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WHEN I TEACH THE HISTORY OF US POLICING, I BEGIN OUR SURVEY by holding up one of the most widely used textbooks on policing, The Police in America by Samuel Walker and Charles M. Katz (2018, 33), first published in 1981 and currently in its ninth edition. I turn to a chapter of the textbook titled "The History of the American Police" and read the first sentence from a section on "The First Modern American Police": "Modern police forces were established in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s." I then quote from a facing page, in a section under the heading "Law Enforcement in Colonial America," which reads:
Policing in the southeastern states where slavery existed had a distinctive institution: the slave patrol. Because the white majority was so concerned about slave revolts (ofwhich there were many), and runaway slaves, they created this new form oflaw enforcement. The slave patrols, in fact, were the first modern police forces in the United States. The Charleston, South Carolina slave patrol, for example, had about 100 officers in 1837 and was far larger than any northern city police force at that time. (Walker & Katz 2018, 32)
The point, which the reader has likely already figured, is to show that on facing pages in an authoritative source, the history of US police is told in such a way that invites confusion. Perhaps as perplexing is that this chapter opens with the phrase, "The day the first American police officer went out on patrol in 1838," while failing to acknowledge that the Charleston slave patrols referenced in the passage above were founded in 1704 (Walker & Katz 2018, 29).
The Police in America is among the two-thirds of American policing textbooks that have any mention at all of slave patrols, all of which provide scant coverage (Turner et al. 2006). K.B. Turner and colleagues (2006) 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 among their sample. They cite an earlier article from the same journal by Samuel Walker...