Policing is a reflection of a larger American historical context. One explanation of that reflection is the history of race. Consider the following.

In August 1619, African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va. Within two decades Virginia law only allowed Africans to be enslaved and classified them as aliens, having no legal rights.

Race was the designation for slavery.

In 1787, the writers of the Constitution determined African-Americans would be counted as three-fifths of other persons for representation in Congress; the international slave trade could not be limited by Congress until 1808; and the North was obligated to secure and return escaped slaves.

Congress passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, both of which were compromises to placate tensions over slavery.

In 1861, the rift over slavery brought the Civil War, and Lincoln said of both, "in the providence of God, . . . He gives to both North and South this terrible war . . . Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword . . . the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

In the antebellum period, the governments of the Deep South created slave patrols (the antecedent of Southern policing) with the sole purpose of enforcing slavery which included controlling free blacks, preventing slave revolts, and capturing escaped slaves.

Northern justice, to the slave, was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which reinforced the power of law enforcement to chase down escaped slaves as far as the Canadian border.

After the Civil War, law enforcement changed from slave patrols to local police enforcing the sharecropper system.

Laws were passed to entrap former slaves to the land, and the police were authorized to make sure that happened. Some of the local police during the day were members of the Ku Klux Klan at night.

The purpose of both was to control former slaves and keeping them in their place.

After the North abandoned Reconstruction in 1877, it adopted, and in some cases improved upon the system of segregation.

With Jim Crow firmly in place by the early 1880s, the criminal justice system, nationally, enforced laws that imprisoned African-Americans disproportionately to their population or criminal activity. A system of laws (pig laws, anti-vagrancy statutes, peonage, convict leasing, the criminalization of hiring blacks under contract, and other types of unemployment laws) were instituted to place blacks in a position of servitude as close to slavery as possible.

After WWII, black male soldiers were excluded from many of the aspects of the GI Bill and the rise of suburban housing.

This segregation resulted in excluding blacks from participation in the formation of the modern middle class in America.

This discrimination, in conjunction with white and employment flight in the 1940s to 1950s, concentrated blacks in urban neighborhoods resulting in social and political isolation and containment. This isolation fostered intergenerational desperation, poverty, anger and crime.

While the Civil Rights Movement (1953-68) rendered more than three centuries of structural and legal racism and second class citizenship to the dustbin of history, the racism that undergirded the system remained. Large police departments in Los Angeles and other urban cities recruited officers from the Deep South to control black neighborhoods.

By the middle 1970s, black middle class flight followed white flight. This flight further exacerbated the loss of positive structures within urban neighborhoods. Between 1981-1983, the plague of crack cocaine arrived, and it ran havoc for more than a decade over urban neighborhoods already damaged by the scourge of heroin and street gang violence dating back to the early 1960s.

By the late 1980s, America responded to open air violent urban crime by creating militarized police drug units, increasing sentences for drug use and possession, increasing the number of blacks in prison, and building prisons (and supermax prisons) to house them in.

Insensitive and power-oriented policing was the norm and it was not until the 1990s, after the riots in Los Angeles and major police scandals in L.A., New York City and other large urban cities, that some departments changed from community control to the philosophy of Sir Robert Peel and community policing. Non-criminal justice system answers to black crime were not politically viable until the second decade of the 21st century.

The point: Racism, legal policy and policing have all been linked together since before the writing of the Constitution.

I tell my students the purpose of policing can only be understood within the broader context of a complicated American history.

Policing has a purpose, to protect some (to be a shield) and to be a sword upon (to control) others.

In relation to blacks, policing can be summarized as follows: Policing has always been about protecting whites, it was certainly about controlling blacks in the past, and it is open to debate if it's about protecting blacks now.

If it's about controlling blacks now, the grand juries of Ferguson and Staten Island are of no surprise.

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Dr. Arthur H. Garrison, LP.D. is an assistant professor in the Criminal Justice Department at Kutztown University.