Before Europeans invaded and took over the New World, English Common Law allowed police to use any means necessary to stop and capture a felon. Back then, there were very few felony crimes and those were punishable by execution. Firearms were not an available means to police for stopping criminals (Broomé J.Humanistic Psychology, 2014). The use of deadly force in the Americas became prominent in the 1800s when police first began carrying duty firearms. As USA law enforcement evolved, firearms became standard issue and were also an available means by which a fleeing felon could be stopped legally under the law. Historically, the military has supplied large numbers of members to police forces as well as being a major influence on police psychology and police deadly force training methods. Military shooting performance examples include such factors as dehumanizing the enemy, physical proximity, social distancing (objectification of the adversary), and the natural instinct to fight, flee, bluff, or freeze. In the military is it known that the more realistic the training is for a soldier, the more likely he/she will be effective in shooting and killing enemy combatants. Military and police actions have been featured in the many wars before the American Revolution—in the USA’s seven officially declared wars since 1775 and innumerable others. Although USA wars have honed Euro-Americans’ patterns of aggressiveness and use of violence, in using the Tree Concept the “Root” causes for both the military and the police “killer” enthusiasm date to primitive European Warriors. Its “Trunk” formed when Europeans perfected the GUN (starting in 1304). “Branches” came when released European prisoners + an assortment of “low life” Europeans (e.g. enslavers, prostitutes, religious dissidents, and the wayward) + a conglomeration of religious fanatics (advocating hypocritical concepts of Christian dealings with “all God’s children”) were on board ships headed to the Americas so as to “Fruit” people’s oppression.
Their resultant superficial and Indifference/Hate/Evil/Sadism Complex (IHES) lifestyle molded Enslaved Africans into brutal submission. In fact, the single most important shaper of USA violence has been racism and police action directed at Black People. It started with perceptions by plantation captors, police groups, and the colonial/state governments deeming it essential to maintain slavery and then Jim Crow segregation (1865-1965) as state-enforced racial caste systems. Meanwhile, from the beginning of the Americas the police have assumed roles in all aspects of Black People’s lives, each requiring a heavily armed, violence-prone White civilian population for support. The police were actively involved in keeping the Enslaved under control, including vigilante actions. Lynching, as part of Mob law, features a society that is most rotten at its core. It was used mainly against Southern Blacks after slavery ended in 1865, but also in the West--directed mainly against Mexican Americans and Asians. What made anti-Black lynching so significant was the unspeakable barbarity with which they were carried out against adult men, teenager boys, women, children, and pregnant mothers. To enforce deference and submission to Whites, 2 to 4 Blacks were hanged, burned at the stake, or quietly murdered every week by beating, drowning, strangling, stabbing, poisoning, and axing. Apart from being public spectacles, killings were also public theater, often a festive affair, a participatory ritual of torture and death. Special “excursion” trains transported spectators to the scene; employers sometimes released their workers to attend; parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children for the event; and entire families attended--the children hoisted on their parents’ shoulders to miss none of the action and accompanying festivities.
Every year of USA history has witnessed Euro-Americans committing the overwhelming majority of homicides in untold numbers, engaging potentially lethal assaults, and daily exhibiting countless “white collar” crimes “everywhere’. Police have always been at the center of lynching, racial, ethnic, religious, agrarian, urban riots, rural feuds, industrial conflict; crime, vigilantism, halting revolutions, as well as in terrorism against Black People; assassinations; and violence against women and Black/Brown/”Red” youth; and stirring gang wars and then “gifting” duffel bags filled with street drugs and guns to struggling Black People so they can fight each other.