are as old as civilization. Laws without a body to enforce them are just words in paper (or clay tablets).

[Pfhreak]

Night watchmen aren't police. Personally, I believe it's dangerous to conflate the two -- modern police departments are very, very different than the more community organized (or elected) folks who watched over small towns. Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces like we have today are a relatively new phenomena.

That said, we're skidding towards a semantic argument, so if you are comfortable agreeing to disagree here, I am too. We can continue to think each other wrong, looking at the same history.

[manfredo]

> Night watchmen aren't police. Personally, I believe it's dangerous to conflate the two -- modern police departments are very, very different than the more community organized (or elected) folks who watched over small towns. Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces like we have today are a relatively new phenomena.

This isn't a semantic disagreement, this is factually incorrect. ”Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces" have absolutely existed in the US before the 1800s and date back to classical antiquity at least. Rome often employed it's legions as police, and there was even a dedicated legion stationed specifically to police Rome [1]. It's hard to get more "Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed" than deploying the military as a patrol force. And in the US professional police forces, not militia or community watch, have existed since the 1600s. And by the way, many police forces are still led by elected leaders - professional, organized police and community oversight are not mutually exclusive.

It might be fair to say that in the 1800s and early 1900s industrialization and technology had progressed to the point that police started to resemble modern police, and many US cities grew to the point that they started municipal police forces in this time frame. But the police of the 21st century with cameras, computers, dna testing, 911 systems and radios are arguably even more removed from the police of 1900 than the police of 1900 were to the police of 1800 or 1700.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohortes_urbanae