Origins of the police

Law and Society Review, 1987

Draft of chapter 23 published in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen (eds), 2016, pp 456-73.This chapter examines key developments in the historical context that shaped a very influential model of modern policing, while also attending to alternative models and effects. Section I considers the historical conditions for a new police in the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, with attention to the rapidly changing urban centres, and contemporaneous rural disorder in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Section II we look at the origins and mandate of the London Metropolitan Police (1829), as well as examining its legacy in diffusion of a policing model and ideological impact. Section III considers the way in which alternative approaches to policing were shaped in the gendarmerie model and its colonial expressions, while a concluding discussion in Section IV highlights the distinctive powers, functions and governance models that developed in the earliest phase of what we know as ‘modern’ policing.

Monthly Review, 2003

Journal of Urban History, 2010

Recent years have seen the renewal of historiography concerning the police in the early modern period. Specialists no longer receive the figure of cities without police forces before the creation of modern institutions. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated convergence of a great movement of reflection with reforms of the police forces and organizations in European towns, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century. Two tendencies illustrate this evolution: first, the general decline of the institutions of civic police forces and their replacement by professional forces and, second, the professionalization of municipal police forces. But these reforms of the police force could also be realized via use of traditional mechanisms of community policing. In several cities, inhabitants of the district or neighborhood were again in charge of functions of “modern” policing. Although it is premature to present a global synthesis, various European examples demonstrate that th...

For most of the nineteenth century, there is little evidence of any significant transfer of policing knowledge or practice from continental Europe to England. In general, it appears that disinterest or even outright antipathy were the predominant attitudes of English officers towards their continental counterparts. This is interesting during a period when, in other fields of public endeavour, interest in continental developments was considerable. This article, therefore, considers the limited instances of co-operation and knowledge exchange which did take place, before investigating the history of nineteenth-century antipathy towards continental (particularly French) methods of policing. The article considers stereotypes of continental policing as political and state-centred to have been a subset of wider anti-French sentiment, but also argues that the self-image of the English police (constructed in direct opposition to a perceived ‘continental model’) may also have impeded the importation of knowledge and practice from continental Europe.

This essay’s aim is to explore possible factors that shaped the necessary emergence of organised police forces in the United Kingdom

Social Justice, 2020

hen I teach the history of US policing, I begin our survey by holding up one of the most widely used textbooks on policing, The Police in America by Samuel Walker and Charles M. Katz (2018, 33), first published in 1981 and currently in its ninth edition. I turn to a chapter of the textbook titled "The History of the American Police" and read the first sentence from a section on "The First Modern American Police": "Modern police forces were established in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s." I then quote from a facing page, in a section under the heading "Law Enforcement in Colonial America," which reads: Policing in the southeastern states where slavery existed had a distinctive institution: the slave patrol. Because the white majority was so concerned about slave revolts (of which there were many), and runaway slaves, they created this new form of law enforcement. The slave patrols, in fact, were the first modern police forces in the United States. The Charleston, South Carolina slave patrol, for example, had about 100 officers in 1837 and was far larger than any northern city police force at that time. (Walker & Katz 2018, 32)

AbolitionistFutures, 2021

Can the origins of the police help explain why they are beyond reform and need abolishing? In this article John Moore shows how England’s first central government funded police were established to protect the interests of slavers and impose order on London’s dock workers.