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By 1857, additional departments were created in New York City, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Newark, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. By the twentieth century, the country saw major changes to policing, thanks to August Vollmer, the first police chief of the Berkeley, California, police department, established in 1909. As chief, Vollmer introduced new policing policies to his department, including lie detector tests, a police records system, police training schools, and mounted officers. He also helped to militarize U.S. police departments. Years after he served in the military, Vollmer credited his time fighting in the Spanish-American War with teaching him the military tactics needed because at the end of the day, Vollmer espoused, police officers were conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society and we must never forget that. His training schools, which were implemented nationally, were centered on the coercive institutions and practices of the imperial state that create and sustain empire, which refer to colonial conquest, the violent suppression of anticolonial dissent, and counterinsurgency operations. Police adopted many of these reforms across the country.

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At the University of California, Vollmer was the head of their criminal justice program, where his students took courses in which they learned about different racial types and how hereditary and race degeneration led to criminality. These sentiments were internalized by U.S. police departments across the country, many of which have also been infiltrated by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, police officers shot and killed at least two thousand Americans. Black Americans are viewed by law enforcement as more suspicious than white Americans, a sentiment that emboldens nonlaw enforcement persons, like George Zimmerman, to treat Black citizens as dangerous and therefore disposable. Two-thirds of 8,000 police officers surveyed across the country view police shootings as isolated incidents that have nothing to do with larger social issues. Black and Brown communities are less likely to rate police officers highly. In 2020 alone, the list of Black women and men killed by police includes Tina Marie Davis, a fifty-three-year-old mother killed by police in Spring Valley, New York; Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old emergency medical technician shot and killed by police while she slept in her Louisville, Kentucky, home; Tony McDade, a thirty-eight-year-old Black transgender man shot and killed by police in Tallahassee, Florida; Mubarak Soulemane, nineteen, shot and killed by police in West Haven, Connecticut; Lebarron Ballard, twenty-eight, shot and killed by police in Abilene, Texas; Kanisha Necole Fuller, forty-three, shot and killed in Birmingham, Alabama; Modesto Reyes, thirty-five, shot and killed by police in Marrero, Louisiana; Malik Canty, thirty-five, shot and killed by officers in Paterson, New Jersey; and Dijon Kizzee, twenty-nine, shot and killed by police in Los Angeles, California.

Another form of police brutality is sexual assault. Chattel slavery created an economic system in which white men tortured and raped enslaved Black women and children, who were then subsequently forced to give birth to the resulting children. Policing was born out of the same anti-Black violence that allowed Americans to justifyand which continues to excusethe violence of enslavement, from slavery to prison. Police departments across the United States are equipped with resources that allow them to physically assault and restrain citizens at any given moment. Along with guns, tasers, handcuffs, and rubber bullets, law enforcement also uses sexual violence as a tool. This includes cavity searches and rape; the latter is one of the most common complaints filed against police officers. David Correia writes:

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The History of Policing in the United States Is About Controlling Black Lives - Teen Vogue