Though history books may say otherwise, policing in the United States has its roots in the slave patrols in the South. The institution of policing, and the larger justice system, must reconcile its past in order to evolve away from its racist roots.
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Law enforcement has been around since the dawn of laws. Jim Crow is millennia late to be the origin.
Clearly the article is not talking about the global history of policing, it’s talking about American history of policing. You can infer that because Jim Crow laws are American laws. They didn’t have Jim Crow in Sweden.
As for the history of American policing, again, the article acknowledges that American policing has 2 lineages that merged over time.
There are two narratives of how U.S. policing developed. Both are true.
The more commonly known history—the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course—is that American policing can trace its roots back to English policing.
Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.There’s no one “origin” to American policing.
There has been police ever since there has been a State, so for tens of thousands of years that we know of. Pretending that something didn’t exist for 99% of its own history just to call it racist is silly.
So, I just read the article.
Which line of it “pretends” policing didn’t exist before the American South?
Because I’m not seeing what you’re claiming.
The first line: “Jim Crow Origins of Policing”
Police and law enforcement have existed ever since laws existed. We have millennia of history of policing before Jim Crow came into being. Jim Crow demonstrably is not the origin of policing.
I’m with you. I expect something closer to literal accuracy before I take a statement seriously. It’s rather like being told that the phrase “defund the police” does not mean to actually defund the police. The fight against racism in policing is not helped with this type of purely metaphorical speech.
Counterpoint.
The article was clearly referring to American police, and pretending it was referring to the entire history of law enforcement is pedantic to the extreme.
Also, defund the police.
Jim Crow is used as a descriptor of a specific kind of policing. You seem to read this in bad faith, and that’s making you misunderstand what it’s saying.
