> The Coal and Iron Police committed numerous atrocities, including the Latimer Massacre of 1897, in which they killed nineteen unarmed miners and wounded thirty-two others. The final straw was the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, a pitched battle that lasted five months and created national coal shortages.

> In the aftermath, political leaders and employers decided that a new system of labor management paid for out of the public coffers would be cheaper for them and have greater public legitimacy and effectiveness. The result was the creation of the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905, the first state police force in the country.

> It was modelled after the Philippine Constabulary, used to maintain the US occupation there, which became a testing ground for new police techniques and technologies. The local population resented US occupation and developed anticolonial organizations and struggles. The national police force attempted to develop close ties to local communities to allow it to monitor subversive activities.

> The US also moved quickly to erect telephone and telegraph wires, to allow quick communication of emerging intelligence. When demonstrations emerged, the police, through a huge network of informants, could anticipate them and place spies and agents provocateurs among them to sow dissent and allow leaders and other agitators to be quickly arrested and neutralized.

> this new paramilitary force represented an important shift of power away from local communities. This shift unambiguously favored the interests of large employers, who had significantly more influence over state level politicians.

> In 1915, the State Commission on Industrial Relations described them as: "an extremely efficient force for crushing strikes, but ... not successful in preventing violence in connection with strikes, in maintaining legal and civil rights of the parties to the dispute, nor in protecting of the public. On the contrary, violence seems to increase rather than diminish when the constabulary is brought into an industrial dispute..."

(1st elision authors, 2nd mine)

> Marine General Smedley Butler, who created the Haitian police and played a major role in the US occupation of Nicaragua, served as police chief of Philadelphia in 1924, ushering in a wave of technological modernization and militarized police tactics. He was removed from office after a public outcry over his repressive methods.

> Jeremy Kuzmarov documents US involvement in creating repressive police forces in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. These forces were designed to be part of a ... program of modernization and nation-building, but were quickly turned into forces of brutal repression in the service of US-backed regimes. These US-trained security forces went on to commit horrific human rights abuses, including torture, extortion, kidnapping, and mass murder.

> Japan, South Korea, and South Vietnam all had US-created police forces whose primary purposes were intelligence and counterinsurgency.

> Postwar police reformer O.W. Wilson, a colonel in the military police during World War II, was involved in the denazification of Germany following the war. Afterwards, he went on to teach police science at Berkeley and was appointed Commissioner of Police in Chicago in 1960 and influenced a generation of police executives with his ideas of preventative policing.

> The US also had its own domestic version of colonial policing: the Texas Rangers. Initially a loose band of irregulars, the Rangers were hired to protect the interests of newly arriving white colonists, first under the Mexican government, later under [the] Republic of Texas, and finally as part of the state of Texas. Their main work was to hunt down native populations accused of attacking white settlers, as well as investigating crimes like cattle rustling.

> Mexicans and Native Americans who resisted Ranger authority could be killed, beaten, arrested, or intimidated. Mike Cox describes this as nothing short of an extermination campaign in which almost the entire indigenous population was killed or driven out of the territory.

> the horrific 1918 massacre at Porvenir, in which Rangers killed 15 unarmed locals and drove the remaining community into Mexico for fear of further violence. This led to ... state legislative hearings in 1919 about extrajudicial killings and racially motivated brutality on behalf of white ranchers. Those hearings resulted in no formal charges; the graphic records of abuse were sealed for the next fifty years to avoid any stain on the Rangers' "heroic" record

> In the 60s and 70s, local and state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and economic rights of Mexican Americans and played a central role in subverting farmworker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters, and arresting and brutalizing picketers and union leaders. They were also frequently called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out of voting in local elections.

> in 1963, [Crystal City Mexican Americans] ran a slate of candidates for... city council. In response, the Rangers undertook a program of intimidation. They tried to prevent voter rallies, threatened candidates and supporters, and even engaged in physical attacks and arrests. In the end, because of extensive outside press coverage, the Rangers had to back down and the slate swept the election, ushering in a period of greater civil rights for Mexican Americans

> Slavery was another major force that shake early US policing. Well before the London Metropolitan Police were formed, Southern cities ... had paid full-time police who wore uniforms, were accountable to local civilian officials, and were connected to a broader criminal justice system. These early police forces were derived not from the informal watch system as happened in the Northeast, but instead from slave patrols, and developed to prevent revolts.

> When slavery was abolished ...; small towns and rural areas developed new and more professional forms of policing... The main concern of this period was... forcing newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles. New laws outlawing vagrancy were used extensively to force blacks to accept employment, mostly in the sharecropping system. Local police enforced ... voter suppression efforts to ensure white control of the political system.

> Local police were the essential front door of the twin evils of convict leasing and prison farms.

> sheriffs and judges also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists of fit and hardworking blacks to be incarcerated on behalf of employers, who would then lease them out to perform forced labor for profit.

> By the Jim Crow era, policing had become a central tool of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad hoc vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan, which often worked closely with--and was populated by--local police.

> Northern policing was also deeply affected by emancipation. ... Ghettos were established in Northern cities to control this growing population, with police playing the role of both containment and pacification. Up until the 1960s, this was largely accomplished through the racially discriminatory enforcement of the law and widespread use of excessive force.

> Blacks knew very well what the behavioral and geographic limits were and the role the police played in maintaining them in both the Jim Crow South and the ghettoized North.

> In the South police became the front line for suppressing the [civil rights] movement. They denied protest permits, threatened and beat demonstrators, made discriminatory arrests, and failed to protect demonstrators from angry mobs and vigilante actions, including beatings, disappearances, bombings, and assassinations. All of this occurred to preserve a system of formal racial discrimination and economic exploitation.

> Eventually local police, often working in cooperation with the FBI, undertook the overt suppression of these movements through targeted arrests on trumped-up charges and ultimately even assassinations of prominent leaders such as Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader killed in a hail of gunfire in the middle of the night during a police raid of his Chicago apartment.

> the US government operated a major international police training initiative, staffed by experienced police executives, called the Office of Public Safety (OPS). This agency worked closely with the CIA to train police in areas of Cold War conflict

> the training emphasized counterinsurgency, including espionage, bomb making, and interrogation techniques. In many parts of the world these officers were involved in human-rights abuses including torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial killings.

> many of the trainers moved in large numbers into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), FBI, and numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a more militarized vision steeped in Cold War imperatives of suppressing social movements through counterintelligence, militarized riot-suppression techniques, and heavy-handed crime control. They applied this counterinsurgency mindset to the political uprisings occurring at home.

> OPS director Byron Engle testified before the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders that "... Much of this experience may be useful in the US." The result was a massive expansion of federal funding for the police under the Johnson administration. Under the guise of preofessionalizing the police, the federal government began spending hundreds of millions of dollars to provide police with more training and equipment with few strings attached.

> unsurprisingly, rather than reducing the burden of racialized policing, this new professionalization movement merely enhanced police power and led directly to the development of SWAT teams and mass incarceration.

> The past few decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the scope and intensity of police activity. More police than ever before are engaged in more enforcement of more laws, resulting in astronomical levels of incarceration, economic exploitation, and abuse. This expansion mirrors the rise of mass incarceration. It began with the War on Crime rhetoric of the 1960s and continued to develop and intensify until today, with support from both political parties.

> Nixon mobilized racial fears through the lens of "law and order" to convince Southern whites to vote Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.

> Following the disastrous defeat of Michael Dukakis in 1988 for being "soft on crime," Democrats came to fully embrace this strategy as well, leading to disasters like Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, which added tens of thousands of additional police and expanded the drug and crime wars.

> Christian Parenti has shown how the federal government crashed the economy in the 1970s to stem the rise of workers' power, leaving millions out of work and creating a new, mostly African American permanent underclass largely excluded from the formal economy. In response, government mobilized at all levels to manage this "surplus population" through intensive policing and mass incarceration.

> Today's police are clearly concerned with matters of public safety and crime control, however misguided the methods are. The advent of Compstat and other management techniques are in fact designed to address serious crime problems, and significant resources go into these efforts. But this crime-fighting orientation is itself a form of social control.

> the criminal justice system excuses and ignores crimes of the rich that produce profound social harms while intensely criminalizing the behaviors of the poor and nonwhite, including those behaviors that produce few social harms.

> No bankers have been jailed for the 2008 financial crisis despite widespread fraud and the looting of the American economy, which resulted in mass unemployment, homelessness, and economic dislocation.

> American crime control policy is structured around the use of punishment to manage the "dangerous classes", masquerading as a system of justice.

> The transition from the use of militias and military troops to civilian police was a process of engineering greater public acceptance of the social-control functions of the state, whether abroad or at home.