Vol. 77/No. 1      January 14, 2013

BY JOHN STUDER
Cops—the armed henchmen of the bosses’ government who workers confront in the streets and on picket lines—are a relatively new development in history. Like modern prisons, the first police forces were created with the establishment of capitalism as the dominant world economic system in the 18th century and the rise of industrial factory production in the 19th.

As capitalist manufacturers increasingly pushed feudal lords aside, they took steps to create the urban working class they needed from the peasantry. As the textile industry exploded, for example, they passed enclosure laws to drive peasants off the land, replacing them with sheep pasture for wool.

But the landless peasants had reason to resist factory labor with its starvation wages, slavery to machines, unhealthy conditions and long work hours. So the ruling classes enforced vagabondage laws—backed by harsh penalties—to make it a crime to live in cities without a job or home.

“Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system,” Karl Marx wrote in Capital.

Vagabond laws and ‘workhouses’

Vagabondage laws were transported to the new world. An 1837 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Mayor of City of New York v. Miln, held it “necessary for a State to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts.”

With the expansion of factory production and cities, the bosses established the night watch to keep a lookout for their facilities and goods.

But the growth of capital soon made this system inadequate. Bosses pushed for the creation of full-time police, armed and uniformed, with military discipline, to guard their property and enforce capitalist order.

The first police force was organized in London in 1829, followed rapidly in Boston in 1838 and New York City in 1845. Similar steps were taken in other urban centers across the northern states.

During the 1830s and ’40s hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers from Ireland, Germany and elsewhere swelled the cities, seeking work. They faced competition with each other, low wages, ramshackle and dangerous housing. In city after city riots broke out in protest against living conditions.

From their outset, the cops’ mission was to control the “dangerous classes”—the rioters, vagabonds, unruly immigrants and workers who fought to organize unions and defend political rights.

This process had a different history in the U.S. South, where the growth of the textile industry in Britain propped up the slave system, built on the transport of Blacks from Africa to labor on cotton and tobacco plantations.

Because slave-labor-based agriculture retarded the development of industry and urbanization, there was little need for a night watch.

What did develop was the slave patrol. Organized gangs searched for slaves bold enough to escape, to find and smash any meetings they organized and enforce laws enshrining human bondage.

As shipping expanded and ports grew on the southern coast, night watches, often in league with the slave patrols, were organized to protect the cotton and other crops on the docks.

In the port city of Savannah the first police force was pulled together out of elements of the watch and slave patrols in 1859. Its targets, as described in one contemporary account, were “runaway slaves from surrounding counties, free Negroes, seamen, and Irish laborers congregated in Savannah’s outlying districts, where they engaged in various illicit activities.”

In most southern cities, the first police departments were set up after the victory of capital in the Civil War. Former slave patrol members played a key role. Patrol veterans—including those newly hired as cops—were central in setting up the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist terror organizations.

The first prisons in the U.S. began in the early 1800s—Auburn in western New York state and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Auburn followed the model of the European workhouses, extracting labor from those imprisoned behind its walls.

Eastern State billed itself as an example of reform. The system was built on solitary confinement, each worker placed alone in a tiny cell to seek “penitence.”

Police brutality, cop frame-ups, stop-and-frisk, and the explosion in incarceration of millions of workers in the U.S. over the last quarter century flow from the needs of capitalist rule today.
 
 
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