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Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States.
Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color.
Between and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.
A San Francisco vigilance committee established in arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. The U. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian.
In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In , at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children.
Nearly a century later, in , F. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C. Modern American policing began in , when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.
To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated.
Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings.
In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns. Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in William G. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in , about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.
In the early colonies policing took two forms. The watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a night watch in , New York in and Philadelphia in The night watch was not a particularly effective crime control device.
Watchmen often slept or drank on duty. Philadelphia created the first day watch in and New York instituted a day watch in as a supplement to its new municipal police force Gaines, Kappeler, and Vaughn Augmenting the watch system was a system of constables, official law enforcement officers, usually paid by the fee system for warrants they served. Constables had a variety of non-law enforcement functions to perform as well, including serving as land surveyors and verifying the accuracy of weights and measures.
Some police officers responded with tear gas, by running cruisers through crowds , and with riot guns, while others stood in solidarity with the protesters. On April 20, , Chauvin was found guilty on all three counts: second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
As Black communities around the country celebrated the verdict, many were cautious to call it a victory or justice. However, it should inspire us to continue to push for significant change in our criminal legal system and the system of policing.
This verdict shows that is possible in America. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Frank Olito. The modern police force started in the early s, but its origins date back to the colonies.
In the South in the s, patrol groups were created to stop runaway slaves. Now police departments across the country are facing accusations of brutality and racial profiling. Visit Insider's homepage for more stories. Before a formal police system was put in place, colonies were protected by a "night watch," dating back to the s. The history of the police in the South differs from other parts of the country because of the prominence of slavery.
In the north, as more immigrants moved into cities by the mids, citizens looked for a more formal way to keep order. In response, the first official police force was established in Boston in Almost all of the police forces were structured similarly, and their main duty was to prevent crime and keep order. In the s, there were reports of corruption among some police forces. This led to the start of private police forces, like the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. In the early s, the police forces made dramatic changes, thanks to August Vollmer.
Federal and state police forces were born in the early s. In the s, J. Edgar Hoover created the FBI and changed the face of police work. The '60s marked a turning point in policing. Much like the civil rights movement, in , the Stonewall riots against New York City police sparked another movement.
In the mid-'70s, studies found that policing was unsuccessful and departments attempted to make changes throughout the late s. In , the police's response to the Columbine school shooting changed policing forever. Throughout the 21st century, police have been called out for their unfair treatment of Black people and other minorities.
In , a New York City police officer put Eric Garner in a chokehold while arresting him, leading to Garner's death.
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