The police as an institution are so thoroughly ingrained in the public’s mind that it’s easy to overlook the fact that a professional police force is a fairly recent development. Before professional policing, there were many ad-hoc assemblies of people with varying amounts of authority, organized and paid for by this or that individual or organization, and ultimately relying on nothing more than overwhelming force to perform their duties.

Sir Robert Peel came up with the idea of an official police force in England in the early 19th century. The nickname “Bobbies” is a riff on Peel’s first name. So an official, organized police force is only about two-hundred years old. America more or less followed along with the organization of police in the same way as Merry Olde.

There were ancient laws in England that instructed every freeman to have certain weapons on hand and use them when called upon to serve king and country. That goes back to Henry II. Constables were appointed to call out the citizenry when required to restore order, and watchmen have been looking out for crooks, fires, stolen property, lost dogs, and various other breaches of public security for a millennium. Eventually sheriffs were sworn in to keep jails, collect taxes, and generally keep order over larger areas of the country. This office caught on in the American west, as well, giving birth to lots of good movies, and to Jamaica, where Reggae confessions eventually became popular.

The old ways led to mobs of criminals or disgruntled citizens clashing with loosely and quickly organized mobs of authorities. Civil disorder, whether due to outright criminality or not, was crushed with extreme prejudice, as they say, and only rarely with a detour to any judge when a tree was handier. Peel thought things could be improved if the general public thought that a policeman was just like them, only professionally interested in keeping order continuously. In other words, a policeman is just supposed to do what any good citizen would do in his place, but pay attention to nothing else while the general public got on with their lives.

Robert Peel came up with what he called “General Instructions” given to all policeman in London starting in 1829. Here they are:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

That sounds pretty good to me. However, it doesn’t sound even 1% like the approach to policing of any current police force I know of in the United States.