The Boston Watch was a neighborhood watch group. There were also informal militias tasked with keeping order throughout the colonies.

This is important because it shows that the police or other law enforcement have been here for a long time, even if it wasn’t formal

These patrols were to control enslaved black people. White men ages 21-45 were informally conscripted to serve on the patrol for a period of time. This is also when slave codes started, which were laws that enslaved people lived by. They also limited where they could go, that they couldn’t receive education or property, etc. 

This is important because it was the start of a formal police situation. This is also the root of our racial issues in policing today.

This was in Louisiana, and it was a mandate to arrest a slave with or without their permit who was in the woods with a source of light. There was fear of an uprising and the slaves setting things on fire.

This is important because slaves who were just walking through the forest trying to get home could have been arrested just because there was the fear of an uprising.

After slavery was abolished, the southern states started passing new laws that were similar to the slave codes. They restricted what a black person could do. Their thinking was that if they committed crimes, they would do free labor as punishment (slavery), and so they tried to criminalize every black person they could.

This was important because even though they were free, black people were being criminalized and forced back into a slavery system, even if it wasn’t called that. This set up the view that black people were criminals.

Prisons are being expanded, more are being built. Prison farms have become a thing, which is another nod to slavery. And the South didn’t have a formal police structure like the North did, so vigilante groups were encouraged by officials to watch black people and police them.

This is important because this is where the Ku Klux Klan came from, a vigilante group that encouraged the surveillance and policing of black people.

Congress passed the Amendments to ensure equal rights for black citizens and give them the right to vote. They thought this would stop the brutal violence done by the KKK, and it did for a small time until the South retaliated with the Jim Crow laws.

This is important because the Jim Crow laws were here for a century and kept black people segregated and treated as inferior. They also made it easier to police black people brutally since they were seen as inferior.

Even in the North, the police were targeting black populations. Black people had said that the treatment in the North wasn’t that much better than in the South. The police kept the black population and the poor population (which was mainly black) in check, giving them very minimal freedom outside of work.

This is important because even in the North, which was anti-slavery, they were still targeting black populations and treating them harshly.

This was the first major investigation of police violence. 10,000 pages of testimonies from the 600 witnesses were produced. 45 counts of assault in the second degree were charged.

This is important because formal policing had only been around for 40-60 years and there were already massive and fatal flaws.

Alcohol became illegal in America, but mobsters took advantage of this and were too powerful for the police to stop, so the police teamed up with the mobsters. The police started targeting people who didn’t like the mobsters.

This is important because it showed that the police were willing to work with criminals whom they could not overpower.

August Vollmer, the chief of police of Berkeley, California, wanted to fix the police. He made the first centralized police record system, and he created a motorized force, and pushed for higher education for police officers. The Uniform Crime Reports were started.

This is important because it was creating a more professional police force. This was the start of the police we still see today.