It concedes that there's an indirect connection in some places. But it explains how simplistic this is:
> First, every decent country has police, including the non-white ones. Second, the South lost the Civil War. Under Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans imposed the North’s will on the South. The slave patrols were disbanded. Some patrollers did indeed become police. But so did African-Americans. Meanwhile, the evil energies of the patrols were primarily expressed elsewhere—in the form of vigilante groups like the KKK. When Reconstruction ended, the South imposed tyrannical Jim Crow laws.
The only known case of a former slave patrol organization becoming a municipal police force is in Charleston South Carolina. Slave patrols were a mostly irregular force, tasked with policing a mostly rural agricultural enslaved population. And when the civil war was lost, these patrols were disbanded. Only in a few instances did slave patrols actually become police, like in Charleston.
That's still largely a rebuttal of the broader claim that policing in general has its origin in slave patrols - a claim the original comment didn't make. You can argue the narrower claim is still in some ways inaccurate but your own link just doesn't support the position that it's "incredibly reductive to the point of being untrue". Otherwise why would the author write:
Yes, policing in Southern slave states has some roots in slave patrols.
There's a vast difference between "some roots" in slave patrol and trying to say that southern police "rose out of gangs of slave patrols". Those slave patrols were disbanded, and police forces were formed often decades after the abolition of slavery. Justification of this claim is indeed possible, via pedantic exercise of stretching the meaning of "rose out of" to cover a very wide ground.
Roman tradition still forms the basis for many police institutions across much of Europe. Most of Europe and the Americas didn't abolish slavery until a few decades before the US did. Some actually didn't abolish it until decades after US emancipation. One could make a claim that their police forces are rooted in enforcement of slavery, in the same vein as the South. And even stronger ones for much of the Middle East and North Africa, some of which didn't actually make slaver a crime until the 2000s (I kid you not [1]). If you believe what is going on in Western China, you could argue that slavery is still practiced, under the watchful eye of law enforcement. My point is that pointing to the history of policing in the US as uniquely tied to slavery is pretty disingenuous if you're taking a good faith reading of the history of policing. It's acting like there isn't a country and a half between the police forces of 1860 and 2020.
Sure but you're moving the argument to something else, closer to your linked article and other things entirely. I don't really plan to debate either the history of US policing or chattel slavery - my point is only that if you're going to correct someone in such strong language and cite something as the basis for your correction, the cited thing should support your claim. I don't think it does.
I said from the beginning that it had some kernels of truth, but is reductive and simplistic. I don't think that's particularly strong language, I have since the beginning acknowledged that you can put together the kernels to truth to claim a sort of poetic truth - it's not a total fabrication. But that's all it is: a poetic truth. Actual truth of continuity between slave patrols and municipal police forces only exists in perhaps one southern city. The overwhelming majority of police forces do not have their roots in slave patrols. Slave patrols were disbanded, and police forces formed after abolition.
That's essentially summarizing the article: slave patrols existed in much of the south, but claiming continuity with today's police is a very big stretch, to the point where it's only poetically true.
I think he makes a reasonable point. Even a source that acknowledges some connection makes it clear that saying that policing in the South "rose out" of slave patrols is a far overreach.
