Zimmerman Trial; The slave patrol is live and well in Florida.

Thom Hartmann
George Zimmerman kept close watch over his neighborhood.

When Black men walked or even drove through the area, he alerted the police, over and over and over again.
Finally, exasperated that “they always” got away, he went out on a rainy night armed with a loaded gun and the Stand Your Ground law, looking for anybody who should not be in his largely White neighborhood.
The South has a long history of this sort of thing. Today they’re called Neighborhood Watches. They used to be called Slave Patrols.
Prior to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the main way Southern states maintained the institution of slavery was through local and statewide militias, also known as “Slave Patrols.”  These Patrols were, in many states, required monthly duty for southern white men between the ages of 17 and 47, be they slave-owners or not.

Slave patrollers traveled, usually on horseback [the modern equivalent would be in a car], through the countryside looking for African-Americans who were “not where they belong.” When the patrollers found Black people in places where they “did not belong,” punishment ranged from beatings, to repatriation to their slave owners, to death by being whipped, hung or shot.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17573-zimmerman-verdict-the-slave-patrol-is-alive-and-well-in-florida