Americans often discuss police violence, military deployments in American cities, protests, and the use of government force against civilians as though these were uniquely modern controversies. They are not. Questions about armed government authority, protest, public order, and the legitimate use of force reach back to the political struggle that eventually produced the United States.

One of the defining confrontations preceding the American Revolution occurred when residents of Boston confronted British soldiers stationed in their city. Tensions between civilians and the troops had been building for months. On March 5, 1770, that tension erupted into violence when British soldiers fired into a crowd, killing five people. The man traditionally remembered as the first person killed was Crispus Attucks, a Black man of African and Indigenous ancestry. His identity should not be relegated to a historical footnote because it places a Black man at the center of one of the formative episodes in America’s struggle over government power.

Before the Declaration of Independence, before Lexington and Concord, and before the United States existed, a Black man was killed by government soldiers while participating in resistance to an armed government presence in an American city. His death became a powerful symbol for colonists who increasingly believed that British authority had become oppressive. The Boston Massacre did not, by itself, cause the American Revolution, but it became one of the most important events used to galvanize resistance to British rule and demonstrate the perceived dangers of government power backed by military force.

More than 250 years later, military personnel are again being deployed into American cities as part of domestic public safety operations, while heavily armed federal law enforcement personnel are conducting operations in communities across the country. The historical circumstances are obviously different, but the underlying community safety question deserves serious consideration: Can government create sustainable public safety through the presence of armed personnel when significant portions of the population increasingly view that presence as a source of danger rather than protection?

Before America Had Police, It Had Soldiers in the Streets

The British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre were not police officers, and any serious historical comparison must acknowledge that distinction. Modern municipal policing did not yet exist in the United States. These were soldiers of the British Empire, deployed into Boston amid growing political resistance to British authority.

That distinction is particularly important today because the United States is again debating the appropriate role of military personnel in civilian communities. The historical comparison is therefore not between an eighteenth century police department and a twenty first century police department. It is between two very different periods in which governments have turned, under very different legal and political circumstances, to military personnel as part of their response to unrest, crime, or perceived threats to public order.

By the late 1760s, Boston had become a center of resistance to British rule. Parliament imposed taxes and regulations that many colonists considered illegitimate, while merchants organized boycotts, political organizations mobilized residents, and crowds confronted government officials. British authorities increasingly viewed Boston as a place where imperial law could not be reliably enforced, and in 1768 Britain sent troops into the city.

The soldiers became a visible part of everyday life. To British authorities, their presence represented law, order, and the legitimate enforcement of governmental authority. To many residents of Boston, the same soldiers represented occupation, coercion, and a government increasingly willing to rely upon armed force to impose policies that lacked popular consent.

That difference in perception is fundamental to understanding community safety. Governments frequently measure safety through crime rates, arrests, shootings, homicides, disturbances, and other quantifiable outcomes. Communities also experience safety through their relationship with the institutions exercising authority over them. Residents judge whether they trust the people carrying weapons in their streets, whether government power is being exercised fairly, whether they are being protected or controlled, and whether the institutions claiming to provide safety possess legitimacy within the community.

By 1770, that legitimacy had deteriorated dramatically in Boston. The presence of additional armed personnel had not resolved the political conflict between Britain and the colonists. Instead, soldiers and civilians increasingly encountered one another within an atmosphere of hostility, resentment, and mutual suspicion.

March 5, 1770

On the evening of March 5, an argument involving a British sentry and civilians escalated near Boston’s Custom House. A crowd formed, additional soldiers arrived, colonists shouted at the troops, and objects were thrown. The confrontation became increasingly chaotic until British soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three people immediately and mortally wounding others. Five colonists ultimately died as a result of the confrontation.

Crispus Attucks was among those killed at the scene and has traditionally been remembered as the first person to fall. He was not merely an anonymous bystander who happened to find himself in the wrong place. Historical accounts place Attucks among the people actively confronting the soldiers, although the precise sequence of actions during the chaotic encounter has been debated for more than two centuries.

That distinction makes his story more consequential rather than less. A Black man was participating in resistance to governmental authority at a moment when people of African descent could themselves be legally enslaved in the colonies. He stood among colonists protesting the presence and conduct of government soldiers, and he died when those soldiers opened fire.

Attucks’ death quickly became part of the political meaning attached to the Boston Massacre. The victims were publicly mourned, and the massacre became powerful propaganda for opponents of British rule. Paul Revere’s famous engraving helped circulate an image of uniformed soldiers firing upon civilians, reinforcing the argument that British power had become dangerous to colonial liberty.

The developing American resistance movement therefore incorporated the killing of a Black man by government troops into its case against governmental oppression. This is not a modern reinterpretation imposed upon an unrelated historical event. Attucks was there, he was killed, and his death became part of the revolutionary memory surrounding the Boston Massacre.

The Question America Asked in 1770

Stripped of more than two centuries of patriotic mythology, the Boston Massacre presents a recognizable community safety problem. A government faced political resistance and disorder. It increased its armed presence in response. Many residents considered that presence illegitimate, confrontations between civilians and government personnel became increasingly common, and eventually one of those confrontations ended with civilians dead.

The deeper question confronting Boston was not simply whether Britain possessed the legal authority to station troops in the city. The question was whether military force could produce public safety within a community where government legitimacy was rapidly deteriorating.

Britain possessed soldiers, weapons, laws, and the formal authority of the Crown. What it could not command through military deployment was the trust and consent of the population. The distinction between governmental authority and community legitimacy remains one of the most important distinctions in any serious discussion of community safety.

America Is Asking That Question Again

That history deserves renewed attention because military personnel are again performing public safety functions on American streets. National Guard personnel have been deployed in American cities as part of crime control and public order initiatives, while federal law enforcement agencies have expanded highly visible operations in civilian communities.

These institutions are not interchangeable. National Guard members are military personnel, while ICE officers, Border Patrol agents, and other federal agents are law enforcement personnel. Their legal authorities, missions, training, and chains of command differ substantially. A responsible comparison with the British military presence in Boston must preserve those distinctions.

The broader community safety question, however, extends beyond the insignia on a uniform. When governments place armed personnel into civilian communities, particularly when their presence is controversial, those governments assume responsibility for demonstrating that the deployment improves safety, respects constitutional rights, provides meaningful accountability, and does not create additional danger for the people who live there.

Recent deadly encounters make that question more urgent. In Memphis, 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson was killed by Tennessee National Guard members in July 2026 while Guard personnel were participating in a domestic public safety operation. The investigation into the shooting is important, and a medical examiner’s classification of a death as a homicide does not itself establish criminal culpability. Nevertheless, the incident presents a circumstance Americans should examine carefully: military personnel participating in domestic crime control encountered a civilian, used deadly force, and killed him.

The National Guard is only one component of contemporary debate. Federal law enforcement operations have also produced deadly encounters, including the January 2026 killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Those incidents involved federal immigration and border enforcement personnel rather than military forces and conflating them would obscure important legal differences. Taken together, however, these events raise broader questions about the expanding presence of heavily armed government institutions within civilian communities and the systems of oversight that govern their use of force.

The Uniform Matters

Democratic societies have important reasons for distinguishing between civilian policing and military power. Police operate within civilian communities and are expected to investigate crimes, make arrests, exercise discretion, deescalate encounters, collect evidence, testify in court, and maintain continuing relationships with the populations they serve. Soldiers are trained for fundamentally different purposes, even though National Guard personnel can and do perform a variety of legitimate domestic missions.

The Guard has a long history of responding to hurricanes, floods, wildfires, natural disasters, civil emergencies, and extraordinary periods of unrest. Americans have repeatedly benefited from those deployments. Using military personnel as a continuing component of ordinary crime control, however, raises a different set of questions about training, rules governing the use of force, civilian oversight, investigative authority, and political accountability.

The most important question is ultimately empirical rather than ideological. Does placing military personnel into civilian communities make those communities safer? If government officials claim that military deployment is necessary for public safety, the public should be able to evaluate evidence demonstrating what the deployment accomplished, what risks it created, what it cost, and whether civilian alternatives could have achieved better results.

The Boston Massacre Was a Failure of Legitimacy

The British government possessed overwhelming military superiority in Boston. It had soldiers, weapons, laws, and the formal authority of the Crown, but it increasingly lacked legitimacy among the population it was attempting to govern. Sending additional soldiers into the city did not resolve that problem and ultimately contributed to the conditions in which the Boston Massacre occurred.

A government can control a street without earning the trust of the people who live on it. It can deploy more armed personnel without addressing the conditions producing violence. It can temporarily suppress disorder while increasing resentment toward government, and it can describe an operation as public safety while portions of the population experience that same operation as intimidation or occupation.

None of this means governments should tolerate violence or abandon their responsibility to maintain order. Communities suffering from shootings, robberies, assaults, drug trafficking, and other serious crimes have every right to demand effective intervention. Residents of neighborhoods experiencing high levels of violence deserve protection every bit as much as residents of wealthy communities.

The question is therefore not whether government should act. The question is what kind of government action produces sustainable safety while maintaining legitimacy, accountability, and constitutional protections.

Community Safety Cannot Mean Choosing Between Violence and Militarization

This distinction is central to the mission of the Community Safety Exchange. Criticizing excessive government force cannot mean dismissing the violence occurring within American communities. Parents who have lost children to gun violence, business owners repeatedly victimized by crime, children traveling through dangerous neighborhoods, and older residents afraid to leave their homes all have legitimate demands for safety. A government that cannot protect them has failed one of its most basic responsibilities.

Acknowledging that failure does not require accepting militarization as the inevitable solution. Community safety requires a broader infrastructure in which effective and accountable policing operates alongside mental health services, stable housing, educational opportunity, youth development, employment, violence interruption, substance use treatment, credible community organizations, and functioning government institutions. Police remain an essential part of responding to serious violence, but neither police nor soldiers can substitute for the social infrastructure required to produce durable safety.

Crispus Attucks and the American Contradiction

Crispus Attucks forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth about the founding of the United States. A Black man became one of the earliest martyrs of a movement demanding liberty from government oppression while hundreds of thousands of people of African descent remained enslaved in the colonies. Colonists condemned British soldiers for violating their liberty while maintaining a racial system that denied liberty to Black people every day.

Yet Attucks was there at the beginning. A Black man participated in the resistance, stood among the protesters, was killed when government soldiers fired, and became a symbol used to demonstrate the dangers of government power. That history cannot reasonably be separated from contemporary discussions about race and the use of government force.

Black Americans are sometimes portrayed as though demands for accountability from police or other armed government institutions represent hostility toward American institutions or traditions. The history of Crispus Attucks complicates that argument considerably. Resistance to government overreach is not outside the American tradition. It is embedded within the country’s founding narrative, and a Black man occupies an extraordinary place at the beginning of that story.

This does not mean every modern protest is equivalent to the Boston protests, nor does it mean every contemporary use of force is equivalent to the Boston Massacre. The historical circumstances are vastly different. The importance of history lies not in pretending that two periods are identical, but in recognizing recurring questions about power, legitimacy, accountability, protest, and the relationship between armed government institutions and the populations they are intended to protect.

The Question From 1770 Has Returned

The Boston Massacre occurred more than 250 years ago, but the fundamental question it raised has never disappeared: What happens when a government attempts to produce public safety through an armed presence that substantial portions of the community do not trust? The answer cannot be found simply by counting the number of soldiers, officers, agents, arrests, or weapons deployed into a community. Safety ultimately depends upon the relationship between governmental capacity and governmental legitimacy.

There are enormous differences between Boston in 1770 and the United States today. The contemporary United States is a constitutional republic with elected governments, courts, elections, constitutional protections, civilian institutions, investigative mechanisms, and forms of accountability that colonial Bostonians did not possess. Those distinctions are essential, and invoking Crispus Attucks should never require erasing them.

History does not have to repeat itself precisely to provide a warning. Before there was a United States, armed government soldiers patrolled the streets of an American city. Residents protested their presence, confrontations followed, and soldiers eventually fired upon civilians. Among the dead was a Black man named Crispus Attucks.

His death helped galvanize resistance to British authority and became part of the story Americans told about why unchecked government power was dangerous. The nation that eventually emerged from that struggle has spent more than two centuries wrestling with many of the same fundamental questions about race, protest, government authority, public order, and the legitimate use of force.

That is why Crispus Attucks belongs in the modern conversation about community safety. The lesson of Boston is not that government should abandon its responsibility to protect people, nor is it that every deployment of armed government personnel is inherently illegitimate. The lesson is that weapons and governmental authority alone cannot create sustainable safety. Government can impose order through force, but community safety requires legitimacy, accountability, trust, due process, and the participation of the people being protected.

America began learning that lesson before it was even a country, and one of the first people whose blood forced Americans to confront it was a Black man named Crispus Attucks.

Sources Cited

Archer, R. (2010). As if an enemy’s country: The British occupation of Boston and the origins of revolution. Oxford University Press.

Boston National Historical Park. (n.d.). Crispus Attucks. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.

Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d.). Crispus Attucks. Encyclopedia Britannica.

National Park Service. (n.d.). Boston Massacre site. Boston National Historical Park, U.S. Department of the Interior.

National Park Service. (n.d.). The Boston Massacre. U.S. Department of the Interior.

Smithsonian American Art Museum. (n.d.). Crispus Attucks. Smithsonian Institution.

Zobel, H. B. (1970). The Boston Massacre. W. W. Norton & Company.