For historians of South Africa, the emergence of colonial rule is one of the critical hinge moments in understanding the nation’s modern political, cultural, and social beginnings, along with its unique place within the British empire. Natal, which remained an independent colonial entity from 1844 to the Act of Union in 1910, used this imperial moment to help define its place as a colonial entity within that empire. Specific circumstances on the group over the second half of the nineteenth century helped to forge the colony’s identity, which in turn helped to define the institutions of colonial rule, including the systems of policing in Natal. But to fully understand the history of the police during this period, the broader history of Natal and its early formation must be examined, along with the initial obstacles which plagued the police during the first decade and a half of the colony’s existence. This chapter will provide a brief introduction to the history of Natal while presenting the first police institutions in the colony, most notably the Natal Native Police under the command of Theophilus Shepstone. This chapter argues that even with the disbanding of the Native Police in 1851, the structural composition of policing in Natal during the 1840s and 1850s laid the foundation for the future problems and debates that dominated the formative period, particularly the concerns over the cost of the police in the colonial budget and the underlining fear of Africans in a place of authority within the colony’s policing apparatuses. Even the reforms in policing which took place in the urban centres of the colony created a veneer of legitimacy, which rarely came to fruition throughout the history of Natal, fully illustrated in the problematic career of Chief Constable Johnstone of Pietermaritzburg. However, it would take nearly half a century after the colony’s founding in 1844 for those who wished for some kind of formal police to take hold.