We are lucky that majority of people have cellphones with cameras after around 2010 so we can easily make videos. If we go back to the 1970's where there were 'Starlight Tours' but nobody to easily make a video of these tours and therefore no accountability for police. 'Starlight Tours' started in Saskatoon, Canada in the early 1970's where police officers would drive mainly Indigenous people to the outskirts of the city in the middle of the winter. The person would then have to walk back, usually very late at night.
There were no cameras that those people could use to document their walk back or record the police car driving away from them when they got dropped off.
When the Metropolitan Police of London was first launched in 1829 they had a hard time retaining people. Police officers would quit after a year or 2 of doing service. Around 1860 the average length of service was 4 years. After about 1870 people started to stay longer with the police force and were not quitting as quickly. A lot of the reasons why officers were now leaving the force was due to dismissals. In the early 1900's the police authorities relaxed their response to police misconduct which lead to less officers leaving the police force.
Police work offered advantages that were not offered at other firms. When the economy was down and work was hard to find the police officers were still working. If you were sick and could not work and if you didn't have an employer you would need to get government supported social services. However if a policeman got sick he was given free medical services and sick pay. In the late 1800's if a police officer got injured at work he would get a lump sum payment whereas employees in other industries had to take their employer to court.
The Police Act in 1890 helped retain officers. The Act gave policemen who completed 25 years of service a pension, regardless of age. So people in their forties could retire. These are some of the ways the police kept employees when the police forces were being established in the 1800's.
In the USA, between 1877 and 1950, around 4000 people, mostly African-Americans, were lynched in the Southern parts of the USA. A lot of times police officers were involved. In the book "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America" discusses some of these lynchings. It is hard to find if there were any convictions for these lynchings, similar to the police presently rarely get charged when they shoot someone. However, as was mentioned above, police lowered the standard on what police misconduct is so they could retain police officers since a large number of officers were leaving the force or were being dismissed in the first few years of being hired.
