THE POLICE – WHAT THEY ARE AND WHERE THEY CAME FROM

Man, the taste of that police-boot must be sweet. So many of you fall over yourselves just to get your tongue onto that sweetly polished black leather.

 

Your plaintive, emotion-cracked voices echo everywhere in your rush to signal your compliance, obeisance, servitude, and acceptance.

 

“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear!” and “Who are you going to call when someone breaks into your house and kills your family?” pours forth each time someone dares to criticise the police.

 

Like, how dare anyone criticise these selfless and heroic people who lay their lives on the line for the good of us all each and every day? What kind of gall does it take to question the motives and actions of the Thin Blue Line that stands between normal society and the ravening vortex of criminality?

 

After all, the police were created and exist only to protect and serve the community!

 

Shut the fuck up, and sit the fuck down, you ignorant sack of shit. I’m going to school you. After all, if you’re going to lick police boots, it’s best you know where those boots have trodden.

 

Prior to 1825, there were no police. The police, as you know them, were created in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1825 and 1855.

 

And you know what? Unlike Batman, they were not created to fight crime or even stop crime. The police were created by the ruling class of industrialists, land-owners, and politicians to protect their interests from workers who were actively mobilising and demanding better conditions for themselves.

 

The creation of the police was a response to crowds and not to crime. Author David Whitehouse, in his seminal Origins Of The Police, observes that as the modern wage-labour society was forming, the threats to the upper classes in England were striking workers. In the USA, the elites felt threatened by rioting workers in the northern states, and terrified of a slave insurrection in the south.

 

You may read David’s brilliant treatise HERE. And I encourage you to do so.

 

How about that, huh? The cops were invented to bust the heads of those who threatened the ruling class. The fighting of crime had nothing to do with it.

 

So what kept all the Karens safe before the invention of the modern police force? Whose boots were wettened by the eager tongues of the frightened back then?

 

The truth of the matter was that prior to the great economic divide we have today, communities were entirely self-policing. Village justice, as it were. Sure, there were kings and nobles, but the vast majority of people existed on a very equal socio-economic level. There was just no need for police.

 

Murder, rape, and theft still occurred, but nowhere near the scale at which it does in today’s cities. And perpetrators were easily identified and dealt with – and yes, there were miscarriages of justice. Just as there are today, one would imagine, huh, Karen?

 

This type of self-policing society underwent a huge upheaval in the early 19^th century in England. The shared lands (or commons) were enclosed, and the people who worked and depended on these lands were forced off them and into the burgeoning towns and cities and put to work in all the new industries.

 

They were exploited and brutalised, and as the years went by, they began to organise themselves, and the labour unions were born. Strike action began to affect the hip pocket of the elites, and they started sending the army in to beat shit out of the protesting workers.

 

Many were killed, because that’s what armies do. Martyrs to the labour movement were born, and that was somewhat surplus to the needs of the ruling class. So, in 1829, the London Police Force was created, and tasked with the job of breaking these strikes using “non-lethal” means.

 

Much the same thing happened in the States. In the early 1800s, New York had an organisation called the Night Watch – this was private and for profit “policing” – and it had had this kind of organisation since the 1600s, as did cities like Boston and Philadelphia.

 

The Night Watch was famously shit in terms of controlling crime. The Watchmen were often asleep, or drunk, and while they were essentially volunteers, the reality was they had been forced into the Night Watch as punishment, or were trying to evade military service. So, cowards and crooks.

 

It was even worse in the southern United States. South Carolina vomited forth one of the first modern police forces, which was created from the existing slave patrols.

 

So as slavery was coming to an end, God-fearin’ white folks started getting nervous. So they empowered all those slave hunters to patrol the streets at night and keep them safe from the perceived depredations of the freed slaves.

 

The heavily militarised City Guard was formed to make sure the slaves understood who still cracked the whip in the South.

 

Over in beaut Australia, which was still an English prison colony at that time (Remember back in school when they told you we only became a country in 1901? Yeah, that was true.), there were all sorts of problems with the indigenous population.

 

The problem was that the aborigines had the temerity to be living on land which the British colonisers had decided belonged to the British colonisers.

 

And you can read all about Australia’s glorious Frontier Wars if you like, because you certainly weren’t taught about them at school.

 

The police in Australia began in NSW in 1789, essentially to “guard” the penal settlement of Sydney. They guarded it by beating and killing aborigines and convicts, getting drunk and raping their way through the few females they managed to find. And it too was called the Night Watch.

 

In 1862, these gangs of vicious thugs, rapists, and killers were unified and sanctified by the Police Regulation Act of 1862 and renamed the NSW Police Force.

 

The NSW Police Force has since grown into one of the largest police forces in the English-speaking world, and one of the most historically corrupt – as the Wood Royal Commission observed.

 

Its corruption, along with its hatred and brutality towards society has continued unabated – especially towards the indigenous people. Our First People make up some two per cent of our population, yet represent 27 per cent of our prison population. What is that about?

 

Obviously, our police have never existed to fight crime. And they do not now. They exist to keep you subjugated. They exist to protect the rich people from everyone else. They exist to bring people they have accused of crimes before the courts.

 

That’s it. No, seriously. That is it.

 

It’s not about preventing crime. It’s a simple fact. The police were not created to prevent crime. And the police do not prevent crime from occurring any more than the Death Sentence stops people from committing murder.

 

That is not what it is about. If you needed a clearer picture of what the police are about, just have a look at what that vile Klingerjiklian has done to the people of NSW as the Plague engulfs us all. She has appointed that bin-wheeling, hand-clapping, bucket-of-incompetent fuck, Mick Fuller, as Head Plague Lord. Not a doctor. Not a psychologist. Not an epidemiologist. A Pentacostal cop.

 

It is on Mick and his uniformed legions of thugs, cowards, and criminals to ensure we humbly and quickly obey every single diktat the police issue. The cops are running NSW. Not the state government.

 

Your suburb is not under curfew because it’s a health issue. Your suburb is under curfew because the cops want it under curfew. Gladys even admitted it.

 

And that suburb is a working-class suburb full of brown people. Not a wealthy suburb full of beach-strolling rich people. The cops are nice and polite to those people. They don’t ride those people down with horses and fine them into poverty and despair.

 

The police know full well who butters their bread, and for whom they work. They know what their job is, and it sure as shit isn’t to protect and serve you.

 

Their job is to stay true to their proud history of brutality, racism, and corruption. They remain utterly unaccountable to the society whose taxes pay for them to drive around in luxury German cars and raise revenue for the state.

 

They stubbornly resist any independent oversight. They refuse to be drug-tested before going on duty, just as they refuse to have tracking devices fitted to their cars. Their vile unions ride roughshod over every state government who tries to effect a change in police culture. What “good cops” are said to be in the Force mutely and blindly go about their jobs because they know they have to go along to get along, and they say nothing about the crimes they see and tacitly go along with every day.

 

They do as they please and have always done so. In the beginning, the cops were created from the very worst people society could produce. And nothing all that much has changed, has it?

 

But you go right on slurping at that fine, black boot-leather.

 

You’ve paid for it, after all.

 

But while you’re down there, maybe try to imagine what our world would be like if we had a professional, accountable police service that existed to help society.

 

Go on. Try.