For thousands of years, the enforcement of laws and rules were left in the hands of individuals. Sure, there were specific laws and punishments related to those laws established in many societies (the earliest and most well known example of this is Hanmurabis Code, originating around 2,200 BCE), but they still remained the responsibility of individuals and their communities to enforce.

But during the reign of the English king Alfred the Great (849-899 CE), this began to change. A new idea emerged that the king ought to have an interest in keeping the peace (the kings peace might sound familiar to you at this point). This relates to a second idea that held that a Kong’s subject was also his property. Therefore, any crimes committed against a kings subject was also a crime committed against the king. Obviously, the king wasn’t about to go to all the villages and towns in his kingdom to enforce the law (and collect taxes so much of our history is driven by collecting taxes), so he divided England into shires. Each shire was comprised of a hundred regions referred to as hundreds, because they each contained a hundred families. Each of these hundreds were comprised of ten tithings, and each tithing was made up of ten families.

This tied every single person in the kingdom to a tithing, and each was responsible for maintaining order and making sure all taxes were paid. This also meant that if one person of a tithing failed to maintain order or actively committed a crime, the punishment would be borne by everyone as a whole. Like I said earlier, Alfred may have been Great, but he was too good to come down and enforce the law himself, so he appointed leaders to the different shires called shire reeves. Think of these guys like the ancestors to a sheriff. With the help of locally elected constables, the shire reeves would come to a town and organize the community into a posse and round up criminals. While today we recognize this as being pretty crude and flawed, it fundamentally changed how the law was enforced. Instead of it being your neighbor and you, it was instead the responsibility of your leaders to ensure the law was enforced. It was about another three hundred years before justices of the peace, who acted as judges, began to make an appearance.

So, fast forward to the eighteenth century. The industrial revolution is beginning to get into full swing, and the justices and constables are nearly all corrupt. The powers that be tried a few different things to fix the issue, but none worked. Until a man called Henry Fielding, the London magistrate, formed a group known as the Bow Street Runners in 1749. These men were specifically hired for the task of recovering stolen goods, and apprehending criminals. They were actively organized, had the duty of solving crimes, and were partially paid out of city funds. I know I implied that this somehow worked, but it didn’t and they were actually disbanded almost a hundred years later, in 1839. Even though they couldn’t stem the rise in the crime rate, they still made an impression in people’s minds. They were well known for nevertheless being effective, organized, determined, and incorruptible (mostly, on that last bit. Someone always has to ruin things for everyone else). Adding pressure to the want for a permanent, salaried police role was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. It started out as a polític protest that turned deadly when the military was brought in to break it up and left 11 people dead, and a fear in people’s minds of the military being used to enforce public order. In a similar vein, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was passed in the US specifically prohibiting the military from acting in a law enforcement role on US soil.

In 1829, Parliament passed the Metropolitan Police Act, giving funds for the establishment of a one thousand officer strong force that would be guided by strict standards of conduct and discipline. They were organized according to traditionally military chains of command, and had rules of conduct, they wore uniforms, and carried badges with their ID numbers on it. They were also directly employed by the state rather than being private citizens charged by the law to enforce it. This police force is what most people consider to be the first modern police force, and indeed is what most are actually modeled after.

In the northern US, watch systems were initially popular, not unlike what you’re likely thinking of now. Initially they were volunteer, however over time these became less effective and so, they began to be replaced by full time, paid watchmen.

In the Southern US, law enforcement was more frequently about controlling slaves. Slave patrols first originated in the 1740s and the members were given broad powers to punish disobedient slaves. As time went on, little changed about this. Slavery grew ever more divisive which led to the Civil War and after the traitors lost, they enacted many laws, which we know today as Jim Crow laws, and the police were required to enforce them. This is actually the origin of many of the racial tensions present between the police and black people today. The abolishment of Jim Crow laws has done little to calm these tensions, and for relatively obvious reasons.

There’s a lot more to cover but I’ve already written a papers worth of information here. If you still want to learn more, I’d suggest looking up the Political and Reform Eras of American policing. All my information came from my old textbook, Law Enforcement in the 21st Century 3rd edition