No Name
CJA/214
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Instructor: No Name
We can learn a lot from the history of our police; this history tells us about how we first started off as society. As society today, this history should be something that everyone should know about. The start of our police was a great period in history. America learned a lot of its policing tactics from Great Britain and still uses many of those tactics with a few modifications today. It is a misconception that policing stayed the same over the years, they have learned and applied many different ways of handling different scenarios over the years and police departments continue to evolve. The police has gone through different stages in America’s history, political era, reform era, community era, and the new development stages.
In the early colonies policing took form of both informal and communal, patrols called “Watch”. The system of the “Watch” was composed of volunteers in the community and their primary duty was to warn of potential danger. Boston was the first to create the night watch in 1663 followed by New York and Philadelphia shortly after. Watchmen would often sleep or would drink on duty making this a very ineffective crime deterrent. Most the watchmen volunteers were either forced into service by the town, as a form of punishment, or were simply attempting to evade military service. Philadelphia organized an independent police force in 1833 followed by Boston and New York with day police and night watch working independently.
The beginning of police history in the United States was a very slow process with a lot of mistakes that we learned from. We as the United States, implemented many policies that Robert Peel developed during his time. Robert Peel fought to improve law enforcement in his home country of England and was the home secretary in London; he also created the London Metropolitan Police an efficient system of law enforcement and laid the foundation to