\n\nIn England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades\u2014roughly from 1825 to 1855.
\nThe new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn\u2019t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime,\u00a0before and since the invention of police,\u00a0has been for someone to tell them who did it.
\nBesides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That\u2019s
\n\u2014 strikes in England,
\n
\u2014 riots in the Northern US,
\u2014 and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.
\n
Trueish enough. I’ve mentioned how 20th century American urban policing was heavily modeled after the FBI. Which was heavily modeled after the Pinkertons. Who were a nationwide mercenary police force with a specialty in combating (quite literally) labor unrest.
\nMy one complaint is that it totally overlooks the British/American heritage of sheriffs, and posse comitatus, as an intermediate force between feudal men-at-arms and towns’ “hue and cry”. But then, this is a Marxist analysis and Marxist frameworks have never quite known what to do with rural yeomanry (see Lenin’s vacillating between the New Economic Policy and then “dekulakization”, or the inability of the urban and rural radicalisms of late 19th century America to form productive alliances even in areas of mutual strength like western New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin).
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