People think of policing as eternal, as having always existed. But like child welfare and boarding schools, it evolved fairly recently to serve a particular purpose. When you move people off the land, they need to go somewhere, and people without land go to cities. Cities and villages have always had neighborhood watches and loosely organized citizen groups that managed antisocial behavior, but these were local and had limited power. In 1829, Robert Peel created London’s Metropolitan Police Force to deal with the exploding urban population. This
