Dispersing of Them when Drumming and Praying: Was U.S. policing really from Slave Patrols? Prof Phil Reichel's Slave Patrol articles

 A prominent Sunday newspaper letter in the Minneapolis StarTribune is claiming that US policing is NOT from slave patrols. This letter was published in lieu of the upcoming vote to reorganize the control of the Minneapolis Police Department - into a public safety department with more civilian control.

The main source of claiming a Slave Patrol origin of U.S. policing is from Reichel, 1988 in a journal that is now defunct. I have contacted Professor Emeritus Reich to ask for a copy of the article - an electronic copy - as there is no DOI number to read the journal article online currently.

The basic claim in the 32 citations of the article is that Slave Patrols were not just to capture runaway slaves but were set up as government funded militias to prevent any slaves from organizing resistance - politically or privately in homes, etc. 

So Professor Emeritus Phil Reichel promptly sent me two articles but he also emphasized there is no evidence for the northern cities having policing originating from slave patrols. 

I sent him this response:

OK - thanks so much! I will share something related - our house that I grew up in - built in 1887 - was part of a racial covenant recently tracked by the University of Minnesota - and the legal language for the racial covenant was directly appropriated from the Virginia slave laws of the early 1700s. I sent the details to the University researcher who responded with thanks. Also the University was a leader in eugenics in the 1930s - using the phrase "To Grow a Better Man Crop" - the University being segregated.

Lotus Coffman formalized the commitment to segregated housing, on behalf of the Board of Regents, in a 1935 letter that responded to the report of the All-University Council Committee on Negro Discrimination. The report called for a change in housing policy. Coffman’s letter became the subsequent rationale for denying all African American students the right to live in University housing.

thanks,

drew

http://acampusdivided.umn.edu/essay/segregated-student-housing/ 

and

https://www.minnesotaalumni.org/stories/remembering-the-morrill-hall-takeover 

and

https://www.mpd150.com/report-old/timeline/ 

My former coworker - Bobbie Lenon - told me he was part of this take over and that he threw an FBI agent down the stairs.... (but the article says the take over was peaceful - so the truth must be a bit in between).

 OK since these articles are no longer online - I will quote extensively. 

 Philip L. Reichel (1992) The misplaced emphasis on urbanization
in police development, Policing and Society: An International Journal, 3:1,

The later article gives a nice summary:

 

 

 

 

 wow - fascinating.

 and so

 Slave Patrols as the Rural Police....

 

 Slave Patrols - Wow - to stop DRUMMING!!

 And so then FREE NEGROES were also attacked by the slave patrols:

OK this is what I documented - from the early 1700s when the first Slave Patrols were created - as Reichel documents - there were also new laws after Bacon's Rebellion - that white bond servants could no longer be whipped while FREE NEGROES could not vote nor own weapons...

 

And so now we go back to Minneapolis!!

https://www.mpd150.com/report-old/timeline/

 Drunk cops attacking the black community...1922

 

 OK now let's look at the New Yorker article again that connects the Slave Patrols to northern policing...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-of-the-police

 The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people.

 Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice.

 In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city.

 New York wasn't a slave state yet had laws against the slaves?

Connecticut, New York and other colonies enacted laws to criminalize and control slaves.

 https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing

 It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland,

 It's fascinating that international imperial connections tie together the Southern Slave Patrols to the Northern Urban Police departments!!

policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? 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,

 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/so-called-kidnapping-club-featured-new-york-cops-selling-free-blacks-slavery-180976055/

The Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause required northern free cities like New York to return the self-emancipated to their southern enslavers, and the NYPD and officers like Rynders were only too willing to comply, conveniently folding their hatred of black people into their reverence for the nation’s founding document. Armed with the founders’ compromise over slavery, Rynders and his fellow officers, men like Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash, terrorized New York’s black community from the 1830s up through the Civil War.

And, even worse, it often mattered little whether a black person was born free in New York or had in fact escaped bondage; the police, reinforced by judges like the notorious city recorder Richard Riker, sent the accused to southern plantations with little concern and often even less evidence.

 https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/fugitive-slave-clause-the-constitution-of-the-united-states-1787-1992/

FULL TEXT of Fugitive Slave Clause of US constitution

Clause 3. No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Wow so New York definitely had a "slave patrol" extension into the North....

 Ruggles fought relentlessly against those officers and marshals who threatened black liberty. Just as modern protestors decry the role of the police in the quest for order, black and white activists in pre-Civil War New York claimed that the force was little more than a vigilante expression of the worst tendencies of white residents. A more professionalized police force, however, did not mean one more suited to the protection of black civil rights. On the contrary, in the early 1800s, the police proved sadly and persistently indifferent to the black lives they were supposed to protect.

 So now we get to the Slave Patrols as just attacking people are property in general - not just African-Americans.

By the 1730s, South Carolina expanded the duties of slave patrollers to include authority over white indentured servants and initiated payments for
those on slave patrols (Hadden 2001:22). Slave patrollers could enter, without permission, any homes of blacks or whites suspected of harboring slaves who
were in any way violating the law.

 from Ignoring the Past: Coverage of Slavery
and Slave Patrols in Criminal Justice
Texts 

K. B. Turner , David Giacopassi & Margaret Vandiver
Published online: 17 Feb 2007.