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I guess there's been a long weekend, keeping us both away, but since you brought up ancient Rome, I keep remembering fun things from reading about this a couple of years back, inspired by Mike Duncan's excellent podcast on the history of Rome. Within the great city, there were, as you pointed out, police. As I pointed out, they were mostly there for fire-fighting and as a slave patrol, and were themselves made up of mostly-slaves. But you might be thinking, what about investing crimes? That's what police do when there aren't traffic stops to make, right? In that great city, if you wanted a crime investigated, you did it yourself. Evidence gathered? Find it yourself. If you wanted to accuse someone of something, you grabbed them and at least one witness and dragged them before a judge. So justice, what there was of it, was largely available to the wealthy, who could afford to hire people to drag other people before judges, and if you were a poor person wanting to accuse a rich person of a crime, well, good luck with that. So modern cops might have a really poor clearance rate for most crimes, barely exceeding half even for murder[0], but at least they try, which is more than can be said for Roman vigiles urbani. And at least they pretend to be impartial, even if one can clearly see that crimes are prosecuted unevenly, and that US prisons are filled with more than their fair share of the poor. 0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r... |