A few weeks ago DPF posted an article about the latest Green Party brainfarts on policing, with the usual “Defund The Police” stuff but including much more via Green MP Tamatha Paul’s connections to People Against Prisons Aotearoa:

  • Abolish all prisons
  • Abolish the Police
  • Make it illegal to take criminal records into account in employment
  • Close the NZ court system

Ms Paul should be aware of what happened to policing when the Antifa nutters tried it in Seattle in 2020 with their six-block area called the CHAZ – Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone – (That wasn’t anarcho-communism):

Raz Simone and crew assault a man for tagging. Man said repeatedly he was kicked in the head, punched and had his glasses broken.

I’ve have been informed for many years that beating up taggers is real Right Wing Reactionary stuff.

I also commented that Ms Paul needs to be made aware that this is what law enforcement was like before the invention of the modern police force by Sir Robert Peel, and that the Police are actually there to protect criminals from the citizens, not citizens from criminals.

This resulted in a response from a guy who is a regular commentator (both there and here), Jake Dee:

John Peel created the first modern professional Police force but didn’t invent the idea of a Police force. That goes back to ancient times, the Romans and Egyptians had dedicated law enforcement organizations.

In Britain the Anglo-Saxons had the Shire -reeves (Sheriffs) and the Normans had Constables established by the 13th century Statute of Winchester (1285). William Shakespeare had Constable Dogberry in “Much ado about nothing” so they were a recognizable local character in London late 16th-early 17th century.

As such I thought the following article interesting as it looked at the career and history of the American version of Robert Peel, one August Vollmer, of whom I’d never heard but should have given that he’s basically the founder of the modern professional police forces in America, and it’s an important article given the myths that have been spun recently about American cops:

One popular but false narrative holds that modern policing in the United States emerged from nineteenth-century slave patrols—a potent “original sin” argument, suggesting that the police are permanently stained by the legacy of American slavery.

Given that Peel started his London Metropolitan Police in 1827 it took a long time for the Yanks to realise they needed something similar, that Sherrffs and such were not going to cut it in the growing cities:

In the 1840s and 1850s, cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York created modern police forces to address a surge in ethnic mob violence. These urban riots often involved attacks by native-born Protestant groups on Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany, or by Irish and other ethnic mobs targeting free blacks. 

Not only was that the reason for their creation but the Southern States did not follow that path for much longer:

Municipal governments in Southern slaveholding states, on the other hand, did not develop modern police forces until after the Civil War. Before then, they relied on paramilitary volunteers—the infamous slave patrols—to suppress potential slave revolts and maintain the slavery system.
…
As historian Eric Monkkonen observed, the stark difference between the development of police forces in the North and the South during the antebellum period underscores a critical point: “An unfree society cannot support a modern police system.”

I found the following piece particularly interesting when you consider that Western police forces are assumed to be much alike:

The only major metropolis in the South during the 1840s was New Orleans, where policing followed the French military model of the gendarmerie rather than the civilian-focused London Metropolitan Police. New Orleans’s gendarmerie lived in barracks and marched with rifles and swords. New Orleans transitioned from this gendarmerie system to a modern police force in response to rapid urbanization.

A very different style of policing from the London model, and not surprising given that the city was part of the French North American colonies until sold to the USA in the famous Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

It’s also amusing to see that these early American police forces were unarmed!

The reason the article tackles the slavery-foundational myth is that Vollmer’s influence is under the same sort of attack from the same ideological bullshit, because his influence is considerable:

[Vollmer] served as Berkeley, California’s first police chief, from 1909 to 1932, including a one-year leave of absence to lead the Los Angeles Police Department in 1923. Vollmer became the leading advocate for professionalization of policing. 
…
 During his career as a police chief, Vollmer pioneered several innovations in police use of technology, operations, training, and hiring standards. Through extensive academic writings, he set forth a path for effective, just policing that remains viable today. He was a forward-thinking reformer willing to take unpopular positions, often at great personal cost.

He founded the American Society of Criminology and it has an annual “August Vollmer Award” (which a few academic criminologists are now trying to cancel).

Aside from slavery origins the attacks are the usual ones of 21st century perspectives applied to a 19th century man – imperialism, militarism, racism, etc.

Militarisation of the police is a concern and not just to the Left. Many on the Right have written about it and pointed to things like the number of armoured vehicles picked up cheap by police departments from the US Army in the wake of the Iraq War. But it can’t really be tied to Vollmer, despite his military background. In fact he had views on policing that would fit perfectly into the 21st century:

Throughout his life, he articulated a “vision of policing that was a nonpartisan public servant committed to the betterment of society,” as historian Sam Walker puts it. His career reflects a focus on evidence-based, community-oriented policing, breaking radically from the often-corrupt patronage system…his emphasis on public engagement, humane treatment of offenders, and crime prevention contrasts starkly with the allegedly militarized model of policing that today’s revisionists condemn. Any genuine military influence related more to formal and procedural policies, from recruitment and drilling to order and command structure.
…
he frequently sought to handle situations using unconventional de-escalation techniques—with student rioters, for example. One might say that his approach embodied the principles of what today we call “community policing.”

In short he’s far from being the villain that the moderns need to create as they seek to re-shape policing and systems of law and order. Moreover, all this garbage heaped on the man stems from just one academic article –  “The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century” – which has been cited many times but not critiqued, outside of this article and one historian.

Fascinating stuff. As always, read the whole thing.