Slave patrols: the origins of American policing

One of the earliest formal slave patrols was organized in South Carolina around 1704, and the institution spread across the slaveholding South. Made up of white men — often compelled to serve — patrols rode at night to enforce the pass system, break up gatherings, hunt people who had escaped, and terrorize the enslaved into submission. They had legal authority to stop, search, and punish any Black person, free or enslaved, without a warrant. Many historians identify the slave patrol as the direct institutional ancestor of modern American policing, especially in the South, where some patrols evolved into the first police forces. The lesson is foundational to this theme: in America, organized law enforcement was, from its origins, an instrument for controlling Black people.