 Everyone has an opinion on US police right now. From modern day police's roots in slavery, to the birth of powerful unions, to the persistent problem of violence toward black and brown communities, the history of police in the US is volatile and complicated. This is the bizarre history of US police. In the 1600s, the colonies inherited their system of justice from their chain, England. And in both places, early policing was pretty casual. The night watch was a team of volunteers who were supposed to warn their fellow citizens of coming danger. The problem was, having a volunteer system didn't work very well. Many watchmen slept or drank on the job. Rich men up for the duty would pay poor men to work their shifts. And while the watchmen were in theory volunteers, a lot of them volunteered as punishment or to avoid military duty. For all these reasons, the watchmen weren't very effective. But as dysfunctional as the ragtag night watch was, it holds no comparison to what was happening in the South, slave patrols. White Southerners lived in constant fear of slave rebellions and revolts. So they looked at what European colonizers were already doing in the Caribbean, slave patrols. In 1704, the first formal slave patrol was established in the Carolina colonies. Unlike the night watchmen in the northern colonies, this volunteer force was pretty effective at doing their job. That's because they were terrorizing enslaved black people in order to protect white wealth. Slave patrols in the South had three purposes. One, find runaway slaves. Two, scare slave communities into not revolting. And three, act as a justice system for slaves that stepped out of line. The end of the Civil War in 1865 didn't so much eliminate slave patrols as transform them into police departments controlling black people in other ways. But we'll get to that later. Meanwhile, in the North, the first publicly funded organized police force was created in Boston in 1838, with other major cities following the coming decades. Why? One reason is the US population was growing, and more people meant the night watch's casual, disorganized manner was even less effective than it had been. But the organization of police was mainly due to the fact that the people running society, big business bosses, wanted them. Imagine you're a factory worker in mid-1800s New York City. The Industrial Revolution has brought machines and products a generation earlier could have only dreamed about. But you're soon feeling the huge inequalities that come with this new age. Laughably low pay, dangerous working conditions, extremely long hours, and your whole family has to work too. Soon, you've had enough, and you and your colleagues use the only political power available to you, rioting and striking. So how did the captains of industry that ran these factories keep the workers threatening their entire business model in chat? They created the impression that law and order needed to be maintained. Then gave an organized group of men free reign to brutalize anyone who stepped out of line, aka police. Officers would go head to head with union demonstrators throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. The encounters were often violent, and police gained a reputation for indiscriminately beating the sh** out of people. Police at this time weren't just known for violence, but also corruption, which isn't shocking considering they were often handpicked by politicians. Let's go back to the South for a moment, where late 1800s police forces there had their own kind of aggression against the worker going on. In the South, those workers were primarily Black people. Slade patrols were officially gone, but segregation and discrimination were the law thanks to Jim Crow. Outside the law, Ku Klux Klan groups tormented and lynched Black people, and some government officials and police officers became KKK members. At this point, the two styles of policing in the South and North were starting to merge, and three significant forces were about to completely change police as we knew them, which brings us into the catalysts for modern day policing. One, labor unions kept making small gradual progress, culminating with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which legalized a lot of union activity, like strikes. Police stopped focusing so much on fighting the labor movement. Two, the great migration of Black Americans away from the South and into urban areas across the country gave police everywhere a new prime target, Black people. In the 1950s, a new go-to solution for police reform emerged, professionalization. The idea was to model the police after the military, get them more disciplined and organized, and hope they'd have fewer problems and perform better. Changes included centralized police stations, cop cars instead of foot patrols, and more emphasis on officer oversight. This wave of professionalization created further tension between communities and police. By the early 60s, police jumped on the union bandwagon. To accomplish this, they used tactics still used today, sit-ins and slowdowns. Slowdown is the idea that you'll show your important value of your work by producing less. In the case of police unions, that can mean not answering calls that come in, not showing up for work on time, but it could also lead to the loss of life if they're doing their job to protect civilians. The 60s were a revolutionary time worldwide, and the era didn't help tensions between police and the public get any better. Police continued to act brutally toward Black people throughout the civil rights movement, but this time it was caught on camera. There was even an effort post-60s and through the 80s to shift to a community policing model, as the 60s had made it crystal clear that the whole professionalization thing wasn't working so well. But naturally, politicians responded to the chaos by throwing more money at police. 1965, President Johnson calls for a war on crime. Today's equivalent of $223 million was spent on military-grade gear and weapons for police across the country. 1971, Nixon launches the war on drugs. More money goes toward policing, and now, prisons. Black Americans would bear the brunt of arrests and prison sentences and still do. Despite their growing power and resources, it was hard for police unions to negotiate more pay during the 80s Reagan-era budget cut years. So instead, they settled on more protections for misbehaving officers. Collected barring agreements, protect them, and protect their pensions, really, in case they, you know, shoot someone. These protections are still in place today. A 2017 investigation looked into police union contracts in 82 cities and found that most of them literally required disciplinary records to be erased, some after only six months. And in recent years, a legal protection called Qualified Immunity has blocked thousands of lawsuits against cops accused of using excessive force or even killing people. Today, things have escalated in every way. One, police unions have more power than ever, pushing the idea that law enforcement needs more resources to keep the public safe. Two, US police still have a huge violence problem. US police killed over 1,000 people in 2018 alone. The rate at which people die in US police custody is more than doubled out of Australia and more than six times that of the UK. Many experts say efforts to reform the police with more diversity, bias training, and de-escalation do little to address these huge, deadly problems. And three, hand in hand, police also still have a huge racism problem. A black person is three times more likely to get killed by a cop than a white person and 20% more likely to get pulled over. But the difference this time is a groundswell activism movement, really questioning not only everything police stand for, but systemic racism as a whole. If this bizarre history has taught me anything, it's that one, the way we police has never really worked. Two, the history of police isn't so much about the officers on the ground as it is about powerful people wanting to keep less powerful people in check. And three, we need to start fixing this problem by making sure officers themselves are held accountable. We need to decide whether we want a system of public safety that involves keeping the most powerful people wealthy and powerful or if we truly want a system that protects the safety of its citizens.