Immigration, Crime, and Legal Issues Practice Exam

The main idea here is that policing in early America was built as a system of social control over enslaved people. Slave patrols were organized groups of white men authorized to monitor enslaved individuals, prevent gatherings, patrol roads and plantations, arrest or punish runaways, and enforce labor discipline. Their purpose was to maintain the slave system through surveillance and coercive force, making them a direct form of policing designed specifically to watch and capture enslaved Black people. That focus distinguishes them from slave codes or Black codes, which are laws restricting enslaved people’s and later Black people’s rights, and from the broader category of predecessors of modern policing, which is too wide and not tied to the concrete enforcement body aimed at enslaved populations. Slave patrols best fit the description because they are the actual policing groups created to monitor, control, and capture enslaved individuals.