Race and Police: The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions

By Ben Brucato

In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order. The state determined not only that it would administer slavery, but that it would regulate slaves, authorizing the use of violence by agents of the state and white citizens to secure the social order. In doing so, slavery, citizenship, and police mutually informed one another, and together they produced racial capitalism, a working class defined and separated by the color line, and a racial social order.
 
Race and Police corrects the Eurocentrism in the orthodox history of American police and in predominating critical theories of police. That orthodoxy rests on an origin story that begins with Sir Robert Peel and the London Metropolitan Police Service. Predating the Met by more than a century, America’s first police, often called slave patrols, did more than maintain order—it fabricated a racial order. Prior to their creation, all white citizens were conscripted to police all Blacks. Their participation in the coercive control of Blacks gave definition to their whiteness. Targeted as threats to the security of the economy and white society, being policed defined Blacks who, for the first time, were treated as a single racial group. The boundaries of whiteness were first established on the basis of who was required to regulate slaves, given a specific mandate to prevent Black insurrection, a mandate that remains core to the police role to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978834507

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Cover: Race and Police, THE ORIGIN OF OUR PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS by Ben Brucato

Race and Police

Critical Issues in Crime and Society

RAYMOND J. MICHALOWSKI AND LUIS A. FERNANDEZ, SERIES EDITORS

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Race and Police

THE ORIGIN OF OUR PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS

BEN BRUCATO

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey

London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Brucato, Ben, author.

Title: Race and police : the origin of our peculiar institutions / Ben Brucato.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023004700 | ISBN 9781978834484 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978834491 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978834507 (epub) | ISBN 9781978834521 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Police—United States—History. | Racism in criminal justice administration—United States—History. | Racism in law enforcement—United States—History. | Black people—Civil rights—United States—History. | Black people—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States—History.

Classification: LCC HV8135 .B78 2023 | DDC 363.20973—dc23/eng/20230207

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004700

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Ben Brucato

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PARTI CRITICALTHEORY OFRACE ANDPOLICE

1 The Peculiar Institution of Police

2 The Peculiar Institution of Race

PARTIITHEPOLICELAW OFSLAVERY

3 The Genesis of Race in Colonial Virginia

4 The First Black Slave Society

5 Acquiring a Slave Society

PARTIII BLACKINSURRECTION ANDWHITECOUNTERINSURGENCY IN COLONIALAMERICA

6 A Patroll to Suppress Domestic Dangers

7 Policing the Chesapeake

8 Enemies of Their Own Households

Conclusion: Peculiar Institutions

Acknowledgments

Notes

Note on the Cover Art

Index

PREFACE

THE YEAR 2019 marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English mainland colonies. A year later, in response to the widely publicized murder of George Floyd, streets swelled with protests against police violence. From the multicultural melting pot of New York City to small, mostly white, rural towns in southwest Indiana, people spoke out against police, who killed Floyd—like hundreds of others—after racially profiling him under the guise of enforcing a commonplace, minor infraction. This movement called not just for police accountability, but for defunding police. Moreover, it targeted monuments to leaders of the Confederacy and those who profited from slavery. For those invested in mining the history of slavery for its relevance to race relations today, and for those resisting police violence, the connections among these issues may seem obvious. Protesters responding to the police murder of George Floyd seemed to clearly understand the relevance of the history of slavery to the policing of Blacks in the United States today. Should they want to consult the contributions of critical theory and criminal justice studies to find a scientific analysis of these connections, they would be at a loss, especially if they expect to locate a sustained attention to slavery, race, and police in a single source. Beyond making the intellectual point that race and police were created in tandem to resolve the same political economic crises, this book is intended to be part of this conversation, to inspire further thinking and action to transform society away from enduring racial domination and state violence, toward a future beyond the abolition of the white race and the police.

When I teach about the history of police, I consistently begin our survey by holding up one of the most widely used textbooks on policing in the United States: The Police in America, by Samuel Walker and Charles M. Katz, first published in 1981 and currently in its ninth edition. I turn to a chapter of the book titled The History of the American Police and read the first sentence from a section headed The First Modern American Police: Modern police forces were established in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s.¹ The authors point to professional, uniformed police in municipal police departments in Boston and New York as typical of these organizations.

Explaining that I am selecting a section from a facing page, in a section headed Law Enforcement in Colonial America, I then read: The slave patrol was a distinctly American form of law enforcement.… The slave patrols, in fact, were the first modern police forces in the United States. The Charleston, South Carolina, slave patrol had about a hundred officers in 1837 and was far larger than any northern city police force at that time.² The point, which the reader has likely already figured out, is to show that on facing pages in an authoritative source, the history of U.S. police is told in a way that invites confusion. Perhaps as perplexing is that in a section on the colonial era, the authors include a date that is half a century after the colonial era ended and 133 years after the founding of this particular patrol in 1704.

The Police in America is among the two-thirds of policing textbooks that have any mention at all of slave patrols, all of which provide scant coverage.³ That only one paragraph in a thirty-five-page chapter on U.S. police history mentions slave patrols would hardly give pause to most in the field of criminal justice. K. B. Turner and colleagues noted in an article in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education that introductory criminal justice and police textbooks lack comprehensive attention to the importance of slavery in the founding and development of criminal justice in the United States. An earlier edition of The Police in America is included in their analysis of thirty-three textbooks published since 2000. They cite an earlier article from the same journal by Samuel Walker and Molly Brown, which spoke to the neglect of racial and ethnic minorities in introductory criminal justice textbooks.⁴ If that is not ironic enough, consider that Walker and Turner have coauthored research on race and policing. Though Walker served as a professor of criminology and criminal justice, and much of his research fits best in those fields, he earned his degree in history, and most of his published monographs are on the history of American criminal justice institutions. In his 1980 book Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, he provides greater detail and similarly claims that slave patrols were precursors to the police.⁵

In the introduction to Aaron Fichtelberg’s 2020 textbook, Criminal [In]Justice: A Critical Introduction, he claims the book will discuss the racial elements of criminal justice throughout and that he will make the case that the racial inequalities we see in the criminal justice system are historically connected to slavery.⁶ Chapter 5, titled The History of Policing, produces confusions similar to those found in the Walker and Katz textbook, opening as follows: In this chapter, we will follow the history of American policing from its origins in England up to the present day.⁷ Then, five pages later, Fichtelberg writes Many early police organizations were created specifically to monitor and oppress both free and enslaved blacks.… A significant portion of early policing in the South consisted in slave patrols.⁸ To Fichtelberg’s credit, he returns to the slave patrols for their lasting influence on policing. Later in the book, he remarks that the toxic relationship between the police and the African American community has a history stretching back to the fugitive slave patrols of the early 19th century, if not earlier.⁹ Despite recognizing the earlier existence and persisting influence of slave patrols, the compound naming of "fugitive slave patrols" lends to the flawed view that these police were chiefly focused on slave-catching.

Walker and Fichtelberg are rare examples of scholars in criminology and criminal justice who pay much attention at all to the role slave patrols play in the origins of U.S. police. Slave patrols, once footnotes at most, are included briefly in the main text; yet one can search at length and rarely find where the patrols form the basis for any meaningful analysis of police. Instead, the patrols are relegated to adjuncts in the history of police, their presence treated as an early experiment or serving as a resolution to problems limited to slavery in the antebellum South. Instead of serving as a basis for theorization of U.S. police, perfunctory references to slave patrols often seem to be included to deflect criticism over past inattentiveness to race. They are mentioned, but are not meaningfully connected to the developments of police in the United States.

THE ORTHODOX HISTORY OF POLICE

An orthodox history of police is institutionalized, not just in criminology and criminal justice studies, but just about anywhere police history appears. This history has its own origin story: In the beginning, Sir Robert Peel created police. The orthodox version of the history of United States police begins in 1829 when Sir Robert Peel founded the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), which functioned as a model for police in northern cities, beginning with Boston in 1838. This history is as mythical as it is orthodox, demonstrating both colloquial connotations of myth: ritually recited without reflection or investigation and riddled with fantastical inaccuracies.

As Markus Dirk Dubber notes, Americans were policing long before they imported the concept of policing from overseas in the late eighteenth century.¹⁰ Indeed, they were doing the practical work of policing and clarifying the police mandate well before the European concept informed the state’s articulation of its power on the other side of the Atlantic, and even before formal slave patrols were created. Large, well-funded, and fully institutionalized police already existed in colonial America for over a century before the small, dysfunctional Boston Police Department was founded with its force of just thirty-two men.¹¹ A police mandate originated in Carolina and Virginia in the late seventeenth century, with the first organizations tasked solely with fulfilling that mandate being founded later, in 1704 and 1727, respectively. Conventionally referred to as slave patrols, these police were influenced by efforts of the English to police slave populations on their island colonies in the West Indies, most notably in Barbados. In their own time, they were called neither police nor slave patrols, and slave-catching was but a minor part of their role.¹² Whether deliberate or not, the convention of naming these police forces as slave patrols—and almost never as police—contributes to the confusion in understanding their place in the history of police. This convention leads to the mistaken treatment of slave patrols and the watch as engaged in two distinct activities. One historian writes that the Charleston Town Watch House was the headquarters of the night watch, who were responsible for the constant surveillance that was required to police the colony’s slave population.¹³ The Watch House was a temporary jail for Blacks apprehended by patrollers, and just outside was a public pillory where slaves convicted of petty crimes were brought to suffer the whippings, brandings, or ear-croppings to which they had been sentenced.¹⁴

In neglecting the colonial history of police, the orthodox history presumes the direction of influence comes from the mother country to its colony, and thus avoids accounting for the ways that influences between colonial and English police went both ways. Mike Brogden finds that the first British police were founded not in the seat of its empire, but in its colonies, where concerns over rebellion overrode the establishment of social order. Reminding the reader that the history of England is also the history of our colonies, Brogden explains: There is no inexorable law that made the British style and organisation of policework (as conventionally portrayed) the norm from which to assess critically the functions of the professional police in Western societies. An appreciation of the imperial context permits a fresh appraisal. More sense can be made of the police public order role in present society by inserting the material omitted from most police histories—the centrality of colonial conquest and of imperial legitimation to institutional development in Victorian England.¹⁵

The founding father of modern English police, Sir Robert Peel, had his start as an under-secretary in the War and Colonies Office, which prepared him in the management of alien, poverty stricken, and rebellious populations when he took on policing colonial Ireland, roughly a decade prior to his founding of the London Metropolitan Police Service.¹⁶ His police in Ireland were influenced by an earlier system in Dublin, founded in 1785. Monkkonen explains that administering a hostile nation of unwilling subjects who were frequently engaged in peasant rebellions was difficult and challenging, since by the time Peel came to Ireland, the behavior of the Irish resembled that of ghettoized people anywhere.¹⁷

In 1786 London, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was founded to respond to challenges presented when Black Loyalists began settling in London during and after the American Revolution. The Committee provided them with economic relief, but their main concern was enabling their resettlement in Sierra Leone.¹⁸ In the late eighteenth century, immigration laws were considered to limit entry of Blacks, and vagrancy laws were used as grounds for deportation.¹⁹ In 1787, the Public Advertiser reported: The Mayor [of London] has given orders to the City Marshals, the Marshalmen, and Constables, to take up all the blacks they find begging about the streets, and to bring them before him; or some other magistrate, that they may be sent home, or to the new colony which is going to be established in Africa.²⁰

The arrival of Blacks increased after the international slave trade was banned in 1807 and slavery itself abolished throughout the empire in 1833. The Vagrancy Act of 1824, of course, was not solely or even chiefly concerned with the regulation of poor Blacks; however, reports by the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity suggest this population may have received the most disproportionate attention.²¹ This is suggestive that good order was inextricably racialized in England as well, and that this also played some role in the founding of police there. Recognizing this requires no imposition of the present on the past, as observers in the nineteenth century recognized it. In 1850 the editor of the Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper observed that ‘peelers’ have been placed as superintendents over the different ranks; their savage tyranny to the cabmen exceeds belief, and had they a whip in their hands, English policemen would in all respects greatly resemble negro slave-drivers.²²

Eric Monkkonen’s landmark study of urban police in the United States from 1860 to 1920 remains one of the highly regarded sources on the orthodox history of police. In it he assumes a functionalist posture that rejects class control, urban riots, and crime rates as reasons for the advent of municipal policing in the North. Monkkonen attributes the origins of police to a new kind of city government and new kinds of social control for physically large and diverse populations.²³ It takes little license to read his account of the unease over diverse populations as depicting concerns about the social insecurity that resulted from the growing presence in northern cities of non-whites who were perceived to harbor a tendency toward rebellion and violence. Among this group, free Blacks competed for jobs against newly arrived immigrants from Ireland and Southern Europe, sparking ongoing conflicts that frequently erupted in mass violence. The functionalist tradition, alive in Monkkonen’s analysis, finds in diversity the likely breakdown in traditional forms of social control commonly found in smaller, homogeneous communities, which can only be replaced in a modern society by the state’s formal organs of social control. Some of his explanations can be redeemed if the reference to diverse populations is treated as a proxy for the class conflicts and riots that were becoming as racialized in the North as they had been in the South, yet consisting of a more complex ethnic and racial composition.

The orthodox history of U.S. police follows a periodization established by George L. Kelling and Mark H. Moore.²⁴ The first period, which they call the political era, began in 1840 and extended to the end of the nineteenth century. The reform era ran from 1930 to 1970 and was followed by the community era, from 1970 onward. From its purported origins in 1840, and for the remainder of the nineteenth century, police were involved, primarily through foot patrols, in social control through crime prevention and order maintenance, but also were engaged in riot control. They provided services to citizens, such as running soup lines, providing temporary housing for newly arrived immigrants, and finding work for them, both in the police departments and in other vocations.²⁵ Police in the political era were beholden to local politicians and officers often were recruited from the same ethnic stock as the dominant political groups.²⁶ Local politicians and reformers, most of them English and Dutch, required officers to enforce unpopular laws foisted on immigrant ethnic neighborhoods.²⁷ Kelling and Moore recognize that close affiliation between politicians and police not only meant widespread corruption, but also targeting minority ethnic and racial groups with regular violence.

Crucially, Kelling and Moore established their three eras on the basis of the organizational strategy and the structuring of police agencies. Chapter 1 of this book shows that this narrow conceptualization of police provides little upon which to theorize the institution. To do so would be akin to developing a theory of health care by only attending to the organizational structure of hospitals and doctors’ offices. Such a focus can provide only so much theoretical purchase. It is through a genealogy of the police mandate, the driving force behind those structures and strategies, that we can best understand the nature of police in the United States.

In the interstices between Kelling and Moore’s political and reform eras, Raymond Fosdick completed two studies: European Police Systems and American Police Systems. The latter, published in 1920, opens by noting any American with knowledge of European police would struggle to find anything comparable in U.S. police. The comparison, Fosdick opined, furnishes slight basis for pride, as police work in the United States is generally recognized as perhaps the most pronounced failure in all our unhappy municipal history.²⁸ More than seventy years prior to Kelling and Moore’s work on the so-called political era, Fosdick admonished those who would charge it up generally to ‘politics’ and accept the phenomenon without analysis.²⁹ Fosdick sees the political influence on police as an obvious observation, but instead concludes that to believe that the unfavorable comparison between European and American police systems is chargeable solely to politics or to the personnel of our forces is to overlook certain fundamental divergencies in national conditions, customs, and psychology.³⁰ Most notable is that the population of American cities is heterogeneous to an extent almost without parallel.³¹ Compared with the 211,000 foreign-born in London and 170,000 in Paris, in the first decades of the twentieth century, New York had nearly 2 million immigrants, and about 75 percent of them did not speak English. For those who were born in the United States, hundreds of thousands of them were first-generation Americans. Fosdick notes that immigrants made up the majority of the populations in nineteen of the fifty largest cities, writing the native white population of native parents amounts to less than one-fifth the total population of New York and less than one-fourth the total population of Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee, while in cities like Fall River, Massachusetts, it constitutes little more than 10%.³² When Detroit founded their first metropolitan police department in 1865 after a draft riot, an attempted lynching, and a spate of race riots destabilized the local economy, nearly half the city’s population was foreign-born.³³ Because Fosdick wrote that the contrast can be emphasized in terms not only of race but of color, we are cautioned against the presentism that would mistakenly lead us to believe that in the early twentieth century, all those with white skin and European ancestors were considered white.³⁴ Fosdick explains, the consequences of this mixture of race and color are far reaching, particularly in their effect on such functions as policing.³⁵ A century later, class control theories of police still underestimate this centrality of the color line in U.S. police. Quite simply, while the work of the MPS and U.S. police may share class control elements, police in the United States is different because of the ways the color line is fundamental to class control.

If we erroneously apply contemporary racial categories to the past, we are bound to neglect the ways policing—even in communities almost entirely made up of people with European ancestry—was engaged in social control through race management well into the twentieth century. In American police systems, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, and Lithuanians are occasionally discussed separately from whites. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad makes clear, the exclusion of some foreign-born Europeans from the category white during the early decades of the twentieth century also appeared alongside comparisons between these groups and Blacks, which in a short time served to provide European immigrants with a pathway to redemption and assimilation into white citizenship.³⁶ When we properly account for the extent to which many ethnic and immigrant groups were restricted from entry into the white race and the ways police were engaged in shoring up the boundaries of that race, we can see even in the early orthodox history a necessity to center race in our analysis.

One problem with this orthodox history is that the MPS influences were in fact weak, experimental, and short-lived. Quite simply, the orthodox history is factually inaccurate. Very little about these agencies was ever stable, and throughout the nineteenth century U.S. police was inefficient and politically factional.³⁷ In the early eighteenth century, South Carolina slave patrols went through little more than two decades of experimentation before finally stabilizing. Their structure remained durable for well over a century, and it was directly influential upon the formation of police organizations throughout the South.

Another problem with the orthodox history is that it works in service of poor theorization of police. The origin story that begins with the MPS is maintained with competing causal explanations, such as rising crime rates, public disorder, mob violence, or a combination thereof, which depict the creation and maturation of a police as a natural and practical development.³⁸ Because this origin story is institutionalized, these diverging explanations cause little trouble to those who theorize and critique police today. Once the myths are shattered, however, theories built on them lose their moorings. The orthodox history’s origin story tells us little about the role of police in creating and maintaining a specific kind of social order. Police seemingly appear within a preexisting order, fulfilling a functional imperative for solving one or several disturbances of that order. Just as Mark Neocleous soundly refuted this idea in an Anglo-European context, the present volume will do the same for the colonial context, explaining that the police mandate was first articulated in the earliest slave codes, before African chattel slavery was even the primary source of labor in the South, and that the police mandate created the very first U.S. police in the form of slave patrols. Before having a force dedicated to fulfilling the police mandate, the militias in all the colonies were charged with that responsibility. White citizens were expected to aid or face costly punishment. The South was far ahead of the North in making the transition to a dedicated police force, but in both contexts, when the militia’s particular remit and physical presence was too remote to ensure the security of the internal racial order, all whites were summoned to aid. Only later were these responsibilities handed over to newly created organizations, which nearly always took their personnel and organizational structure from the militias.

A favorable result of the orthodox history is that it highlights a break from quasi-police institutions like the constabulary. At best, this orthodox history is told as a story of class control, where police were created to manage the dangerous classes. In this version, unlike the constabulary, modern police were autonomous from the judiciary and founded to respond to the exigencies of cities with increasingly large, dense, and diverse populations of workers competing over jobs and occupations. They were police because they fulfilled a preventive function, whereas the constabulary were officers of the court who responded post facto. At worst, these histories eschew causal explanation entirely, instead providing celebratory stories lauding police as a mark of social progress, an arm of the state that purportedly restored order to cities whose security was threatened by persistent disorder.

THE POLICE LAW OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE PATROLS

As is established in chapter 1, the orthodox history of police is overly preoccupied with organizational analysis of so-called modern police agencies.³⁹ To accommodate the unique character of policing in the United States, attention is instead shifted to the origins of a police mandate that gave rise to various mobilizations of the state and the white citizenry. Through attention to slave laws, the use of the militia to police domestic enemies, and the creation and activities of the slave patrols, we see how problems relating to order and security were defined in racial terms and how the solutions were defined in terms of routine, proactive policing by white citizens, both in their private capacities and in fulfilling their public duties in the militia and slave patrols.

The earliest slave codes defined slavery and race relative to one another. Slave codes regulated the trade in, and ownership of, slaves, but also the coercive control of the slaves themselves. Just as important as who could—or could not—be legally enslaved, was who would—or would not—be legally compelled to engage in the coercive control of Blacks.⁴⁰ In different places and times, slave law compelled private citizens, the militia, and newly created slave patrols to fulfill the police mandate—usually concurrently in this order as racialized chattel slavery was more deeply institutionalized. In practice, the distinction between these three bodies was often more abstract than actual. As is the case with all law, slave codes do not reflect reliable practices. These laws set formal standards and reflected the worldviews of the planters who composed the colonial assemblies and wrote their laws. As Thomas J. Little observes, their expectations, fears, and anxieties are closely woven together in the statutes. Slave laws were not consistently enforced, but they are nonetheless a historical fingerprint impressed upon the colonial landscape by the white ruling class.⁴¹

Despite the prevalence of the orthodox history of police, histories of the slave patrols are not always ignored or relegated to the margins. The most thorough secondary historical sources that address slave patrols take one of two approaches. The first, typified by Sally Hadden’s magisterial text, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, treats southern slave patrols as separate institutions from so-called modern police in the North.⁴² Hadden deliberately avoids making connections to other forms that policing took in the United States. Her book has gathered worthy attention not only because it is a masterwork in American history, but also because it is the only book-length study of the slave patrols published in this century, joining one other major work, which was published in 1914. This earlier work, H. M. Henry’s The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, was written as a dissertation at Vanderbilt University, and served as a major source for Hadden’s book. Hadden established that the slave patrols were no mere ad hoc solution by government to capture bonded workers who fled their masters. They were the first institution of the state that brought together whites from all stations to work on a common cause: the suppression of Black rebellion. Both works focus on the structure and activities of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century patrols, moving quickly past their origins, which is the sole focus of this book.

Recent work that attempts to integrate the slave patrols into the historical arc of U.S. police frequently references a 1988 article in American Journal of Police by Philip L. Reichel. His is a second approach taken in the history of slave patrols.⁴³ Borrowing the concept from Lundman, Reichel describes slave patrols as a transitional police type that served as a bridge between the informal, ad hoc duties performed by constables, day and night watches, on the one side, with modern types on the other. With the exception of the slave patrols—who in their practical work also fulfilled some of these responsibilities—responses to property and violent crimes were performed by watchmen, which also included reporting fires, managing runaway animals, helping in family emergencies, and lighting lamps to illuminate public areas after dark.⁴⁴ If the watchmen witnessed a crime taking place, they did little more than raise a general alarm—a hue and cry—and then assisted private citizens who were expected to respond. Their numbers were few and their methods informal. The watch performed no detective work and the constabulary could be aroused to serve warrants after private citizens brought evidence of a crime before a magistrate. This separation of the watch, the slave patrols, and police obscures that in certain settings these are often mostly abstract, analytical distinctions. The organization that policed and surveilled the slave population in Charlestown, enforcing a pass system and curfew laws that applied only to slaves, was referred to by slaves as the pattyrollers, but was formally named the Town Watch.⁴⁵

Reichman relies on Lundman’s typology of police, where informal police are characterized by community members sharing responsibility for maintaining order.⁴⁶ However, Reichel explains these types are typical of societies with little division of labor and a great deal of homogeneity.⁴⁷ Societies with varying population sizes and degrees of complexity going back centuries have distributed the same tasks assigned to the night watches of the American colonies. Policing in the colonies began with community members sharing responsibility for maintaining order.⁴⁸ This remained a core feature of policing for centuries in the United States, well beyond the creation of the modern type in northern cities. Further, well before their founding, there was already considerable heterogeneity and highly divided labor. Because Reichel places slave patrols in the intermediary transitional position between informal and formal police, he affirms a typology that is not appropriate in this national context.

Reichel’s research was guided by a specific question that limited his findings from the outset. He asked whether slave patrols were precursors to modern policing, and so treated them as something other than modern police. Similarly, historians were once accustomed to asking whether the plantation system was a precursor to modern capitalism. Du Bois established at the turn of the twentieth century that the plantation was the first and most important component of the early capitalist system, and that the slaves who worked on those plantations were ideal examples of proletarians. Similarly, rather than a separate institution preceding modern police, the slave patrols were modern police.

My interest in placing history and critical theory of police in conversation with criminal justice and police studies is what drove me to teach in these areas in the first place: for all the fundamental deficiencies and problems with these disciplines—not limited to their complicity in providing legitimacy and direction for an institution that remains fundamental to racial oppression in the United States—this is where nearly all scholarly inquiry about police has remained for over a century.⁴⁹ Once circumscribed to a conservative discipline where the bulk of institutional resources are invested in police professionalization, it was all but certain that critical theory of police would remain undeveloped and that the scant attention to police history would consider little more than its development as a civil trade.⁵⁰ Recent trends in research on so-called mass incarceration has created room in the discipline for critical studies of corrections, and attention to racialized police killings through the successes of the Black Lives Matter movement has created demand for critical study of police. This opens opportunities to marshal resources of the discipline while also challenging its conciliatory status quo.

Recent critical theory of police has appropriately placed the institution at the center of class formation. No theorist has been more important in these developments than Mark Neocleous. His critical theory of police power builds on his earlier work on the administration of civil society and his subsequent research on the history of the police concept in France and England. On both accounts, his pioneering and influential work requires amendments in order to accommodate the central role played by race in U.S. police. This book applies methods similar to Neocleous’s, by mining the institutional history of police, the origin and development of ideas about social order and security, and their deployment in class formation. As in Neocleous’s work on police, the approach employed here does not often involve original historical research. Instead, through using some primary texts and a reading of revisionist histories of the colonial and antebellum eras, this book builds a new critical theory of police that is appropriate to the unique national contours of the United States.

Though Joel Olson was politically involved for decades in community organizing against police violence, his theoretical work rarely touched on the topic. Nonetheless, his work—and that of his primary interlocutor, W.E.B. Du Bois—is felicitous for the subject at hand. Thus, the use of Olson’s political theory of race is more one of application, whereas the treatment of Neocleous’s critical theory of police power is more one of adaptation and amendment, making necessary adjustments so that the power of his incredibly useful theory can go furthest in analyzing U.S. police.

The result of this synthesis is a new abolitionist theory of U.S. police. The abolitionist aspect of this theory has four influences. First, it builds on an analysis of racial oppression fostered by the abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Second, it acknowledges the influence of historians like Noel Ignatiev, Theodore W. Allen, and David Roediger, whose work informed a political and intellectual movement that took the name new abolitionist, was associated with the journal Race Traitor, and called for the abolition of the white race. Third, though rejecting approaches to police based in an analysis of the so-called carceral society, where the primary purpose of police is too often treated as little more than to fill prisons, it takes some inspiration from the intellectual and political movements to abolish prisons. Finally, it draws from and is in conversation with a new radical movement to abolish police. After the killing of George Floyd Jr. at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, the police abolition movement earned unprecedented public attention through a wave of protest and direct action around the globe. McDowell and Fernandez argue that "a practice of radical abolition offers the most enduring lesson and greatest promise for people organizing to eliminate policing in the present moment … this promise stands on: (1) aiming directly at the police as an institution; (2) dismantling the racial-capitalist order; (3) adopting uncompromising positions that resist liberal attempts at co-optation, incorporation, and/or reconciliation; and (4) creating alternative democratic spaces that directly challenge the legitimacy of the police."⁵¹

An abolitionist theory of police holds the assumption—substantiated by critics of racial capitalism—that the capitalist economy of the United States has always depended on a racial social order. It also defines police as state-certified violence used for the purpose of reproducing that order. Part I provides the theoretical bases for and implications of these positions, and