American policing has faced significant challenges over the last decade, with major upticks in homicide and shootings during the pandemic, legislation restricting policing practices, and a “defund the police” movement that gained momentum in 2020 before declining in popularity. Criticisms of the police profession have also included attempts to rewrite the origin story of American law enforcement. One popular but false narrative holds that modern policing in the United States emerged from nineteenth-century slave patrols—a potent “original sin” argument, suggesting that the police are permanently stained by the legacy of American slavery. In truth, any connection between policing and slavery is tenuous, at best.

The basic model of American policing was inspired by London’s Metropolitan Police, established in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel to manage mob behavior and public disorder. In 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln warned of the “increasing disregard for law which pervades the country” and the “growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts,” a sentiment echoed by the wave of violent and ethnic mob riots sweeping American cities during that decade. In the 1840s and 1850s, cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York created modern police forces to address a surge in ethnic mob violence. These urban riots often involved attacks by native-born Protestant groups on Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany, or by Irish and other ethnic mobs targeting free blacks. Policymakers of the era looked to London’s approach as a solution to their pressing public-order challenges.
— Read on www.city-journal.org/article/august-vollmer-american-policing-legacy