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The Origin of Police Forces

The modern police force evolved gradually in the United States. In colonial Amer-
ica, cities and towns employed volunteers as night watchers, and they paid con-
stables or sheriffs to collect taxes and arrest debtors, thieves, and other criminals.
Merchants often hired guards to protect their ships and warehouses. In the South
so-called slave patrols were an early form of police force, created to control the
movement and activities of enslaved people of African descent.
White plantation owners wanted to make sure that their slaves could not
escape. They also feared slave rebellions, so all southern colonies had laws pro-
hibiting slaves from leaving their plantations at night or congregating with other
slaves. “The history of police work in the South grows out of this early fascina-
tion, by white patrollers, with what African American slaves were doing,” writes
historian Sally E. Hadden in the book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia
and the Carolinas. “Most law enforcement was, by de nition, white patrolmen
watching, catching, or beating black slaves.”
The earliest precursors to the modern police force were established in large
cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago during the nineteenth cen-
tury. By the 1880s all major American cities had municipal police forces in place.
Their primary job was to keep the lower classes of American society—poor im-
migrants and Black Americans—in line, preventing labor strikes, property dam-
age, and other disruptions to the economic activities of the wealthy classes.

Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001, p. 4.

a person who has already committed a violent crime and is trying
to escape, under the reasoning that such a criminal has already
shown disregard for human life and is a threat to others.

Constant Evaluation
When police offi cers respond to a dangerous situation, they must
quickly determine the level of force needed to gain control and

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