Discussion»Statements»Rosie's Corner» "POLICING WAS CREATED TO PROTECT WHITE PEOPLE". TRUE? Wait a minit. It must be true. Else more people of color wouldn't be dead. Shocking?
Policing was created to protect white people? Actually no, policing was not created to protect white people. The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the Democrat-controlled South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts.
During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves. So originally the police were created to protect business interests not to protect white people. Obviously the business interests in the North were much different than they were in the South.
