American policing descends from slave patrols created in the 1700s.

Evidence

The first official slave patrol was created in South Carolina in 1704, following rumors of a planned rebellion. As the historian Sally Hadden writes in her comprehensive study Slave Patrols, colonists already fearful of attack by the Spanish in Florida concluded that they needed two military forces: “a militia to repel foreign enemies, and a patrol to leave behind as a deterrent against slave revolts.” Every militia captain would select a group of men under his command to serve as patrollers, a separate unit that was responsible for enforcing slave codes. Patrollers were required to hunt fugitives and rebellious enslaved people and to visit every plantation at least once a month; there they invaded slave cabins, confiscating any items they believed to be stolen, as well as anything they judged could be used as a weapon. … By the late 1720s, slave patrolling in the Carolina colony had become a fundamental part of the militia’s regular duties. Virginia and North Carolina soon created their own slave patrols, and by the mid-eighteenth century, colonial authorities there had transformed groups of white settlers, who were recruited and handsomely rewarded, into a militarized law enforcement organization that, as Hadden notes, was primarily engaged in “watching, catching, or beating black slaves.” Patrollers enforced slave codes and routinely broke into the homes of enslaved people, aggressively searching them and their quarters and subjecting women to sexual violence. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 356

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s interest in infrastructure origins: slave patrols are an American civic infrastructure whose founding purpose shapes its DNA.
• XREF: connects to: Colonial surveillance techniques developed abroad were imported home to police domestic populations. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 753