I don't have anything specific to recommend on labor history, but WP gives a pretty good overview and there's lots of goods writers on the subject. The major labor struggles are just drenched in state crackdowns and bloodbaths. It was brutal in Europe too, but the US is just beyond comparison.
The tl;dr of the industrial revolution, which is when police departments were first established, is that independent farmers were basically being driven into what they called "industrial slavery." Industrialists needed the urban slums filled with cheap, disposable "free labor" and that's more or less what they got. Along with it, they got a lot of antiquated, belligerent ideas they wanted driven out of people's heads. You couldn't have people organizing and demanding some different political order. The police were introduced to crack down on truancy, punish populist insubordination, beat organized labor into submission. Class control is still what they do today. For example, the war on drugs has never had anything to do with drugs. Chomsky explains it pretty well, not that you need any sophisticated analysis when the aims were stated clearly by the people implementing the policies:
>[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. (Haldeman, Chief of Staff)
-
>Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue...that we couldn't resist it. (Ehrlichman, White House Counsel to the president)
I think David Simon has dissected the police like no one else in recent memory, though I don't really share his nostalgia for some good ol' beat cop from some halcyon days of America.
Our Enemies in Blue is supposed to cover some of that in more depth too, from an anarchist point of view.
edit - It's also worth noting that when police departments were first being introduced, all over America, you didn't even have this pretext of cracking down on crime and protecting the public. Nobody was suggesting that the role of these institutions was to keep people from being robbed, raped or murdered and to guard the righteous from the wicked. That marketing came much later... e.g. "protect and serve" is the winner of a catchy motto contest for BEAT magazine. It's got nothing to do with any kind of duty. For that, see Warren v. District of Columbia.
this guy. Sounds like he said some stuff that was misogynist but was very specific to a certain situation and I can't really figure out whats going on. I don't want to support misogyny, but I'm still pretty confused as to what the claims against him are
This thread is filled with ignorant and simplistic analyses of the role and function of police institutions in modern society. I can almost guarantee 99% of these people commenting about how police are "good" or "bad" overall haven't read a single book, academic or otherwise, that seriously dissects the purpose of having a class of enforcers to uphold the legal and political apparatus of the state in the past say 200 or so years. Try this, for example, a serious study by a serious academic and get back to me. Whether or not individual police officers are "good" or "bad" is largely irrelevant, it isn't a case of tallying up positive and negative examples of police behaviour. It's about recognising patterns and the motivations and ideology that informs those patterns, and surprise most of them paint a pretty grim picture of police conduct and the biases and behavioural congruences that inform their role. To take one small example, look at the current investigation on the racist stop and frisk policies in the NYPD. To anyone with a fucking brain it isn't surprising and it isn't an aberration or inexplicable phenomenon. Pathetic...