The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not ‘Serve and Protect’

[Teamster Jeff]

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Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols.

Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.
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More: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17505/police_and_poor_people

[randys1]

1. The police exist to protect the wealthy, or the one percent as we now refer to them, from

the rest of us.

They spend most of their time dealing with confrontations between the 99% because the 99% are forced to live in conditions that the one percent would not tolerate, for one SECOND.

Even the liberal one percenters are less interested in income equality and more interested in their protection, believe it.

[Octafish]

2. They've evolved.

That In These Times article explains exactly how.

There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal. (For that matter, the law itself has never been neutral.) In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.

Thank you for the heads-up, Teamster Jeff!

[Trillo]

3. Nice, brief history lesson.