“Policing itself started out as slave patrols. We know that,” Rep. James Clyburn declared in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. Clyburn, the House majority whip, is the third highest ranking Democrat in Congress. He's widely respected. And he's wrong. Or, to be more generous, he's being irresponsibly sloppy in making a point he’s right about.
But he’s not alone.
A story in Yahoo News makes a similar claim. Discussing police abuses, reporter Marquise Francis writes, "The injustice harkens back to the very origins of policing in the U.S., in volunteer patrols charged with keeping African-Americans in their place and hunting runaway slaves.”
A USA Today article headlined, “Law enforcement's history of racism; First police departments date back to slave patrols”: “Across the U.S., black Americans lived in fear of law enforcement officials armed with weapons who monitored their every behavior, attacked them on the street and in their homes, and killed them for the slightest alleged provocation.”
Wenei Philimon, the author, continues, “These organized groups of white men known as slave patrols lay at the roots of the nation's law enforcement excesses, historians say, helping launch centuries of violent and racist behavior toward black Americans, as well as a tradition of protests and uprisings against police brutality.”
One has to read deep into the piece to discover the important caveat to a legitimately significant historical fact. Yes, policing in Southern slave states has some roots in slave patrols.
But policing doesn’t.
Policing—enforcing the law, preventing crime, apprehending criminals—has a very long tradition of existence. I don't know where it started, but for our purposes we can note that Augustus Caesar, born in 27 B.C., created the cohortes urbanae near the end of his reign, to police Ancient Rome. Policing in England takes rudimentary form with Henry II's proclamation of the Assize of Arms of 1181. In the 1600s England established constables and justices of the peace to oversee them. The Metropolitan Police Act created the first recognizable police force in the U.K. in 1829.
Meanwhile, in America the first constables were created in the 1630s in what came to be known as New England. Boston has the oldest “modern” police department. It was created in 1838. New York and Philadelphia soon followed.
They were not created to search for runaway slaves.
It is true that slave patrols were created in slave states and they were an early form of policing. How much that taints the police forces of modern-day Atlanta or Charleston or any other state is clearly up for discussion.
But it strikes me as somewhat far-fetched to argue that police in Minnesota or New York are imbued with the spirit of southern militias tasked with tracking down slaves. It even strikes me as a bit of a stretch to claim that the slave patrols of the 1840s have a lot of bearing on the actions of police departments in majority black cities like Atlanta.
Indeed, there's something uncomfortable to the idea that attempts to prevent rape, murder, robbery, etc., have some obvious racist intent behind them. Black people are just as deserving of protection from crime as anybody else.
Moreover, the attempt to paint policing—all policing "across America," in former slave states and free states alike—as the poisoned fruit of American slavery is problematic. First, every decent country has police, including the non-white ones. Second, the South lost the Civil War. Under Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans imposed the North's will on the South. The slave patrols were disbanded. Some patrollers did indeed become police. But so did African-Americans. Meanwhile, the evil energies of the patrols were primarily expressed elsewhere—in the form of vigilante groups like the KKK. When Reconstruction ended, the South imposed tyrannical Jim Crow laws.
In other words, the history is complicated. But the important point is that it is history, not America today.
Rep. Val Demings, reportedly on Joe Biden's vice presidential shortlist, is the former chief of police of Orlando, Florida, and an African American. Do people really mean to say she ran the moral equivalent of a slave patrol? Really?
One of the arguments made by both advocates of reasonable police reform—like Demings—as well as proponents of abolishing the police is that cops do too much. They reasonably note that police are expected to be first-responding mental health professionals, dealing with homeless people, possible suicides, etc. Why send people with guns to do that?
It's a fair question. But by even asking it, you're conceding that police are not, in fact, behaving like slave patrols.
Photograph by Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images.
I have known many cops. Family members and friends. Most of them good people in their own eyes. I would also argue, many of them less than aware of their own bias. There is a definite us vs. them in the mind of many police officers. I’ve had conversations where I was told I just didn’t get it. “Those people” are different, “those people” live in crappy neighborhoods, “those people” ad infinitum......At one point, my whole staff was black men that had been incarcerated. I have spoken with parole officers, I know A LOT of the mindset of cops is based on belief that “those people” just can’t manage their own lives. The best you can do is keep them corralled. I think it is very possible (and worth the discussion) that the idea of different rules for “those people” can be traced back to just another shitty remnant of slavery that has permeated the zeitgeist of an intellectual lazy nation. (present company notwithstanding)
Thank you for taking a potentially hot topic head on. Focusing on slave patrols is a diversion that only detracts from the real problem. Even if you concede that the police population has a higher percentage of racists than the general population, trying to link them to slave patrols from 100+ years ago is counter productive.
The real problem is accountability. Police work has a non zero level of violence baked in. Screening and training procedures are important to keep the bad ones out and the good ones in-line, but because the police department is composed of, and run by, humans a good mechanism for finding and correcting excesses must be built in AND executed. The attention should be laser focused on the lack of oversight both on the officers AND those responsible for enforcing the rules (police chiefs, politicians, prosecutors).
While it is undeniable that there is some level of bias against minorities in police enforcement, claiming racism from as many angles as possible (even if it is true) only diverts attention from the solution; accountability. As divided as the country is right now, focusing on race will only fan the flames. Highlighting race causes both sides to talk past each other. The real problem is an unacceptable number of egregious deaths at the hands of police. Even if racism was the overriding factor in every death, race should not be the lone focal point.
If an officer in Podunk, PA decided that he was going to rough-up all of the (insert your high school clique here) from his senior class every time he had a chance, would the ultimate result (unjustified violence) be any different than if he used brown skin as his criteria? I’m sure the level of public outrage would be different, but that would not change the required solution ; Defined rules and enforcement of those rules AT EVERY LEVEL. Society cannot foresee his hatred for his high school class, but can make sure he does not get away with it.
Every time one of these events happens the police chief, police union, and mayor should be put under an unrelenting microscope to produce the procedure and/or person responsible for allowing the bad officer to remain in their department without detection. The police departments should have to publicly justify every death and more attention should be given to the vast sums of taxpayer money used for lawsuit settlements.
If we are going to focus on a systemic old school problem, I would like to see half of the attention applied to race concentrated on the ‘good old boys’ network between unions, police chiefs and prosecutors covering each others asses. The racism would be flushed out naturally.