Talk:An Impasse at Waywickshire/@comment-25488152-20141001194636/@comment-10502460-20190906210529

"Police" existed before then, "the police" not so much. Prior to Robert Peel's London police force founded in 1845, the various officials and departments that did some of the roles modern police do today were more like magisterial officials who each had a narrow lane of what law enforcement they actually did. So yes, there were maritime police, constables, sheriffs and marshals in the United States, railway police, etc, but nothing really analogous to a modern general municipal police department who would do things like look into missing persons cases. I'm 99% sure that "filing a police report" or a "missing person report" or anything like that would not have been a thing in the 1840s.