Comment by ojnabieoot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ojnabieoot | Hacker News Reader

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The police (and their unions, and civilian voters with authoritarian pro-police ideologies) are a major political constituency on the right, one that Donald Trump had repeatedly pandered to (because he is a pro-police authoritarian). It is beyond naive to pretend “unaccountable police violence is good” isn’t a mainstream right-wing belief in 2020.

> When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’ [Trump, July 2017]

> If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise. They won’t be so much, because the courts agree with us too — what’s going on in this country? [Trump, July 2016]

> “Sometimes they grab one guy, ‘I’m a reporter! I’m a reporter!” ...they threw him aside like he was a little bag of popcorn.” [Trump, September 2020, clearly mocking the reporter in context]

So the people on the “right” who are cool with this are basically every Republican official and about 70m Americans who voted for Trump last month. Seems like a lot of people!

Surprised to see your downvotes.

The police were literally started in the late 1800s to protect capital and share the responsibility of cost across all people. (In the South, they were tightly related to patrolling for slaves, in the north they were predominantly helping wealthy merchants protect warehouses and other stores of wealth.)

In the decades since, the police (and their unions) have had a long, long history of right wing action.

The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is known for their 'Red Squad', which was used in the 1900s to bust up unions, leftists, and people suspected of being communists. They regularly welcomed literal Nazis into their ranks in the 30s and 40s.

The stories aren't unique to Portland either. A common piece of police iconography is a Punisher skull. Police with SS tattoos are not uncommon.

Law enforcement had existed for millennia, not the last two centuries. Greek polis had nyctostrategoi (literally, "night officers") that patrolled and enforced laws as early as 500 BC. And Mesopotamian city states probably had police, too. Do people really believe that professional law enforcement didn't exist until 1800 AD?

Sorry, I was a bit vague. Yes, obviously law enforcement has existed for centuries. Uniformed police departments have not. Especially in the United States, where police violence is especially bad. (I had sort of implied this with the North/South dichotomy, but was not explicit about it.)

Historically, enforcement of the law was a military, community, religious, or rotating obligation. It was not particularly respected, organized, or high class. There were some exceptions, but in general our current model of policing evolved from English tithings. Groups of men who were responsible for bringing criminals forward. These groups were collected into Shires, overseen by a Shire-reeve (later "Sheriff"). The shire reeve could round up a posse to go collect a criminal.

Over time, cities started to want to improve the protections for their capital. They wanted to try and prevent crime rather than hunt criminals. The night watch had a reputation of being low class and unruly, and the city of Glasgow decided to clean up their act. They founded the first uniformed police department in 1800 in an effort to be a visible presence in hopes of deterring crime.

Police in America were largely slave patrols, sheriffs and posses, and militias until the middle of the 1800s, when larger cities started following Glasgow's model.

As I pointed out in a response to your other comment [1] this is incorrect. Police as a public institution in the US date back to the colonial era, centuries before you claim the first police departments were formed. Altering the statement to saying that police were reformed to be more professional in the 1800s immensely different than claiming that police did not exist. The latter is akin to saying that armies didn't exist until the early modern period because most soldiers were levies instead of professional solder.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25341633

> The police were literally started in the late 1800s to protect capital and share the responsibility of cost across all people. (In the South, they were tightly related to patrolling for slaves, in the north they were predominantly helping wealthy merchants protect warehouses and other stores of wealth.)

This is a correct reading of the history of policing in America[1].

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

Policing in America dates back well beyond the 1800s (let alone the late 1800s), and has it's roots in the medieval system of sheriffs and their deputies. Organized police in the US date back to the early 1600s at the latest. In fact police existed in New York back when it was called New Amsterdam: https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...

I'm serious baffled as to how people got the idea that police were created in the 1800s. Do people really believe that cities like Boston and New York existed for centuries with nobody to enforce laws?

Night watches, tithings, posses, militias, and sheriffs are not the same thing as police departments. And even still, the vast majority of night watches were privately funded in America.

My link provides direct examples of law enforcement organizations that were publicly funded, as early as the 1630s:

> Among the first public police forces established in colonial North America were the watchmen organized in Boston in 1631 and in New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1647.

Again, police are as old as civilization. Laws without a body to enforce them are just words in paper (or clay tablets).

Night watchmen aren't police. Personally, I believe it's dangerous to conflate the two -- modern police departments are very, very different than the more community organized (or elected) folks who watched over small towns. Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces like we have today are a relatively new phenomena.

That said, we're skidding towards a semantic argument, so if you are comfortable agreeing to disagree here, I am too. We can continue to think each other wrong, looking at the same history.

> Night watchmen aren't police. Personally, I believe it's dangerous to conflate the two -- modern police departments are very, very different than the more community organized (or elected) folks who watched over small towns. Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces like we have today are a relatively new phenomena.

This isn't a semantic disagreement, this is factually incorrect. ”Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed standing patrol police forces" have absolutely existed in the US before the 1800s and date back to classical antiquity at least. Rome often employed it's legions as police, and there was even a dedicated legion stationed specifically to police Rome [1]. It's hard to get more "Organized, uniformed, powerfully armed" than deploying the military as a patrol force. And in the US professional police forces, not militia or community watch, have existed since the 1600s. And by the way, many police forces are still led by elected leaders - professional, organized police and community oversight are not mutually exclusive.

It might be fair to say that in the 1800s and early 1900s industrialization and technology had progressed to the point that police started to resemble modern police, and many US cities grew to the point that they started municipal police forces in this time frame. But the police of the 21st century with cameras, computers, dna testing, 911 systems and radios are arguably even more removed from the police of 1900 than the police of 1900 were to the police of 1800 or 1700.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohortes_urbanae

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