Organized police forces are relatively recent inventions, developing especially
Organized police forces are relatively recent inventions, developing especially in the nineteenth century. They emerged as (and remain) a means of imposing social order. Their precise nature differs in important ways across national contexts and forms of government, depending on which populations were perceived to be threats to social order. For example, British police were formed to quell Irish nationalism and Chartist demonstrations in the interests of wealthy Victorians, fearful that London was growing rapidly in size and impoverishment. The London Metropolitan Police was modeled both on the Bow Street Runners, originators of the concept of regular uniformed police patrols, and on the London Marine Police Force, initially funded by the West India Merchants and the West Indian Planters Committee for the purposes of securing cargo from the colonies. Techniques of policing were also derived from colonial governance. Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British police forces increasingly took on the role of ensuring public order against the threat of rioting. In nineteenth-century Canada and Australia, national “mounted” police forces were established to control Indigenous populations, serving as security forces for settler colonialism.
These histories are important for understanding not only the criminalization of Indigeneity, and the continued regularity of the murder of Indigenous people in police custody, but also the ways that war and police have been inextricably entwined for centuries.
— A. Howell, International Feminist Journal of Politics, page 123
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Mexico’s power elite in the last three decades is overwhelmingly the product of elite mentors. Only one out of seven of our power elites had no known elite mentor. Furthermore, most of the mentors were either members of their same small power elite circle or members of elite circles prior to 1970.
These figures are extraordinary for two reasons. First, the fact that nearly half of Mexico’s most influential figures were disciples of their own peers during a thirty-year period suggests the rapidity of elite dynamics on one hand and the ability of a narrow group of leaders to choose their replacements on the other. Second, although having an elite rather than an “oridinary” mentor is not a requirement for achieving super elite status, in more than eight out of ten cases it is in the norm. Thus, those talented individuals in Mexican society with leadership ambitions are not likely to achieve membership in Mexico’s power elite withoutthe assistance of an elite mentor. Having such a mentor does not guarantee achieving elite status, but rather it is a typical characteristic among those Mexicans who achieve such influence.
Camp, Roderic A., and Camp, Roderic A. Mexico’s Mandarins: Crafting a Power Elite for the Twenty-first Century. United Kingdom, University of California Press, 2002.
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Those who rule in this country now . . . want to hide the truth from black people . . . and they