Slavery, Mass Murder and the Birth of American Policing

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hello everyone, I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards,
which is normally a show about the worst people in
all of history, and I guess it's still is. But
but recent world events, UM have compelled us to create
a special mini series, Behind the Police, where we are

(00:26):
going to be giving a detailed history of American policing,
all the good, the bad, and mostly mostly the bad
and the ugly. It's it's mostly bad, uh and and
mostly ugly. Um and uh. In order to help me
give this story and tell it to the world, my
guest today uh and for the next couple of weeks

(00:48):
UH is Jason Petty, better known as Propaganda Jason. You
are a hip hop artist, UM and a podcast host. UM.
And yeah, how are you doing? Man? Hey man? You know,
West West and the world don't fire. But NASCAR stopped
flying Confederate flags. So that's a thing, you know what
I'm saying. Yeah, it's in a weird moment right now.

(01:11):
I just like like snag a picture of and just
and like send it to yourself in two thousand eighteen
and go what stupid director wrote this storyline? You know,
it's it's wild, and like the wildest thing about it
is that I think we were all at this point
of getting like just completely exhausted by like this constant

(01:33):
parade of like bad news and like political malfeasance and
like horrible things being done by people in power, and
nobody was able to get on the same page about
really anything. Um. And then all of a sudden, you know, um,
after the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in that video
came out for like the first time in a long time,

(01:55):
almost everyone, like most people got broadly onto the same page. Like,
I mean, we weren't even on the same page about
a virus. Like it's like something something that I will
give no ships about what political stance you are gonna
kill you either way. We couldn't even agree on that. Yeah,
But then I was like we could agree that black

(02:16):
lives matter for real. That's what we finally agree it on. Yeah,
it's good, broadly good. Like I'm kind of I'm recording
this from outside of the what will surely probably not
exist by the time this airs, but was briefly the
the the Seattle the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. I went
to check that out for a couple of days. Yes,

(02:37):
it's been wild. I wish you could talk to me
a little more about like there's got to be some
sort of version of behind the bastards that's that is
the Northwest. Yeah, it's like it's definitely a tale of
two cities up there. Yeah. Yeah, I've been getting tear
gas in Portland for days, and they were in Seattle too,

(02:58):
but then they succeeded in getting their police to like
pull out of a precinct um, which is wild, and
now the cops are back, so it didn't last. But like, yeah,
and you've been on the ground in Los Angeles some
of the protests, if I'm not mistaken, Yeah, how have
you felt about that? Dude? It's like obviously the sheer

(03:18):
volume I mean because I was here for the you know,
for the l A riots, you know what I'm saying.
So the sheer volume of people, the amount of of
um sustained energy has been like maybe something's different, you
know what I'm saying. Um, the amount of diversity in
the streets has been like yo, maybe I guess after

(03:39):
having to like take it to the streets since the
the day after Trump was elected. You know what, I'm
saying from the woman's marts all the way to the
school shootings, to the to the climate, to the like
there's no to the the damn um uh Muslim band.
It's just like at some point we were just like, okay,
enough is a day, m enough um. But I like

(04:03):
to be fully transparent. I think I echo like the
sounds of of of people who've been in like justice
work for a while, where like your arms are still
kind of folded on the side, like Okay, are you
gonna be here next week? Yeah? You know what I'm saying,
It's like you like this song, or are you gonna
stay for the concert? Like this is a long concert,
you feel me? Yeah, Yeah, it's a long And I

(04:25):
guess that's kind of why we're doing And yeah, after
like two weeks almost in the streets reporting on that,
I kind of felt like the thing to do was
to try to um because I guess it's I think
it's wrong to say that we're all on the same page.
We're all reading the same book, and the book is titled, Uh,
the police are murdering a whole ton of black people, um,

(04:45):
and also doing a bunch of other messed up stuff.
And it feels like for a lot of folks, the
first time they opened that book was because they they
went out to a protest and they got tear guests,
and sudden we were like confronted by the violence of
American policing. So I think now is a good time
to go into a really deep history of American policing

(05:06):
and let people know like where all this came from,
because this didn't Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's so there's I
and I and I know what I love about your show.
It is I think why it reigned so true with me.
It was like it's the stuff that like we we
might be looking at the same dumpster fire, but I'm
looking at it with a hundred years of history to know,

(05:27):
like I actually know what I'm looking at, you know
what I'm saying. And like y'all think I'm making this
ship up, Like I'm not, Like I swear to you,
I'm not making this up. Like just learn more and
you'll stare at this dumpster fire like I am. Yeah,
so let's stare at the dumpster fire. Um and and
and really just yeah, I'll get into the story. Um.

(05:51):
As a side note, your camera is phenomenal, like what's
up with this depth of feel on your That's great, man,
it's like blurry in the back. Look at this. Yeah yeah,
that's so people don't see all of my all of
my illegal artwork that's behind me. Yeah yeah, yeah, very erotic.
Yeah you see my bed here, and by magic I

(06:17):
mean snoring and my daughter kicking me and my life
in our roofs anyway, yeah yeah yeah, so, um yeah,
I guess let's get into it. So obviously, the idea
of law, of their being laws that people could break
and be punished, that's existed for a while. We all
remember hearing about hammer Abi's code and stuff like back
in back in school. Um, but throughout history a surprising

(06:39):
amount of society is probably most of them have lacked
anything that we would recognize as like a police force
and like an organized and kind of a modern sense
of the word. Like a lot of times you'd have
like the you know, you'd have a military that would
enforce some rules for like the king or whoever, but
you didn't have like beat cops rolling around, you know,
scanning neighborhoods. Now, the ancient egyp has had something that

(07:00):
might be seen as kind of a predecessor to the police.
It was a small, dedicated force regarding the tombs of
the wealthy as well as their businesses. Um, which will
be something of a pattern throughout the episode. Aca convince everything.
Let's just gonna do that's the pattern anyway going, including
policing for the police. You can't they can't be winners. Yeah, yeah,

(07:23):
it's not all writing. Yes. Um. So, some ancient Greek
city states, including Athens, had what you might call a
proto police force um as well. And in Athens this
force was kind of geared towards protecting markets and keeping
an eye on untrustworthy foreigners. So it's a little bit like,
you know, a mix between normal police and ice. Um. Now,

(07:43):
this was not considered to be an honorable job, as
historian P. K. Bailey noted in the ninety lecture quote,
even in the enlightened democracy of Athens in the fifth
century BC, no free citizen was prepared to serve in
that capacity, and such police force as there was, consisted
of foreigners with the status of slaves who were the
property of the states in Greece. Generally, very few of

(08:04):
the states seemed to have made any provision at all
so far as is known for the ordinary policing of
their cities, though the state of Sparta certainly had a
very efficient system of secret police. This is really interesting
to me, especially because of what comes next. So Sparta
really seems to be like some of the first police
that are very similar. You can draw a direct line

(08:27):
from the Spartan secret police to the origins of American policing,
which we're gonna we're gonna get to it a little bit,
because the secret police of Sparta existed for one purpose
and one purpose only, and it was to clamp down
on any hint of rebellion from the vast majority of
the nation's populace. See only about one in seven. Spartans
were like the guys from three hundred, right that everybody knows,

(08:48):
Like that with the abs and the and the spears.
The vast majority of the population were helots. They were slaves. Basically,
they were they were slaves. They were just straight up slaves.
Like it was a slave empire. Sparta was. The vast
majority of people in the country were slaves, and the
Spartan like leadership and the Spartan like citizens spent all
of their time terrified of slave rebellions. That's why the

(09:08):
Spartan army didn't actually leave the country all that often
because like they get up risen. Yeah. So they had
all these slaves and they had to like clamp down
on them, and they established a secret policing force called
the Crypteia, which was made up of young men who
had just finished the basics of their military terry training.
So once a year, Sparta would elect a council of

(09:28):
five e force or leaders, and as part of a ritual,
these forms would begin their term by declaring war on
the Helot population. They did this every year, like every year,
we declare war on our slaves. So the Spartans had crips,
is what you're telling me. They did. They did Yeah again, Cryptiae,
the crypt So they had crips. So that studio was

(09:48):
the boys in Blue, I'm telling you, man, like this
stuff has been going on for a long time. The
other boys in blue, and it was trying to keep
the slaves. They were trying to keep the slaves from rebelding. Everybody,
tuck that back in, Tuck that away for a second.
Keep that in your head, keep that in your head.
So every year these elected leaders, you know, formally declare

(10:08):
war on the Helots, and it's something of like a
ritual like to and this ritual is based around like
keeping them from rebelling. So the Cryptania would be sent
out to wander barefoot, armed with knives into the countryside,
and they would seek out the strongest and the smartest
of the Helots their slaves, and they would murder them
in the night, calling the population of any potential leaders
that like, every year we go out, we find the

(10:28):
smart ones and we kill them so that they can't
rise up against us. How does he fishing telling me
this is the pinnacle Western civilization? You're trying to be okay,
got it? It does make it kind of appropriate when
you could a lot of American police officers were like
spartan helmet patches. Now it's like, okay, little on the

(10:53):
nose fellas. Yeah. Now I should note here that there's
actually there is quite a lot of historical debate about
the Cryptia. Some scholars agree with defining them as a
secret police as a force to keep the Helots in
line through regular murder. Victor Davis Hansen, who's a pretty
prominent like pop historian, compares them to the Gestapo, but
other historians will argue that the Cryptia were less of

(11:15):
like a policing force and more of a guerrilla military
unit and auxiliary to the regular Spartan military. That's sort
of um also acted as kind of an advanced training
program designed to blood new warriors by like giving them
easy kills to help them get over any hesitation they
might have to do violence. And I don't think these
two views are necessarily in conflict. The Cryptaia seemed to
have been like a dedicated guerilla armyment to suppress descent

(11:38):
against the ruling class by doing violence to the impoverished
majority who produced all of Sparta's value. In this they
fulfilled a role not very different from a lot of
police forces in Western history. He can't make this stuff up.
You can't. We can't make this pretty. I may myself today.

(12:01):
I was like, Okay, I'm gonna do a longer meditation,
I'm gonna do some yoga. I am going to prepare
myself for the amount of things you've ben to tail
me right now. And none of it were because I
still picked a fight with my wife today. It was like,
I'm sorry, babe, it's we're about to talk about the
ancient police. Okay, so I'm sorry, but and for the record,

(12:27):
fuck the ancient police, like you know what ancient n
w A like you feel me. The Roman Republic didn't
have any kind of like formal national police force for
most of its history. In Rome, which is like the
biggest city in the ancient world, for most of you know,
the time that it was like kind of the center
of the world, lacked anything that we would describe as

(12:49):
like police. As Rome grew to become the largest city
and you know it's era, crime became an increasing problem.
The wealthy were able to use vast networks of clients.
Romans had this weird system where by like, if you
were rich, you gave money to a bunch of people
who had less, and they all had to like kind
of have your back, Like everybody had a posse and
ancient that's the way to look at like every yeah,

(13:10):
everybody had like a big squad um. And so the
wealthy were able to use these big squads to like,
you know, defend themselves from aggression and murder their political enemies,
protect them in the streets and stuff. Um. Meanwhile, organized
criminals and gangs did basically the same thing, and there
wasn't really a big difference between like the rich and
their squads and like criminal gangs that were kind of
the same thing. Um. Now, victims of crimes had to

(13:33):
either get revenged themselves or whip up a mob of
their fellow citizens to help them in this task. There
was a lot of whipping up of mobs in ancient Rome. Um, Yeah,
why do I I could just it just makes it
just it just tracks like that just tracks so well.
You know, Yeah, we've always been the same species. We

(13:54):
say we are the same. But one of the best
my history professor in college, one of the best thing
he said to me was like, if you want to
know what happened in history, thing about what you would do? Yeah,
it's just us, then what would you do? It's history
is us them? Yeah, And in in ancient Rome, like
the kind of graffiti networks they had really did act

(14:15):
a lot like social media does, to the extent that
like kind of famous and powerful people would use like
graffiti to get like shiploads, like to to kind of
do the same thing that like people who get piste
off online and have a following can do, like like
but with a literal mob as opposed to I'm literally
cancel you ancient style. Yeah, I'm gonna cancel you by
having four hundred dudes stab you repeatedly. We're talking about

(14:39):
the government. I mean it was it was just kind
of everyone. Yeah. Uh. Seneca, a Roman philosopher in this period,
described street life in Rome this way. Some things will
be thrown at you, some will hit you, um, which
you know. Yeah, yeah, Rome's first emperor or Augustus, when

(15:00):
like the whole republic thing ended, he established what's generally
recognized as the city's first police force, and it would
be fairer to describe them as like a fire department
that also did some policing. Um. They were called the
vigils um, and they stood watch at night and mainly
kind of looked out for fires and attempted to stop
the city from burning down because that was like a
huge problem in Rome. And the vigils were armed though,

(15:22):
and they were drilled in a similar way to soldiers.
You know. They used artillery to shoot dampening materials onto fires.
But they also had the right to enforce laws and
had the right to enter private homes to capture thieves,
returned runaway slaves, and generally insure order UM, so kind
of like a fire department mixed with the police force. UM.
And this system didn't really spread widely throughout the Roman Empire,
but broadly similar systems were established in a number of

(15:45):
European cities intermittently over the centuries. The night watchman was
kind of the most common way that this would this
would wind up happening. And these were just, you know,
in most of Europe, members of the community who like
would rotate through the job of defending their town or
city from external threats like invaders and internal threats like fire.
Their primary job was to give alarm to kind of

(16:06):
get like everybody together so that they could deal with
whatever problem, you know, happened in the night. And most
of what we today would recognize as law enforcement was
handled by citizens watching over their own communities. The English
called this kin police, as it was generally seen as
the responsibility of individual families to watch out foreign police
their family members. Right. You know, there's not nothing centralized

(16:27):
really in a lot of this period, you know, the
Middle Ages and ship whatever you wanna call it. Yeah,
so starting yeah, yeah, yeah, like watch your people. Yeah, hey, man,
get your boy, get your boy. Whose man's Is this
what I'm saying? Yeah, I love it. Yeah it makes sense, Yeah,
it kind of does. Yeah. So, starting in the Middle Ages,

(16:47):
like kind of the Late Middle Ages, English communities began
to develop something called the frank pledge system. Now, this
was a structure by which small groups of men could
enforce the law in communities, and it was based around
tin man groups called tithings, which were themselves elves grouped
into hundreds, and then shires, which were similar to modern counties.
So if you wondering where like the lord of the rings,
why they called the shire. That was like an old

(17:07):
English word for a county. Yeah. Now the person who
was in charge, yeah, yeah, that's there. So the person
who was in charge of all of the different tithings,
those tin man groups in a shire was called the
shire reeve. And that's where the word sheriff comes from.
Is like the head of this like shire wild kind
of community protection group, the shire reef, the shaff, and

(17:28):
that's why the sheriff's run the county exactly exactly. Yeah,
So that's where that comes back to. So yeah, it
makes sense. Yeah, and so far we're like, this isn't
something you can really like obviously, like the Spartan police
is terrible, but like this makes sense, Like, yeah, you
take care of your community, like everybody kind of un
rotates through it. Share. Yeah, hard to be angry at it.

(17:50):
Individuals within tithings were expected to apprehend criminals and bring
them to court, and shire Reeves oversaw their work. When
Europeans began, you know, genociding and conquer ring North America,
they brought variants of this system and other kind of
similar systems developed in other parts of Europe with them.
Policing in you know, the colonies which you know, we're
broadly referring to like mainly North America here, Like I'm

(18:12):
not really I don't have the time to like talk
about like what went on in South America, Central America.
We're talking about like kind of the particularly the English
speaking colonies that started on the East coast. Um Policing
in those colonies fell into two broad categories, known to
historians as the Watch and the Big Stick. And I'm
going to quote next from a paper on the history

(18:32):
of US policing by Dr Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University. Quote.
The Watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary
duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a
night watch in sixteen thirty six New York and sixteen
fifty eight in Philadelphia, and seventeen hundred. The night watch
was not a particularly effective crime control device. Watchman often

(18:52):
slept or drank on duty. Well, the watch was theoretically voluntary,
many volunteers were simply attempting to evade military service, were
cons grips, forced into service by their talent. We're performing
watch duties as a form of punishment. And I have
to say again, last night, I was kind of hanging
out in the Autonomous Zone and I volunteered to do
a shift on the night watch, and I was definitely drinking.

(19:15):
You know. We we look in in the hood, you
know again, like the part we build it's called hood politics.
And one of the things is like I just feel like, Okay,
no matter how unique are experiences, like you said, we're
kind of we're still all the same species. Right. So
when we talk about like, um neighborhood pigeons, right, I

(19:40):
mean there's there's there's a there's a misogynistic version of that,
and then there's the other part that we would call
the pigeon stool, which is like the guy who's supposed
to sit at the edge of the street to make
sure to see if the cops are coming. Right, So
that's your pigeon stool, right, and he's drunk all the time.

(20:00):
It's drunk, like he falling asleep, and it's just so.
And the hope is to do that because it's the
easiest because it's odds are nobody coming, you know, So
you could just sit over there and just kind of
like he's trying to holler girls like, you know, it's
just just on the one off chance that the police

(20:21):
actually come around. I mean, that's your life. But most
of the time that's not gonna happen. Yeah, let's just
sit there and drink and smoke. Yeah, keep an eye
on things, but not all that. Make sure you just
make sure mama not coming, you know. So these kind
of watch systems that started, you know, hitting you know,

(20:43):
the colonized Northeast were more similar to the pseudo police
system that you saw in ancient Athens than anything else.
Um and you know, kind of the the other side
of this was the big stick system. And this was
the first real example of for profit policing. We're not
gonna go into tremendous de tale about it in this episode.
We're going to talk about it a lot or in
our next episode, but I'm gonna give an overview here.
So in a you know, we're when we're talking about

(21:06):
the colonies, we're talking about a very unregulated market for
law enforcement in a lot of ways. You know, there's
not an organized, centralized police, but there are merchants who
have a lot of property, and those merchants want to
make sure their property doesn't get stolen um, either when
it's in transit or when it's in a shop. And
so you know, they have they have constables in these towns,
and constables are either appointed, um kind of in like

(21:27):
a rotating basis, so like you do your your brief
period of time as constable, or you're elected to be constable.
It was kind of they did it a couple of
different ways, um. And as a general rule, because constables
weren't really paid um, like, they had to develop services
that they would sort of sell to people in order
to make the job worthwhile. So sometimes they acted acted

(21:47):
as land surveyors. They would verify the accuracy of scales,
but they would also get paid directly by the merchants
they were protecting, And so as a general rule, these
constables were really just hired muscle for the business leaders
in these communities. Um, and they would be paid by
the people. Um. You know, they weren't being paid by
the state to enforce justice. They were being paid by

(22:08):
people with money to enforce debts, to punish theft, and
to even intimidate rival business owners. Right like that, yeas
they're good. They're hired yeah um and obviously, as you
caught by calling them hired goons, this was not seen
as an honorable job. People don't really want to be
a constable, right like. There was no blue lives like

(22:29):
back the yeah so. Historian Gary Potter notes that constables
and night watch officers quote didn't want to wear badges
because these guys had bad reputations to begin with, and
they didn't want to be identified as people that other
people didn't like. There was a strong resistance with early
law enforcement of being identified as law enforcement because nobody

(22:50):
liked you. Now, some towns in colonial North America made
service in the watch compulsory. Rich people tended to pay
were people to take their shifts for them, and Potter
notes that these substitutes were usually quote a criminal or
a community thug. Yeah yeahs again it all tracks yeah

(23:14):
yeah yeah. In eighteen nine, back over in England, Sir
Robert Peel, who is the Home Secretary of England, introduced
the Bill for Improving the Police in and in and
Near the Metropolis. Now. The goal of this was to
take the air set system of watchmen and the like
and formalize them into a real police force, and the
London Metropolitan Police are generally recognized to be the very

(23:36):
first modern police department in history. Um And Peel he's
an interesting guy. He felt that the job of police
should be to prevent crime rather than to punish it,
because that's kind of what you know, all these constables
something got stolen, you like you'd get paid to go
like funk up the person who stole it, right, But
like they weren't really preventing crimes. So Peele was like,
what if we tried to stop crimes? Um And he
felt the best way to achieve that goal was with

(23:58):
regular visible patrols of off officers from a formal centralized
apartment with uniforms and ranks and a clear physical headquarters,
so that people like new those aren't just dudes, like
those are the police and they're like a part of
the state. Now. Peel felt that it was critical that
only calm, even tempered citizens should be police officers. He
felt they need again yeah what a thought. Yeah, yeah,

(24:23):
that one didn't really spread. Um. I don't know much
about the London police, but it didn't make it across
the pod. It just there's there's a few things that
they threw out the bay with the bathwater in this situation.
I get it, you don't want to have a you
don't want to have a king anymore, you know, you know,
like the t I get it, But like maybe having
a calm police voice wasn't a bad idea. Took part
of the magna carta. He was like, Yo, this that

(24:45):
this kind of seems like a good idea. Maybe Yah
should have taken that one too. Yeah, And I did
recently watch like again, the London police have done a
lot of messed up stuff too, even with some of
the recent protests. But I did watch that when they
threw the statue of that slaveholder into the bay in Bristol,
um into the channel. Um, I watched an interview with
like the local constable or whatever. He was like the

(25:05):
local police chief type guy in Bristol, because he was
being asked by the news like why he didn't stop it,
and his answer was basically like, well, you know, I'm
a cop, so obviously I'm not okay with property destruction.
But we had a choice to, like, like, our choice
was to either let it happen or like basically funk
up people to protect the statue. And I felt like
that would be bad for community trusting the police, reasonable attitude,

(25:28):
taking on your feet, man, like you feel me, like yeah,
and he's like, what do I care about the statue?
So um yeah. Peel had some other ideas too. Again,
he felt that like police needed uniforms with badges that
had visible display numbers. So he was the idea of,
like police should have badge numbers that you can identify.
If you're encounter a police officer, you can identify them.

(25:49):
He also felt that police should not carry firearms, and
again that's like still kind of broadly applied in a
lot of you know, English policing. Now, some of Peel's
ideas quickly spread. Obviously not the thing well we'll talk
about that again. Apart two American police didn't initially have guns. Um.
In eighteen thirty eight, though, the city of Boston became
the first US city to establish a modern police force. Now,

(26:12):
the creation of the Boston Police, which we'll talk about
a bit more in our next episode, was driven by
largely a capitalist necessity to protect the property of big business.
Boston merchants had been paying constables and the like to
protect their goods for years, and they pushed for the
establishment of a formal police force in order to shift
the burden of paying for this onto the public, arguing
that such a force would be for the collective good.

(26:33):
So now we the merchants still get our stuff protected,
but we don't have to pay every or we you know,
we pay a little bit, but we pay a lot
less because everybody is paying for these guys to protect
our stuff. Um. Yeah, So so that's interesting. Um. Now
we're we'll return to these Northern police and again our
second episode is going to cover more that because you know,

(26:54):
while the Boston Police at the first modern department in history,
the roots of many US police departments go back much further.
And I think a lot of folks have heard, you know,
through social media or whatever. In the last couple of
weeks as we've gone through this this uprising, UM the
idea that American police started out with slave patrols, UM,
and that's what we're going to talk about now, And

(27:14):
that's partly accurate. It's not fair to say that all
US police started a slave patrols because obviously in the
North they didn't have you know, slave patrols. Really they had, um.
You know, it was a different route in the North.
But in the American South, policing absolutely did grow out
of slave patrols. UM. And it you know, it came out.
And you can draw a line between the two because

(27:34):
obviously the first police departments in the North come out
of a desire from you know, people with money and
property and shops to protect their property. And in the
American South, policing also grew out of a desire for
people with money to protect their property, but that property
was enslave human human beings. Yeah, yeah, you know, who
doesn't establish slave patrols. Well, that's not I don't know, man,

(28:01):
I think you never know, bro, You never know, you
never know, man, Yeah, you know who historically might have
tried to establish police departments to protect this is I'm
not doing great with this. Hey you know who uh
that I got no neither, man, I'm sorry, we're going

(28:22):
to roll ads now, you can just simply go funk
the police. It's an odd break there, it is. There
we go, we are back. Uh yeah, so we're we're
we're getting into we're talking slave patrols. Now, we're talking
slave patrols. Yes. So the first slave patrol was created

(28:46):
in the Carolina colonies in seventeen o four and twenty
six years before Boston got its police force. And this
is again we're not we're not even North or South
Carolina yet. They hadn't gotten that far, but they knew
they wanted Carolina's Yeah, we were clear on that, and
they were clear that they wanted slave patrols in those
Carolinas and slave yeah sorry man. Yeah, firston I was

(29:11):
gonna go, OK, Carolina, but I was like, that's probably
not gonna land as well as Sweet Carolina. Sweet Carolina. Yeah,
I think you read the room right. Yeah. So slave
patrols had three jobs. To chase, down, apprehend, and returned
escaped slaves to their owners, and to discipline slave labors
via violence if they broke plantation rules. And to act
as an organized and constant form of state endorsed terror

(29:33):
in order to stop American slaves from revolting. Now, white
Southerners lived in pretty much constant fear of slave uprisings
the Haitian Revolution which started in sevente and again it's
very complicated the Revolutions podcast, But I think Mike Duncan
is his name, is a great job of breaking this down.
But the end result of it is that black enslaved
people rosed up and murdered many of their masters. And

(29:55):
they also, to make this very complicated, a lot of
their masters were also colored people. It's a very compliment twisted,
it's really twisted. Supremacy just really scrambles your brain, man, Yeah,
it sure does. Beside note about Haitians, did you know
that that's where the word zombie came from? I do. Yeah,
It's came from a zombie. Yeah, and it is. Yeah,

(30:18):
there's kind of like, I'm sorry, Sophie, it's history. I'm
just hoping he doesn't sing. She knows I'm going to
start singing the Cranberry song, Zombie. That's what that was triggered.
Job like this, sing to me again, please, Okay? It
is kind of neat. I don't know, neat maybe the
wrong word, but I do think like you can. I
don't know, maybe I'm I'm wrong about this, but it

(30:39):
seems like you might be able to draw kind of
a line and sort of the impetus behind or like
why kind of these like where the zombie sort of
myth came from an Haitian culture and it's like roots
to like the enslavement of of of of black bodies
and like kind of what the like what was kind
of depicted and get out like yeah, yeah it is.

(31:00):
There's a lot of there's a lot of ties to
that to where you're just like you're a shell of
who you are. So they're like they look like they're working,
but they look like there's nothing, no life behind their eyes,
and it's like, well fooled, duh, saying of course there's
not like this, is there anything more hopeless than where
I am right now? You know? Yeah? And it was
you know what what's scared white people so much about

(31:21):
the Haitian Revolution is that it kind of proved that like,
oh no, that light is still in there, Like you
can you can beat them down pretty bad, but like
it never goes away and like if we're not careful,
that'll happen here and they'll kill us all. Yeah. Yeah,
And and you know, unfortunately, the Haitian Revolution remains the
only successful slaveryholt in Western history, I think maybe the

(31:43):
only the most definitely the most successful slave rebellion anywhere
in history really because like at least based on like
the yeah, as as far as like Chattow slavery and
like the trans Atlantic slave trade, that's the only one
that worked. Yeah yeah, um, which is a it's I mean,
it's good that it worked. It's a bummer it didn't
work elsewhere. Um. But the memory of this one successful
uprising was was really lodged deep in the psyche of

(32:06):
white Southerners and it scared the ship out of them. Um.
And you can you can hear echoes of that in
the Slave patrollers Oath from North Carolina in and I'm
gonna I'm gonna read that now. Well wait, let me
take a deep breath for you do it? Yeah, Okay,
go for it. Yeah, I Patroller's name, do swear that
I will, as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons

(32:27):
among the slaves in my district, faithfully and as privately
as I can discharge the trust reposed in me as
the law directs, to the best of my power. So
help me God. So again, what they're looking for here,
they're they're they're trying to stop a rebellion. Um. So
searching for weaponry is kind of like one aspect of
how they did this. But really the thing they did
the most was beat the ever living ship out of slaves.

(32:50):
Yeah yeah. Um. Now, in most of the South, working
in these slave patrols was an obligation for white men,
similar to compulsory military service, and in most of the
slave states it was kind of broadly mixed between rich
people and poor people. So like a lot of slave
patrollers didn't actually own slaves because they were poor white dudes. Um,
But it was kind of seen as a broad duty
for white people to be in the slave patrols for

(33:13):
men to kind of rotate through. Um. Now, rich people
could in some places like basically pay a fine in
order to not volunteer in the slave patrol um. And
it was also not uncommon for like wealthy white dudes
uh and who were ironically the folks who owned the
most slaves, to pay to have poor white men take
their place. South Carolina was unique in allowing white women

(33:33):
to be called up for service and slave patrol. So
that's what, right, Yeah, you know what I'm saying. You know,
you pick your you pick your oppression, and you're just
like this is the one I'm gonna fight for. You know,
it's like cheering when the CIA puts a woman in charge.
It's like we did it. Yeah. I always say that,

(33:55):
Like I always say, you know, obviously reading the room,
I don't have to tell y'all this, but like just
the difference between white people and whiteness. You know, it's
like it's a it's a it's a thing. Whiteness is that,
it's a thing. It's itself just booked and you know,
cooked in a white supremacy. And from from my vantage point,

(34:18):
it's like just how detrimental that is to the psychology
of white people. Also, you know what I'm saying, like,
how yeah, like you just this rich dude hires this
poor dude, right, so now the poor dude feel like,
oh I'm a little more important now, you know what

(34:38):
I'm saying. But like, fam, you he don't dead man,
don't respect you, that man, don't love you. I will
make you think he don't like you, want you us,
you want of us, fool you know what I'm saying.
He's throwing your chump change to do a ship job
that he think he better people. Yeah, I'm gonna oppress
you so you can turn around and oppress somebody else

(34:58):
because the reality is I'm better than you. And it's
just like like it's scrambles. It just it just it's
turned your brain to a pretzel. Just just does. I'm
not a not a fan. I'm gonna be on record
about that, taking a bold stance, and I am a
fan of you two I the band and the two

(35:19):
people I'm looking at. I am a fan of all
all right anyway, So um so yeah, South Carolina, let
let ladies be in the slave patrols. And I'm not
sure if they ever actually really did serve in them,
because they kind of they had the option to pick
a mail from their family to go in as a substitute.
So I do think that happened more off and there
may have been someone in the road with us. I
I can't tell you, um, but yeah, in you know,

(35:41):
in some states they were kind of more of like
an air sat sort of force that was kind of
cobbled together. In some states they were a professional, paid
institution that was like really kind of formalized. UM. In
some states their membership was cold from local militias. So
you know, they were there were different, They weren't all
like there weren't a uniform thing, but kind of the
way they worked over the decades that slavery was, you know,

(36:05):
a factor in the South. Um, the way they worked
kind of did become formalized. Now. Historian Sally Hayden's book
Slave Patrols is probably the most comprehensive history yet written
about these the organizations, whatever you wanna call them. She
argues that in most cases, slave patrols consisted of members
of all social classes. White people were more or less
unified in their obligation to suppress the black population and

(36:26):
thus guarantee white supremacy. One piece of evidence Hayden or
Hadden sorry Um sites to support this is an eighteen
forty five letter from a former South Carolina governor to
a visiting English abolitionist, quote with us, every citizen is
concerned in the maintenance of order and in promoting honesty
and industry. Among those of the lowest class who are
our slaves, and our habitual vigilance or understanding armies, whether

(36:50):
if soldiers or policemen entirely unnecessary, small guards in our
cities and occasional patrols in the country ensure us a
repose and security known nowhere else. Yeah, that's how this
that's how this governor felt, or at least that's what
he wanted. And again he's talking to an abolitionist from
England here. So this is kind of the propaganda spend

(37:12):
of the slave patrols. People have to have an army
or police because our only danger is from these black people, right,
Like that's what he's saying. Yeah, that's wow, Yeah, interesting,
it's a brain pretzel man. Yeah, sure is. Yeah. So again,
in all states, slave patrols did the same basic work,
which included enforcing the curfew that slaves lived under, checking

(37:35):
which is talking about curfews, Yeah, curfew, checking traveling slaves
for permission passes, breaking up unlawful assemblies of slaves, and
of course searching for weapons. Just okay, yeah, I'm gonna
need you to I'm gonna need you to define its
arms here, you know, overseers, Like, what do you mean

(37:55):
by unlawful gathering. Yeah, this ain't my house, this ain't
my land. I'm not even my own it would I
would tell me what I mean, what do you get?
Where do you want us to stand? Where do you
want us to stand so that you don't feel scared? Yeah?

(38:15):
That really is what it like comes down to, like
where where do we what? What can we do to
not scare you? Do you want to just like turn
off after we're done farming? Like what do you like? Yeah?
Then then if that's the case, you should have just
hired animals. Yeah you know what I'm saying, Like, yeah,
that's how they felt, yes, exactly, Yeah, so yeah. Historian

(38:36):
Sally Hayden writes in her book Slave Patrols, quote, the
history of police work in the South grows out of
this early fascination by white patrollers with what African American
slaves were doing. Most law enforcement was, by definition, white
patrolmen watching, catching, or beating black slaves. And I do
find that really interesting because that's a through line right
up to today. This destination stopped. Yeah, never stop, you guys. Yeah,

(39:00):
And I like what she described that, this fascination with
what African Americans were doing, right, Like that's what the
origin of policing in the South. Have you heard of
the Have you heard of the phrase like and it's
it's in it's in like feminism also, but the phrase
the male gaze. Ye, yeah, so like in the same
same thing and like black activism spaces where it's like

(39:21):
the white gaze's just like what are you looking at
all the damn time? Like good lord, just make something
up yourself, Like why like just can you go do something?
Like you know, I think you said in one of
your one of the episodes because I am an actual
fan listeners, I listened to the show like that you
were just like if we could just give just like

(39:41):
white kids some cosplay, that's like you're allowed to just
like shoot things into an open space, and you know
what I'm saying, Like that maybe you wouldn't just be
so worried about like what I'm doing right now, you know, Yeah,
Like that's that's I I do think Warida, which is

(40:01):
you know, our plan to wall off Florida turning into
a free fire zone for just as once the war. Yeah,
as long as we like cover like Miami, Yeah, just
keep Miami. Yeah we can keep Mi Miami. Yeah, we
have to. We have to protect Orlando real quick so
that I can watch the NBA playoffs. All right, well
we're rapidly chiseling away. This is not fun, man, Orlando's

(40:26):
too far inland. Yeah, well we'll find a war state,
we you know, figure it out. Maybe the Panhandle. Can
we go like the Texas Panhandle? Nobody likes that, Yeah,
nobody likes turn Abilene into a free fire zone. Why
is Evelene a city anywhere? We don't need to be
a city here. Yes, yeah, I'd apologize to the Abilene listeners,

(40:49):
but there's no one listening from Abilene. Or you're in
Dallas now, could you realize Abilene shouldn't exist. Abilene the
place where you will absolutely get pulled over if you
drive through, just because there's nothing else for the constant,
nothing else to do. A Beelieen where as soon as
you're eighteen, we'll see you later. Yeah, get out of there.

(41:12):
So the violence meeted out by slave patrols was neither
random nor disorganized. Slave patrollers had the right to detain
and deterrogate and search slave quarters that were allowed to
seize property at will um, which was you could see
as kind of an early form of civil asset forfeiture.
They also had the right to punish black people on
the spot for infractions of slave laws. Now, physical punishment
could be dealt out via firearms, but was usually dealt

(41:35):
out by what we're called either negro whips or negro dogs.
And I probably don't need to explain what negro dogs were,
but they they're they're large bloodhounds that patrollers used both
to track down slaves and to horribly name them. Um.
And and that is the term that that historians used
for these is negro dogs, because that's what they were

(41:56):
called by. Yeah. Um. So we're talking mostly about slave patrols,
and there's there's a lot of other areas that could
get into detail, and I just don't have the time too.
But I should note here that slave patrols were not
entirely the first thing kind of like slave patrols to
exist in the United States, Even before slavery was really
common in the United States. U S settlers in New

(42:17):
England appointed Indian constables whose job was the police Native Americans,
often by violent terror. Um. And it's worth noting that
the St. Louis Police, who we are we'll be talking
about a bit at the end here were formed both
as a slave patrol and as a patrol to defend
white people against Native Americans. So that is a big
factor in a lot of this too. You know, some
of these areas, the native populations kind of had gotten

(42:40):
exterminated or pushed out by the time things formalized. But
in a number of particularly more quote unquote frontier places,
slave patrols also did a lot of violence against Native Americans,
and that is an important aspect of this. And even
in the North, where slave patrols weren't a thing, there
were you know, groups of vigilantes, well not quite vigilantes,
because they were sort of part of the government whose

(43:01):
job was to like, you know, do violence to Native people.
Um so that is a factor in all this as well.
Um So, yeah, if we want to be perfectly accurate,
the case is less as it's made on Twitter, that
US police started as slave patrols and more that US
police started as a series of armed groups whose central
purpose was to protect white people from non white people
via violence. That that would be yeah, that that's that

(43:25):
that Yeah, that gets your your critical race theory juices going.
The intersectionality of of oppression from the police, like it ain't.
Look yeah, they coming for you too. That's always been
That's always been my anset. Look you're chilling, They're coming
for you too, how you know. So the institution of

(43:45):
slave patrols evolved and formalized over time, and for a
look at how that worked, I think it'll be used
for us to zoom in on the case of my
home state, Missouri. Now, Missouri entered the Union in eighteen
twenty one as a slave state, and racism was obviously
baked into the new policy from the beginning. In eighteen five,
the new state passed a law banning any quote free
negro or mulatto from coming into the state under any

(44:08):
pretext whatsoever UM, which Oregon had a pretty similar but
partial rule after the Civil War. So like, yeah, how
racist Oregon started out as UM eight is also the
year that Missouri established its very first slave patrols. And
I'm going to quote now from a paper by Morehouse
College professor Larry Sproule. Quote, by eighteen forty five, these

(44:28):
patrols had permission to administer from ten to thirty lashes
to slaves found strolling about from one plantation to another
without pass from his master mistress. Or overseer or strolling about. Yeah,
you can't go for no walk? What's wrong with you?
And you could just as what you just said. It's like, oh, no,
I don't have a like I'm free. I don't have
a master. Yeah, well you ain't got no letter from

(44:50):
your master. No, sir, you're not listening to me. I
don't have a master. You're breaking the law. Well, then
you don't belong in this state. Yep, all right, I guess. Yeah.
So Missouri slave patrols worked at least twelve hours a month, um.
But also you know, some people worked a lot more,
and members received about twenty five cents per hour. Now

(45:13):
I should note here that the patrols weren't just randomly
accosting individual slaves. Enslaved humans in the United States resisted
their situation in a variety of ways, um and so
there were often, like, you know, minor little uprisings that
slave patrols were like working to put down. So slaves
would often take crops and livestock from from their masters.
They would burn fields and even plantation houses. They would

(45:34):
poison their masters, and they would attempt uprisings, um and so,
like the Spartan crypteia. Most of the work of slave
patrols was broadly what we would call counterinsurgency today. In
many rural counties in Missouri, um enslaved black persons were
the majority of people, and whites were well aware that
they had, you know, kind of a tiger by the tail.
Sprul continues quote. Southern whites developed a collective conscience and

(45:57):
political consensus to tightly control blacks within their midst. Slave
policing demanded accountability for every captive's whereabouts. A missing slave
was caused for grave concern, often causing panic. Fear of
insurrection made unauthorized blacks on roads are in the public square.
Hazardous racial features made blacks visible, suspect and vulnerable to
slave patrollers looking to catch h inward out of his

(46:18):
place without a pass. Just as blackness was the stigmatized
identification of bondsman, it also singled them out as suspects
and criminals. An enslaved African's phenotype marked them as a habitual,
dangerous class, requiring relentless supervision and policing to guarantee their submission. Yeah,
that also sounds familiar. Yeah, that sounds familiar. And we'll

(46:40):
be talking the term dangerous class is used constantly by
historians who study policing in the United States that we
will be talking a lot about the idea of dangerous classes. Yeah,
it's an important concept. You don't realize, like how that
like that that just poisonous stain like just that that

(47:01):
that weird DNA strand just like stayed with us to
the point to where you know you're I know you're
gonna get to it later. But like you know, black men,
black boys being treated like adults when your kids because
you already think we're more dangerous in your first gun.
I was the first time coll pulled a gun on me.
I was fourteen, and I was like, I didn't grown

(47:22):
on facial hair. I still had a squeaky voice. It
just was terrified. He was talking to me like I
was so hard and criminal, and I'm like, dog, I'm
a freshman. I'm a freshman in high school. Like I'm
scared that I'm like, my mom's gonna be pissed because
I'm home late. That's what I'm scared about. My mom
gonna be pissed that I was supposed to be home
at three five. I'm gonna get home at four fifteen,

(47:43):
she gonna be like, where the hell are you? You
know what I'm saying, So like I'm I'm tearing and
he's talking to me, like I know, I don't even
know the words he's saying. It's because you already see
us already as dangerous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah this
is this is like how that kind of starts and
evolves and how that ball gets rolling to the boulder

(48:04):
it is today. Um yeah, So for kind of another
another look at how people saw the slave patrols in
that time, Um, I want to go to a guy
named Basil Hall. He was a nineteenth century English traveler
and author. He visited the American South in eighteen twenty
nine and he wound up in Richmond, Virginia. His recollection
of how slave patrols were explained to him gives us
another insight into how white people talked about this institution

(48:27):
to other white people, which I think is compelling. Quote
in walking around, my eyes were struck with the unusual
site of a sentinel marching with his musket. My companion said,
and his companion is a local American Southerner, white Southerner. Obviously,
it is necessary to have a small guard always under arms.
It is the consequence of the nature of our colored population.
But it has done more as a preventative check than

(48:48):
anything else. It keeps all thoughts of insurrection out of
the heads of the slaves, and so gives confidence to
those persons amongst us who may be timorous. But in
reality there is no cause for alarm. The blacks have
become more and more sense of every day of their
want of power. After further inquiry, Hall noted, I learned
that there was in all these places in towns, a
vigorous and active police, whose rule is that no negro,

(49:09):
for example, is allowed to be out of doors after
sunset without a written pass from his master explaining the
nature of his errand if during his absence from home
he'd be found wandering from the proper line of his message,
he is speedily taken up and corrected accordingly. So that's
a lot of that's interesting, Like the idea that, like,
the police are here not just to keep keep black

(49:30):
people in line, but so that frightened white people don't
get scared of black people. That's an interesting part to me. Yeah. Yeah,
that's a good that yeah, that layer yeah yeah, man, Yeah, yeah,
it's like it's here, We're here for Karen's too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You can always call us, you can always call the cops. Scared. Yeah,

(49:53):
that's exactly what's going on here. So slaves patrols were
generally limited to pursuing escaped slaves within their own counties.
When a slaver or a group of slaves was fortunate
enough to be able to move further away from wherever
they were being held, bounty hunters, like slave bounty hunters,
generally took on the job of attempting to track these
slaves down, and these men were allowed across state lines,

(50:14):
and their work was supported by the Fugitive Slave Act,
which was passed in eighteen fifty as part of a
compromise to try and avoid a civil war. The law
mandated that all escaped slaves, if captured, be returned to
their masters, even if those slaves had escaped to a
free state. Abolitionists called this the Bloodhound Bill, after the
dogs that bounty hunters and slave patrollers used to track
down slaves. Solomon Northrop, author of the memoire Twelve Years

(50:37):
a Slave, gave one account of what it was like
to watch patrollers with dogs hunt down an enslaved black person.
In this case, it was not even an escaped slave,
but merely an individual who had broken his curfew. Quote.
One slave fled before one of these companies, thinking he
could reach his cabin before they could overtake him. But
one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him
by the leg and held him fast. The patrollers whipped

(50:59):
him severely. Yeah, I want to be careful. I don't
want to draw because it's it does a disservice to
like the horrific suffering of black people in this period
of time and today to to draw like too many
direct comparisons to some of the stuff happening now. But
it's not I don't think we can go without entirely

(51:21):
mentioning it that Like probably a lot of people listening
right now had violence done to them by police recently
for breaking curfew. Like that is interesting to me, Like
the the the session with curfew is a through line, right,
but like if you're out when you're not allowed to,
we get to funk you up. Like yeah, and it's funny,
like I was talking with you know, some of my friends, Uh,
my wife, even my daughter got My daughter is old

(51:44):
enough now to like go to protests, go to protests
with us, and you know, and kind of like kind
of do our own thing, and just us at this
point being like, okay, dude, are you serious. Like at California,
we just kept getting the alerts, like for five o'clock,
six o'clock, it just kept you kept getting Amber alerted
the thing, and it's like, dude, okay, bro get it

(52:06):
together all right and just talk to us later. But
it's kind of like we we're kind of like, is
this a joke? Man, Like, Okay, so it's a thousand
dollar fine, Okay, throw me in the pattiwagon. Thousand dollars fine,
it's fine. You know what I'm saying. Um, maybe you're
gonna rough me up a little bit, but I'm black,
I'm from Los Angeles. You've been roughing me up my
whole life, you know what I'm saying. So for us,

(52:28):
we were kind of like, it's kind of it's kind
of laughable, and then you go back to like, no,
it wasn't always laughable. Yeah, you know, like this was terror. Yeah,
this was absolutely terror, and I think they would have
It's interesting that it is talked about slave patrols as
like a counterinsurgency. But like the way they counter the

(52:50):
insurgency was my being terrorists terrorists. Yeah, and that's the
first police departments. So Spruit's article, which we've been quoting from,
includes a number of other firsthand accounts by enslaved persons
of the use of these these dogs, you know, these bloodhounds,
negro dogs. Um. Most of these accounts were taken down

(53:11):
during the Great Depression. Which is one of the coolest
things they did during the New Deal is the FDR
administration send a bunch of people out to interview former
slaves who are right now at that point quite old.
But that's where we get a lot of ore, a
lot of our like kind of formal stories of what
it was like to be an enslaved person this period.
So thank you the New Deal for that particular was
a good call. Um. So one of these people who

(53:33):
has interviewed noted quote, in every district they had about
twelve men they call patrollers. They write up and down
and round looking for inwards without passes. When slaves run away,
they always put the bloodhounds on the tracks. They had
the dogs trained to keep their teeth out of you
till they hold them up to bring you down. Then
the dogs would go at your throat and they'd tear
you to pieces too. After a slave was caught, he
was brung home and put in chains. M Yeah, so

(53:57):
we also have recollections of slave patrol members of their
use of dogs. One of these guys, and who was
a slave patroller in Louisiana in eighteen fifty seven, described
his method of work thus, Lee quote, If I can
catch a cust runaway in word without killing him, very good. Though.
I generally let the hounds punish him a little, and
sometimes give him a load of squirrel shot, which is
like a light shotgunload. If mild measures like these do

(54:20):
not suffice, I use harsher punishment. The moment the hounds
come close, they utter a hideous and mournful howl. Heaven,
pity the poor. And then he uses the in word again.
So yeah, not a not a good dude. I hope
he didn't make it out of that Civil War. Um. Yeah, yeah,
I hope that guy got Gettysburg. Yeah, I hope he

(54:41):
met Sherman or Grant or someone. Yeah, I'm about to
get his burg this transition. Yeah, let's get Easburg. These
ads like pickets. I don't know, just run as So
we're back, uh, and we're talking about the use of

(55:04):
dogs to enforce a regime based in terrorism. Um, otherwise
known as the American sound. That's kind of what it was. Yeah.
So the horrible wounds left by these these dogs fulfilled
the dual purpose. They served as a reminder of white supremacy. Um.
It is an easy way to identify troublesome slaves because

(55:25):
obviously there's a ton of slaves with horrible dog scars
and see other black people seeing those scars. Both would
be like white people have the power because like, look
at what they're how badly all these people got sucked up.
And also it was a way for the white people
to see like that guy's that guy's trouble, Like that
was your arrest record? Was the dog stars on your face? Yeah? Um,

(55:47):
he's the red sports car. Yeah that's what the teachers.
That's what the teachers tell you. You You know, you're kind
of a red sports car kid. Yeah. I decide what
the cops is gonna look for you because I expect
you to be fast, Like yeah, thanks, Miss Williams. It's
pretty obscure, deep cut like but still anyway, No nobody
tells white kids stuff like that. At least I didn't

(56:08):
hear anything, Like you didn't hear the red car vet
or the red sports car story. I mean I got
told as a as a young adult, I got told
not to buy a red car because the police cite
them for speeding more often. But like that that was
my thing. Yeah, well that's there. It is. Yeah, yeah,
it is weird that we tell people in general, like

(56:29):
don't stand out or the Yeah, I don't know, I
don't want to be leaders, don't stand out. So um.
By the onset of the Civil War, bloodhounds had grown
to become the single most reliable tool of oppression in
the arsenal of Southern whites. Like the dogs in particular
were like the way in which more than any other
tool white people like, I think even the lash was

(56:53):
used more as like a punishment, but like in terms
of a tool of actual oppression, Like the dogs were
really like the fucking thing. Um. And when the Civil
War started, the organized and militantmen of the slave patrols
were all too happy to turn their counterinsurgency skills to
use in a real war. One Union field officers scouting
through rebel lands in eighteen sixty two, reported hearing the

(57:14):
constant barking of hounds, which would have been turned towards
a new use searching for Union infiltraders. This officer described
dogs as the detective officers of Slavery's police. Confederate generals
also deployed bloodhounds on the front line. Black Union soldiers
were considered fugitive slaves in arms, and it was seen
as only logical that these Negro dogs could be used
to break their will and send them fleeing from battle.

(57:36):
You know that these Southern generals were like, they're so
scared of these dogs. If we use them against these
new black military units, it will make them all run away, right, Like,
clearly they these guys won't be able to handle, you know,
standing up to dogs in combat. Yeah. This was one
of many misconceptions that the things we're going to go
in that war. On October eighteen sixty two, the Battle

(57:57):
of Polka Taligo Bridge marked the first time Black soldiers
came face to face with the Negro dogs of slave
patrols in open combat. The black soldiers were the men
of the first South Carolina Colored Regiments, and their field
reports stated that the men met these dogs with bayonets
killed four or five of their old tormentors with great relish.
And I'm not normally a killing dogs person, but in

(58:19):
this case it's a good story. Yeah. Yeah, just you
when you and I feel like, knowing a little bit
of your backstory, you'd be surprised when a person is
like fighting for their life, the amount of bravery and
adrenaline that you can muster up when you're like I,

(58:40):
I'm not dying today. Yeah, it's not happening to day,
you know. So yeah, when you when you don't under
if you want to estimate that, and you just think
you you think this dog, you think this dog Finn,
stop these men like you think. I'm worried about that
little dog right now? Nah, bro, we got going back.
We're not going back. We got guns now, you know
what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, So, fighting between Confederate units

(59:03):
with slavehounds and Black Union units continued throughout the war.
In eighteen sixty four, one Black soldier wrote a letter
back to his wife depicting one such batter and was
he actually wrote her a poem and it's a pretty
cool poem. So I'm going to read that. Now we
met the bloodhounds at the bridge. They ran with all
their might. It was a glorious site. We ran our
bayonets through their backs. We shot them with the gun.
It was all over with the dogs, and twas most

(59:24):
glorious fun. In former days, those brutes were used to
hunt the flying slave. They tracked them through their dismal
swamps and little quarter gave. But when they tried the
game of war, we knocked them on the head. We
shot them quick and ran them through until every hound
was dead. Oh yeah, that's bars. Yeah, so obviously, and

(59:49):
um spoilers here to the listeners who have not caught
up to us, history passed like eighteen sixty four. The
Confederacy didn't win at all in our lost. I'll tell
you one of the I I got to watch from
a distance someone in my neighborhood in Portland have a
real like like growth moment. So there's this, you know,

(01:00:12):
the General Lee the car from the hazard that was
like the Confederate flag on the hood. I had a
little hot wheels one. Yeah sure, yeah. Um there's a
guy who lives not far from me who has like
a who has that car like a perfect replica of
the Generally and it had the Confederate flag on it.
And for the first few months I lived there, I
would see him driving through the streets with his big
Confederate flag on his general Lee. And about to three

(01:00:33):
months ago I saw him driving his car but he
painted over the Confederate flag and it was just orange.
I was like, oh you had ad you like, yeah,
you had a little moment. Good for you. You grew
a bit. Yes see. That's what I mean by the Northwest,
specificallymportant as a tale of two cities, because I'm like,

(01:00:56):
there's this just bashtion of like left progressive, like freedom
fighting Yato and like, you know, Tiger Claw, damn like
hard hard ciders at the police, you know what I'm saying.
And then and then there's the guy with the right
in my life, my life. It's a complicated place, yes,

(01:01:18):
and then the right guy with the robberty league, with
the with the general League. Like it's just it's two
cities in one place. Some of the greatest coffee in
the world, quote solid beer quote me, some of the
most amazing beer. And then there's like and then there's Salem.
You're like, there's Salem how it happened. Yeah, yeah, so,

(01:01:42):
um yeah. The Confederacy lost the war, and by eighteen
sixty five, both the dream of Southern independence and slavery
were dead. White supremacy, though did not die. White people
in the former Confederate States wasted no time in turning
the institutions of the slave patrols into formal police departments.
In eighteen sixty five, if the editor of the Lynchburg
Virginian noted, which was the newspaper, noted that quote, stringent

(01:02:04):
police regulations may be necessary to keep freedman from over
burdening the towns and depleting the agricultural regions of labor.
The civil authority should also be fully empowered to protect
the community from this new imposition. The magistrates and municipal
officers everywhere should be permitted to hold a rod into
a ram over these wandering, idle creatures. Nothing short of

(01:02:24):
the most efficient police system will prevent strolling, vagrancy, theft,
and other destruction of our industrial system. So that's pretty clear.
That's pretty great. It's the it's the like, it's the moment. Like.
So the Chappelle Show years ago had a skit where
he depicted the day, like the postman comes with the

(01:02:45):
letter that the slaves are free, right, Like it's one
of the greatest skits, and they're just and he's about
to whoop this whip this guy whipped, this guy, whipp
this guy. Then the postman walks up and he goes, well,
apparently apparently you guys are free. It's starts like looking
around at all the other slaves around him, and they're
like he's like, uh hey, sorry about that a second ago, man,

(01:03:08):
you know, just like so what do you do? Like
what exactly? So they're like, we bet it, you know,
we bet it. We bet to get us some protection
because those last hundred years were kind of ship to them.
Oh ship, what if they treat us even a little
bit as bad as were Yeah. In her book Slave Patrols,

(01:03:30):
Hayden notes quote policemen in southern towns continued to carry
out those aspects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race
neutral but in reality were applied selectively. Police saw that
nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets,
just as patrollers had done in colonial and anti bellum times.
In the post war South, police were seen as the
single most important method of maintaining a system of, in

(01:03:52):
the words of one prominent Virginia clergyman, liberty for the
white man, slavery for the inward, so long as the
white man is able to hold him m M. Exactly now.
In the textbook Policing by North Dakota States Karro Archbold,
published by Sage Press, uh, it gets like that text

(01:04:13):
book gives a rundown of how slave patrollers transitioned into
policing freed blacks in the post war period. And I'm
gonna quote from that next. During early reconstruction, several groups
merged with what was formerly known as slave patrols to
maintain order over African American citizens. Groups such as the
Federal military, the State Militia, and the ku Klux Klan
took over the responsibilities of earlier slave patrols and were

(01:04:34):
known to be even more violent than their predecessors. Over time,
these groups began to resemble and operate similar to some
of the newly established police departments in the United States.
In fact, David Barlow and Melissa Barlow note that by
eighteen thirty seven, the Charleston Police Department had a hundred
officers and the primary function of this organization was slave patrol.
These officers regulated the movements of slaves and free blacks,

(01:04:56):
checking documents and forcing slave codes, guarding against slave revolts,
and catching runawa slaves. Scholars and historians assert that the
transition from slave patrols to publicly funded police agencies was
seamless in the southern region of the United States. So
they just took these slave patrols. The war is over,
now your cops. That's literally how it went. Yeah. Now

(01:05:16):
that's not every obviously, not every police part from the
South because like a lot of cities and towns that
are in the South now and have police didn't exist
back then. But like, for example, the St. Louis Police
started as a slave patrol. The the St. Louis Police
Department that existed today began as a slave patrol. Yes,
the current St. Louis Police have their origins as a
slave patrol. Yeah. So a number of the St. Louis

(01:05:41):
Police Department's first officers were former bounty hunters and slave patrollers,
and they brought to their new job their old tactics,
most specifically their old tactic of using dogs to torture
and terrify black people and Here's where things get real, real,
real angry making, because the use of Negro dogs continues

(01:06:02):
to this moment right now in present day St. Louis.
Oh my god, yeah, talk to huh, I said, talked
to me so stomping into air force ones. In two
thousand fourteen, the murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson St.
Louis police officer prompted an uprising by the city's black population.

(01:06:25):
And people are broadly familiar with us, and this was
suppressed with extreme violence. But the whole affair forced the
Department of Justice to conduct and publish an expansive report
on the Ferguson Police Department's behavior. This report concluded that, quote,
the Ferguson Police Department engages in a pattern of deploying
canines to bite individuals when the articulated facts do not
justify the significant use of force, leaving serious puncture wounds

(01:06:48):
to non violent offenders, some of them children. Now, the
report went on to note that Ferguson police were allowed
to sick dogs on suspects when any crime not just
a felony or violent rhyme has been committed. This permissiveness,
combined with the absence of meaningful supervisory review and an
apparent tendency to overstate the threat based on race has
a resulted in avoidable dog bites to low level offenders,

(01:07:12):
and the d o J report kind of uses a
little bit of weasel language on this fact, but one
of the things that revealed is that one d percent
of the people maimed by Ferguson police dogs were black.
See this, like, how what am I trying to say
right now? What gets right? What gets under my skin

(01:07:33):
in discussions of this is that it sounds so preposterous
that people say, where alarm is? We're just making this
stuff up. You know, that was a long time ago.
It's all in your head, and it's and you like,
so after a while you actually start thinking, you know,

(01:07:53):
maybe I am crazy, maybe it is in my head.
And then you're just like and then you look at
your other your other black friends, and you like, am
I tripping? Or did this happen? And they're like, no,
it kind of happened to me too. And then you're like,
how about the other fucking side of the country. Did
it happen to you all too? And you're just like yeah.
So then when you and then when the report comes out,

(01:08:14):
You're just like, guys, like I'm telling you, I'm not crazy.
I'm telling you this is happening, you know, And I
still got to convince you. And I'm like, what do
you what do many receipts do you need? And it
it didn't convince fifteen this comes out and it's another
like people seem more convinced now after everything has happened,
but like it took like five years after this report

(01:08:35):
came out, and there was really you know, there was
an uproar over the murder of Michael Brown, obviously, um,
but there was the fucking the fact that the fact
that a police department formed out of a slave patrol
that used dogs too maim black people in order to
terrorize them was two hundred years later using dogs to
name only black people in order to tear the fact
that that was happening. Like that, it was like yeah,

(01:08:58):
and then it was out of the zeitgeist. And then
it was out of the guys that I was gonna say,
then it's gone out as I guys, and it's and
that's the other thing that's so hard about like and
im and I'm critiquing myself period. I'm taking all of
us period is like when when the cameras leave, Like
how hard it is to keep the energy up to say, look, listen,
I know it's a high. It was a high, like

(01:09:18):
you know, high profile case. But it's not done, you
know what I'm saying. And now that it's back, Okay,
it's a year later, y'all forgot about my ground because
you onto the next hashtag. But I'm like, no, seriously,
we didn't make this up, Like here's the evidence, Like
I'm telling you that's what happened. And it's like how
it's you. You You find yourself like just exhausted as

(01:09:39):
to go, like I just no matter how many receipts
I give you, Like you know what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's speaking of receipts. I do feel like I need
to quote from the New Yorker here and there. They
did do a pretty good article kind of digging into
the use of these these dogs, So I do want
to credit them for that. They didn't like they you know,

(01:10:01):
they put out an article which isn't nothing um better
than not? Yeah right? Like yeah. In one account, a
dog was sent after an unarmed sixteen year old who
was also tazered. The electric shock of that weapon partially
paralyzes a person. If that were to happen while a
dog was tearing at your arms and legs, all you
could do would be to watch in immobilized horror. Another

(01:10:22):
case involved four police officers, including a canine handler, trapping
an unarmed fourteen year old in an abandoned basement. The
crime trespassing. The Department of Justice report recounts what the
boy says happened to him when he saw the dog
at the top of the steps. He turned to run,
but the dog quickly bit him on the ankle and
then the thigh, causing him to fall to the floor.
The dog was about to bite his face or neck,

(01:10:42):
but instead got his left arm, which the boy had
raised to protect himself. FPD officers struck him while he
was on the ground, one of them putting a boot
on the side of his head. He recalled the officers
laughing about the incident afterward. Ah, the poison blue. The
Boys in Blue had a Boys in Blue man. Yeah,

(01:11:02):
you just man, It's like how many how many bad
apples you need before you start like checking the orchard?
Like yeah, what if the soil is bad? Like how
nobody's like you keep talking about these your tree keep
producing bad fruit like and you keep blaming like some
wrong with your tree man. All these apples are just

(01:11:23):
filled with piss, Like what happened all the apples? Why
are the all the apples would piss? That's just one
then why you Well, if it's just why are you
putting it in a bucket? Where were in these apples?
Why do you keep throwing apples? Then? I mean we
get rid of the orchard. It's a bad appard like
it makes sense to me, yeah, yep. So again, the

(01:11:45):
use of Ferguson police dogs made very little of a
splash when it was revealed, even though we get of
the individuals named by Ferguson police dogs were black, and
of individuals that the Ferguson Police did violence too in
general were black. Names of canine officers and their supervisors
were not revealed in the report. That Department of Justice
report on the Ferguson p D made one hundred and
thirty seven corrective recommendations on how the department could fix

(01:12:07):
its violent behavior. Only one of those reforms dealt with
canine violence, suggesting that the police department require on site
supervisory approval before allowing a canine officer to main people.
It's like, you got cool, I bite this black guy? Okay, yeah,

(01:12:28):
I want to have a dog tear at the flesh
of this fourteen year old? Is that cool? That's all right? Glad?
We put it. Put this this listen. So, as of today,
Ferguson police still use dogs to control suspects. Most Ferguson
officers are white. Virtually all the people they arrest and
detain are black. No Ferguson officer has yet been tried

(01:12:50):
or fired for using police dogs to brutalize citizens. Professor
Larry Sprule notes quote the officer's procedural avoidance of criminal
liability for death and torture of black citizens was not
dissimilar to slave patroller's Antebellum indemnity for similar violence yep.
In his paper on Negro dogs and the Ferguson Police,

(01:13:11):
Professor Sproul sites to other academics Williams and Murphy, who
wrote a nine paper on the transition from slave patrols
to police departments. Williams and Murphy noted, quote, the legal
order sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination from most of our
nation's history, and the fact that the police were bound
to uphold that order set a pattern for police behavior
and attitudes towards minority communities that have persisted until the

(01:13:33):
present day. That pattern includes the idea that minorities have
fewer civil rights, that the task of police is to
keep them under control, and that the police have little
responsibility for protecting them from crime within their communities. Oh god,
there we go. Oh my god. Yep, maybe they can
throw me one of those one of those white claws.

(01:13:59):
There was I missed this rally, but there was apparently
a rally where some of the anti for kids. Do
you remember there was that that pepsi ad with them
Jenner where she hands a pepsi to a cop like
right after that. Add a bunch of those like kids
showed up at this. I think it was a made
a protest with like like crates of pepsi and just
started chucking them at the cops. I love it. Uh yeah,

(01:14:28):
oh my god, dude, when you know what I give
it to an ANTIFA kids, Man, they got sense. It's
a humor died like y'all funny. You know what I'm saying. Yeah,
it's it's I you know it. It's it's been interesting
because like there's all this talk of like like Portland's
has like a big anti fascist sort of activist community,
but like with all the talk that there is with

(01:14:48):
from the President about antifa at these protests, they've really
taken a backseat. Like they have not been driving the
fucking bus here. Yeah, I can tell you that much. Um.
And it's kind of obvious because I'm like in some ways,
I feel like a lot of the anti fascist dudes,
like they gotta they have a style. There's like an
aesthetic to what they do that like, and I know

(01:15:11):
it's a weird way to say it, but I feel
like I go, oh, yeah, that's that's kind of their flavor,
you know. I'm like, this ain't that. Yeah, it's just
something else, you know. Yeah. It's like when you see, yeah,
when you see like the graffiti that says like blacks rule,
I'm like, black man, did not write that, did not
write that. That's ridiculous. Okay. The flip side of that

(01:15:35):
was like in Portland on two Fridays ago, I think
we had, um, you know, a crowd marched to the
Justice Center and then people just started sucking it up
like breaking all the windows, they lit some fires, like
and it was one of it was very obvious, I
think to everyone who knew the city, like oh, because
this was like the day after the Precinct in Minneapolis
was burned, and I was like, yeah, that justice center up,
it's going down. Yeah, And there was like it was

(01:15:57):
blamed a lot on like like white anarchists kids, Like yeah,
there were definitely some of those folks doing it, but
like it was a pretty diverse crowd that sucked up
the justice It's not yeah, you know, life in history
is not so compartmentalized that you could just be like
this happened, and this happened, and that group of people
by it sales did the thing. Yeah, a lot of
folks wanted to get into that justice center and yeah,

(01:16:23):
um so properly. That is episode one, and again this
is you know, the Slave Slave but a lot of
you know this pretty much every episode is going to
deal with racism because it's kind of central to policing.
But next episode we're gonna be talking about sort of
policing more in the North and and kind of policing
against against people we consider white, but who at the
time the people who controlled the police might not necessarily

(01:16:44):
have considered white. You know. That's that's Oh, I can't
wait for this one because like at some point, man,
I just feel like I know my work's gonna call
me to do a some sort of deep dive in
the construction of like pan ethnic terms like black or
white and what the hell that means? Like, you know,

(01:17:06):
even even hearing like the who is the Milo boy?
What was his name? Milo? Yeah? Whatever his name is
him talking about like this our country was made for
the advancement of white men, And I'm like, no, wasn't,
because there was no such thing as white man when
y'all got here, and you you ain't even you don't

(01:17:28):
even want the Irish here. That's the northern part of
the same island, for crying out loud, so like you're
looking at them, you don't think it's still people in
this world that don't think Italians are white, Like I
just what the hell are you talking about? You know
what I'm saying, Like so you don't even know what
white means? You know? So I love what you're gonna
go to next, because just like you have to remember
again it's a construct like y'all made y'all made that up.

(01:17:51):
So we'll talk about that in part two. Prop you
want to plug some plugules before we roll out? Man, Yeah,
so yeah, everything for me, it's prop hip Hop uh
dot com that's my app mentioned, just all of it.
Prop hip Hop doing a fun thing on Friday's called
poor Gami Friday's where I basically just make a make

(01:18:12):
a single cup of like pour over coffee with a
buddy on Instagram and we feature like yeah, and we
feature like a local roaster, uh from wherever, like offer
discounts and like. And since since this last you know, uprising,
we've been featuring like coffee roasters you know, owned by
by persons of color. Um did just support just support

(01:18:36):
good coffee, you know what I'm saying. So that's kind
of a fun thing. I'd i'd plug on this one.
Since I get to come back three times, I get
to pick what I'm gonna plug, you know. Yeah, yeah awesome. Yeah,
Well check that out. Check out Prop and his his
wonderful music on his YouTube channel. Um and uh what
propaganda people should know if they look for something at it. Yeah. Also,

(01:18:58):
you know what, actually I would say, you know what,
I'm glad you brought that up, So let me save
all y'all the d m s you're gonna give me. Okay,
at some point, I don't already answered the question you
find at want a personal answer for in one of
these videos or interviews, so like, so just you know,

(01:19:19):
check the YouTube. Yeah, I'm saying, uh, just just it's
it's probably there. We at some point we've talked about it.
So I'm just just just go ahead and put that out,
all right, folks. Um, Well we will be back like
sucking four more times at least to talk about more

(01:19:40):
times American police, um and where they came from. So
I hope everybody enjoys this series, UM, and I hope
folks pass it along to um friends and family who
might uh think that policing just needs a little bit alike.
Just gotta like just gotta like off its face and
we'll be back. We'll be fine. You can't go back

(01:20:01):
to it being good. It was always ship rethink this thing,
you know, and like and and and I mean, I'm
gonna come back to this a bunch of times in
this episode, got it, And I'm gonna come back to
this a bunch of times. But like I hope people
are hearing that, like almost not almost literally, all of
our institutions we just made them up, like they're made up,

(01:20:23):
you know what I'm saying, at some point in time
we made they don't exist in nature like we made
them up. So if you have a bad idea in
any other part of your life, you stop doing the
bad idea and you try to make a better one. Yeah,
we can. We can have a society where like, if
someone commits murder, there's somebody who's job at is to

(01:20:43):
like figure out who did that and like make sure
they don't get to keep doing. We we can have
that we don't have. We can have that without having
a dude who feels empowered to choke a man for
nine minutes. We have to have You don't have to
have both. You mean to tell me that thought has
never crossed your mind that the person next takes care
it is homeless guy for loitering, who's just by virtue

(01:21:07):
of his existence is breaking it all. And the same
guy and the same tool needs to deal with the
acts murderer like you. You mean to tell me that
that takes the same people. Yeah, Like countries that have
people who like make sure there aren't drunk drivers on
the road, and the people who do that job don't

(01:21:29):
have guns and don't get to like throw people in
prison and ruin their lives and search them for drugs
and plant drugs on them, Like you don't you can
have people whose job is like, yeah, we should make sure,
you know, we should have some eyes on traffic because
like that's that's a big thing. Like somebody should be
like keep an eye on that ship without the other stuff.
Legally go into a woman's house while she's sleeping and

(01:21:52):
murder her. Maybe we don't need no knock raids at
all for any reason. That's a bad idea, Like why
like who just keeps? Who just holds onto bad ideas?
Just like it's a bad idea, Like let's just think
of another one. Yeah, shame we can't change. Well yeah,
right for more bad ideas, come back on on Thursday.

(01:22:13):
Well we'll talk about um, talk more about cops. Yeah,
all right, that's us for now. Goodbye Behind the Police
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} Slavery, Mass Murder and the Birth of American Policing