| 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. |
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.