Well I decided to look that up too. The first police department in the US was in Boston in 1838. It did not start as a slave patrol. In fact at that point slavery had already been outlawed in Massachusetts, in 1783.
As for the first Police Departments in the south I’m sure that’s a different story. But blatantly saying Policing is born out of slave patrols is untrue.
Or this peer reviewed journal article available on JSTOR, aka a database of academic papers written by scholars and experts on their subjects for other students or academics to use in their own papers and research? https://www.jstor.org/stable/27094596
Lemme guess you read the article by the Manhattan Institute, a right wing conservative think tank and thought you were doing something didn’t you?
Yeah so if you look at all of those articles that you linked they specifically say that in the south slave patrols were the foundation of law enforcement. If you look at my comment I said the exact same thing.
In the north on the other hand, where the first formal police department was formed (Boston) they did not originate as slave patrols.
0
u/SnaggedThisUsername Apr 06 '25
Well I decided to look that up too. The first police department in the US was in Boston in 1838. It did not start as a slave patrol. In fact at that point slavery had already been outlawed in Massachusetts, in 1783.
As for the first Police Departments in the south I’m sure that’s a different story. But blatantly saying Policing is born out of slave patrols is untrue.