Personal Response This is a page-long (250 word) posting which describes your pe

Personal Response
This is a page-long (250 word) posting which describes your personal reaction to one module section. This is your chance to relate the course material to your own experiences.
Students can get through a whole course and learn nothing, so let’s fix that.
The police were invented in 1830.
The police were invented in 1830.
The police were invented in 1830.
Now, everything about that “fact” is a lie – types of ‘policing’ stretch back to the Roman era and the creation of police in England was actually in 1829 – but 1830 provides a good trail-marker in our research and it also marks the start of an era of progressive reforms that features policing as one its’ defining social institutions.
By focusing on the early 1800’s we can witness the founding of the first police force (in Ireland) and we also recognize all of the peace-keeping that must have pre-existed before 1830. These are the twin purposes of Module 1.
The Deep Blue Foundation – Peace-keeping before 1830
All social animals must have methods for peace-keeping if they are to live together. From schools of fish to troops of monkeys, social living involves the regulating of aggression, breeding, territoriality, trauma and developmental & mental health issues of its’ members. If you can’t figure out how to live together then you get eaten individually.
Peace-keeping instincts are built into our evolutionary inheritance and in sociology we look at how this urge expresses itself at various levels of social complexity, the larger the population the more complex its’ society must be. To give a very simplified version of this growing complexity we can sketch the progression: KINSHIP (family) > TRIBAL (clans) > IMPERIAL (cities).
At the simplest level are the family networks that give birth to and raise new members, and these KINSHIP relationships do a tremendous amount of peace-keeping. Soon enough families living together produce Shamans and Chieftains to guide them; the Shamans using supernatural-spiritual techniques to assist peace-keeping while the Chiefs use the physical force of their male followers. If this level of TRIBAL peacekeeping is successful then larger populations can live in peace together and the shamans become Bishops, the chiefs become Kings and a network of IMPERIAL peace-keeping emerges based on laws and courts. The “police” invented by the British Empire in 1830 are a complex IMPERIAL solution to peace-keeping.
This KINSHIP > TRIBAL > IMPERIAL framework is a vast oversimplification but it highlights the vital historical perspective on policing. Policing is a recent invention that rests upon a deep foundation of kinship, tribal and imperial peace-keeping; without thousands of generations of successful peace-keeping that allowed for the British Empire, policing could not even have been invented. Policing, as the fancy imperial ‘peace-keeping’ concept we know, is less than 200 years old. Like computers today it is hard to imagine the modern world without them, but to say that police are necessary for social order is like saying computers are necessary for literacy. Long histories of social order and literacy allowed for computer and police to be invented not visa-versa.
From this historical perspective the “thin blue line” of policing exists on top of a massive “deep blue foundation” of peace-keeping that stretches back to our animal origins. Policing can only assist social order but can never be the provider of social order.
Without “policing” other types of peace-keeping would re-emerge to provide social stability, these would often be older and less complex forms of peace-keeping that include everything from gossiping grandmothers (kinship) to local militias or social media shaming (tribal) to religion-based courts (imperial). This might be chaotic but the idea of societies reverting to cannibalistic bandits in the absence of policing is an American fantasy.
A real test of a society’s health is whether you can remove the police and not have an immediate outbreak of violence. A society that immediately descends into crime in the absence of police is already a corrupt, unhealthy society. If police are the only barrier preventing mass violence then such a toxic society needs deep revolutionary change.