Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of Left podcast, where we

remember the past and choose to repeat it. Today's episode was originally published in June

2020 and is about the history of racist policing amid the George Floyd uprising of that year.

Here's what the original description of the episode said.

Today we take a look at the history of racist policing, which flows seamlessly into a

present racist policing, which itself flows into Trump's authoritarian glee at the opportunity

to consolidate violent racist power in response to protests against violent racist power.

And now the only thing to add is that it turns out all of that ended up flowing seamlessly into the current racist immigration policies of Trump's second administration.

And all of this seemed like a fitting throwback during a holiday in which we remember that it was all of the Europeans who were immigrants to this land and needed the help of the natives to survive in the first place.

And so to look back to better understand the present, sources today include through line, Democracy Now, the Tom Hartman program, Code Switch, Behind the Bastards, The Daily Show, In The Fick,

intercepted the Ezra Klein Show, deconstructed, and on the media.

The story of policing in the northern United States actually begins across the ocean, in London.

In 1829, British Parliament passed something called the Metropolitan Police Act,

a bill that effectively created the first modern police force to oversee life within London's city limits.

What made it different from previous types of law enforcement, patrols, local militias,

neighborhood watch groups, three main things.

Their emphasis on crime prevention and control of communities, their strategy to maintain strong

visibility in everyday life by patrolling the streets and their militaristic structure,

with things like uniforms, rank designations, and a code of command and discipline.

And before long, these ideas about policing began to migrate to cities across the northern

U.S. And part of the context for early modern policing by the late 1840s

was that the immigrant population of Europeans,

...