The Origin Of Police: From Ancient Night Watches To Slave Patrols To Robert Peel -- The Full Documented History

Most people know that police exist but very few people know where they actually came from, who built them, and what they were originally designed to do. The history of policing is not one story -- it is several stories running at the same time. Ancient night watches and constables going back to medieval England. Sir Robert Peel, who built the first modern police force in London in 1829, partly based on tactics he developed controlling the Irish during British occupation. Northern cities in America creating police departments in the 1840s to control the urban working poor and new immigrants. And in the American South -- the first formal slave patrol, established in South Carolina in 1704, whose three documented functions were to chase runaway slaves, deter slave revolts with organized terror, and maintain discipline on plantations. In this episode, XO, AZ, and CDA trace the full honest origin of policing -- where it came from, who built it, what it was built to do, and what that history means for how we understand policing and our community today.

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