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How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing
(www.americanbar.org)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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There has been police ever since there has been a State, so for tens of thousands of years that we know of. Pretending that something didn't exist for 99% of its own history just to call it racist is silly.
So, I just read the article.
Which line of it "pretends" policing didn't exist before the American South?
Because I'm not seeing what you're claiming.
The first line: "Jim Crow Origins of Policing"
Police and law enforcement have existed ever since laws existed. We have millennia of history of policing before Jim Crow came into being. Jim Crow demonstrably is not the origin of policing.
Jim Crow is used as a descriptor of a specific kind of policing. You seem to read this in bad faith, and that's making you misunderstand what it's saying.
You need to read the actual article, and not just the first line.
Your understanding of what is being discussed is woefully incomplete.
I'm with you. I expect something closer to literal accuracy before I take a statement seriously. It's rather like being told that the phrase "defund the police" does not mean to actually defund the police. The fight against racism in policing is not helped with this type of purely metaphorical speech.
Counterpoint.
The article was clearly referring to American police, and pretending it was referring to the entire history of law enforcement is pedantic to the extreme.
Also, defund the police.