THE BLACK VIEW (Coming Soon) Police Brutality; understanding the culture: Whos policing the Police? The Slave Master! Now James Ramsey, a doctor working for several sugar plantations in St Kitts, was shocked by the way the slaves were treated by the overseers. Ramsay later recalled in his book, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784): [The ordinary punishments of slaves, for the common crimes of neglect, absence from work, eating the sugar cane, or theft, were cart whipping, beatings with a stick, sometimes to the point of breaking bones, the chain, an iron crook about the neck, a ring about the ankle, and confinement in the dungeon. There had been instances of slitting of ears, the breaking of limbs, so as to make amputation necessary, beating out of the eyes, and even castration. In short, in the place of decency, sympathy, morality, and religion; slavery produces cruelty and oppression. DID YOU KNOW that official police departments did not begin until the mid-1800: s and that the word “officer” is a derivative of the word “over-seer.” Initially they were called Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, and were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans. The St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nations first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property. Policing was not the only social institution enmeshed in slavery. DID YOU KNOW slavery was fully institutionalized in the American economic and legal order with laws being enacted at both the state and national divisions of government. Virginia, for example, enacted more than 130 slave statutes between 1689 and 1865. Slavery and the abuse of people of color, however, was not merely a southern affair as many have been taught to believe. Connecticut, New York and other colonies enacted laws to criminalize and control slaves. Congress also passed fugitive Slave Laws, laws allowing the detention and return of escaped slaves, in 1793 and 1850. As Turner, Giacopassi and Vandiver (2006:186) remark, “the literature clearly establishes that a legally sanctioned law enforcement system existed in CIA Adviser Warns Americans before the Civil War for the express purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave owners. The similarities between the slave patrols and modern American policing are too salient to dismiss or ignore. Hence, the slave patrol should be considered a forerunner of modern American law enforcement.”
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 07:13:07 +0000
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