By Timothy Hsiao

Critics of American policing often make the claim that it is a direct descendant of antebellum slave patrols, the mostly voluntary groups organized to capture runaway slaves and stifle slave rebellions in the early eighteenth century. Consider just a few examples:

• “The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the ‘Slave Patrol.’” — NAACP

• “Policing itself started out as slave patrols. We know that.” — Rep. James Clyburn.

• “Slave patrols . . . morphed directly into police.” — Nikole HannahJones.

• “[M]odernized police actually emerged in the South during slavery— they literally were slave catchers.” — Scalawag Magazine.

Even pro-law enforcement organizations such as the National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C. have come to accept this claim. According to one criminal justice textbook, it is “widely recognized that law enforcement in the 20th-century South evolved directly from these 18th and 19th-century slave patrols.”

While it is true that slave patrols were a form of American law enforcement that existed alongside other forms of law enforcement, the claim that American policing “traces back” to, “started out” as, or “evolved directly from,” slave patrols, or that slave patrols “morphed directly into” policing, is false. This widespread pernicious myth falsely asserts a causal relationship between slave patrols and policing and intimates that modern policing carries on a legacy of gross injustice. There is no evidence for either postulate.

In order to demonstrate causation, one must show that modern policing drew its distinctive practices and structure from slave patrols. But the evidence shows that American law enforcement—whether in the form of sheriffs, town watches, constables, or police—all emerged from distinctly English influences. Both slave patrols and modern police departments drew from these influences. The fact that the latter did so after the former does not mean that the latter emerged from the former.

New York: National Association of Scholars, 2023. 6p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

By Brian E. McKnight

FROM THE PREFACE: “In moving down through this nested hierarchy of organizational types, we reach one of the key steps at a level where the social units are distinct as unique cultural and political entities. What was peculiarly Byzantine, or peculiarly Chinese, about the perception of law-enforcement problems and responses and about the ways in which lawbreakers were treated? These attributes, which distinguish one such political entity from another, are simply parts of our definition of what it is to be Chinese or Byzantine or Roman. Such defining attributes evolve over time. The Chinese language has changed from the time of the Shang dynasty to today. However, the changes in these fundamental attributes are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Despite the ways in which it has changed, the Chinese language has remained the Chinese language..”

Cambridge University Press. 1992. 572p.

By Johann Koehler, Tony Cheng
We show how both the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department sought to settle uncertainty about their propriety and purpose during a period when abrupt transformations destabilized urban order and called the police mandate into question. By comparing annual reports that the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department published from 1877 to 1923, we observe two techniques in how the police enacted that settlement: identification of the problems that the police believed themselves uniquely well equipped to manage and authorization of the powers necessary to do so. Comparison of identification and authorization yields insights into the role that these police departments played in convergent and divergent constructions of disorder and, in turn, into Progressivism's varying effects in early urban policing.

Criminology, 2023:1-28

By Richard C. Lindberg
In this serious yet entertaining book, historian Richard Carl Lindberg probes unexplored avenues of Chicago history and presents the first in-depth history of the Chicago Police Department in over a century. The book traces the stormy history of the department from the 1850s to the Summerdale Scandal of the near present. Interspersed with the major chapters about the chaotic struggle between reform and the machine are short, intimate vignettes: the Armory Station, a gray, somber fortress that housed some of Chicago's most desperate characters for over thirty years; Francis O'Neill, Chicago's turn-of-the-century police chief who collected Irish folk songs and transcribed them into sheet music; the first fingerprint conviction in Cook County in which a man paid the ultimate price; and a retrospective look at some of the most infamous murder cases of the century and how the police solved them. Lindberg discusses the tie between politics, organized crime, vice, and the police department. He presents a history of Chicago politics and law enforcement in chronological order and recounts pivotal events in Chicago history in the police context.

• More.....

  The book reveals how police corruption in Chicago was the result of the political drag on the department; the pernicious influence of meddling aldermen and vice operatives that prevented the police from carrying out their sworn duties in a forthright manner. Lindberg examines the lack of central authority over the police department; police superintendents were traditionally weak, subservient figures to the mayor, unable, and often unwilling to exercise control over the bureaucracy. Students and scholars of history, criminal justice, Chicago history, and law enforcement will find To Serve and Collect provocative reading.

Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991. 366p.

By Robert J. Abbott

Founded by Peter the Great in 1718, Russia’s police were key instruments of tsarist power. In the reign of Alexander II (1855-1881), local police forces took on new importance. The liberation of 23 million serfs from landlord control, growing fear of crime, and the terrorist violence of the closing years challenged law enforcement with new tasks that made worse what was already a staggering burden. This book describes the regime’s decades-long struggle to reform and strengthen the police. The author reviews the local police’s role and performance in the mid-nineteenth century and the implications of the largely unsuccessful effort to transform them. From a longer-term perspective, the study considers how the police’s systemic weaknesses undermined tsarist rule, impeded a range of liberalizing reforms, perpetuated reliance on the military to maintain law and order, and gave rise to vigilante justice. While its primary focus is on European Russia, the analysis also covers much of the imperial periphery, discussing the police systems in the Baltic Provinces, Congress Poland, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia.

Budapest–Vienna–New York: Central European University Press, 2022. 235p.

By T. W. Hanshew.

Being the and adventures of that "The remarkable detective genius, Man of the Forty Faces," once known to the police as "The Vanishing Cracksman.”

Toronto Thomas Langton (1914) 394 pages.

By the Committee of Sixteen.  The Committee of Sixteen in seeking sources for this report has studied the experience of various organizations m England and the United States formed for the suppression of vice, and has found them interestingly similar in aims and methods to its own We have found other organizations of private individuals, like ourselves, which have been formed because they desire, first, to get accurate information as to local conditions; second, to study experience elsewhere; and third, to make a continuous effort to deal with the vice problem.

Montreal: The Committee, 1919. 80p.

By Canada. Dept. of Labour.

Printed by order of Parliament. Sir,—In the report recently presented, of the settlement of the claims of the Chinese residents of the city of Vancouver, B.C., for losses occasioned by the anti- Asiatic riots of September last, I drew attention to a report of the evidence before the commission, disclosing the existence of opium manufacturing on a considerable scale in the province of British Columbia, and respectfully submitted that the operations of the opium industry should receive the immediate attention of parliament, and of the legislatures, with a view to the enactment of such measures as would effectually suppress the opium traffic in Canada, and wholly eradicate this evil and its baneful effects.

Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1908. 13p.

By Percy Fitzgerald

With an account of the magistrates, “runners” and police; and a selection of the most interesting cases. By Percy Fitzgerald, in two volumes. f.s.a. vol. 1. with numerous illustrations.

London— Chapman and Hall, Ltd. (1888) 382 pages.

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By Patrick Colquhoun.

Containing an Historical View of the Trade of the Port of London and Suggesting Means for Preventing the Depredations Thereon. “Excerpt from A Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames: Containing an Historical View of the Trade of the Port of London, and Suggesting Means for Preventing the Depredations Thereon, by a Legislative System of River Police. The Subject is in many respects new; while the Details which are given will be found interesting in no common degree; inasmuch as the renovation of the Morals of a numerous body of Individuals, and the protection of vast masses of Commercial Property against Fraud and Depredation, is the principal object in view. In discussing a great variety of topics, which will come under the review of the Reader in this Treatise, almost every rank of Society will find beneficial Information but particularly those Classes who are concerned in Navigation and Commerce, 'and who follow Nautical Pursuits.

London: J. Mawman, 1900. 676p

By R. G. Macbeth.

Being The Real Life Record Of The Famous Royal North-West Mounted Police . “…it is not the young constable himself that counts so mightily, though he is a likely looking fellow enough who could be cool anywhere and who could give ample evidence of possessing those muscles of steel which count in a hand-to-hand encounter. But you see he is one of that widely known body of men called the Royal North-West Mounted Police.

Hidden and Stoughton Ltd. (1921) 247 pages.

By P. Colquhoun.

Containing a detail of the Various crimes and misdemeanors by which Public and Private Property and Security are, at present, injured and endangered: and suggesting remedies for their prevention. the sixth edition, corrected and considerably enlarged. Acting as a Magistrate for the Counties of Middlesex, Surry, Kent, and Essex.—For the City and Liberty of Westminster, and for the Liberty of the Tower of London. (1806) 31 pages.

A Historical Sketch 1672-1916

By S. M. Edwardes. “A perusal of the official records of the early period of British rule in Bombay indicates that the credit of first establishing a force for the prevention of crime and the protection of the inhabitants belongs to Gerald Aungier, who was appointed Governor of he Island in 1669 and filled that office with conspicuous ability until his death in Surat in 1677.”

Oxford University Press (1923) 240.

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THE UNKNOWN STORY AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR CRIMINOLOGY.

ISBN: 978-1-78735-617-7 (PDF)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356177

Jeremy Bentham’s ideas on punishment are famous. Every criminology student learns about Bentham, and every criminologist contends with him, as advocate or opponent. This discourse concerns his ideas about punishment, namely with respect to legislation and the panopticon. Yet, scholars and students are generally ignorant of Bentham’s ideas on police. Hitherto, these ideas have been largely unknowable. Now, thanks to UCL’s Bentham Project, these ideas are public. Jeremy Bentham on Police celebrates this achievement by exploring the story of Bentham’s writings on police and considering their relevance to the past, present and future of criminology