In pop culture, representations of police have tended with few exceptions to start with the vision of a righteous force on the side of the people. In the 1950s, Dragnet showed Sergeant Joe Friday solving crimes with a cool professionalism. In the ongoing Law & Order franchise, detectives often trample civil liberties in pursuit of New York City’s most vile criminals. Any violation of rights that occurs in the course of this work results only from the relentless pursuit of truth and justice. “Hollywood’s police stories,” the film critic Alyssa Rosenberg has written, “have reinforced myths about cops and the work of policing.”

In the early 2000s, The Wire made itself more compelling than any other police drama by assuming that policing—not just the people who do the job but also the institutional demands of the job—is flawed. Examining systems—schools, government, media, and, above all, law enforcement—and their impact on a decaying city, even as it captured compelling characters and told human stories, The Wire made a major innovation by putting police at the center of the show without assuming they were heroes. “If you’re gonna be authentic, you’ve gotta be authentic,” the actor Wendell Pierce, who played the detective Bunk Moreland, told an audience at Columbia University in 2016. This commitment, especially to portraying the shortcomings of the police, won fans among policing’s fiercest critics.

Yet there was one aspect of The Wire’s depiction of police that I always hoped was fabricated. Several times during the show someone is referred to as “natural police.” It is meant as the highest form of praise: The characters Lester Freamon and Jimmy McNulty, portrayed as detective-work savants, possess an innate curiosity that helps with complicated problem-solving, as well as a tenacious relationship to truth-finding, and an easy way with people. If this is what it is to be “natural police,” we are back at the idea that police are inherently virtuous, even as the show constantly dug into the ways in which they were not. Calling someone “natural police” implies that policing is itself natural, and necessary, when it is anything but.

The first modern police force—the London Metropolitan Police—was established by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. He developed his ideas about law and order, Alex S. Vitale writes in his book The End of Policing, when he was “managing the British colonial occupation of Ireland and seeking new forms of social control ... in the face of growing insurrections, riots, and political uprisings.” The “Peace Preservation Force” was meant to serve as a less expensive alternative to the British army, which had previously been tasked with quelling Irish resistance. Appointed home secretary in 1822, Vitale writes, Peel would run the London Metropolitan Police along the same lines. Although the group claimed political neutrality, its main functions were “to protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force.”

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Boston adopted the London model in 1838, and New York established a formal police force in 1844. (This, it would seem, is what Attorney General Jeff Sessions was referring to when he invoked the “Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”) But well before then, cities in the southern United States, such as New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, “had paid full-time officers who wore uniforms, were accountable to local civilian officials, and were connected to a broader criminal justice system,” Vitale writes. These police officers were charged with preventing slave revolts. They had the authority to go onto private property to make sure enslaved people were not harboring weapons or conducting meetings, and they enforced laws against black literacy.