ANNOTATED BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

PREFATORY NOTE
The existence of police and the act of "policing" encompass many functions that have organically evolved over the centuries.  In most cases, police forces were not created and do not serve, even today, chiefly to protect the populace against violence and criminality from their peers, but to serve as protectors—taxpayer-supported shields— for big property and the privileges of persons of high standing in society—nobles, big landowners (almost always nobles in pre-modern societies) and finally big industrial magnates and their high retainers in our time. This particular group, a puny segment of society not much larger than 0.001% in the US, comprises the chief beneficiaries of capitalist regimes, the ruling class in self-denominated "capitalist democracies", a deliberately misleading oxymoron. 

This role of the police—often an offshoot of an standing army (Chile's famous Carabineros used to be a regular army regiment), decommissioned soldiers, or an ad hoc corps with variegated origins (look for example into the creation, role and eventual dissolution/transformation of the Guardias de Asalto (Assault Guard) in Spain), and the existence of supporting local militias—has been observed in diverse sedentary civilizations across the globe since antiquity ⁽¹⁾. Thus ancient Egypt, Rome, the Mesopotamian kingdoms and empires, and Chinese emperors, all had recourse to some form of organised guard or force to provide constant protection for the ruling caste and the day to day enforcement of state functions and specific royal commands. Law enforcement relating to taxation, conscription, and "peacekeeping" according to the established rules and customs of the social order (especially in the countryside ⁽²⁾) and in many cases the whims of the monarchs or regional potentates (dukes, counts, popes, bishops, etc.), represented the bulk of the police job.  From inception, this role automatically made the police a conservative, highly militarised, coercive force charged with the preservation of the status quo.

In this series, we will try to discuss this subject from various perspectives. 
—PG

Part One: Police origins

1.1  History of the police, as seen by a friendly source (mainstream view)

A Brief History of Law Enforcement

CBS Blue Bloods is a latter day cop show with the usual plot lines, albeit modernized for 21st century audiences. Police melodramas are an old staple of American television. Cheap plots with plenty of opportunity for mayhem and "wow" moments, they also reinforce the status quo by giving the police a free public relations boost.

---

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lthough the police are an ever-present force in our lives—providing protection, enforcing the law, preventing crime and maintaining order—the form they take today took hundreds of years to perfect. Nearly 400 years ago, the U.S police force as we know it was merely in its infancy. Policing in Europe, however has been around in some form since 3000 BC.

The word police comes from the ancient Greek word, polis, meaning “city.” The first policing organization, however, began in about 3000 BC in Egypt. Pharaohs were in charge of appointing an official to oversee and enforce justice and security for each jurisdiction. This official was assisted by the area's tax collector. Ancient Greece also had a police force made up of Scythian slaves who were regulated by magistrates. Ancient Rome continued the practise of recruiting lower-class citizens (sometimes with criminal pasts) to be part of the police force. These teams of men were in charge of protecting the city, but prosecuting everyday crimes (even murder) was often left to be resolved between individuals. Emperor Augustus created three groups of police to protect Rome from crime and fire in 6 AD. These men were recruited from the Roman Army.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Byzantine Empire went back to the original model of law enforcement where most crimes were left to be dealt with by individuals. In England, however, a new structure of police was being formed. In this model, groups of 100 men were responsible to enforce good conduct between each other while protecting the community. These groups were headed by a Shire-Reeve. The role of the Shire-Reeve eventually developed into what we know today as a Sheriff. By the late 13th Century, the role of Constable was created. Constables were responsible for overseeing the night watch and for providing security. At this time, the investigation and prosecution of crimes was still left up to individuals.

In 1285, the Statute of Winchester made enforcing the law a social responsibility. Any person who didn't report or try to stop a crime could be prosecuted. In 1361, the Justice of the Peace Act revoked public responsibility and placed it on the Justices who were appointed by the monarch. Their responsibilities included police, judicial and administrative duties. Law enforcement in England rested almost solely on the shoulders of Justices, Constables and the night watch until the 19th Century.

In 1631, Boston became the first U.S city to establish a night watch. New Amsterdam (later New York City) soon followed suit in 1647. In the late 18th and 19th Centuries, “regulators” (vigilantes) became commonplace in many U.S cities. Their role was to enforce order in areas where there was none.

British constables. The subject of much praise in the public imagination.

It wasn't until 1829 that the Metropolitan Police Act was passed and the London Metropolitan Police Department was formed. The structure of the department was based on the military. This law enforcement model went on to influence police departments in Great Britain, the British Commonwealth and the United States.

In the middle of the 19th Century in the U.S, laws were passed in order to regulate social behaviour, and penitentiaries, asylums and official police forces were established. New York City was the first to have an official police department in 1844. The NYPD was based on the London Metropolitan Police Department. Soon after, departments were established in New Orleans and Cincinnati (1852), Boston and Philadelphia (1854), Chicago and Milwaukee (1855), and Baltimore and Newark (1857). Authority over police was left to neighbourhoods and neighbourhood leaders. Officers didn't wear uniforms and the initial function of the police was to prevent crimes. Once this proved a very difficult task, one of their main purposes became investigating crimes that had already been committed. The first detective unit began in New York City in 1857.

In the mid to late 19th Century, U.S police were still governed mostly by the communities they were serving. Because of this, corruption and political favoratism were rampant and created major problems. By the end of the century, with much public influence, the police force became a civil service with control of the force being placed on the city and/or the state.

Between 1900 and 1920, the prohibition movement, as well as fears of corruption and Communist influence lead to the need for Federal and State police organizations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created in 1908 to investigate antitrust and fraud cases, as well as crimes committed on government property or by government officials. In 1920, the Department of Treasury created the first large federal police agency which was in charge of enforcing prohibition. In order to deal with and prevent corruption and striking among local police forces, Pennsylvania established the first state police department in 1905. New York followed in 1917, Michigan, Colorado, and West Virginia in 1919, and Massachusetts in 1920.

Public confidence in the police was waning in the 20s and early 30s due to the effects of prohibition, corruption and the frightening growth in gangs and crime. August Vollmer began lobbying to professionalize the police in the early 20th Century. In 1916, he helped create the first university-level police educational program at the University of California, Berkeley. He also pushed for prosecution of delinquent youths, started the Uniform Crime Reports program which kept track of the annual national crime rate, and helped to abolish the physical and/or mental torture the police had been using in suspect interrogation.

J. Edgar Hoover became head of the FBI in 1924 and began actively trying to change the image of detectives, the Bureau, and the police force as a whole. He made it mandatory for new agents to have a formal education, nearly eliminated corruption and almost single-handedly restored public opinion of the police. A new model was adopted which became known as the “three R's”: random preventive patrols, rapid response to calls for service, and reactive criminal investigation. This model, as well as Hoover's military-based structure of the police force became commonplace among all departments. (Op cit., badgeandwallet.com) ⁽³⁾

1.2 History of the police: A radical view

By T.P. Wilkinson

Born to poverty in Glasgow, Allan Pinkerton (l) first served Lincoln as a spymaster for the abolitionist side, but after the war he became a tool for the lords of capital renting his private army of detectives and spies to defeat labor.⁽⁴⁾ The Pinkerton Agency also worked internationally, assisting the Spanish government in 1872 to suppress a revolution in Cuba — a demonstration of Pinkerton’s rather flexible morality. His exploits foreshadowed both the work of the FBI and the CIA.

 

In the US this meant professionalisation of local government and integration of the private/ partisan police forces into a permanent civil service. Thus the gangs of capitalists acquired protected status as part of the new, modern, professional government apparatus which rationally could counter the "irrationality" attributed to democracy, not least of which the horror of communists and anarchists among the immigrant population. In many US cities, this meant that the ethnic hierarchy became entrenched in the forces of "law and order". Irish came to dominate East Coast urban armies-- later Italians were allowed to join. Blacks were excluded-- also because one of the jobs of the police was control over Blacks and other racial inferiors in the labour force. Even today the major urban armies of the US Eastern seaboard, e.g. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, are dominated by Irish and Italian dynasties for whom the police force is also a cult.

---

Films like Raoul Walsh's Roaring Twenties (1939), with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, in the leads as two hoodlums clawing their way to riches during prohibition, suggested how the police came to assume such a central role in American culture.

---

Not only was the struggle for democratic and socialist government subverted by imposing "pwogwessive" public administration, these professional governments were equipped with private armies which were then given a badge and virtual immunity from any form of civil or criminal prosecution. Although some may know the history, it is important to recall that these policies were developed, supported and ultimately imposed by the plutocrats of the 19th century, Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, later Ford and others both directly and through philanthropic foundations-- established to evade taxes and distribute bribery. 

 

Under Woodrow Wilson, that South Carolina racist and Princeton professor promoted to POTUS, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was essentially moved from its role as private and mercenary political hammer to a State apparatus under Mitchell Palmer, who installed them under a fascist bureaucrat named John Edgar Hoover-- who turned it into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US equivalent of what Hitler established as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the controlling office for all Nazi political and criminal police forces). 

 

The US Constitution does not provide explicitly for police powers-- except in the Second Amendment. That infamous addition is usually interpreted as the right for anyone in the US to own firearms. However that is incorrect. The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the slave states from federal interference in their "slave patrols", the militias organised under state authority to hunt runaway slaves and discipline resp. suppress slave rebellions. In other words, the implied police power of the Second Amendment was conceived as an instrument for controlling slaves and later Blacks after slavery was abolished. This is the license that the Constitution gives to the thugs clothed in municipal or state uniforms as professional armies for the oligarchy that owns the United States. 

 

Revelers in Wisconsin celebrate the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, after 20 years in which the law created a massive crime problem and  an equally massive police presence.

After World War I those owners sought means to establish federal jurisdiction over political dissent, especially given the enormous numbers of urban immigrants from inferior European stock. People like Henry Ford realised that suppressing the consumption of alcohol would create a nationwide pretext for social control without openly contravening the supposed constitutional liberties, e.g. the First Amendment or those forbidding unreasonable search and seizure or denial of due process. The Volstead Act was adopted [in 1920] and the Prohibition amendment entered into force. For the first time since the Civil War, the federal government had a mandate to coordinate policing throughout the US and to mobilise the corporate machine police forces for political control. This not only made families like the Kennedys and Bronfmans fabulously rich, it helped establish the corporate form of crime of which Meyer Lansky became the paragon (although popular culture focuses on Italians rather than Jews). 

 

The federal prohibition of alcoholic beverages did not end drink but created the context for a massive expansion of corporate and state police power. Now the taxpayer-- obviously not corporations or their plutocratic owners-- could pay the bill for their own repression. This would not have been possible were the US not historically saturated with the hypocritical theocratic culture of Oliver Cromwell's puritan republic. Since "white" American politics-- even abolitionism-- has always been dominated by the theocratic tradition of the colonial era, prohibition of alcohol could be promoted as a necessary imposition of moral conduct upon inferior European stock-- where wine and beer were ordinary food-- and as a purification of the body politic. In fact it was an alibi for political policing of immigrants, socialists, and any other "un-American" activities. 

 

When it became clear that Prohibition's days were numbered and an enormous army of uniformed thugs would suddenly be unemployed, people like Harry Anslinger, wed to the Mellon dynasty and a former head of the Pennsylvania Railroad's private army, lobbied for the prohibition of narcotic drugs. One of his barely valid reasons was that policing narcotics would also preserve an instrument for policing Blacks. So the Federal Bureau of Narcotics became the primary national race police while the its senior rival the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the US secret political police (what was called under Hitler the Gestapo-- abbreviation for Geheime Staatspolizei, as opposed to the Schutzpolizei or protective police). 

 

Together these two federal agencies began the process of shaping disparate and independent warlords with their municipal armies into forces that could be mobilised either for political or racialist purposes. The so-called New Deal not only introduced a vast array of federal interventions in the economy and social organisation, some of which were barely socialist but most of which were proto-fascist/ corporatist, it nationalised the police powers. This meant the corporations were no longer directly liable for the actions of their gangs, e.g. the Pinkertons, Ford Service or the numerous railway and factory police forces deployed to control workers and their communities. The uniforms and badges were exchanged and now these private armies were agents of state repression. The fiction of civilian control was preserved in part due to corporate and jurisdictional jealousies. However these armies became entrenched parts of the civilian bureaucracy, unionised, and established legacies that made many forces virtually hereditary castes. 

 

Greek director Costa Gavras' film State of Siege focused on the Mitrione case in Uruguay. Most Americans have never understood that their government trains torturers and death squads across the globe, while mouthing pieties about freedom and democracy at home.

It is against this background that one needs to understand the decades of opposition to police in the US, mainly from non-white and poor communities in the US. This opposition is not based on occasional abuse or failures in training. It is based on the intuitively recognised fact that the police in the US-- as in the rest of the US Empire-- are an army of occupation. They are, individual police officers of good faith notwithstanding, the daily terror and threat of terror which is the complement to Hollywood propaganda and the dictatorship of the workplace. It is no accident that someone like Dan Mitreone, an Indiana police chief, became a notorious trainer of torturers in Latin American police forces before he was kidnapped [by guerrillas] and executed. Michigan State University ran, or served as a conduit for, programs throughout the US war against Vietnam which brought members of these municipal terror organisations to Southeast Asia to torture Vietnamese.

 

Of course policing in Britain and throughout Europe is also derived from state terror policies. Yet only in Britain and the US does one have such an enormous investment in the myth of good police officers. The late journalist Alexander Cockburn once wrote that Britain had the only police department that was treated as a global tourist attraction. Hollywood has done everything possible to give the NYPD that reputation too-- although even less deserved. FBI and DEA have become "brands" for leisure attire. As yet I have seen no one wearing a "GESTAPO" tee shirt. 

 

The current wave of demonstrations and demands for an end to police repression and even an end to the police force as such may shock some who think that it would be enough to end racialist abuse by the police, to finally convict police of the capital crimes they commit and punish them accordingly. In a country which is proud of its death penalty, the number of police condemned for murder and punished accordingly can certainly be counted on one hand -- or less! The number of people wrongly convicted and/ or executed for allegedly killing police gangsters is enormous. The City of Brotherly Love is infamous here.

 

The problem, of which the murder of George Floyd is only one example among thousands (or millions throughout US history), is complex. First of all the warlords-- the corporate owners of municipalities and their armies called police-- have to be restrained. These armies, like the paramilitary units the US corporate oligarchy maintains in its protectorates, have independent means-- e.g. through their control of drug, gambling and other cash flows. They can buy, blackmail or otherwise suborn politicians and judiciary. They are organised in powerful unions with cult-like loyalty through generations. They are supplied by the covert internal security apparatus established since Hoover's ascent and enriched after the war on Vietnam and 9-11. They can rely on a perverse criminal code both at local and federal level which legitimates their functions. Last but not least they are linked to the penal value chain since the privatisation of prisons and other disciplinary operations. There is so much money involved that it is mind boggling.

 

Although I remain sceptical as to the actual organisation behind the wave of demonstrations and actions aimed at police forces and their crimes, the issues are real. An adequate and dialectically developing movement to address these long suppressed issues will need to deal with the complexity of police history and especially the powerful financial and political interests behind the municipal militarism that plagues the US and constitutes one of the main obstacles to democratic struggle there.

[post-views]

 

About Dr. T. P. Wilkinson

An iconoclastic thinker by nature, and a good example of a Renaissance man in our time, Dr. T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of the book Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa.  Most of his work since 2015 has been posted at Dissident Voice where he also have contributed a poem every Sunday since then. Prior to that, pieces were posted at Global Research, Black Agenda Report and while Alexander Cockburn was still alive at Counterpunch. He is now an increasingly familiar voice in the world's leading anti-imperial publications. 

 

 

"Practice with the impossible is preparation for the necessary"

---

Addendum

JIMMY DORE: Most Cops Are Criminals And Here's The Proof

 

REFS
⁽¹⁾ Nomads and hunter-gatherers tribes organised along the lines of primitive communism seem to escape this phenomenon entirely or to a large extent.

The memorable, devious "bandido" in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an iconic film, had the outlaw swiftly dispatched by the rurales. The reality, as usual, was more complex.

⁽²⁾ Projecting the needs and fears of the big landowning elites, some form of countryside police has been in effect for centuries. In modern times, Mexico and Spain offer interesting examples. Sharing the same original functions, the brutish and widely feared Guardia Civil in Spain and the notoriously heavy-handed Mexico’s “Federales” —or countryside police (in actuality in most cases units of the Mexican army, not to be confused with the “rurales”—rural mounted police— also serving the same function), these forces were tasked with the pacification of the peasantry. Summary justice against “bandidos” or anyone accused of such was usually the favored method, which in many cases equated with broad daylight death squad activity against “subversives” or, conveniently, anyone merely accused of being one. Both Federales and rurales were largely eliminated (dissolved) by specific treaties during the Mexican revolution. But the elimination/transformation of police forces in the wake of a genuine revolution is one of the toughest tasks for any new government, especially one advocating new social values. The Cuban, Chinese and of course Russian revolutions have important lessons in this regard. As suggested earlier, there is no general, ideal or quick solution to this knot, as all police forces around the globe reflect their countries' histories and cultures, and specific turning points in their development.  

(3) The FBI came into existence in the first decade of the 20th century (formally c. 1908) under AG Charles Bonaparte, during the Teddy Roosevelt administration. The Bureau of Investigation, as it came to be called, was to operate as a detective force for the Justice Department which, until then, had to borrow detectives from the Secret Service to fill specific tasks. By 1919, in the wake of the first Red Scare and the consequent "Palmer Raids", the Bureau was acquiring its true and principal character as an agency focused on combatting subversion against the established order. Open persecution and spying on US nationals protected by the Constitution could not be admitted, nor did it sit well with some members of Congress and important public officials (yes, we had them in those days), so the Bureau soon found itself developing a proper cover for its real mission, a non-political "crime" fighting force which gave J.E. Hoover immense popularity in the ensuing decades as his "G men" busted one notorious violent gang after another, or so the public was told. 

In June 1919, Attorney General Palmer told the House Appropriations Committee that all evidence promised that radicals would "on a certain day...rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop." He requested an increase in his budget to $2,000,000 from $1,500,000 to support his investigations of radicals, but Congress limited the increase to $100,000.^[7]

An initial raid in July 1919 against an anarchist group in Buffalo, New York, achieved little when a federal judge tossed out Palmer's case. He found in the case that the three arrested radicals, charged under a law dating from the Civil War, had proposed transforming the government by using their free speech rights and not by violence.^[8] That taught Palmer that he needed to exploit the more powerful immigration statutes that authorized the deportation of alien anarchists, violent or not. To do that, he needed to enlist the cooperation of officials at the Department of Labor. Only the Secretary of Labor could issue warrants for the arrest of alien violators of the Immigration Acts, and only he could sign deportation orders following a hearing by an immigration inspector.^[9]

On August 1, 1919, Palmer named 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover to head a new division of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, the General Intelligence Division (GID), with responsibility for investigating the programs of radical groups and identifying their members.^[10] The Boston Police Strike in early September raised concerns about possible threats to political and social stability. On October 17, the Senate passed a unanimous resolution demanding Palmer explain what actions he had or had not taken against radical aliens and why.^{[11].  (Se Palmer Raids, Wikipedia)}

⁽⁴⁾ "Between 1877 and 1892, the Pinkertons were involved in 70 labor union strikes—including some of the biggest and most consequential of the Gilded Age. After Allan Pinkerton’s death in 1884, his sons William and Robert took over, and they doubled down on the project of providing what capitalists and industrialists needed in their struggles with labor. Pinkerton detectives infiltrated labor unions under cover of secrecy, and reported on their activities to employers; Pinkerton guards, acting as visible muscle, protected company property during strikes. The Pinkertons also provided strikebreakers (aka scabs) to fill in for companies when union workers walked out and protected those strikebreakers while they were working." (Rebecca Onion, Who were the Pinkertons?, Slate, Feb. 1, 2019).