[yareal]

The institution of uniformed police forces is relatively recent, established in the 1800s, and it reflects an 1800s era sensibility towards crime. In that it is predominantly focused on protecting the property interests of the wealthy. (The original police forces grew out of a desire to socialize the costs of protecting merchant investments -- the warehouses and docks and factories in much of the world, and slaves held as property in the south of the U.S.)

Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch".

Police in the modern era have been used as a threat of violence against common people more or less since their inception in the 1800s, from slave patrols to strikebreaking. They've been used as political assassins killing the political opponents of the state (see Frederick Hampton) to the systematic oppression of gay and trans people (see, for instance, Stonewall inn). Lest these feel like old examples, just this year police shut down a gay bar in Seattle for having "indecent apparel" being worn by the gay men in attendance.

I think it's absolutely fair for people to think critically about the history and legacy of the institution and wonder, is this the best institution we can imagine to fill this role? Are there better ways to imagine the roles it fills today? Are there systemic issues that need fixing with it?

The reason I bring this forward is that any thoughtful critique of the institution is often painted broadly as, "you are just an anarchist who cannot think beyond your slogans!" Perhaps the institution could do with some immiseration.

[edflsafoiewq]

Prior to uniformed police, law enforcement was a largely private matter, and private "thief-takers" were enlisted to apprehend criminals. My understanding is modern state-run police forces developed in response to public anger over misconduct and corruption in the thief-takers, such as the Macdaniel affair.

Particularly they were infamous for playing "both sides" by taking money from a victim to arrest a thief, then taking money from the thief not to arrest them.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Prior to uniformed police, communities maintained order themselves -- often through night watches in which everyone participated, or eventually through hiring people to "cover my watch"

Dispensing violence as part of these watches was also generally accepted. I'm not sure how that would work in a modern environment.

(You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal. The people maintaining order had their own security forces.)

[yareal]

Yeah, I'm explicitly not calling for the return to night watches. I'm saying it should be possible to imagine societies without uniformed police forces, because we've had many models for justice without them in the past. We could, with some effort, imagine something better.

[lotsoweiners]

I’m imagining the alternative is going to be some kind of AI powered robo cops. Not sure I like that idea any more than the current one.

[yareal]

That's the bad alternative, for sure. I'm an anarchist (not the purge, but instead self organizing local communities kind). I genuinely believe that much of the role can be done by local community, reserving only the most violent and extreme things for a uniformed force.

[thaumasiotes]

> You're also referring to a period during which most of the world was feudal or quasi-feudal.

By most definitions of "feudal", there has never been such a period. What does "feudal" mean to you?

[quickslowdown]

This was way better written than the expletive filled reply I had cooking in my head. I appreciate the history, and in reply to the other commentor, I DO condemn the whole institution, and anyone who participates in it. This isn't some job where you're tricked into doing heinous things to ordinary people, they choose to be that way & anyone working to further the goals of the organization is part of the problem.

[yareal]

Appreciate it. It was apparently flagged, despite my efforts to present a historical accounting and narrow, factual framing that was relatively judgement free until the end where I suggested we should be allowed to be critical towards police.

[clbrmbr]

Appreciated. Could be a fascinating read, how societies through history have maintained internal order with various approaches to security. Did Rome have police? What about the Venetians or 16th-18th century europe? Any reading recommendation?

Also, I’m now curious what a the future of homeland security could look like. Is anyone writing rationally about this?

[yareal]

Rome had a few different approaches, the Vigiles mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Several countries had armies enforce legal codes. Some places had night watches run by their local communities. Some had night watches you could pay to avoid participating in. It was considered quite unpleasant and low class to perform a night watch, so the people paid to do it were often those who could not otherwise find work or found it difficult to work elsewhere.

In some societies you could seek justice via a duel, essentially calling out the criminal and relying on social pressure to see the duel adhered to.

In England there's a system of tithings, shires and shire reeves, individuals who were kept employed and told to keep the peace. The shire reeves could muster people to enforce the law, temporarily.

In the 1600s-1800s the monarchs in various countries instituted police forces, but they were typically plainclothes or carried only a symbol of office. (E.g. a badge) These police were closer to what we expect police to be in the modern era, but were not typically or consistently in the same visible, standard uniform. (Though they may have carried, e.g. a sword that might mark them out.)

The U.S. also had other police systems, including slave patrols, essentially self formed posses that would ride down escaped slaves.

In the 1800s, police forces in England thought, "you know what would deter crime? Visible police!" And they began to standardize uniforms with the intent to prevent crime, rather than react to crime. Prior to this moment, policing was typically reactionary -- an aggrieved party seeking justice. The innovation was that if people saw a neighborhood patrolled by uniformed police, they might believe that area was safer and criminals might go elsewhere.

Around the 1860s, this idea really took off, and you see many places copying it.

I'm on my phone, I'll dig for sources later.

[red_admiral]

Great post, but I feel an aside on the England situation is in order. Prior to police forces, for anything too big for the Shire Reeves or Justices of the Peace to handle, the solution was "send in the army". This came to head at the Massacre of St Peter's Field (often called the "Peterloo Massacre", for example on its wiki page) where several hundred protesting workers were killed in a cavalry charge in 1819.

The massacre caused such public outrage that, among other things, London set up the Metropolitan Police (a.k.a. "the met") 10 years later. They were deliberately designed to be a non-militarised force: they wore visible uniforms, but they were black instead of the army's red; they carried truncheons instead of swords or firearms (this is also why most police in the UK to this day do not carry firearms); they were deliberately "civilian" not "paramilitary"; and they were "answerable to the public" in the words of Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (under whom the force was set up). The preventative instead of reactionary nature of policing definitely fits into this context too.

[thaumasiotes]

> Several countries had armies enforce legal codes.

We do that now. The division of the army responsible for that is called "the police".

[gattilorenz]

No, you don’t. Police in the US is militarized but still police (which ironically is part of the problem, AFAIK. They would have better training had they been in the army in some cases).

Countries like Italy have Army corps (the Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza) that do police work but are still part of the army, in addition to also having regular Police. I think this is not uncommon in countries where Napoleonic France had a strong influence, but there’s plenty of commenters here with a better knowledge of the domain, so please correct me if I misremember:)

But having part of the army do police work doesn’t really fix most problems with the police, of course.

[int_19h]

The problem is that they are equipped like the army in many cases, and certainly seem to have the mentality that they are some kind of counter-insurgency force on occupied hostile territory.

[yareal]

No, the term for that is gendarmerie.

If you've read my other posts you've probably been able to infer that I'm not a fan of the police, but I find that being quippy about them undermines actual meaningful conversation about their history and how they could change.

[thaumasiotes]

> No, the term for that is gendarmerie.

That doesn't mean anything. If we renamed the police "gendarmes", what would be different?

[gattilorenz]

That the gendarmes wouldn't be a part of the army (but at that point the police might be).

[yareal]

I'm sorry, but it does have a different meaning. The gendarmerie are military units, police departments are typically civilian units. There's a clear difference in reporting, accountability, access to weaponry, training, and cultural expectations.

It's not just a different word. Maybe you are from a part of the world where military operate the police force and we have different experiences? I'm from the U.S.

[magnetowasright]

Beautifully said.

Your comment about slogans reminds me of the 'thin blue line between anarchy and order' slogan the police themselves use which, to me, is a bare-faced admission of existing to protect the property and interests of the wealthy by suppressing the rest of us. I've never quite understood why that slogan became so popular.

[lolinder]

Because most people don't equate "order" with "oppression by the wealthy", they understand it to mean "the stability that allows me to live my life without fear", which is a pretty unambiguously good thing by most people's measurement.

We can argue about whether the police deliver what the slogan offers, but your inability to understand why the slogan is popular stems from your very weird take on its meaning.

[magnetowasright]

I don't understand how it's a 'very weird take' on its meaning. Is it any weirder than people finding comfort in it?

It's just hilarious (and confusing) to me that it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required. At all. Other such slogans are usually a bit more obtuse and harder to challenge than 'yeah, that is exactly correct, and it horrifies me', hence the confusion. I suppose it is a very effective thought terminating cliche.

[lolinder]

> Also an anarchist!

From your other comment. This is the only way in which that slogan can be interpreted to mean anything negative—if you're one of the very small number of people who believe anarchy to have positive connotations.

> it's just as easily a condemnation rather than praise; no leaps of logic required

It's not a leap of logic, it's a leap of semantics. For the vast majority of English speakers "order" has positive connotations and "anarchy" has negative connotations. For you it's the opposite. Given that, it's not surprising that you interpret it the opposite way as most people, but it's weird that you have so little understanding of the rest of the Anglosphere that you don't realize that you're the odd one out.

[magnetowasright]

I was never confused about what is more popular. Re-reading what I wrote might make that clearer to you?

My interpretation of the phrase strictly retains the semantics, including that of the word 'order' to essentially mean 'the state', or perhaps more generously 'the status quo'. Like I said, it's not one of the more obtuse slogans, like ones artfully designed to sound reasonable when taken at face value but is actually semantically overloaded, take any dog whistles like weird anti-trans rhetoric about chromosomes which was never actually about chromosomes. I hear they're on to hand-wringing over gametes now; I wonder what they'll run to next. This thin blue line stuff doesn't have any of that overloading (or resultant churn); the semantics of the phrase itself are no deeper than it first appears.

[yareal]

It's especially funny to me, an anarchist, who believes that self organizing communities built around wellbeing for all would be radically better than today's world. If the police are the only thing between today's world and "luxury space communism", maybe the police need to be re evaluated.

[magnetowasright]

Also an anarchist! Totally agree. Oh how I dream of it!

It's been very frustrating watching so much police violence, corruption, etc. being openly reported internationally and nothing changing, at all. In Australia (and from what I've heard of the US) there's not much of an effort to try and suppress news of or spin better PR over the horrific stories of police brutality and corruption any more. Like they're not even bothering to keep up pretence and plausible deniability any more. It feels like we're unfortunately a long way from re-evaluating the police even very strictly within the current political frameworks we have. Gotta try to stay optimistic and active, though!

[someuser2345]

What exactly is the difference between your "self organizing communities" and the cities and towns we have today? Nobody is forcing you to live in a city, you are free to move to any other city in the country.

[yareal]

Cities of millions of people are too big to effectively be a self organized community, imo. And I have moved to a city or town that operates closer to my ideals.

But the other thing that's important to remember is that those communities need to be organized for the well being of all, and there aren't such places today.

Also, there's a practical element. Capitalism is here and powerful. I still need to eat, so I participate. I just also spend a lot of time and money on mutual aid (I have a spare house I rent at "cost of maintenance" to families in need, because I believe housing should not be a commodity. Do I take what I can out of the capitalist mode and put it into the anarchist mode.)

[zo1]

And you don't think self-organizing communities built around their well-being will ever decide to do anything against those that go against its well-being? What if they end up making a defacto police force anyways, what then?

Also an anarchist, though not the kind you probably are ("anarcho capitalist" vs "anarcho space communist"). Either way, I don't have a rainbow happy view of human nature, and as such I don't think you can get away from having bad guys that require some sort of police or enforcement.

[yareal]

It's important to separate the roles police play. Sometimes they are detectives, solving crimes. Sometimes they are traffic enforcement, mental health interventions, noise violation enforcement, violent robbery halters, etc. Not all of these roles need be filled by an armed central full time force.

While I'd personally push for removing most of those roles from a police force, and I believe that communities could do so safely and better with more community run organizations, as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them. If a group decides they really want police, then they should do that. I'd disagree with their decision, but that's ok.

[lolinder]

> as an anarchist I believe it should be up to communities to decide what's right for them

Isn't this more or less what's already happening today? Some communities have scaled back their police force dramatically, others have maintained theirs or even scaled them up.

Is the difference just that you'd prefer to see us start from a clean slate and choose from the buffet table, rather than have to migrate from legacy systems?

[Terr_]

Now I'm wondering about analogies to useful-but-dangerous technologies, where "why do you worry so much about the police" is a bit like "why do you worry so much about butane lighters and cans of gasoline."

[gjsman-1000]

Ah, no; this is historically completely inaccurate. Even as early as 1285, King Edward I put into law rules on the minimum number of officers (“constables”) per area.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constable

[yareal]

Constables are not the same as "uniformed police forces". Constables and shire reeves (from which we derive the word sheriff) did predate uniformed police forces, but they generally operated on the "I'm the local law, and if necessary I can draw on local posses to enforce my law". A constable with the power to draw men into his service temporarily is not the same as "these hundred men are full time employed as police officers as their job".

The men hired by constables were typically not uniformed, full time workers, but temporary muscle.

The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800 with London following in the 1820s.

[hollerith]

Also, IIRC, constables in England were not paid in money, they were paid in opportunities to dispense violence (which many men find rewarding for its own sake) without incurring legal liability and in opportunities to stick it to their enemies as long as the enemies were sufficiently low in rank.

"legal liability": if you beat someone up in Medieval Europe, the big danger is not the authorities' sentencing you to jail, it was getting sued by your victim.

England before 1780 or so was organized for the benefit of the artistocracy (barons and higher ranks). You can see just from the fact that constables were not paid a salary that they probably were a net harm (more of a menace than a help) to the common person, but they were a net benefit to the aristocracy because they generally kept commerce humming along at an faster rate than it would have without the constables and because any constable that messed with an aristocrat would be harshly punished. (The aristocrats specialized in military violence, but it was tedious for them to moderate disputes between commoners, so they farmed some of that work out the the constables, who of course were commoners.) When historians say the world's first police force started in England in 1810 or whatever year it was, they mean the first force with a monopoly on violence that was a net benefit to the every class of society including the commoners.

[JumpCrisscross]

> The first, iirc, police force was in Glasgow in 1800

They were a thing in Imperial Rome [1]. I believe they got the idea from the Egyptians, who seem to have invented civil policing (or the Chinese, depending on how you categorise police).

Otherwise, what we today consider police work would have been handled by an army.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigiles#Police_force

[yareal]

The Vigiles come up a lot in this conversation, however, they were a military unit.

In most cases when people think of police in the contemporary setting, they think of a non military force. But you are correct that I should probably say "uniformed civilian police force" rather than "uniformed police force", as there have been a couple historic examples of the military being used to police people in uniform.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Vigiles come up a lot in this conversation, however, they were a military unit

Source?

They certainly weren't organised under the Roman military. Until the 2nd century, Roman citizens weren't even allowed to serve as vigiles. We could argue they were a paramilitary, but then almost every contemporary police force would qualify as well.

> there have been a couple historic examples of the military being used to police people in uniform

This was the status quo. The exceptions were the civilisations which invested into legal systems and the investigation of crimes, and even then generally only for a minority. One could argue that industrialisation increased the value of a human life enough that a lord dealing with crimes by murdering random peasants (or a nightwatch "cleansing" its community by beating up a pariah) became untenable.

[yareal]

My understanding of the vigiles was that they were under the direct command of centurions, despite being largely slaves, and were organized into barracks. Vigiles could achieve higher or more desirable ranks directly through their service.

The vigiles centurions were military men.

I think it's fair to say, "welllll sorta" to my assertion that they were military, given it was predominantly their individual commanders that were military. But I would assert most folks would find it unfamiliar to think of their local police force being commanded by a military commander.

Edit: I want to address directly the idea that the role of police would be conducted by the army, historically. One, sorta, depends historically, but two that's reinforcing my point -- the role police fill has been achieved by many different things in human history, from mobs to armies to uniformed civilian police. We must not accept that the police as they exist today are the only way policing can be done. So often, people fail to imagine better or different ways of achieving that role because they assume it's the way it's always been.

My whole point is that police, as we understand them today, is not the way they've always been. We can and should question whether this latest evolution of the role is still the right one.

[gjsman-1000]

Yeah, like that’s a preferable system. Basically, the powers of a police officer on steroids.

[yareal]

I don't believe I said the historical systems were better or preferable.

Please double check the post I made, I highlighted the existence of alternative systems not to say "return to tradition", but rather to say "police forces as we know them today are not axiomatic. We can invent other systems."

Police may be an improvement on those past systems, while at the same time be outmoded (if one believes they are outmoded.)