Oaxaca's neighbourhood magistrates, 1796: a police ordinance that tells the police to stay out of houses

The city of Oaxaca was divided into quarters in 1795 and given unpaid neighbourhood magistrates, with a printed ordinance that sets out what they could do. It obliges them to push parents to school their children, to place orphans, to keep the streets swept — and it forbids them to pry into what passes inside houses, on the ground that general enquiries are prohibited by the laws of the kingdom and that families are not to be defamed over domestic gossip.