Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: which is normally a show about the worst people in
Speaker 1: all of history, and I guess it's still is. But
Speaker 1: but recent world events, UM have compelled us to create
Speaker 1: a special mini series, Behind the Police, where we are
Speaker 1: going to be giving a detailed history of American policing,
Speaker 1: all the good, the bad, and mostly mostly the bad
Speaker 1: and the ugly. It's it's mostly bad, uh and and
Speaker 1: mostly ugly. Um and uh. In order to help me
Speaker 1: give this story and tell it to the world, my
Speaker 1: guest today uh and for the next couple of weeks
Speaker 1: UH is Jason Petty, better known as Propaganda Jason. You
Speaker 1: are a hip hop artist, UM and a podcast host. UM.
Speaker 1: And yeah, how are you doing? Man? Hey man? You know,
Speaker 1: West West and the world don't fire. But NASCAR stopped
Speaker 1: flying Confederate flags. So that's a thing, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Yeah, it's in a weird moment right now.
Speaker 1: I just like like snag a picture of and just
Speaker 1: and like send it to yourself in two thousand eighteen
Speaker 1: and go what stupid director wrote this storyline? You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's wild, and like the wildest thing about it
Speaker 1: is that I think we were all at this point
Speaker 1: of getting like just completely exhausted by like this constant
Speaker 1: parade of like bad news and like political malfeasance and
Speaker 1: like horrible things being done by people in power, and
Speaker 1: nobody was able to get on the same page about
Speaker 1: really anything. Um. And then all of a sudden, you know, um,
Speaker 1: after the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in that video
Speaker 1: came out for like the first time in a long time,
Speaker 1: almost everyone, like most people got broadly onto the same page. Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, we weren't even on the same page about
Speaker 1: a virus. Like it's like something something that I will
Speaker 1: give no ships about what political stance you are gonna
Speaker 1: kill you either way. We couldn't even agree on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But then I was like we could agree that black
Speaker 1: lives matter for real. That's what we finally agree it on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good, broadly good. Like I'm kind of I'm recording
Speaker 1: this from outside of the what will surely probably not
Speaker 1: exist by the time this airs, but was briefly the
Speaker 1: the the Seattle the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. I went
Speaker 1: to check that out for a couple of days. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's been wild. I wish you could talk to me
Speaker 1: a little more about like there's got to be some
Speaker 1: sort of version of behind the bastards that's that is
Speaker 1: the Northwest. Yeah, it's like it's definitely a tale of
Speaker 1: two cities up there. Yeah. Yeah, I've been getting tear
Speaker 1: gas in Portland for days, and they were in Seattle too,
Speaker 1: but then they succeeded in getting their police to like
Speaker 1: pull out of a precinct um, which is wild, and
Speaker 1: now the cops are back, so it didn't last. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you've been on the ground in Los Angeles some
Speaker 1: of the protests, if I'm not mistaken, Yeah, how have
Speaker 1: you felt about that? Dude? It's like obviously the sheer
Speaker 1: volume I mean because I was here for the you know,
Speaker 1: for the l A riots, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So the sheer volume of people, the amount of of
Speaker 1: um sustained energy has been like maybe something's different, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. Um, the amount of diversity in
Speaker 1: the streets has been like yo, maybe I guess after
Speaker 1: having to like take it to the streets since the
Speaker 1: the day after Trump was elected. You know what, I'm
Speaker 1: saying from the woman's marts all the way to the
Speaker 1: school shootings, to the to the climate, to the like
Speaker 1: there's no to the the damn um uh Muslim band.
Speaker 1: It's just like at some point we were just like, okay,
Speaker 1: enough is a day, m enough um. But I like
Speaker 1: to be fully transparent. I think I echo like the
Speaker 1: sounds of of of people who've been in like justice
Speaker 1: work for a while, where like your arms are still
Speaker 1: kind of folded on the side, like Okay, are you
Speaker 1: gonna be here next week? Yeah? You know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: It's like you like this song, or are you gonna
Speaker 1: stay for the concert? Like this is a long concert,
Speaker 1: you feel me? Yeah, Yeah, it's a long And I
Speaker 1: guess that's kind of why we're doing And yeah, after
Speaker 1: like two weeks almost in the streets reporting on that,
Speaker 1: I kind of felt like the thing to do was
Speaker 1: to try to um because I guess it's I think
Speaker 1: it's wrong to say that we're all on the same page.
Speaker 1: We're all reading the same book, and the book is titled, Uh,
Speaker 1: the police are murdering a whole ton of black people, um,
Speaker 1: and also doing a bunch of other messed up stuff.
Speaker 1: And it feels like for a lot of folks, the
Speaker 1: first time they opened that book was because they they
Speaker 1: went out to a protest and they got tear guests,
Speaker 1: and sudden we were like confronted by the violence of
Speaker 1: American policing. So I think now is a good time
Speaker 1: to go into a really deep history of American policing
Speaker 1: and let people know like where all this came from,
Speaker 1: because this didn't Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's so there's I
Speaker 1: and I and I know what I love about your show.
Speaker 1: It is I think why it reigned so true with me.
Speaker 1: It was like it's the stuff that like we we
Speaker 1: might be looking at the same dumpster fire, but I'm
Speaker 1: looking at it with a hundred years of history to know,
Speaker 1: like I actually know what I'm looking at, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. And like y'all think I'm making this
Speaker 1: ship up, Like I'm not, Like I swear to you,
Speaker 1: I'm not making this up. Like just learn more and
Speaker 1: you'll stare at this dumpster fire like I am. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's stare at the dumpster fire. Um and and
Speaker 1: and really just yeah, I'll get into the story. Um.
Speaker 1: As a side note, your camera is phenomenal, like what's
Speaker 1: up with this depth of feel on your That's great, man,
Speaker 1: it's like blurry in the back. Look at this. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so people don't see all of my all of
Speaker 1: my illegal artwork that's behind me. Yeah yeah, yeah, very erotic.
Speaker 1: Yeah you see my bed here, and by magic I
Speaker 1: mean snoring and my daughter kicking me and my life
Speaker 1: in our roofs anyway, yeah yeah yeah, so, um yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess let's get into it. So obviously, the idea
Speaker 1: of law, of their being laws that people could break
Speaker 1: and be punished, that's existed for a while. We all
Speaker 1: remember hearing about hammer Abi's code and stuff like back
Speaker 1: in back in school. Um, but throughout history a surprising
Speaker 1: amount of society is probably most of them have lacked
Speaker 1: anything that we would recognize as like a police force
Speaker 1: and like an organized and kind of a modern sense
Speaker 1: of the word. Like a lot of times you'd have
Speaker 1: like the you know, you'd have a military that would
Speaker 1: enforce some rules for like the king or whoever, but
Speaker 1: you didn't have like beat cops rolling around, you know,
Speaker 1: scanning neighborhoods. Now, the ancient egyp has had something that
Speaker 1: might be seen as kind of a predecessor to the police.
Speaker 1: It was a small, dedicated force regarding the tombs of
Speaker 1: the wealthy as well as their businesses. Um, which will
Speaker 1: be something of a pattern throughout the episode. Aca convince everything.
Speaker 1: Let's just gonna do that's the pattern anyway going, including
Speaker 1: policing for the police. You can't they can't be winners. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not all writing. Yes. Um. So, some ancient Greek
Speaker 1: city states, including Athens, had what you might call a
Speaker 1: proto police force um as well. And in Athens this
Speaker 1: force was kind of geared towards protecting markets and keeping
Speaker 1: an eye on untrustworthy foreigners. So it's a little bit like,
Speaker 1: you know, a mix between normal police and ice. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: this was not considered to be an honorable job, as
Speaker 1: historian P. K. Bailey noted in the ninety lecture quote,
Speaker 1: even in the enlightened democracy of Athens in the fifth
Speaker 1: century BC, no free citizen was prepared to serve in
Speaker 1: that capacity, and such police force as there was, consisted
Speaker 1: of foreigners with the status of slaves who were the
Speaker 1: property of the states in Greece. Generally, very few of
Speaker 1: the states seemed to have made any provision at all
Speaker 1: so far as is known for the ordinary policing of
Speaker 1: their cities, though the state of Sparta certainly had a
Speaker 1: very efficient system of secret police. This is really interesting
Speaker 1: to me, especially because of what comes next. So Sparta
Speaker 1: really seems to be like some of the first police
Speaker 1: that are very similar. You can draw a direct line
Speaker 1: from the Spartan secret police to the origins of American policing,
Speaker 1: which we're gonna we're gonna get to it a little bit,
Speaker 1: because the secret police of Sparta existed for one purpose
Speaker 1: and one purpose only, and it was to clamp down
Speaker 1: on any hint of rebellion from the vast majority of
Speaker 1: the nation's populace. See only about one in seven. Spartans
Speaker 1: were like the guys from three hundred, right that everybody knows,
Speaker 1: Like that with the abs and the and the spears.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of the population were helots. They were slaves. Basically,
Speaker 1: they were they were slaves. They were just straight up slaves.
Speaker 1: Like it was a slave empire. Sparta was. The vast
Speaker 1: majority of people in the country were slaves, and the
Speaker 1: Spartan like leadership and the Spartan like citizens spent all
Speaker 1: of their time terrified of slave rebellions. That's why the
Speaker 1: Spartan army didn't actually leave the country all that often
Speaker 1: because like they get up risen. Yeah. So they had
Speaker 1: all these slaves and they had to like clamp down
Speaker 1: on them, and they established a secret policing force called
Speaker 1: the Crypteia, which was made up of young men who
Speaker 1: had just finished the basics of their military terry training.
Speaker 1: So once a year, Sparta would elect a council of
Speaker 1: five e force or leaders, and as part of a ritual,
Speaker 1: these forms would begin their term by declaring war on
Speaker 1: the Helot population. They did this every year, like every year,
Speaker 1: we declare war on our slaves. So the Spartans had crips,
Speaker 1: is what you're telling me. They did. They did Yeah again, Cryptiae,
Speaker 1: the crypt So they had crips. So that studio was
Speaker 1: the boys in Blue, I'm telling you, man, like this
Speaker 1: stuff has been going on for a long time. The
Speaker 1: other boys in blue, and it was trying to keep
Speaker 1: the slaves. They were trying to keep the slaves from rebelding. Everybody,
Speaker 1: tuck that back in, Tuck that away for a second.
Speaker 1: Keep that in your head, keep that in your head.
Speaker 1: So every year these elected leaders, you know, formally declare
Speaker 1: war on the Helots, and it's something of like a
Speaker 1: ritual like to and this ritual is based around like
Speaker 1: keeping them from rebelling. So the Cryptania would be sent
Speaker 1: out to wander barefoot, armed with knives into the countryside,
Speaker 1: and they would seek out the strongest and the smartest
Speaker 1: of the Helots their slaves, and they would murder them
Speaker 1: in the night, calling the population of any potential leaders
Speaker 1: that like, every year we go out, we find the
Speaker 1: smart ones and we kill them so that they can't
Speaker 1: rise up against us. How does he fishing telling me
Speaker 1: this is the pinnacle Western civilization? You're trying to be okay,
Speaker 1: got it? It does make it kind of appropriate when
Speaker 1: you could a lot of American police officers were like
Speaker 1: spartan helmet patches. Now it's like, okay, little on the
Speaker 1: nose fellas. Yeah. Now I should note here that there's
Speaker 1: actually there is quite a lot of historical debate about
Speaker 1: the Cryptia. Some scholars agree with defining them as a
Speaker 1: secret police as a force to keep the Helots in
Speaker 1: line through regular murder. Victor Davis Hansen, who's a pretty
Speaker 1: prominent like pop historian, compares them to the Gestapo, but
Speaker 1: other historians will argue that the Cryptia were less of
Speaker 1: like a policing force and more of a guerrilla military
Speaker 1: unit and auxiliary to the regular Spartan military. That's sort
Speaker 1: of um also acted as kind of an advanced training
Speaker 1: program designed to blood new warriors by like giving them
Speaker 1: easy kills to help them get over any hesitation they
Speaker 1: might have to do violence. And I don't think these
Speaker 1: two views are necessarily in conflict. The Cryptaia seemed to
Speaker 1: have been like a dedicated guerilla armyment to suppress descent
Speaker 1: against the ruling class by doing violence to the impoverished
Speaker 1: majority who produced all of Sparta's value. In this they
Speaker 1: fulfilled a role not very different from a lot of
Speaker 1: police forces in Western history. He can't make this stuff up.
Speaker 1: You can't. We can't make this pretty. I may myself today.
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, I'm gonna do a longer meditation,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do some yoga. I am going to prepare
Speaker 1: myself for the amount of things you've ben to tail
Speaker 1: me right now. And none of it were because I
Speaker 1: still picked a fight with my wife today. It was like,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, babe, it's we're about to talk about the
Speaker 1: ancient police. Okay, so I'm sorry, but and for the record,
Speaker 1: fuck the ancient police, like you know what ancient n
Speaker 1: w A like you feel me. The Roman Republic didn't
Speaker 1: have any kind of like formal national police force for
Speaker 1: most of its history. In Rome, which is like the
Speaker 1: biggest city in the ancient world, for most of you know,
Speaker 1: the time that it was like kind of the center
Speaker 1: of the world, lacked anything that we would describe as
Speaker 1: like police. As Rome grew to become the largest city
Speaker 1: and you know it's era, crime became an increasing problem.
Speaker 1: The wealthy were able to use vast networks of clients.
Speaker 1: Romans had this weird system where by like, if you
Speaker 1: were rich, you gave money to a bunch of people
Speaker 1: who had less, and they all had to like kind
Speaker 1: of have your back, Like everybody had a posse and
Speaker 1: ancient that's the way to look at like every yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody had like a big squad um. And so the
Speaker 1: wealthy were able to use these big squads to like,
Speaker 1: you know, defend themselves from aggression and murder their political enemies,
Speaker 1: protect them in the streets and stuff. Um. Meanwhile, organized
Speaker 1: criminals and gangs did basically the same thing, and there
Speaker 1: wasn't really a big difference between like the rich and
Speaker 1: their squads and like criminal gangs that were kind of
Speaker 1: the same thing. Um. Now, victims of crimes had to
Speaker 1: either get revenged themselves or whip up a mob of
Speaker 1: their fellow citizens to help them in this task. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of whipping up of mobs in ancient Rome. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: why do I I could just it just makes it
Speaker 1: just it just tracks like that just tracks so well.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, we've always been the same species. We
Speaker 1: say we are the same. But one of the best
Speaker 1: my history professor in college, one of the best thing
Speaker 1: he said to me was like, if you want to
Speaker 1: know what happened in history, thing about what you would do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just us, then what would you do? It's history
Speaker 1: is us them? Yeah, And in in ancient Rome, like
Speaker 1: the kind of graffiti networks they had really did act
Speaker 1: a lot like social media does, to the extent that
Speaker 1: like kind of famous and powerful people would use like
Speaker 1: graffiti to get like shiploads, like to to kind of
Speaker 1: do the same thing that like people who get piste
Speaker 1: off online and have a following can do, like like
Speaker 1: but with a literal mob as opposed to I'm literally
Speaker 1: cancel you ancient style. Yeah, I'm gonna cancel you by
Speaker 1: having four hundred dudes stab you repeatedly. We're talking about
Speaker 1: the government. I mean it was it was just kind
Speaker 1: of everyone. Yeah. Uh. Seneca, a Roman philosopher in this period,
Speaker 1: described street life in Rome this way. Some things will
Speaker 1: be thrown at you, some will hit you, um, which
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, Rome's first emperor or Augustus, when
Speaker 1: like the whole republic thing ended, he established what's generally
Speaker 1: recognized as the city's first police force, and it would
Speaker 1: be fairer to describe them as like a fire department
Speaker 1: that also did some policing. Um. They were called the
Speaker 1: vigils um, and they stood watch at night and mainly
Speaker 1: kind of looked out for fires and attempted to stop
Speaker 1: the city from burning down because that was like a
Speaker 1: huge problem in Rome. And the vigils were armed though,
Speaker 1: and they were drilled in a similar way to soldiers.
Speaker 1: You know. They used artillery to shoot dampening materials onto fires.
Speaker 1: But they also had the right to enforce laws and
Speaker 1: had the right to enter private homes to capture thieves,
Speaker 1: returned runaway slaves, and generally insure order UM, so kind
Speaker 1: of like a fire department mixed with the police force. UM.
Speaker 1: And this system didn't really spread widely throughout the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: but broadly similar systems were established in a number of
Speaker 1: European cities intermittently over the centuries. The night watchman was
Speaker 1: kind of the most common way that this would this
Speaker 1: would wind up happening. And these were just, you know,
Speaker 1: in most of Europe, members of the community who like
Speaker 1: would rotate through the job of defending their town or
Speaker 1: city from external threats like invaders and internal threats like fire.
Speaker 1: Their primary job was to give alarm to kind of
Speaker 1: get like everybody together so that they could deal with
Speaker 1: whatever problem, you know, happened in the night. And most
Speaker 1: of what we today would recognize as law enforcement was
Speaker 1: handled by citizens watching over their own communities. The English
Speaker 1: called this kin police, as it was generally seen as
Speaker 1: the responsibility of individual families to watch out foreign police
Speaker 1: their family members. Right. You know, there's not nothing centralized
Speaker 1: really in a lot of this period, you know, the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages and ship whatever you wanna call it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so starting yeah, yeah, yeah, like watch your people. Yeah, hey, man,
Speaker 1: get your boy, get your boy. Whose man's Is this
Speaker 1: what I'm saying? Yeah, I love it. Yeah it makes sense, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of does. Yeah. So, starting in the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: like kind of the Late Middle Ages, English communities began
Speaker 1: to develop something called the frank pledge system. Now, this
Speaker 1: was a structure by which small groups of men could
Speaker 1: enforce the law in communities, and it was based around
Speaker 1: tin man groups called tithings, which were themselves elves grouped
Speaker 1: into hundreds, and then shires, which were similar to modern counties.
Speaker 1: So if you wondering where like the lord of the rings,
Speaker 1: why they called the shire. That was like an old
Speaker 1: English word for a county. Yeah. Now the person who
Speaker 1: was in charge, yeah, yeah, that's there. So the person
Speaker 1: who was in charge of all of the different tithings,
Speaker 1: those tin man groups in a shire was called the
Speaker 1: shire reeve. And that's where the word sheriff comes from.
Speaker 1: Is like the head of this like shire wild kind
Speaker 1: of community protection group, the shire reef, the shaff, and
Speaker 1: that's why the sheriff's run the county exactly exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's where that comes back to. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, and so far we're like, this isn't
Speaker 1: something you can really like obviously, like the Spartan police
Speaker 1: is terrible, but like this makes sense, Like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: take care of your community, like everybody kind of un
Speaker 1: rotates through it. Share. Yeah, hard to be angry at it.
Speaker 1: Individuals within tithings were expected to apprehend criminals and bring
Speaker 1: them to court, and shire Reeves oversaw their work. When
Speaker 1: Europeans began, you know, genociding and conquer ring North America,
Speaker 1: they brought variants of this system and other kind of
Speaker 1: similar systems developed in other parts of Europe with them.
Speaker 1: Policing in you know, the colonies which you know, we're
Speaker 1: broadly referring to like mainly North America here, Like I'm
Speaker 1: not really I don't have the time to like talk
Speaker 1: about like what went on in South America, Central America.
Speaker 1: We're talking about like kind of the particularly the English
Speaker 1: speaking colonies that started on the East coast. Um Policing
Speaker 1: in those colonies fell into two broad categories, known to
Speaker 1: historians as the Watch and the Big Stick. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote next from a paper on the history
Speaker 1: of US policing by Dr Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University. Quote.
Speaker 1: The Watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary
Speaker 1: duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a
Speaker 1: night watch in sixteen thirty six New York and sixteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight in Philadelphia, and seventeen hundred. The night watch
Speaker 1: was not a particularly effective crime control device. Watchman often
Speaker 1: slept or drank on duty. Well, the watch was theoretically voluntary,
Speaker 1: many volunteers were simply attempting to evade military service, were
Speaker 1: cons grips, forced into service by their talent. We're performing
Speaker 1: watch duties as a form of punishment. And I have
Speaker 1: to say again, last night, I was kind of hanging
Speaker 1: out in the Autonomous Zone and I volunteered to do
Speaker 1: a shift on the night watch, and I was definitely drinking.
Speaker 1: You know. We we look in in the hood, you
Speaker 1: know again, like the part we build it's called hood politics.
Speaker 1: And one of the things is like I just feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: no matter how unique are experiences, like you said, we're
Speaker 1: kind of we're still all the same species. Right. So
Speaker 1: when we talk about like, um neighborhood pigeons, right, I
Speaker 1: mean there's there's there's a there's a misogynistic version of that,
Speaker 1: and then there's the other part that we would call
Speaker 1: the pigeon stool, which is like the guy who's supposed
Speaker 1: to sit at the edge of the street to make
Speaker 1: sure to see if the cops are coming. Right, So
Speaker 1: that's your pigeon stool, right, and he's drunk all the time.
Speaker 1: It's drunk, like he falling asleep, and it's just so.
Speaker 1: And the hope is to do that because it's the
Speaker 1: easiest because it's odds are nobody coming, you know, So
Speaker 1: you could just sit over there and just kind of
Speaker 1: like he's trying to holler girls like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: just just on the one off chance that the police
Speaker 1: actually come around. I mean, that's your life. But most
Speaker 1: of the time that's not gonna happen. Yeah, let's just
Speaker 1: sit there and drink and smoke. Yeah, keep an eye
Speaker 1: on things, but not all that. Make sure you just
Speaker 1: make sure mama not coming, you know. So these kind
Speaker 1: of watch systems that started, you know, hitting you know,
Speaker 1: the colonized Northeast were more similar to the pseudo police
Speaker 1: system that you saw in ancient Athens than anything else.
Speaker 1: Um and you know, kind of the the other side
Speaker 1: of this was the big stick system. And this was
Speaker 1: the first real example of for profit policing. We're not
Speaker 1: gonna go into tremendous de tale about it in this episode.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about it a lot or in
Speaker 1: our next episode, but I'm gonna give an overview here.
Speaker 1: So in a you know, we're when we're talking about
Speaker 1: the colonies, we're talking about a very unregulated market for
Speaker 1: law enforcement in a lot of ways. You know, there's
Speaker 1: not an organized, centralized police, but there are merchants who
Speaker 1: have a lot of property, and those merchants want to
Speaker 1: make sure their property doesn't get stolen um, either when
Speaker 1: it's in transit or when it's in a shop. And
Speaker 1: so you know, they have they have constables in these towns,
Speaker 1: and constables are either appointed, um kind of in like
Speaker 1: a rotating basis, so like you do your your brief
Speaker 1: period of time as constable, or you're elected to be constable.
Speaker 1: It was kind of they did it a couple of
Speaker 1: different ways, um. And as a general rule, because constables
Speaker 1: weren't really paid um, like, they had to develop services
Speaker 1: that they would sort of sell to people in order
Speaker 1: to make the job worthwhile. So sometimes they acted acted
Speaker 1: as land surveyors. They would verify the accuracy of scales,
Speaker 1: but they would also get paid directly by the merchants
Speaker 1: they were protecting, And so as a general rule, these
Speaker 1: constables were really just hired muscle for the business leaders
Speaker 1: in these communities. Um, and they would be paid by
Speaker 1: the people. Um. You know, they weren't being paid by
Speaker 1: the state to enforce justice. They were being paid by
Speaker 1: people with money to enforce debts, to punish theft, and
Speaker 1: to even intimidate rival business owners. Right like that, yeas
Speaker 1: they're good. They're hired yeah um and obviously, as you
Speaker 1: caught by calling them hired goons, this was not seen
Speaker 1: as an honorable job. People don't really want to be
Speaker 1: a constable, right like. There was no blue lives like
Speaker 1: back the yeah so. Historian Gary Potter notes that constables
Speaker 1: and night watch officers quote didn't want to wear badges
Speaker 1: because these guys had bad reputations to begin with, and
Speaker 1: they didn't want to be identified as people that other
Speaker 1: people didn't like. There was a strong resistance with early
Speaker 1: law enforcement of being identified as law enforcement because nobody
Speaker 1: liked you. Now, some towns in colonial North America made
Speaker 1: service in the watch compulsory. Rich people tended to pay
Speaker 1: were people to take their shifts for them, and Potter
Speaker 1: notes that these substitutes were usually quote a criminal or
Speaker 1: a community thug. Yeah yeahs again it all tracks yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. In eighteen nine, back over in England, Sir
Speaker 1: Robert Peel, who is the Home Secretary of England, introduced
Speaker 1: the Bill for Improving the Police in and in and
Speaker 1: Near the Metropolis. Now. The goal of this was to
Speaker 1: take the air set system of watchmen and the like
Speaker 1: and formalize them into a real police force, and the
Speaker 1: London Metropolitan Police are generally recognized to be the very
Speaker 1: first modern police department in history. Um And Peel he's
Speaker 1: an interesting guy. He felt that the job of police
Speaker 1: should be to prevent crime rather than to punish it,
Speaker 1: because that's kind of what you know, all these constables
Speaker 1: something got stolen, you like you'd get paid to go
Speaker 1: like funk up the person who stole it, right, But
Speaker 1: like they weren't really preventing crimes. So Peele was like,
Speaker 1: what if we tried to stop crimes? Um And he
Speaker 1: felt the best way to achieve that goal was with
Speaker 1: regular visible patrols of off officers from a formal centralized
Speaker 1: apartment with uniforms and ranks and a clear physical headquarters,
Speaker 1: so that people like new those aren't just dudes, like
Speaker 1: those are the police and they're like a part of
Speaker 1: the state. Now. Peel felt that it was critical that
Speaker 1: only calm, even tempered citizens should be police officers. He
Speaker 1: felt they need again yeah what a thought. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that one didn't really spread. Um. I don't know much
Speaker 1: about the London police, but it didn't make it across
Speaker 1: the pod. It just there's there's a few things that
Speaker 1: they threw out the bay with the bathwater in this situation.
Speaker 1: I get it, you don't want to have a you
Speaker 1: don't want to have a king anymore, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: like the t I get it, But like maybe having
Speaker 1: a calm police voice wasn't a bad idea. Took part
Speaker 1: of the magna carta. He was like, Yo, this that
Speaker 1: this kind of seems like a good idea. Maybe Yah
Speaker 1: should have taken that one too. Yeah, And I did
Speaker 1: recently watch like again, the London police have done a
Speaker 1: lot of messed up stuff too, even with some of
Speaker 1: the recent protests. But I did watch that when they
Speaker 1: threw the statue of that slaveholder into the bay in Bristol,
Speaker 1: um into the channel. Um, I watched an interview with
Speaker 1: like the local constable or whatever. He was like the
Speaker 1: local police chief type guy in Bristol, because he was
Speaker 1: being asked by the news like why he didn't stop it,
Speaker 1: and his answer was basically like, well, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: a cop, so obviously I'm not okay with property destruction.
Speaker 1: But we had a choice to, like, like, our choice
Speaker 1: was to either let it happen or like basically funk
Speaker 1: up people to protect the statue. And I felt like
Speaker 1: that would be bad for community trusting the police, reasonable attitude,
Speaker 1: taking on your feet, man, like you feel me, like yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's like, what do I care about the statue?
Speaker 1: So um yeah. Peel had some other ideas too. Again,
Speaker 1: he felt that like police needed uniforms with badges that
Speaker 1: had visible display numbers. So he was the idea of,
Speaker 1: like police should have badge numbers that you can identify.
Speaker 1: If you're encounter a police officer, you can identify them.
Speaker 1: He also felt that police should not carry firearms, and
Speaker 1: again that's like still kind of broadly applied in a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, English policing. Now, some of Peel's
Speaker 1: ideas quickly spread. Obviously not the thing well we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that again. Apart two American police didn't initially have guns. Um.
Speaker 1: In eighteen thirty eight, though, the city of Boston became
Speaker 1: the first US city to establish a modern police force. Now,
Speaker 1: the creation of the Boston Police, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: a bit more in our next episode, was driven by
Speaker 1: largely a capitalist necessity to protect the property of big business.
Speaker 1: Boston merchants had been paying constables and the like to
Speaker 1: protect their goods for years, and they pushed for the
Speaker 1: establishment of a formal police force in order to shift
Speaker 1: the burden of paying for this onto the public, arguing
Speaker 1: that such a force would be for the collective good.
Speaker 1: So now we the merchants still get our stuff protected,
Speaker 1: but we don't have to pay every or we you know,
Speaker 1: we pay a little bit, but we pay a lot
Speaker 1: less because everybody is paying for these guys to protect
Speaker 1: our stuff. Um. Yeah, So so that's interesting. Um. Now
Speaker 1: we're we'll return to these Northern police and again our
Speaker 1: second episode is going to cover more that because you know,
Speaker 1: while the Boston Police at the first modern department in history,
Speaker 1: the roots of many US police departments go back much further.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of folks have heard, you know,
Speaker 1: through social media or whatever. In the last couple of
Speaker 1: weeks as we've gone through this this uprising, UM the
Speaker 1: idea that American police started out with slave patrols, UM,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're going to talk about now, And
Speaker 1: that's partly accurate. It's not fair to say that all
Speaker 1: US police started a slave patrols because obviously in the
Speaker 1: North they didn't have you know, slave patrols. Really they had, um.
Speaker 1: You know, it was a different route in the North.
Speaker 1: But in the American South, policing absolutely did grow out
Speaker 1: of slave patrols. UM. And it you know, it came out.
Speaker 1: And you can draw a line between the two because
Speaker 1: obviously the first police departments in the North come out
Speaker 1: of a desire from you know, people with money and
Speaker 1: property and shops to protect their property. And in the
Speaker 1: American South, policing also grew out of a desire for
Speaker 1: people with money to protect their property, but that property
Speaker 1: was enslave human human beings. Yeah, yeah, you know, who
Speaker 1: doesn't establish slave patrols. Well, that's not I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: I think you never know, bro, You never know, you
Speaker 1: never know, man, Yeah, you know who historically might have
Speaker 1: tried to establish police departments to protect this is I'm
Speaker 1: not doing great with this. Hey you know who uh
Speaker 1: that I got no neither, man, I'm sorry, we're going
Speaker 1: to roll ads now, you can just simply go funk
Speaker 1: the police. It's an odd break there, it is. There
Speaker 1: we go, we are back. Uh yeah, so we're we're
Speaker 1: we're getting into we're talking slave patrols. Now, we're talking
Speaker 1: slave patrols. Yes. So the first slave patrol was created
Speaker 1: in the Carolina colonies in seventeen o four and twenty
Speaker 1: six years before Boston got its police force. And this
Speaker 1: is again we're not we're not even North or South
Speaker 1: Carolina yet. They hadn't gotten that far, but they knew
Speaker 1: they wanted Carolina's Yeah, we were clear on that, and
Speaker 1: they were clear that they wanted slave patrols in those
Speaker 1: Carolinas and slave yeah sorry man. Yeah, firston I was
Speaker 1: gonna go, OK, Carolina, but I was like, that's probably
Speaker 1: not gonna land as well as Sweet Carolina. Sweet Carolina. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you read the room right. Yeah. So slave
Speaker 1: patrols had three jobs. To chase, down, apprehend, and returned
Speaker 1: escaped slaves to their owners, and to discipline slave labors
Speaker 1: via violence if they broke plantation rules. And to act
Speaker 1: as an organized and constant form of state endorsed terror
Speaker 1: in order to stop American slaves from revolting. Now, white
Speaker 1: Southerners lived in pretty much constant fear of slave uprisings
Speaker 1: the Haitian Revolution which started in sevente and again it's
Speaker 1: very complicated the Revolutions podcast, But I think Mike Duncan
Speaker 1: is his name, is a great job of breaking this down.
Speaker 1: But the end result of it is that black enslaved
Speaker 1: people rosed up and murdered many of their masters. And
Speaker 1: they also, to make this very complicated, a lot of
Speaker 1: their masters were also colored people. It's a very compliment twisted,
Speaker 1: it's really twisted. Supremacy just really scrambles your brain, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sure does. Beside note about Haitians, did you know
Speaker 1: that that's where the word zombie came from? I do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's came from a zombie. Yeah, and it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's kind of like, I'm sorry, Sophie, it's history. I'm
Speaker 1: just hoping he doesn't sing. She knows I'm going to
Speaker 1: start singing the Cranberry song, Zombie. That's what that was triggered.
Speaker 1: Job like this, sing to me again, please, Okay? It
Speaker 1: is kind of neat. I don't know, neat maybe the
Speaker 1: wrong word, but I do think like you can. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe I'm I'm wrong about this, but it
Speaker 1: seems like you might be able to draw kind of
Speaker 1: a line and sort of the impetus behind or like
Speaker 1: why kind of these like where the zombie sort of
Speaker 1: myth came from an Haitian culture and it's like roots
Speaker 1: to like the enslavement of of of of black bodies
Speaker 1: and like kind of what the like what was kind
Speaker 1: of depicted and get out like yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of there's a lot of ties to
Speaker 1: that to where you're just like you're a shell of
Speaker 1: who you are. So they're like they look like they're working,
Speaker 1: but they look like there's nothing, no life behind their eyes,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well fooled, duh, saying of course there's
Speaker 1: not like this, is there anything more hopeless than where
Speaker 1: I am right now? You know? Yeah? And it was
Speaker 1: you know what what's scared white people so much about
Speaker 1: the Haitian Revolution is that it kind of proved that like,
Speaker 1: oh no, that light is still in there, Like you
Speaker 1: can you can beat them down pretty bad, but like
Speaker 1: it never goes away and like if we're not careful,
Speaker 1: that'll happen here and they'll kill us all. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and you know, unfortunately, the Haitian Revolution remains the
Speaker 1: only successful slaveryholt in Western history, I think maybe the
Speaker 1: only the most definitely the most successful slave rebellion anywhere
Speaker 1: in history really because like at least based on like
Speaker 1: the yeah, as as far as like Chattow slavery and
Speaker 1: like the trans Atlantic slave trade, that's the only one
Speaker 1: that worked. Yeah yeah, um, which is a it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's good that it worked. It's a bummer it didn't
Speaker 1: work elsewhere. Um. But the memory of this one successful
Speaker 1: uprising was was really lodged deep in the psyche of
Speaker 1: white Southerners and it scared the ship out of them. Um.
Speaker 1: And you can you can hear echoes of that in
Speaker 1: the Slave patrollers Oath from North Carolina in and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna read that now. Well wait, let me
Speaker 1: take a deep breath for you do it? Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: go for it. Yeah, I Patroller's name, do swear that
Speaker 1: I will, as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons
Speaker 1: among the slaves in my district, faithfully and as privately
Speaker 1: as I can discharge the trust reposed in me as
Speaker 1: the law directs, to the best of my power. So
Speaker 1: help me God. So again, what they're looking for here,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're trying to stop a rebellion. Um. So
Speaker 1: searching for weaponry is kind of like one aspect of
Speaker 1: how they did this. But really the thing they did
Speaker 1: the most was beat the ever living ship out of slaves.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Um. Now, in most of the South, working
Speaker 1: in these slave patrols was an obligation for white men,
Speaker 1: similar to compulsory military service, and in most of the
Speaker 1: slave states it was kind of broadly mixed between rich
Speaker 1: people and poor people. So like a lot of slave
Speaker 1: patrollers didn't actually own slaves because they were poor white dudes. Um,
Speaker 1: But it was kind of seen as a broad duty
Speaker 1: for white people to be in the slave patrols for
Speaker 1: men to kind of rotate through. Um. Now, rich people
Speaker 1: could in some places like basically pay a fine in
Speaker 1: order to not volunteer in the slave patrol um. And
Speaker 1: it was also not uncommon for like wealthy white dudes
Speaker 1: uh and who were ironically the folks who owned the
Speaker 1: most slaves, to pay to have poor white men take
Speaker 1: their place. South Carolina was unique in allowing white women
Speaker 1: to be called up for service and slave patrol. So
Speaker 1: that's what, right, Yeah, you know what I'm saying. You know,
Speaker 1: you pick your you pick your oppression, and you're just
Speaker 1: like this is the one I'm gonna fight for. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like cheering when the CIA puts a woman in charge.
Speaker 1: It's like we did it. Yeah. I always say that,
Speaker 1: Like I always say, you know, obviously reading the room,
Speaker 1: I don't have to tell y'all this, but like just
Speaker 1: the difference between white people and whiteness. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like it's a it's a it's a thing. Whiteness is that,
Speaker 1: it's a thing. It's itself just booked and you know,
Speaker 1: cooked in a white supremacy. And from from my vantage point,
Speaker 1: it's like just how detrimental that is to the psychology
Speaker 1: of white people. Also, you know what I'm saying, like,
Speaker 1: how yeah, like you just this rich dude hires this
Speaker 1: poor dude, right, so now the poor dude feel like,
Speaker 1: oh I'm a little more important now, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But like, fam, you he don't dead man,
Speaker 1: don't respect you, that man, don't love you. I will
Speaker 1: make you think he don't like you, want you us,
Speaker 1: you want of us, fool you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: He's throwing your chump change to do a ship job
Speaker 1: that he think he better people. Yeah, I'm gonna oppress
Speaker 1: you so you can turn around and oppress somebody else
Speaker 1: because the reality is I'm better than you. And it's
Speaker 1: just like like it's scrambles. It just it just it's
Speaker 1: turned your brain to a pretzel. Just just does. I'm
Speaker 1: not a not a fan. I'm gonna be on record
Speaker 1: about that, taking a bold stance, and I am a
Speaker 1: fan of you two I the band and the two
Speaker 1: people I'm looking at. I am a fan of all
Speaker 1: all right anyway, So um so yeah, South Carolina, let
Speaker 1: let ladies be in the slave patrols. And I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if they ever actually really did serve in them,
Speaker 1: because they kind of they had the option to pick
Speaker 1: a mail from their family to go in as a substitute.
Speaker 1: So I do think that happened more off and there
Speaker 1: may have been someone in the road with us. I
Speaker 1: I can't tell you, um, but yeah, in you know,
Speaker 1: in some states they were kind of more of like
Speaker 1: an air sat sort of force that was kind of
Speaker 1: cobbled together. In some states they were a professional, paid
Speaker 1: institution that was like really kind of formalized. UM. In
Speaker 1: some states their membership was cold from local militias. So
Speaker 1: you know, they were there were different, They weren't all
Speaker 1: like there weren't a uniform thing, but kind of the
Speaker 1: way they worked over the decades that slavery was, you know,
Speaker 1: a factor in the South. Um, the way they worked
Speaker 1: kind of did become formalized. Now. Historian Sally Hayden's book
Speaker 1: Slave Patrols is probably the most comprehensive history yet written
Speaker 1: about these the organizations, whatever you wanna call them. She
Speaker 1: argues that in most cases, slave patrols consisted of members
Speaker 1: of all social classes. White people were more or less
Speaker 1: unified in their obligation to suppress the black population and
Speaker 1: thus guarantee white supremacy. One piece of evidence Hayden or
Speaker 1: Hadden sorry Um sites to support this is an eighteen
Speaker 1: forty five letter from a former South Carolina governor to
Speaker 1: a visiting English abolitionist, quote with us, every citizen is
Speaker 1: concerned in the maintenance of order and in promoting honesty
Speaker 1: and industry. Among those of the lowest class who are
Speaker 1: our slaves, and our habitual vigilance or understanding armies, whether
Speaker 1: if soldiers or policemen entirely unnecessary, small guards in our
Speaker 1: cities and occasional patrols in the country ensure us a
Speaker 1: repose and security known nowhere else. Yeah, that's how this
Speaker 1: that's how this governor felt, or at least that's what
Speaker 1: he wanted. And again he's talking to an abolitionist from
Speaker 1: England here. So this is kind of the propaganda spend
Speaker 1: of the slave patrols. People have to have an army
Speaker 1: or police because our only danger is from these black people, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what he's saying. Yeah, that's wow, Yeah, interesting,
Speaker 1: it's a brain pretzel man. Yeah, sure is. Yeah. So again,
Speaker 1: in all states, slave patrols did the same basic work,
Speaker 1: which included enforcing the curfew that slaves lived under, checking
Speaker 1: which is talking about curfews, Yeah, curfew, checking traveling slaves
Speaker 1: for permission passes, breaking up unlawful assemblies of slaves, and
Speaker 1: of course searching for weapons. Just okay, yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: need you to I'm gonna need you to define its
Speaker 1: arms here, you know, overseers, Like, what do you mean
Speaker 1: by unlawful gathering. Yeah, this ain't my house, this ain't
Speaker 1: my land. I'm not even my own it would I
Speaker 1: would tell me what I mean, what do you get?
Speaker 1: Where do you want us to stand? Where do you
Speaker 1: want us to stand so that you don't feel scared? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That really is what it like comes down to, like
Speaker 1: where where do we what? What can we do to
Speaker 1: not scare you? Do you want to just like turn
Speaker 1: off after we're done farming? Like what do you like? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Then then if that's the case, you should have just
Speaker 1: hired animals. Yeah you know what I'm saying, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how they felt, yes, exactly, Yeah, so yeah. Historian
Speaker 1: Sally Hayden writes in her book Slave Patrols, quote, the
Speaker 1: history of police work in the South grows out of
Speaker 1: this early fascination by white patrollers with what African American
Speaker 1: slaves were doing. Most law enforcement was, by definition, white
Speaker 1: patrolmen watching, catching, or beating black slaves. And I do
Speaker 1: find that really interesting because that's a through line right
Speaker 1: up to today. This destination stopped. Yeah, never stop, you guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I like what she described that, this fascination with
Speaker 1: what African Americans were doing, right, Like that's what the
Speaker 1: origin of policing in the South. Have you heard of
Speaker 1: the Have you heard of the phrase like and it's
Speaker 1: it's in it's in like feminism also, but the phrase
Speaker 1: the male gaze. Ye, yeah, so like in the same
Speaker 1: same thing and like black activism spaces where it's like
Speaker 1: the white gaze's just like what are you looking at
Speaker 1: all the damn time? Like good lord, just make something
Speaker 1: up yourself, Like why like just can you go do something?
Speaker 1: Like you know, I think you said in one of
Speaker 1: your one of the episodes because I am an actual
Speaker 1: fan listeners, I listened to the show like that you
Speaker 1: were just like if we could just give just like
Speaker 1: white kids some cosplay, that's like you're allowed to just
Speaker 1: like shoot things into an open space, and you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like that maybe you wouldn't just be
Speaker 1: so worried about like what I'm doing right now, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's I I do think Warida, which is
Speaker 1: you know, our plan to wall off Florida turning into
Speaker 1: a free fire zone for just as once the war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as long as we like cover like Miami, Yeah, just
Speaker 1: keep Miami. Yeah we can keep Mi Miami. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: have to. We have to protect Orlando real quick so
Speaker 1: that I can watch the NBA playoffs. All right, well
Speaker 1: we're rapidly chiseling away. This is not fun, man, Orlando's
Speaker 1: too far inland. Yeah, well we'll find a war state,
Speaker 1: we you know, figure it out. Maybe the Panhandle. Can
Speaker 1: we go like the Texas Panhandle? Nobody likes that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: nobody likes turn Abilene into a free fire zone. Why
Speaker 1: is Evelene a city anywhere? We don't need to be
Speaker 1: a city here. Yes, yeah, I'd apologize to the Abilene listeners,
Speaker 1: but there's no one listening from Abilene. Or you're in
Speaker 1: Dallas now, could you realize Abilene shouldn't exist. Abilene the
Speaker 1: place where you will absolutely get pulled over if you
Speaker 1: drive through, just because there's nothing else for the constant,
Speaker 1: nothing else to do. A Beelieen where as soon as
Speaker 1: you're eighteen, we'll see you later. Yeah, get out of there.
Speaker 1: So the violence meeted out by slave patrols was neither
Speaker 1: random nor disorganized. Slave patrollers had the right to detain
Speaker 1: and deterrogate and search slave quarters that were allowed to
Speaker 1: seize property at will um, which was you could see
Speaker 1: as kind of an early form of civil asset forfeiture.
Speaker 1: They also had the right to punish black people on
Speaker 1: the spot for infractions of slave laws. Now, physical punishment
Speaker 1: could be dealt out via firearms, but was usually dealt
Speaker 1: out by what we're called either negro whips or negro dogs.
Speaker 1: And I probably don't need to explain what negro dogs were,
Speaker 1: but they they're they're large bloodhounds that patrollers used both
Speaker 1: to track down slaves and to horribly name them. Um.
Speaker 1: And and that is the term that that historians used
Speaker 1: for these is negro dogs, because that's what they were
Speaker 1: called by. Yeah. Um. So we're talking mostly about slave patrols,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of other areas that could
Speaker 1: get into detail, and I just don't have the time too.
Speaker 1: But I should note here that slave patrols were not
Speaker 1: entirely the first thing kind of like slave patrols to
Speaker 1: exist in the United States, Even before slavery was really
Speaker 1: common in the United States. U S settlers in New
Speaker 1: England appointed Indian constables whose job was the police Native Americans,
Speaker 1: often by violent terror. Um. And it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: the St. Louis Police, who we are we'll be talking
Speaker 1: about a bit at the end here were formed both
Speaker 1: as a slave patrol and as a patrol to defend
Speaker 1: white people against Native Americans. So that is a big
Speaker 1: factor in a lot of this too. You know, some
Speaker 1: of these areas, the native populations kind of had gotten
Speaker 1: exterminated or pushed out by the time things formalized. But
Speaker 1: in a number of particularly more quote unquote frontier places,
Speaker 1: slave patrols also did a lot of violence against Native Americans,
Speaker 1: and that is an important aspect of this. And even
Speaker 1: in the North, where slave patrols weren't a thing, there
Speaker 1: were you know, groups of vigilantes, well not quite vigilantes,
Speaker 1: because they were sort of part of the government whose
Speaker 1: job was to like, you know, do violence to Native people.
Speaker 1: Um so that is a factor in all this as well.
Speaker 1: Um So, yeah, if we want to be perfectly accurate,
Speaker 1: the case is less as it's made on Twitter, that
Speaker 1: US police started as slave patrols and more that US
Speaker 1: police started as a series of armed groups whose central
Speaker 1: purpose was to protect white people from non white people
Speaker 1: via violence. That that would be yeah, that that's that
Speaker 1: that Yeah, that gets your your critical race theory juices going.
Speaker 1: The intersectionality of of oppression from the police, like it ain't.
Speaker 1: Look yeah, they coming for you too. That's always been
Speaker 1: That's always been my anset. Look you're chilling, They're coming
Speaker 1: for you too, how you know. So the institution of
Speaker 1: slave patrols evolved and formalized over time, and for a
Speaker 1: look at how that worked, I think it'll be used
Speaker 1: for us to zoom in on the case of my
Speaker 1: home state, Missouri. Now, Missouri entered the Union in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty one as a slave state, and racism was obviously
Speaker 1: baked into the new policy from the beginning. In eighteen five,
Speaker 1: the new state passed a law banning any quote free
Speaker 1: negro or mulatto from coming into the state under any
Speaker 1: pretext whatsoever UM, which Oregon had a pretty similar but
Speaker 1: partial rule after the Civil War. So like, yeah, how
Speaker 1: racist Oregon started out as UM eight is also the
Speaker 1: year that Missouri established its very first slave patrols. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote now from a paper by Morehouse
Speaker 1: College professor Larry Sproule. Quote, by eighteen forty five, these
Speaker 1: patrols had permission to administer from ten to thirty lashes
Speaker 1: to slaves found strolling about from one plantation to another
Speaker 1: without pass from his master mistress. Or overseer or strolling about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't go for no walk? What's wrong with you?
Speaker 1: And you could just as what you just said. It's like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: I don't have a like I'm free. I don't have
Speaker 1: a master. Yeah, well you ain't got no letter from
Speaker 1: your master. No, sir, you're not listening to me. I
Speaker 1: don't have a master. You're breaking the law. Well, then
Speaker 1: you don't belong in this state. Yep, all right, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Missouri slave patrols worked at least twelve hours a month, um.
Speaker 1: But also you know, some people worked a lot more,
Speaker 1: and members received about twenty five cents per hour. Now
Speaker 1: I should note here that the patrols weren't just randomly
Speaker 1: accosting individual slaves. Enslaved humans in the United States resisted
Speaker 1: their situation in a variety of ways, um and so
Speaker 1: there were often, like, you know, minor little uprisings that
Speaker 1: slave patrols were like working to put down. So slaves
Speaker 1: would often take crops and livestock from from their masters.
Speaker 1: They would burn fields and even plantation houses. They would
Speaker 1: poison their masters, and they would attempt uprisings, um and so,
Speaker 1: like the Spartan crypteia. Most of the work of slave
Speaker 1: patrols was broadly what we would call counterinsurgency today. In
Speaker 1: many rural counties in Missouri, um enslaved black persons were
Speaker 1: the majority of people, and whites were well aware that
Speaker 1: they had, you know, kind of a tiger by the tail.
Speaker 1: Sprul continues quote. Southern whites developed a collective conscience and
Speaker 1: political consensus to tightly control blacks within their midst. Slave
Speaker 1: policing demanded accountability for every captive's whereabouts. A missing slave
Speaker 1: was caused for grave concern, often causing panic. Fear of
Speaker 1: insurrection made unauthorized blacks on roads are in the public square.
Speaker 1: Hazardous racial features made blacks visible, suspect and vulnerable to
Speaker 1: slave patrollers looking to catch h inward out of his
Speaker 1: place without a pass. Just as blackness was the stigmatized
Speaker 1: identification of bondsman, it also singled them out as suspects
Speaker 1: and criminals. An enslaved African's phenotype marked them as a habitual,
Speaker 1: dangerous class, requiring relentless supervision and policing to guarantee their submission. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that also sounds familiar. Yeah, that sounds familiar. And we'll
Speaker 1: be talking the term dangerous class is used constantly by
Speaker 1: historians who study policing in the United States that we
Speaker 1: will be talking a lot about the idea of dangerous classes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an important concept. You don't realize, like how that
Speaker 1: like that that just poisonous stain like just that that
Speaker 1: that weird DNA strand just like stayed with us to
Speaker 1: the point to where you know you're I know you're
Speaker 1: gonna get to it later. But like you know, black men,
Speaker 1: black boys being treated like adults when your kids because
Speaker 1: you already think we're more dangerous in your first gun.
Speaker 1: I was the first time coll pulled a gun on me.
Speaker 1: I was fourteen, and I was like, I didn't grown
Speaker 1: on facial hair. I still had a squeaky voice. It
Speaker 1: just was terrified. He was talking to me like I
Speaker 1: was so hard and criminal, and I'm like, dog, I'm
Speaker 1: a freshman. I'm a freshman in high school. Like I'm
Speaker 1: scared that I'm like, my mom's gonna be pissed because
Speaker 1: I'm home late. That's what I'm scared about. My mom
Speaker 1: gonna be pissed that I was supposed to be home
Speaker 1: at three five. I'm gonna get home at four fifteen,
Speaker 1: she gonna be like, where the hell are you? You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, So like I'm I'm tearing and
Speaker 1: he's talking to me, like I know, I don't even
Speaker 1: know the words he's saying. It's because you already see
Speaker 1: us already as dangerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah this
Speaker 1: is this is like how that kind of starts and
Speaker 1: evolves and how that ball gets rolling to the boulder
Speaker 1: it is today. Um yeah, So for kind of another
Speaker 1: another look at how people saw the slave patrols in
Speaker 1: that time, Um, I want to go to a guy
Speaker 1: named Basil Hall. He was a nineteenth century English traveler
Speaker 1: and author. He visited the American South in eighteen twenty
Speaker 1: nine and he wound up in Richmond, Virginia. His recollection
Speaker 1: of how slave patrols were explained to him gives us
Speaker 1: another insight into how white people talked about this institution
Speaker 1: to other white people, which I think is compelling. Quote
Speaker 1: in walking around, my eyes were struck with the unusual
Speaker 1: site of a sentinel marching with his musket. My companion said,
Speaker 1: and his companion is a local American Southerner, white Southerner. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it is necessary to have a small guard always under arms.
Speaker 1: It is the consequence of the nature of our colored population.
Speaker 1: But it has done more as a preventative check than
Speaker 1: anything else. It keeps all thoughts of insurrection out of
Speaker 1: the heads of the slaves, and so gives confidence to
Speaker 1: those persons amongst us who may be timorous. But in
Speaker 1: reality there is no cause for alarm. The blacks have
Speaker 1: become more and more sense of every day of their
Speaker 1: want of power. After further inquiry, Hall noted, I learned
Speaker 1: that there was in all these places in towns, a
Speaker 1: vigorous and active police, whose rule is that no negro,
Speaker 1: for example, is allowed to be out of doors after
Speaker 1: sunset without a written pass from his master explaining the
Speaker 1: nature of his errand if during his absence from home
Speaker 1: he'd be found wandering from the proper line of his message,
Speaker 1: he is speedily taken up and corrected accordingly. So that's
Speaker 1: a lot of that's interesting, Like the idea that, like,
Speaker 1: the police are here not just to keep keep black
Speaker 1: people in line, but so that frightened white people don't
Speaker 1: get scared of black people. That's an interesting part to me. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good that yeah, that layer yeah yeah, man, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's here, We're here for Karen's too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You can always call us, you can always call the cops. Scared. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what's going on here. So slaves patrols were
Speaker 1: generally limited to pursuing escaped slaves within their own counties.
Speaker 1: When a slaver or a group of slaves was fortunate
Speaker 1: enough to be able to move further away from wherever
Speaker 1: they were being held, bounty hunters, like slave bounty hunters,
Speaker 1: generally took on the job of attempting to track these
Speaker 1: slaves down, and these men were allowed across state lines,
Speaker 1: and their work was supported by the Fugitive Slave Act,
Speaker 1: which was passed in eighteen fifty as part of a
Speaker 1: compromise to try and avoid a civil war. The law
Speaker 1: mandated that all escaped slaves, if captured, be returned to
Speaker 1: their masters, even if those slaves had escaped to a
Speaker 1: free state. Abolitionists called this the Bloodhound Bill, after the
Speaker 1: dogs that bounty hunters and slave patrollers used to track
Speaker 1: down slaves. Solomon Northrop, author of the memoire Twelve Years
Speaker 1: a Slave, gave one account of what it was like
Speaker 1: to watch patrollers with dogs hunt down an enslaved black person.
Speaker 1: In this case, it was not even an escaped slave,
Speaker 1: but merely an individual who had broken his curfew. Quote.
Speaker 1: One slave fled before one of these companies, thinking he
Speaker 1: could reach his cabin before they could overtake him. But
Speaker 1: one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him
Speaker 1: by the leg and held him fast. The patrollers whipped
Speaker 1: him severely. Yeah, I want to be careful. I don't
Speaker 1: want to draw because it's it does a disservice to
Speaker 1: like the horrific suffering of black people in this period
Speaker 1: of time and today to to draw like too many
Speaker 1: direct comparisons to some of the stuff happening now. But
Speaker 1: it's not I don't think we can go without entirely
Speaker 1: mentioning it that Like probably a lot of people listening
Speaker 1: right now had violence done to them by police recently
Speaker 1: for breaking curfew. Like that is interesting to me, Like
Speaker 1: the the the session with curfew is a through line, right,
Speaker 1: but like if you're out when you're not allowed to,
Speaker 1: we get to funk you up. Like yeah, and it's funny,
Speaker 1: like I was talking with you know, some of my friends, Uh,
Speaker 1: my wife, even my daughter got My daughter is old
Speaker 1: enough now to like go to protests, go to protests
Speaker 1: with us, and you know, and kind of like kind
Speaker 1: of do our own thing, and just us at this
Speaker 1: point being like, okay, dude, are you serious. Like at California,
Speaker 1: we just kept getting the alerts, like for five o'clock,
Speaker 1: six o'clock, it just kept you kept getting Amber alerted
Speaker 1: the thing, and it's like, dude, okay, bro get it
Speaker 1: together all right and just talk to us later. But
Speaker 1: it's kind of like we we're kind of like, is
Speaker 1: this a joke? Man, Like, Okay, so it's a thousand
Speaker 1: dollar fine, Okay, throw me in the pattiwagon. Thousand dollars fine,
Speaker 1: it's fine. You know what I'm saying. Um, maybe you're
Speaker 1: gonna rough me up a little bit, but I'm black,
Speaker 1: I'm from Los Angeles. You've been roughing me up my
Speaker 1: whole life, you know what I'm saying. So for us,
Speaker 1: we were kind of like, it's kind of it's kind
Speaker 1: of laughable, and then you go back to like, no,
Speaker 1: it wasn't always laughable. Yeah, you know, like this was terror. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was absolutely terror, and I think they would have
Speaker 1: It's interesting that it is talked about slave patrols as
Speaker 1: like a counterinsurgency. But like the way they counter the
Speaker 1: insurgency was my being terrorists terrorists. Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 1: first police departments. So Spruit's article, which we've been quoting from,
Speaker 1: includes a number of other firsthand accounts by enslaved persons
Speaker 1: of the use of these these dogs, you know, these bloodhounds,
Speaker 1: negro dogs. Um. Most of these accounts were taken down
Speaker 1: during the Great Depression. Which is one of the coolest
Speaker 1: things they did during the New Deal is the FDR
Speaker 1: administration send a bunch of people out to interview former
Speaker 1: slaves who are right now at that point quite old.
Speaker 1: But that's where we get a lot of ore, a
Speaker 1: lot of our like kind of formal stories of what
Speaker 1: it was like to be an enslaved person this period.
Speaker 1: So thank you the New Deal for that particular was
Speaker 1: a good call. Um. So one of these people who
Speaker 1: has interviewed noted quote, in every district they had about
Speaker 1: twelve men they call patrollers. They write up and down
Speaker 1: and round looking for inwards without passes. When slaves run away,
Speaker 1: they always put the bloodhounds on the tracks. They had
Speaker 1: the dogs trained to keep their teeth out of you
Speaker 1: till they hold them up to bring you down. Then
Speaker 1: the dogs would go at your throat and they'd tear
Speaker 1: you to pieces too. After a slave was caught, he
Speaker 1: was brung home and put in chains. M Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we also have recollections of slave patrol members of their
Speaker 1: use of dogs. One of these guys, and who was
Speaker 1: a slave patroller in Louisiana in eighteen fifty seven, described
Speaker 1: his method of work thus, Lee quote, If I can
Speaker 1: catch a cust runaway in word without killing him, very good. Though.
Speaker 1: I generally let the hounds punish him a little, and
Speaker 1: sometimes give him a load of squirrel shot, which is
Speaker 1: like a light shotgunload. If mild measures like these do
Speaker 1: not suffice, I use harsher punishment. The moment the hounds
Speaker 1: come close, they utter a hideous and mournful howl. Heaven,
Speaker 1: pity the poor. And then he uses the in word again.
Speaker 1: So yeah, not a not a good dude. I hope
Speaker 1: he didn't make it out of that Civil War. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope that guy got Gettysburg. Yeah, I hope he
Speaker 1: met Sherman or Grant or someone. Yeah, I'm about to
Speaker 1: get his burg this transition. Yeah, let's get Easburg. These
Speaker 1: ads like pickets. I don't know, just run as So
Speaker 1: we're back, uh, and we're talking about the use of
Speaker 1: dogs to enforce a regime based in terrorism. Um, otherwise
Speaker 1: known as the American sound. That's kind of what it was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the horrible wounds left by these these dogs fulfilled
Speaker 1: the dual purpose. They served as a reminder of white supremacy. Um.
Speaker 1: It is an easy way to identify troublesome slaves because
Speaker 1: obviously there's a ton of slaves with horrible dog scars
Speaker 1: and see other black people seeing those scars. Both would
Speaker 1: be like white people have the power because like, look
Speaker 1: at what they're how badly all these people got sucked up.
Speaker 1: And also it was a way for the white people
Speaker 1: to see like that guy's that guy's trouble, Like that
Speaker 1: was your arrest record? Was the dog stars on your face? Yeah? Um,
Speaker 1: he's the red sports car. Yeah that's what the teachers.
Speaker 1: That's what the teachers tell you. You You know, you're kind
Speaker 1: of a red sports car kid. Yeah. I decide what
Speaker 1: the cops is gonna look for you because I expect
Speaker 1: you to be fast, Like yeah, thanks, Miss Williams. It's
Speaker 1: pretty obscure, deep cut like but still anyway, No nobody
Speaker 1: tells white kids stuff like that. At least I didn't
Speaker 1: hear anything, Like you didn't hear the red car vet
Speaker 1: or the red sports car story. I mean I got
Speaker 1: told as a as a young adult, I got told
Speaker 1: not to buy a red car because the police cite
Speaker 1: them for speeding more often. But like that that was
Speaker 1: my thing. Yeah, well that's there. It is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is weird that we tell people in general, like
Speaker 1: don't stand out or the Yeah, I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't want to be leaders, don't stand out. So um.
Speaker 1: By the onset of the Civil War, bloodhounds had grown
Speaker 1: to become the single most reliable tool of oppression in
Speaker 1: the arsenal of Southern whites. Like the dogs in particular
Speaker 1: were like the way in which more than any other
Speaker 1: tool white people like, I think even the lash was
Speaker 1: used more as like a punishment, but like in terms
Speaker 1: of a tool of actual oppression, Like the dogs were
Speaker 1: really like the fucking thing. Um. And when the Civil
Speaker 1: War started, the organized and militantmen of the slave patrols
Speaker 1: were all too happy to turn their counterinsurgency skills to
Speaker 1: use in a real war. One Union field officers scouting
Speaker 1: through rebel lands in eighteen sixty two, reported hearing the
Speaker 1: constant barking of hounds, which would have been turned towards
Speaker 1: a new use searching for Union infiltraders. This officer described
Speaker 1: dogs as the detective officers of Slavery's police. Confederate generals
Speaker 1: also deployed bloodhounds on the front line. Black Union soldiers
Speaker 1: were considered fugitive slaves in arms, and it was seen
Speaker 1: as only logical that these Negro dogs could be used
Speaker 1: to break their will and send them fleeing from battle.
Speaker 1: You know that these Southern generals were like, they're so
Speaker 1: scared of these dogs. If we use them against these
Speaker 1: new black military units, it will make them all run away, right, Like,
Speaker 1: clearly they these guys won't be able to handle, you know,
Speaker 1: standing up to dogs in combat. Yeah. This was one
Speaker 1: of many misconceptions that the things we're going to go
Speaker 1: in that war. On October eighteen sixty two, the Battle
Speaker 1: of Polka Taligo Bridge marked the first time Black soldiers
Speaker 1: came face to face with the Negro dogs of slave
Speaker 1: patrols in open combat. The black soldiers were the men
Speaker 1: of the first South Carolina Colored Regiments, and their field
Speaker 1: reports stated that the men met these dogs with bayonets
Speaker 1: killed four or five of their old tormentors with great relish.
Speaker 1: And I'm not normally a killing dogs person, but in
Speaker 1: this case it's a good story. Yeah. Yeah, just you
Speaker 1: when you and I feel like, knowing a little bit
Speaker 1: of your backstory, you'd be surprised when a person is
Speaker 1: like fighting for their life, the amount of bravery and
Speaker 1: adrenaline that you can muster up when you're like I,
Speaker 1: I'm not dying today. Yeah, it's not happening to day,
Speaker 1: you know. So yeah, when you when you don't under
Speaker 1: if you want to estimate that, and you just think
Speaker 1: you you think this dog, you think this dog Finn,
Speaker 1: stop these men like you think. I'm worried about that
Speaker 1: little dog right now? Nah, bro, we got going back.
Speaker 1: We're not going back. We got guns now, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, So, fighting between Confederate units
Speaker 1: with slavehounds and Black Union units continued throughout the war.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty four, one Black soldier wrote a letter
Speaker 1: back to his wife depicting one such batter and was
Speaker 1: he actually wrote her a poem and it's a pretty
Speaker 1: cool poem. So I'm going to read that. Now we
Speaker 1: met the bloodhounds at the bridge. They ran with all
Speaker 1: their might. It was a glorious site. We ran our
Speaker 1: bayonets through their backs. We shot them with the gun.
Speaker 1: It was all over with the dogs, and twas most
Speaker 1: glorious fun. In former days, those brutes were used to
Speaker 1: hunt the flying slave. They tracked them through their dismal
Speaker 1: swamps and little quarter gave. But when they tried the
Speaker 1: game of war, we knocked them on the head. We
Speaker 1: shot them quick and ran them through until every hound
Speaker 1: was dead. Oh yeah, that's bars. Yeah, so obviously, and
Speaker 1: um spoilers here to the listeners who have not caught
Speaker 1: up to us, history passed like eighteen sixty four. The
Speaker 1: Confederacy didn't win at all in our lost. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you one of the I I got to watch from
Speaker 1: a distance someone in my neighborhood in Portland have a
Speaker 1: real like like growth moment. So there's this, you know,
Speaker 1: the General Lee the car from the hazard that was
Speaker 1: like the Confederate flag on the hood. I had a
Speaker 1: little hot wheels one. Yeah sure, yeah. Um there's a
Speaker 1: guy who lives not far from me who has like
Speaker 1: a who has that car like a perfect replica of
Speaker 1: the Generally and it had the Confederate flag on it.
Speaker 1: And for the first few months I lived there, I
Speaker 1: would see him driving through the streets with his big
Speaker 1: Confederate flag on his general Lee. And about to three
Speaker 1: months ago I saw him driving his car but he
Speaker 1: painted over the Confederate flag and it was just orange.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh you had ad you like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you had a little moment. Good for you. You grew
Speaker 1: a bit. Yes see. That's what I mean by the Northwest,
Speaker 1: specificallymportant as a tale of two cities, because I'm like,
Speaker 1: there's this just bashtion of like left progressive, like freedom
Speaker 1: fighting Yato and like, you know, Tiger Claw, damn like
Speaker 1: hard hard ciders at the police, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: And then and then there's the guy with the right
Speaker 1: in my life, my life. It's a complicated place, yes,
Speaker 1: and then the right guy with the robberty league, with
Speaker 1: the with the general League. Like it's just it's two
Speaker 1: cities in one place. Some of the greatest coffee in
Speaker 1: the world, quote solid beer quote me, some of the
Speaker 1: most amazing beer. And then there's like and then there's Salem.
Speaker 1: You're like, there's Salem how it happened. Yeah, yeah, so,
Speaker 1: um yeah. The Confederacy lost the war, and by eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, both the dream of Southern independence and slavery
Speaker 1: were dead. White supremacy, though did not die. White people
Speaker 1: in the former Confederate States wasted no time in turning
Speaker 1: the institutions of the slave patrols into formal police departments.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixty five, if the editor of the Lynchburg
Speaker 1: Virginian noted, which was the newspaper, noted that quote, stringent
Speaker 1: police regulations may be necessary to keep freedman from over
Speaker 1: burdening the towns and depleting the agricultural regions of labor.
Speaker 1: The civil authority should also be fully empowered to protect
Speaker 1: the community from this new imposition. The magistrates and municipal
Speaker 1: officers everywhere should be permitted to hold a rod into
Speaker 1: a ram over these wandering, idle creatures. Nothing short of
Speaker 1: the most efficient police system will prevent strolling, vagrancy, theft,
Speaker 1: and other destruction of our industrial system. So that's pretty clear.
Speaker 1: That's pretty great. It's the it's the like, it's the moment. Like.
Speaker 1: So the Chappelle Show years ago had a skit where
Speaker 1: he depicted the day, like the postman comes with the
Speaker 1: letter that the slaves are free, right, Like it's one
Speaker 1: of the greatest skits, and they're just and he's about
Speaker 1: to whoop this whip this guy whipped, this guy, whipp
Speaker 1: this guy. Then the postman walks up and he goes, well,
Speaker 1: apparently apparently you guys are free. It's starts like looking
Speaker 1: around at all the other slaves around him, and they're
Speaker 1: like he's like, uh hey, sorry about that a second ago, man,
Speaker 1: you know, just like so what do you do? Like
Speaker 1: what exactly? So they're like, we bet it, you know,
Speaker 1: we bet it. We bet to get us some protection
Speaker 1: because those last hundred years were kind of ship to them.
Speaker 1: Oh ship, what if they treat us even a little
Speaker 1: bit as bad as were Yeah. In her book Slave Patrols,
Speaker 1: Hayden notes quote policemen in southern towns continued to carry
Speaker 1: out those aspects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race
Speaker 1: neutral but in reality were applied selectively. Police saw that
Speaker 1: nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets,
Speaker 1: just as patrollers had done in colonial and anti bellum times.
Speaker 1: In the post war South, police were seen as the
Speaker 1: single most important method of maintaining a system of, in
Speaker 1: the words of one prominent Virginia clergyman, liberty for the
Speaker 1: white man, slavery for the inward, so long as the
Speaker 1: white man is able to hold him m M. Exactly now.
Speaker 1: In the textbook Policing by North Dakota States Karro Archbold,
Speaker 1: published by Sage Press, uh, it gets like that text
Speaker 1: book gives a rundown of how slave patrollers transitioned into
Speaker 1: policing freed blacks in the post war period. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from that next. During early reconstruction, several groups
Speaker 1: merged with what was formerly known as slave patrols to
Speaker 1: maintain order over African American citizens. Groups such as the
Speaker 1: Federal military, the State Militia, and the ku Klux Klan
Speaker 1: took over the responsibilities of earlier slave patrols and were
Speaker 1: known to be even more violent than their predecessors. Over time,
Speaker 1: these groups began to resemble and operate similar to some
Speaker 1: of the newly established police departments in the United States.
Speaker 1: In fact, David Barlow and Melissa Barlow note that by
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty seven, the Charleston Police Department had a hundred
Speaker 1: officers and the primary function of this organization was slave patrol.
Speaker 1: These officers regulated the movements of slaves and free blacks,
Speaker 1: checking documents and forcing slave codes, guarding against slave revolts,
Speaker 1: and catching runawa slaves. Scholars and historians assert that the
Speaker 1: transition from slave patrols to publicly funded police agencies was
Speaker 1: seamless in the southern region of the United States. So
Speaker 1: they just took these slave patrols. The war is over,
Speaker 1: now your cops. That's literally how it went. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: that's not every obviously, not every police part from the
Speaker 1: South because like a lot of cities and towns that
Speaker 1: are in the South now and have police didn't exist
Speaker 1: back then. But like, for example, the St. Louis Police
Speaker 1: started as a slave patrol. The the St. Louis Police
Speaker 1: Department that existed today began as a slave patrol. Yes,
Speaker 1: the current St. Louis Police have their origins as a
Speaker 1: slave patrol. Yeah. So a number of the St. Louis
Speaker 1: Police Department's first officers were former bounty hunters and slave patrollers,
Speaker 1: and they brought to their new job their old tactics,
Speaker 1: most specifically their old tactic of using dogs to torture
Speaker 1: and terrify black people and Here's where things get real, real,
Speaker 1: real angry making, because the use of Negro dogs continues
Speaker 1: to this moment right now in present day St. Louis.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, yeah, talk to huh, I said, talked
Speaker 1: to me so stomping into air force ones. In two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen, the murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson St.
Speaker 1: Louis police officer prompted an uprising by the city's black population.
Speaker 1: And people are broadly familiar with us, and this was
Speaker 1: suppressed with extreme violence. But the whole affair forced the
Speaker 1: Department of Justice to conduct and publish an expansive report
Speaker 1: on the Ferguson Police Department's behavior. This report concluded that, quote,
Speaker 1: the Ferguson Police Department engages in a pattern of deploying
Speaker 1: canines to bite individuals when the articulated facts do not
Speaker 1: justify the significant use of force, leaving serious puncture wounds
Speaker 1: to non violent offenders, some of them children. Now, the
Speaker 1: report went on to note that Ferguson police were allowed
Speaker 1: to sick dogs on suspects when any crime not just
Speaker 1: a felony or violent rhyme has been committed. This permissiveness,
Speaker 1: combined with the absence of meaningful supervisory review and an
Speaker 1: apparent tendency to overstate the threat based on race has
Speaker 1: a resulted in avoidable dog bites to low level offenders,
Speaker 1: and the d o J report kind of uses a
Speaker 1: little bit of weasel language on this fact, but one
Speaker 1: of the things that revealed is that one d percent
Speaker 1: of the people maimed by Ferguson police dogs were black.
Speaker 1: See this, like, how what am I trying to say
Speaker 1: right now? What gets right? What gets under my skin
Speaker 1: in discussions of this is that it sounds so preposterous
Speaker 1: that people say, where alarm is? We're just making this
Speaker 1: stuff up. You know, that was a long time ago.
Speaker 1: It's all in your head, and it's and you like,
Speaker 1: so after a while you actually start thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I am crazy, maybe it is in my head.
Speaker 1: And then you're just like and then you look at
Speaker 1: your other your other black friends, and you like, am
Speaker 1: I tripping? Or did this happen? And they're like, no,
Speaker 1: it kind of happened to me too. And then you're like,
Speaker 1: how about the other fucking side of the country. Did
Speaker 1: it happen to you all too? And you're just like yeah.
Speaker 1: So then when you and then when the report comes out,
Speaker 1: You're just like, guys, like I'm telling you, I'm not crazy.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you this is happening, you know, And I
Speaker 1: still got to convince you. And I'm like, what do
Speaker 1: you what do many receipts do you need? And it
Speaker 1: it didn't convince fifteen this comes out and it's another
Speaker 1: like people seem more convinced now after everything has happened,
Speaker 1: but like it took like five years after this report
Speaker 1: came out, and there was really you know, there was
Speaker 1: an uproar over the murder of Michael Brown, obviously, um,
Speaker 1: but there was the fucking the fact that the fact
Speaker 1: that a police department formed out of a slave patrol
Speaker 1: that used dogs too maim black people in order to
Speaker 1: terrorize them was two hundred years later using dogs to
Speaker 1: name only black people in order to tear the fact
Speaker 1: that that was happening. Like that, it was like yeah,
Speaker 1: and then it was out of the zeitgeist. And then
Speaker 1: it was out of the guys that I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: then it's gone out as I guys, and it's and
Speaker 1: that's the other thing that's so hard about like and
Speaker 1: im and I'm critiquing myself period. I'm taking all of
Speaker 1: us period is like when when the cameras leave, Like
Speaker 1: how hard it is to keep the energy up to say, look, listen,
Speaker 1: I know it's a high. It was a high, like
Speaker 1: you know, high profile case. But it's not done, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. And now that it's back, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's a year later, y'all forgot about my ground because
Speaker 1: you onto the next hashtag. But I'm like, no, seriously,
Speaker 1: we didn't make this up, Like here's the evidence, Like
Speaker 1: I'm telling you that's what happened. And it's like how
Speaker 1: it's you. You You find yourself like just exhausted as
Speaker 1: to go, like I just no matter how many receipts
Speaker 1: I give you, Like you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's speaking of receipts. I do feel like I need
Speaker 1: to quote from the New Yorker here and there. They
Speaker 1: did do a pretty good article kind of digging into
Speaker 1: the use of these these dogs, So I do want
Speaker 1: to credit them for that. They didn't like they you know,
Speaker 1: they put out an article which isn't nothing um better
Speaker 1: than not? Yeah right? Like yeah. In one account, a
Speaker 1: dog was sent after an unarmed sixteen year old who
Speaker 1: was also tazered. The electric shock of that weapon partially
Speaker 1: paralyzes a person. If that were to happen while a
Speaker 1: dog was tearing at your arms and legs, all you
Speaker 1: could do would be to watch in immobilized horror. Another
Speaker 1: case involved four police officers, including a canine handler, trapping
Speaker 1: an unarmed fourteen year old in an abandoned basement. The
Speaker 1: crime trespassing. The Department of Justice report recounts what the
Speaker 1: boy says happened to him when he saw the dog
Speaker 1: at the top of the steps. He turned to run,
Speaker 1: but the dog quickly bit him on the ankle and
Speaker 1: then the thigh, causing him to fall to the floor.
Speaker 1: The dog was about to bite his face or neck,
Speaker 1: but instead got his left arm, which the boy had
Speaker 1: raised to protect himself. FPD officers struck him while he
Speaker 1: was on the ground, one of them putting a boot
Speaker 1: on the side of his head. He recalled the officers
Speaker 1: laughing about the incident afterward. Ah, the poison blue. The
Speaker 1: Boys in Blue had a Boys in Blue man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just man, It's like how many how many bad
Speaker 1: apples you need before you start like checking the orchard?
Speaker 1: Like yeah, what if the soil is bad? Like how
Speaker 1: nobody's like you keep talking about these your tree keep
Speaker 1: producing bad fruit like and you keep blaming like some
Speaker 1: wrong with your tree man. All these apples are just
Speaker 1: filled with piss, Like what happened all the apples? Why
Speaker 1: are the all the apples would piss? That's just one
Speaker 1: then why you Well, if it's just why are you
Speaker 1: putting it in a bucket? Where were in these apples?
Speaker 1: Why do you keep throwing apples? Then? I mean we
Speaker 1: get rid of the orchard. It's a bad appard like
Speaker 1: it makes sense to me, yeah, yep. So again, the
Speaker 1: use of Ferguson police dogs made very little of a
Speaker 1: splash when it was revealed, even though we get of
Speaker 1: the individuals named by Ferguson police dogs were black, and
Speaker 1: of individuals that the Ferguson Police did violence too in
Speaker 1: general were black. Names of canine officers and their supervisors
Speaker 1: were not revealed in the report. That Department of Justice
Speaker 1: report on the Ferguson p D made one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty seven corrective recommendations on how the department could fix
Speaker 1: its violent behavior. Only one of those reforms dealt with
Speaker 1: canine violence, suggesting that the police department require on site
Speaker 1: supervisory approval before allowing a canine officer to main people.
Speaker 1: It's like, you got cool, I bite this black guy? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to have a dog tear at the flesh
Speaker 1: of this fourteen year old? Is that cool? That's all right? Glad?
Speaker 1: We put it. Put this this listen. So, as of today,
Speaker 1: Ferguson police still use dogs to control suspects. Most Ferguson
Speaker 1: officers are white. Virtually all the people they arrest and
Speaker 1: detain are black. No Ferguson officer has yet been tried
Speaker 1: or fired for using police dogs to brutalize citizens. Professor
Speaker 1: Larry Sprule notes quote the officer's procedural avoidance of criminal
Speaker 1: liability for death and torture of black citizens was not
Speaker 1: dissimilar to slave patroller's Antebellum indemnity for similar violence yep.
Speaker 1: In his paper on Negro dogs and the Ferguson Police,
Speaker 1: Professor Sproul sites to other academics Williams and Murphy, who
Speaker 1: wrote a nine paper on the transition from slave patrols
Speaker 1: to police departments. Williams and Murphy noted, quote, the legal
Speaker 1: order sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination from most of our
Speaker 1: nation's history, and the fact that the police were bound
Speaker 1: to uphold that order set a pattern for police behavior
Speaker 1: and attitudes towards minority communities that have persisted until the
Speaker 1: present day. That pattern includes the idea that minorities have
Speaker 1: fewer civil rights, that the task of police is to
Speaker 1: keep them under control, and that the police have little
Speaker 1: responsibility for protecting them from crime within their communities. Oh god,
Speaker 1: there we go. Oh my god. Yep, maybe they can
Speaker 1: throw me one of those one of those white claws.
Speaker 1: There was I missed this rally, but there was apparently
Speaker 1: a rally where some of the anti for kids. Do
Speaker 1: you remember there was that that pepsi ad with them
Speaker 1: Jenner where she hands a pepsi to a cop like
Speaker 1: right after that. Add a bunch of those like kids
Speaker 1: showed up at this. I think it was a made
Speaker 1: a protest with like like crates of pepsi and just
Speaker 1: started chucking them at the cops. I love it. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my god, dude, when you know what I give
Speaker 1: it to an ANTIFA kids, Man, they got sense. It's
Speaker 1: a humor died like y'all funny. You know what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's I you know it. It's it's been interesting
Speaker 1: because like there's all this talk of like like Portland's
Speaker 1: has like a big anti fascist sort of activist community,
Speaker 1: but like with all the talk that there is with
Speaker 1: from the President about antifa at these protests, they've really
Speaker 1: taken a backseat. Like they have not been driving the
Speaker 1: fucking bus here. Yeah, I can tell you that much. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of obvious because I'm like in some ways,
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of the anti fascist dudes,
Speaker 1: like they gotta they have a style. There's like an
Speaker 1: aesthetic to what they do that like, and I know
Speaker 1: it's a weird way to say it, but I feel
Speaker 1: like I go, oh, yeah, that's that's kind of their flavor,
Speaker 1: you know. I'm like, this ain't that. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: something else, you know. Yeah. It's like when you see, yeah,
Speaker 1: when you see like the graffiti that says like blacks rule,
Speaker 1: I'm like, black man, did not write that, did not
Speaker 1: write that. That's ridiculous. Okay. The flip side of that
Speaker 1: was like in Portland on two Fridays ago, I think
Speaker 1: we had, um, you know, a crowd marched to the
Speaker 1: Justice Center and then people just started sucking it up
Speaker 1: like breaking all the windows, they lit some fires, like
Speaker 1: and it was one of it was very obvious, I
Speaker 1: think to everyone who knew the city, like oh, because
Speaker 1: this was like the day after the Precinct in Minneapolis
Speaker 1: was burned, and I was like, yeah, that justice center up,
Speaker 1: it's going down. Yeah, And there was like it was
Speaker 1: blamed a lot on like like white anarchists kids, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: there were definitely some of those folks doing it, but
Speaker 1: like it was a pretty diverse crowd that sucked up
Speaker 1: the justice It's not yeah, you know, life in history
Speaker 1: is not so compartmentalized that you could just be like
Speaker 1: this happened, and this happened, and that group of people
Speaker 1: by it sales did the thing. Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: folks wanted to get into that justice center and yeah,
Speaker 1: um so properly. That is episode one, and again this
Speaker 1: is you know, the Slave Slave but a lot of
Speaker 1: you know this pretty much every episode is going to
Speaker 1: deal with racism because it's kind of central to policing.
Speaker 1: But next episode we're gonna be talking about sort of
Speaker 1: policing more in the North and and kind of policing
Speaker 1: against against people we consider white, but who at the
Speaker 1: time the people who controlled the police might not necessarily
Speaker 1: have considered white. You know. That's that's Oh, I can't
Speaker 1: wait for this one because like at some point, man,
Speaker 1: I just feel like I know my work's gonna call
Speaker 1: me to do a some sort of deep dive in
Speaker 1: the construction of like pan ethnic terms like black or
Speaker 1: white and what the hell that means? Like, you know,
Speaker 1: even even hearing like the who is the Milo boy?
Speaker 1: What was his name? Milo? Yeah? Whatever his name is
Speaker 1: him talking about like this our country was made for
Speaker 1: the advancement of white men, And I'm like, no, wasn't,
Speaker 1: because there was no such thing as white man when
Speaker 1: y'all got here, and you you ain't even you don't
Speaker 1: even want the Irish here. That's the northern part of
Speaker 1: the same island, for crying out loud, so like you're
Speaker 1: looking at them, you don't think it's still people in
Speaker 1: this world that don't think Italians are white, Like I
Speaker 1: just what the hell are you talking about? You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like so you don't even know what
Speaker 1: white means? You know? So I love what you're gonna
Speaker 1: go to next, because just like you have to remember
Speaker 1: again it's a construct like y'all made y'all made that up.
Speaker 1: So we'll talk about that in part two. Prop you
Speaker 1: want to plug some plugules before we roll out? Man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, everything for me, it's prop hip Hop uh
Speaker 1: dot com that's my app mentioned, just all of it.
Speaker 1: Prop hip Hop doing a fun thing on Friday's called
Speaker 1: poor Gami Friday's where I basically just make a make
Speaker 1: a single cup of like pour over coffee with a
Speaker 1: buddy on Instagram and we feature like yeah, and we
Speaker 1: feature like a local roaster, uh from wherever, like offer
Speaker 1: discounts and like. And since since this last you know, uprising,
Speaker 1: we've been featuring like coffee roasters you know, owned by
Speaker 1: by persons of color. Um did just support just support
Speaker 1: good coffee, you know what I'm saying. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of a fun thing. I'd i'd plug on this one.
Speaker 1: Since I get to come back three times, I get
Speaker 1: to pick what I'm gonna plug, you know. Yeah, yeah awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well check that out. Check out Prop and his his
Speaker 1: wonderful music on his YouTube channel. Um and uh what
Speaker 1: propaganda people should know if they look for something at it. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: you know what, actually I would say, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought that up, So let me save
Speaker 1: all y'all the d m s you're gonna give me. Okay,
Speaker 1: at some point, I don't already answered the question you
Speaker 1: find at want a personal answer for in one of
Speaker 1: these videos or interviews, so like, so just you know,
Speaker 1: check the YouTube. Yeah, I'm saying, uh, just just it's
Speaker 1: it's probably there. We at some point we've talked about it.
Speaker 1: So I'm just just just go ahead and put that out,
Speaker 1: all right, folks. Um, Well we will be back like
Speaker 1: sucking four more times at least to talk about more
Speaker 1: times American police, um and where they came from. So
Speaker 1: I hope everybody enjoys this series, UM, and I hope
Speaker 1: folks pass it along to um friends and family who
Speaker 1: might uh think that policing just needs a little bit alike.
Speaker 1: Just gotta like just gotta like off its face and
Speaker 1: we'll be back. We'll be fine. You can't go back
Speaker 1: to it being good. It was always ship rethink this thing,
Speaker 1: you know, and like and and and I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna come back to this a bunch of times in
Speaker 1: this episode, got it, And I'm gonna come back to
Speaker 1: this a bunch of times. But like I hope people
Speaker 1: are hearing that, like almost not almost literally, all of
Speaker 1: our institutions we just made them up, like they're made up,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, at some point in time
Speaker 1: we made they don't exist in nature like we made
Speaker 1: them up. So if you have a bad idea in
Speaker 1: any other part of your life, you stop doing the
Speaker 1: bad idea and you try to make a better one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can. We can have a society where like, if
Speaker 1: someone commits murder, there's somebody who's job at is to
Speaker 1: like figure out who did that and like make sure
Speaker 1: they don't get to keep doing. We we can have
Speaker 1: that we don't have. We can have that without having
Speaker 1: a dude who feels empowered to choke a man for
Speaker 1: nine minutes. We have to have You don't have to
Speaker 1: have both. You mean to tell me that thought has
Speaker 1: never crossed your mind that the person next takes care
Speaker 1: it is homeless guy for loitering, who's just by virtue
Speaker 1: of his existence is breaking it all. And the same
Speaker 1: guy and the same tool needs to deal with the
Speaker 1: acts murderer like you. You mean to tell me that
Speaker 1: that takes the same people. Yeah, Like countries that have
Speaker 1: people who like make sure there aren't drunk drivers on
Speaker 1: the road, and the people who do that job don't
Speaker 1: have guns and don't get to like throw people in
Speaker 1: prison and ruin their lives and search them for drugs
Speaker 1: and plant drugs on them, Like you don't you can
Speaker 1: have people whose job is like, yeah, we should make sure,
Speaker 1: you know, we should have some eyes on traffic because
Speaker 1: like that's that's a big thing. Like somebody should be
Speaker 1: like keep an eye on that ship without the other stuff.
Speaker 1: Legally go into a woman's house while she's sleeping and
Speaker 1: murder her. Maybe we don't need no knock raids at
Speaker 1: all for any reason. That's a bad idea, Like why
Speaker 1: like who just keeps? Who just holds onto bad ideas?
Speaker 1: Just like it's a bad idea, Like let's just think
Speaker 1: of another one. Yeah, shame we can't change. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: right for more bad ideas, come back on on Thursday.
Speaker 1: Well we'll talk about um, talk more about cops. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, that's us for now. Goodbye Behind the Police
Speaker 1: is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
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