[policepost]

I'm saying the opposite. Originally, enforcement was communal - it was a periodic expectation, something you did but didn't get paid for.

Then the wealthy started paying people to take the unpleasant shift, but even then the pay wasn't to enforce the law, it was pay to take over for some rich guy who didn't want to be up all night.

People whose career is law enforcement is newer and the compensation and expectations are different.

[LudwigNagasena]

You are saying that for thousands of years of civilization nobody got paid for law enforcement before capitalism? Yeah, that doesn't sound very plausible.

[policepost]

I don't know what to tell you.

People were paid to protect someone's stuff, those people were called guards, but they weren't enforcing law. Some people were given ownership of a place and the people in that place, they were called lords or knights, but they weren't enforcing laws, they were enforcing their will.

Some communities had expectations and rules, and the community was self policing - if you did theft, the mob would come punish you. They weren't enforcing laws and certainly weren't paid. Their justice was uneven and often brutal.

Sometimes soldiers would be pressed into enforcing laws, but they were being paid to be soldiers.

Eventually we got to some folks who were paid to enforce laws. Some of the earliest were "Shire Reeves" (from which we derive the word sheriff). A shire reeve was a single man who was charged with keeping order in a shire. That's not exactly enforcing laws, but it's close enough in spirit. A reeve would hire temporary folks in a posse if needed to achieve a temporary goal, but did not have a police department.

Temporary posses were not uniformed, and were typically paid for short term labor - arrest this guy or get that property back. A reeve may have guards for his safety or to intimidate local folks, but those guards weren't really law enforcement.

Around the fourteenth century, governments started relying on formal roles known as justices of peace, or conservators of peace, who were explicitly charged with binding people to laws and enforcing laws. They were relatively large in number and the practice continued through to the industrial revolution. Except JPs weren't paid, they were typically gentry who enjoyed the social status it granted them.

The history of US police is really fascinating, and not something most people really every dive into. They believe it was always this way, but it very much wasn't. Police as a concept like we know them is very, very modern.

[LudwigNagasena]

> People were paid to protect someone's stuff, those people were called guards, but they weren't enforcing law.

So you deny that some people were paid to enforce the law at some point of time somewhere? So the Code of Hammurabi was just a useless piece of stone nobody cared about?

> Some people were given ownership of a place and the people in that place, they were called lords or knights, but they weren't enforcing laws, they were enforcing their will.

Lords and knights is a very recent phenomena. Civilization is much older than lords and knights. In fact, feudalism is a very peculiar part of human history. Most of the time, power was very "centralized" even if "devolved".

> Sometimes soldiers would be pressed into enforcing laws, but they were being paid to be soldiers.

They also were being paid to police, evidently, thus being the police.

> Eventually we got to some folks who were paid to enforce laws. Some of the earliest were "Shire Reeves" (from which we derive the word sheriff).

They weren't the earliest. State monopoly on violence is much older than Shire Reeves.

> The history of US police is really fascinating, and not something most people really every dive into. They believe it was always this way, but it very much wasn't. Police as a concept like we know them is very, very modern.

People believe everything in the US is a consequence of slavery. They can't comprehend that laws and cities existed before 1619, let alone before Anglo-Saxons came to Albion.

[policepost]

Police departments in the US derived from English law, which had a system of unpaid enforcement via gentry. Prior to that, reeves were individuals charged with keeping the peace. Prior to that it was expected everyone contributed via frankpledge.

This takes us back to around the year 1000.

There's not much evidence of law enforcement prior to that in the direct historical lineage of US policing.

In other cultures we see military (gendarmes or "men at arms") and slaves being deployed to enforce laws. (Common in Rome and Byzantine culture.)

In other cultures a leader would create justifications and appoint a single person to ensure the jurisdiction was peaceful. That single individual was paid, and they likely hired guards when they wanted, but I generally wouldn't consider a guard or posse to be law enforcement in the way we understand that term today. Those roles were closer to bounty hunters. This is how the Egyptian pharaohs ran things thousands of years ago.

Hammurabi, btw, isn't like the inventor of laws. He just very famously decided to punish violence with violence. Sumerian law existed prior. But the existence of laws says nothing about their enforcement. If you've got good resources on Sumerian or Mesopotamian enforcement, I'd be interested, but it's pretty far off topic of the US law enforcement lineage.

[LudwigNagasena]

> Police departments in the US derived from English law, which had a system of unpaid enforcement via gentry. Prior to that, reeves were individuals charged with keeping the peace. Prior to that it was expected everyone contributed via frankpledge. > This takes us back to around the year 1000.

> There's not much evidence of law enforcement prior to that in the direct historical lineage of US policing.

There is. Police departments in England are derived from police departments in France.

> If you've got good resources on Sumerian or Mesopotamian enforcement, I'd be interested, but it's pretty far off topic of the US law enforcement lineage.

It is not. People in the US like to find idiosyncratic reasons for why things are so in the US and why their country is oh so unique, but the truth often is that things are like that everywhere —even in places where such idiosyncratic reasons couldn't exist.

[policepost]

Great! Let me know what resources I should read up on.

[raincom]

In earlier times, there was more decentralization. So, such decentralized localities couldn't be what we call states today. Yes, some elders, some wise men, some people with more clan-power, etc., were involved in settling property disputes that arose in their villages, camps, places, etc (whatever such locality could be called).

[raincom]

It was not so much law enforcement, but protection of property. Especially during harvest seasons in old days, farmers pay a share of harvest to protectors. Some kind of such protection has had existed, for sure, without formal laws or without formal law enforcements. It was more of customs, traditions, with some sense of reasonableness.