“The BPD [Baltimore Police Department] is giving a 2 day no choice workshop to its order followers to hammer home that the origins of policing are slave catching. I do not recall you ever pointing to this as the origins here in plantation pretend, was it not more pointed at factory worker organizing... My gut just said that the cop-slave catcher thing is somewhat a stretch.”

-Woke Dervish, text 5/28/21

Woke one of the Sharp Whirl, this question strikes to the heart of what it is to be an American, and that is to believe in lies. The art of American history is primarily the means by which certain facts are brought into exclusive focus so that other facts may remain unknown. The art of the lie in America is based on omission and is buttressed by denial.

As for the origins of police activity and force in America, although it seems that I am somehow the foremost actual authority on this subject, I know very little about it. I simply know of more threads that gathered there than the willful liars or duped buyers of slackademia can fathom.

The answer to this questions would take books that I will not write. The truth will never be known in this nation of the lie because the American mind cannot trace or gather the many threads of reality in such a way as to form a perception in his mind that is congruent with the American fantasy. People who live in the Ideological Realm of Should, just cannot understand the living conditions of Mere and Actual Is and are especially befuddled by the complexity of Ancient Was. I would suggest accessing my Hobo History talks with Incognegro for a more general survey.

In the U.S., the fist police institution to operate along the lines of what we understand to be a blue-suited and heavily armed brutal army of civic occupation was the Pennsylvania Coal and Mining Police, who did act as industrial slave catchers, but mostly as corporate bullies.

Let's trace a side thread—state Natural Resources and Federal Land Management police and Agents trace their lineage directly to the medieval huntsman of Europe and have the same purpose, limiting land use to the will of the ruling elite.

What I would like to do now, is remind the reader that escaped slave ads I have examined in Pennsylvania and Maryland from the 1730s to 1820 are roughly 95% notices that slaves of European descent ran away, with about 5% of African descent. However, since the idiot American mind thinks that the only slaves in Plantation America were those 5% of African genetics, the bulk of the slave catching activity goes effectively undocumented. In Virginia the ratio was roughly 50% of each racial slave type.

We are told that the “whites” were “indentured servants” though no such term was in use during the period under discussion—so the Sacred Lie of American Omission is dressed up with the drapery of Academic Pre-Cognition.

Since the argument is lost before the idiot American mind even begins to process the shimmering sliver of the Lie balanced against the unseen and decayed tonnage of the Truth, let us simply agree with the BPD propaganda, for, as you will see, many threads of modern policing derive from slave catching. The dates are simply times in which the form of slave catching was in heavy use, not necessarily the time of its origin.

-1380s, England: knights, priests, Sheriffs, huntsmen, tax collectors and men-at-arms were all employed to recover and punish runaway “bondmen” providing the basis for the main theme in American private and federal police work, the pursuit of runaway slaves as enemies of the realm. So, the very gay Batman comic in which he is the Dark Knight, working with the police, has a literal noble pedigree. Heroes against these early police state actors were men such as John Ball and Wat Tyler, unknown martyrs against the Police State.

-1500s, Scotland: kid-nabbers or kidnappers, who trafficked in child rape and labor, even snatching children from their parents beds up into the mid 1700s.

-1540s, America: conquistadors, under Navarez, Coronado and Soto, who formed the first chain gangs of slaves in the Southern United States, although these did not do road work, but carried baggage and served as a chain of translators to babble in many languages, “The hair-faced aliens with leg-coverings want the tears of the sun—please give them some!”

-1600-1700s, Atlantic and West Indies: sailors, mates, captains, marines and pressmen who abducted able seamen and even landsmen to labor as prisoners in the world's deadliest occupation and oversaw and conducted the massive shipment of slaves out of The British Isles, Europe and Africa to Shithole America.

-1700s, Europe: Grenadiers, elite soldiers in big hats who abducted men to serve as slave soldiers and recovered runaways from regular line units.

-1700s, England-America: gaol-keepers, gaolors, goalors and jailers, who provided the main strand of law-enforcement before dedicated police forces were developed to deal with gangs of industrial workers, who were beginning to escape in large bodies in Maryland around 1775. This strand is extant today, in one Tennessee municipality, where a young man I train in boxing worked as a corrections officer in a jail. These jailers were police officers in training, and no person could become a police officer until he had first served in the jail wrangling the slaves there. The gaol-keeper of old used informants to point out men who were masterless [and therefore criminals] and assist him in their abduction. He would be paid the auction price of the masterless men when they were sold into slavery. The primary activity of today's police officer, the checking of our identification and driver's license, is a direct evolution of the gaol-keeper demanding to see freedom papers and travel passes.

But that is not all.

-America, 1800s: Overseers, the original corrections officer, tasked with keeping runaways from happening. This man is now the corrections officer of the penitentiary or prison or holding jail of a large municipal center, like Central Booking in Baltimore or King County Jail in Washington State.

-America, 1800s: slave informants, such as the men who told Frederick Douglass' father/owner that he planned on running away, assisted the master and the overseer in arresting and punishing the restive slave, and were often rewarded.

-America, 1700s-1800s: slave patrols, were public defense militias who had to serve without pay to defend their community from the looting and rapine and rampaging of the unsecured masses of slaves owned by the super elite, who were exempt from serving on slave patrol. The nightly murder and crimes committed by the slaves of the rich, who had no stake in the community and seemed to share their master's contempt for non slave owners, reached such a crescendo in Maryland in the 1790s, that by the 1830s slave owners had been mostly pressured and legislated into freeing their chattel.

-America, 1600-1800s: Slave catchers proper began as Indian warriors in the 1600s and as men of European extraction began to learn woodcraft between 1680 and 1760, such men would serve as bounty hunters employed by the masters of runaways. The marshal and bounty hunter of the Storied Far West of the late 1800s thus had his roots in the Westos, Delaware, Susquehannock and Shawnee warriors who were the man-hunters of Plantation America.

Note: Slave catcher activity was the crux cause for shattering the Union in 1861. There were no such things as slave catching bands, as they were prohibitively expensive. If you can pay ten men to capture one laborer, why not pay one laborer instead? Individual slave catchers or pairs were the rule, men who sometimes with the owner of his quarry, would appear in an often distant municipality, demanding the return of his runaway property. This gave him the authority, to also demand that local men take up arms and help capture or even kill the runaway and the people who were giving him shelter, often family members of free status. A local gaol-keeper might be compelled to assist as well, though there would be no profit in it.

Imagine of you will, if the NFL was a slavery ring and Aaron Rogers ran away, to our town, and then some evil, narrow-faced bounty hunter and a fat-cat rich man showed up demanding that we beat Aaron's ass and toss him in the back of a van, a van that we will have to rent from the dealership!

Today, those lawful actors that trace their activity lineage back to actual slave catchers, are bounty hunters, U.S. Marshals and FBI agents, not municipal police officers.

Municipal police have many origins. However, the main threads in municipal policing were:

-Knights, sheriffs, constables and other enforcement officers of the law

-Gaol-keepers who were more man-trapper than man-hunters

-Company police and strike breakers used to oppress and suppress gangs of rowdy, fit, tough, industrial workers

These three order-keeping necessities of Late Medieval Times and Early Modernity, in the main, evolved into the American Municipal Police Force, a standing army of internal occupation dedicated to our behavioral, rather than labor-based, bondage.