 Where do the police come from? What's the sort of historical moment within which they emerge? What are they a response to? It's all England's fault. There's a kind of liberal narrative about the origins of policing that always begins with the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. They're routinely pointed to as the sort of first example of a modern police force, which is less than 200 years ago. This is a fairly modern institution. But what's left out of that narrative, that standard liberal narrative that you see in the policing textbooks, et cetera, is where this idea came from. The London police are created by Sir Robert Peel, Robert Bob the Bobbys. He got this idea in his previous job, which was that he was in charge of the English occupation of Ireland. He develops the Irish Peace Preservation Force to help manage a growing number of what they called agricultural outrages, which were really peasant uprising against landlords. He could not rely on the military to bail him out because they were tied up with Napoleon and the treasury was empty. He comes across this idea of a cheaper, more nimble, community embedded hybrid force that would allow them to act more preemptively, to quell things before they got out of hand, and also to deal with things in a way that preserves some legitimacy for the occupation. The use of the military often involves shooting on crowds, killing people that further undermine the legitimacy. If policing could come in and calm things out with less violence, that would be good for the regime. He takes that idea to England to manage this massive influx of folks coming from the countryside who've been displaced by the enclosures who are drawn by the new industrial economy, and policing is needed to craft that population into a stable working class, to put down the bread riots and the strikes and the crime and widespread disorder. It's about manufacturing a new working class. In the U.S., there are additional factors at work here. We have our own colonial origins of policing in the U.S., tied to the American occupation of the Philippines at the end of the Spanish American Civil War. The Texas Rangers and other Western police forces that are created to drive out the indigenous population to make way for white settlement, but we also have the role of policing in maintaining and managing slavery. I talk in the book about the case of Charleston, South Carolina. In the cities of the South, slaves lived and worked outside the home of their owners in wharves and workshops and warehouses, and policing emerges to manage that mobile slave population. In fact, the Charleston City Guard and Watch is formed well before the London Metropolitan Police, but it's never talked about in these liberal narratives because their primary law enforcement mission was suppressing the slave population. Yeah, something I've noticed. I mean, I haven't written this in the script, but it's something I've noticed a lot actually is, for instance, when people talk about neoliberalism, there's this story about neoliberalism through Europe, through Hayek, the Austrian school. There's this other school of James Buchanan and the end of desegregation, and it seems to me, as you just very lucidly highlighted, this counter narrative of where policing comes deeply imbricated within the history of slavery in the American South. There's a really nice way you put it, which is that the American police, which if this kind of speculation of yours is correct, it's actually more of the sort of protein police force than what we have in the Metropolitan Police Service or the Bow Street Runners, their forerunner. It's this amalgam of northern technocracy and southern oversight of slaves. So what precisely was bad about the northern bit? Because obviously, in the sort of cliched understanding of the American North, the American South, we know why the sort of, you know, the relationships of domination, oppression about with the South, what was the bad sort of features of northern policing? Well, let's keep in mind that even the precursors in London were also about this beginning process of forming a capitalist working class. You know, the Thames Wharf police were created to eliminate the historical practice of gleaning, where workers took the spillage and the overage home as part of their wages, and capitalism can't abide that. So they create this protein police force to try to put a stop that and to create a solely wage economy. And we see similar things happening in the northern United States, where policing emerges to bring this massive immigrant population that's flooding into the United States and form them into an industrial working class. They were regulating how people wore their clothing, all kinds of regulations about alcohol consumption, about public interactions that really had nothing to do with public safety issues or the law. It was about stamping people into this new working class. And then I'll just give this example, you know, the first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police created in 1903. They were created because of the widespread strike and labor actions that were happening in the Pennsylvania coal and iron fields. And local police were unable or unwilling to suppress those labor movements. And so they created a state police force modeled on the US occupation forces in the Philippines to put down those strikes. Strikers at the time referred to them as the Pennsylvania Cossacks. And so northern policing has always been about a kind of racialized understanding of immigration, the management of those blacks who are in the city, and the suppression of workers movements and really working class lifestyles.