+ development of professional police forces (supplanting existing night watches) in the mid-1800s can be attributed to industrialization and the rise of a industrial class that sought, for a combination of religious/moral, ideological (think: clean, bourgeois urban utopias), and practical reasons, to criminalize and lock up “dangerous classes”
+ incipient police forces propelled their own rise to power: they fueled the aforementioned desires of the business classes for cities in which centralized power could work upon — or at least hide — lower-class “vagrants” (including sex workers), alcoholics, homeless loiterers, etc.; police chiefs simultaneously played upon the fears of these elites and entrenched themselves within the machine politics of modern cities
+ violent crimes tended to be on the decline as cities grew, before police forces were instituted; these new forces targeted victimless, class- and gender-based (e.g. prostitution) crimes, as well as race-based crimes, considering the role of police in carrying on the duties of pre-existing slave patrols in Southern and border states
-> police forces have become increasingly militarized (particularly since 9/11/2001)
+ “An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed” (Joseph McNamara, former chief in both San Jose, CA and Kansas City, MO)
+ beginning with 1981′s Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, police gained access to military bases and research and began receiving training designed for modern military personnel
+ 1988: National Guard granted right to conduct drug raids on city streets, and otherwise enforce drug laws on behalf of local police agencies
+ 1994: Congress passes a law allowing donations of military equipment to police forces; “3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers” given to police forces within first three years
+ SWAT teams, with specialized paramilitary training, utilized 160+ times a day; post-9/11, their implementation goes beyond the drug war and includes regulation of such nonviolent crimes as underage/illegal drinking, “neighborhood poker games,” and … illegal barbering
-> in confronting the prevailing framework about the role of/need for police forces, here are 7 myths about the police
