Policing has many implications on social order such as: classism, capitalism, and racism. While some note that policing started in Europe, and then was adapted and implemented in the United States others can describe how the U.S. already had it’s own system of policing, influenced and constructed by the Barbados slave codes. Regardless of the stages of policing over time, many functions have remained constant; maintaining social order, creating and maintaining class and the fact that policing has been racialized. Klockar writes in The Idea of Police how one must turn their attention to the means of policing instead of the ends of policing. He reasons this because, “throughout history, in this country, and elsewhere, the police have used the means that defines them to achieve so many different ends that no ends-based definition could possibly define them” (9). He claims that listing the means of police …show more content…
Many today understand the concept of the Linear Model, in which legislators make laws that police enforce, and a court decides the outcome for a criminal; that model doesn’t quite follow the path straightforwardly. In fact, this model is very disillusioned, and it’s been observed in history that laws follow police’s behavior. Neocleous states in The Fabrication of Social Order “’Law reform’ is often little more than a product and legitmation of police operational practices. The law has been formally rewritten to suit the exercise of police power” (Neocleous, 98). Neocleous explains that not only were laws changed to advantage the police and their practices, but also in doing so it perpetuated the power the police had. Police are able to do so, because in Europe they started as a form of political and state administration. Both positions in these dynamics are problematic because the consequences are the same; maintaining a social order that is engineered by the state (Neocleous,