The Claim That American Police Started as Slave Patrols Has a 1,000-Year Problem
Spend enough time on Instagram or TikTok and you will encounter it: the confident, authoritative claim that American law enforcement — the sheriff, the city police department, the whole institution — was invented in the antebellum South to catch runaway slaves. The videos present it as buried history that the mainstream doesn’t want you to know. It gets shared as proof that policing was never about public safety to begin with, that it has slavery in its DNA, that the badge is just a slave-catcher’s badge with better branding. ...