The origins of \" modern \" policing

$Page 1: The origins of \" modern \" policing$
Draft only: final version published as Chapter 23 of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, Paul Knepper and Anja Johansen (eds), 2016, pp 456-73.

1

The origins of “modern” policing

Mark Finnane

Introduction

In 1829 the new commissaire of police in Paris found among the items left by his predecessor

a number of volumes of ordinances and laws regulating life in the city. Among them was a

four volume work compiled by a former commissaire, published under the instructive title

Dictionnaire de police moderne (Alletz 1820; Merriman 2006, 25). Characteristic of the

manuals that guided police and magistrates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the

volumes were a guide to duties and powers, ranging in this case from the process of arrest

and prosecution of those threatening the King, to the mundane work of regulating the markets

and streets of Paris and the cities and towns of France. The lengthy discussion of the

regulation of sale of ‘champignons’ for the sake of public health and individual well-being

reminds us that this volume was a particular local manifestation of a more general

phenomenon, the invention of modern policing. Alletz described a ‘police moderne’, a

system, not just an institution, a way of regulating and ordering a society in a modern way.

In the adjective ‘moderne’, he invoked a rhetoric that would flow through many jurisdictions,

national and local, in the debate over the desirability of an efficient and effective new police.

Across the Channel in this same year, the London Metropolitan Police was established by an

act of the British parliament. This was not the first urban police force, in Britain or elsewhere.

It built on changes in the role of earlier police officers, the constables whose office dated

back to medieval times. Yet scarcely any other institution in criminal justice history can

compete with the symbolic valence of the London Metropolitan Police(Emsley 2012). Its

early and enduring association with its parliamentary advocate and first minister, Robert Peel,

ensured that early policeman were called ‘Peelers’, as they had come to be called in Ireland

where Peel had wrought a revolution in policing during his time as Chief Secretary (1813-

22). Later imaginative invention shaped the memory of what were thought to be ‘Peelite

principles’ guiding this exemplary police force. In fact such principles were twentieth century

reconstructions, achieving sway through their repetition in American textbooks (Lentz and

Chaires 2007). Through imperial transfer of ideas and institutions the London Metropolitan


2

Police came to play a crucial role in shaping how modern police in many countries looked

(sometimes literally, in uniform) and acted. In Europe too the image of a civil urban police,

permanent but courteous, forceful but unarmed, came to play a powerful if indeterminate

rhetorical role in contests over the character of a political regime and its apparatus of security

(Johansen 2013). Yet the London Metropolitan Police was but one, if very significant,

influence in what was a much more diverse pattern of institutional and discursive formations

that came to define what modern police and modern policing might look like.

Our appreciation of police history has changed very significantly in the last four decades.

Both social history and cognate developments in the history of the social sciences have

enriched a still developing understanding of the context and variety of police. No less than

‘police’, policing has become a much studied object of research and debate. On one thing all

contemporary scholarship is agreed – any account of modern police which attributes its

emergence to a single idea, person, or legislative enactment founders at once on the weight of

empirical evidence that demonstrates continuity more than rupture. In the language of

English historiography, the ‘Whig’ account of the emergence of modern police, one that

emphasised its natural condition as an emblem of the modern state, gives way to a history of

complexity and contest.

The very word police has itself become an object of much debate, replicating a historical

reality in which police embodied a capacity of government for public well-being as integral

to the security of the state(Dodsworth 2004). As if to mock the early English critics of a

continental despotic police, contemporary social theory has been much interested in the

historical phenomenon of police as something other than a force devoted to either the

prevention or detection of crime. The police of a consolidating early modern state, it is

argued, was as much concerned with the conditions of urban life and the health of the

populace as it was with the narrower interest of protection from crime (Pasquino 1991;

Zedner 2006). But the dualism of this old contest around the proper sphere of police appears

misleading when one moves beyond the rhetoric that inflames debate about the creation of

police forces at particular moments, to study police in their practical work-a-day roles.

Depending on geographic location and jurisdiction the work of a modern police has ranged

from the high-level work of national security, protecting the interests of the state and

sovereign, to the mundane activity of keeping the streets clean and enabling urban mobility.


3

In the words of another modern sociologist of police, there is high and low policing (Brodeur

1982) – and we can see from its early nineteenth century beginnings why this was always so.

This essay will approach the subject with a view to identifying 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.

I Conditions for a new police

The emergence of a new police in the early decades of the nineteenth century was made

possible by changes in state formation and the functions of government. The consolidation of

European nation-states was expressed in expanding ambitions about what government might

do at home and abroad to consolidate wealth and power. In pursuit of imperial power

European governments in the age of mercantilism sought trading advantage through

protecting the interests of private entrepreneurial companies in their various enterprises

across the seas. At home eighteenth century governments were much concerned with internal

security, especially in the cities which were growing as an effect of the changes brought by

the early industrial and agricultural revolutions.

Necessarily these developments were articulated in ideas for change, but there was no single

idea of policing, rather a constant expression of a need for altered institutions to cope with the

conditions of rapid and even revolutionary social and political change. Innovations that

shaped police forces of the future were forged by governments impelled to control

widespread threats to the security of the state. But more mundane challenges to the security

of persons, and homes and workplaces flowed from the rapid growth of cities in the late


4

eighteenth century. The rural disruptions and disorder associated with changing agricultural

patterns and land appropriation were equally important in stimulating alternatives to the

deployment of military forces. In societies that relied heavily on local authority and informal

social control mechanisms, the mobility of populations displaced by economic change and

warfare helped to shape new responses to crime and disorder.

For a century before the French revolution France was the site of two forms of policing that

are recognisable in post-revolutionary legacies. Both were the outcome of the executive

decisions of an absolute state. From 1667, Paris was placed under the command of a

Lieutenant of Police, an office created by Louis XIV. Over the period of more than a century

up to the Revolution the Lieutenant controlled a variety of functionaries responsible for

different aspects of guarding and regulating the city and its ports along the Seine, as well

adjudicating offences. The functions of the Paris police included the arrest of criminals to be

brought before the courts, as well as surveillance of the population for signs of disorder and

subversion (Clive Emsley 1983).

Like Paris before this, other cities and towns were governed by police whose functions

extended back to the mediaeval period. But in rural France the aspirations of an absolutist

monarchy for a more ordered state were embodied in the eighteenth century institution of the

maréchaussée. These companies of armed militia were coordinated from 1720 under the

Ministry of War. They had a wide range of surveillance and crime detection functions,

including the surveillance, harassment and expulsion of vagrants and beggars from local

districts. Their responsibilities overlapped with the police of the towns, sometimes to the

point of conflict and certainly lack of cooperation. The institution was vulnerable to the local

charge that it was an instrument of central government, interfering with local custom and

urban autonomy. The maréchaussée was also hampered in its effectiveness by the poor pay

and conditions of its workforce, many of whom sought other employment to supplement their

pay. From the 1770s, with the deterioration of political conditions in the country the

institution was formed into a more disciplined body with its officers no longer able to be

married and increasingly housed in barracks(Cameron 1977; Cameron 1981). In spite of

criticism of the institution there were those on the eve of revolution who felt it needed to be

strengthened. And indeed in the conditions of revolutionary France the maréchaussée would

be succeeded by the gendarmerie, a paramilitary force, an arm of the central state (Emsley

1999a).


5

In Britain and its North American colonies, policing before the police was the business

principally of local communities. The ancient office of constable was one element of a

system that focussed on prevention of crime, especially at night. The securing of homes and

people from personal assault, or property theft, was a responsibility of the watch, a system

dependent on citizen participation. The night watch exercised a crime prevention function,

perhaps even more effective than the later police reformers wished to recognise. This was

also a system that related closely to the business of prosecuting crime. Offenders caught in

the act would be detained and taken before magistrates for what might be very speedy justice.

The fabled idea of the constable as citizen, possessing no more nor less than the citizen’s

powers, is a legacy of this elementary policing that had its roots firmly in the tradition of

local government and relatively small communities (Reynolds 1998).

For England at least, a decisive break in this tradition came in the middle of the eighteenth

century in London. The rapid growth of population in the country’s capital city was

accompanied by the increasing vulnerability of London and provincial elites frequenting the

roads in and out of the capital. Gangs of highway robbers proved to be well beyond the

capacity of any local magistrates to detect and prosecute their crimes. It lay in the

imagination of the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding to propose successfully the

establishment of runners, aids to the magistrate of Bow Street Court in London, assisting in

the detection and arraignment of suspected criminals. The Bow Street Runners, as these

magistrate’s assistants became known, thus undertook functions that would in the nineteenth

century be taken up by detectives. They did not displace the night watch or the constable, but

aimed to make effective the powers of magistrates to prosecute crime effectively. Perhaps by

doing so they would improve deterrence – so it was hoped (Beattie 2012).

The innovation of the Bow Street runners can distract from other, more consequential

developments in 18th century policing. They become clearer when one looks not at the

deficiencies of the night watch or the constable system in London and the Home Counties but

at changes in the other greater urban centres of the British Isles especially Dublin, Glasgow

and Edinburgh. In the late 18th century Dublin was the second largest city after London. It

was governed by a Protestant ascendancy whose power lay in their landed estates and their

political control of an Irish Parliament with its seat in Dublin. The disordered state of the

countryside in the 1780s, wracked by emerging agrarian rebellion, was matched by the unsafe

condition of the Dublin streets. For the administration based in Dublin Castle the possibility


6

of a radical approach to policing was highlighted by proposals that drew both on a failed

London initiative of 1785, and the attractions of French systems of policing.

In 1763 an English diplomat, long resident in Paris, had published a lengthy treatise on ‘The

police of France’. The author, Sir William Mildmay emphasised the potential to take the

‘civil’ elements of the French system into a police model that would be a distinct department,

employing dedicated officers whose sole employment was for the ‘peace and good order’ of

the city (Mildmay 1763, 61). Mildmay’s caution about the military nature of French policing

cannot disguise the attraction of his ideas to Dublin Castle, whose senior civil servant

cribbed from Mildmay in proposing a Parisian police solution to Dublin’s problems (Palmer

1988).

The establishment of a Dublin Metropolitan police by statute in 1786 was an event of

singular importance. Yet it does not stand alone as a model of urban policing in this period.

Beginning in Glasgow in 1800, a succession of Scottish cities and towns established their

own police forces, helping define the possibilities of urban policing in Britain, long before

the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. As Barrie has shown the Scottish developments are

distinctive not only as a precedent standing between the Dublin statute of 1786 and the

London one of 1829. But he suggests also that there are limits to this distinctiveness, and that

it shares much with contemporary developments of urban improvement in provincial towns in

England (Barrie 2010). These developments represent a particularly interesting third

alternative to the classic opposition between the state, repressive models of policing flowing

out of the governance of a turbulent Ireland, and the ideas of a preventive police focused on

prevention of crime later identified with the London Metropolitan Police. For developments

such as those expressed in the Scottish police acts expressed an ideal of urban government in

which police would play a functional role in securing the proper regulation of town life, of its

markets, street-life, trade and public health. Of course these were all models of development

rather than descriptions of police work in particular locations. Under the right kind of social

conditions the civic government work of police could develop as an aspect of the duties and

responsibilities of colonial police forces as much as of Scottish self-governing towns.

These Scottish ideas of the role of police as an aid to civic government overlap with the more

extensive connotations of the word police as it developed on continental Europe during the

eighteenth century especially in German Enlightenment thought, connected to the work of


7

jurists and philosophers on the conditions of government. In a strain of thinking closely

linked by Michel Foucault to the transition from ancient regime sovereignty to modern

governmentality the security and integrity of the state was seen as embedded in the health and

welfare of the population. Police referred to all those conditions that made civil life possible,

where these were within the control of government. Some sense of the integrated and

ambitious scope of this “police” can be seen in a characteristic German text of the late 18th

century: ‘if subjects are to have those attributes and capacities which are in accord with the

happiness of the state, they must be (1) reasonable, (2) useful and (3) not excessively

burdensome members of the commonality. In accordance with this maxim, the police have

therefore to attend to (1) the moral condition of subjects, (2) civil order and (3) internal

security and the control of evil and injustice ’(Ludtke 2009, 205).

Such a visionary conception of an all-encompassing police would prove impossible to contain

within the one institution. While its absolutist connotations are self -evident, such a program

nevertheless highlights the manifold work of police as it would develop during the nineteenth

century. Emphasising the demands of civil order would justify a wide range of police

interventions in the life of the urban poor and those who spent their life on the street. The

demands of internal security would come to justify not only surveillance of potential risks but

a wide range of repressive sanctions against organised labour and other social protest. Yet

civil order also captured a vision of a society in which victims of crime would have a public

remedy for the harms done to them and perhaps even better might hope for the prevention of

such harms.

The continental idea of police was an all-embracing vision of the responsibilities of

government for the welfare and security of the population, in turn a guarantee of the security

and prosperity of the state. The breadth of this conception of police as something larger than

a concern with the detection and prevention of crime found its British expression in the work

of Patrick Colquhoun. While there are grounds for doubting the immediate impact of his

advocacy of a new police (Beattie 2012), his extended 1806 thesis on the police of the

Metropolis, which went through a number of editions within a decade of its publication, set

out an equally comprehensive conception of the responsibilities of police. Its debts however

were less to the continental notion of police than to his own experience and role in the

development of Scottish urban policing (Barrie 2008). We can see then that the sharp

oppositions between English and Continental policing traditions which have been represented


8

as shaping English resistance to police reform in the early nineteenth century are rather less

fixed when studied in historical context. Modern policing emerges in this way neither as a

single idea nor a single institution. Rather it is shaped by a proliferation of discourses and

practices around the demands of urban government as well as state security during the period

of revolutionary changes.

II A preventive police?

No amount of revisionism can contest the historical reality that the London Metropolitan

Police, established by legislation in 1829, quickly established itself as a model to emulate or

avoid in a large number of particularly English-speaking jurisdictions. We need to separate

the ideological baggage of talk about Peel’s principles of policing, or Whiggish accounts of it

as the finest expression of an English tradition of civil government, from the need to

understand the emergence of the Met at that particular moment and perceptions that quickly

developed around what kind of police this would be (Emsley 2009).

The London Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established a new police supervised by two new

justices (magistrates), to be known later as commissioners. They would be responsible for

recruiting a force of constables distributed for policing the wards of metropolitan district. The

force was hierarchical, with senior officers including superintendents, inspectors and

sergeants, terminology that would be replicated in numerous imitations throughout the

English-speaking world. Although the Home Secretary would direct the metropolitan police,

a legacy from the earlier Dublin (and failed London) initiatives, the police would be

maintained by a tax on the districts being policed – the old watch rates were replaced by a

single rate, as the old parish boundaries were in turn displaced by the ambition of a police for

the entire metropolis, the City of London alone being excluded. The new statute deserves

attention as an exercise in incremental administration. Introducing the bill to the Westminster

parliament, the Home Secretary Robert Peel was careful to set out the gradual nature of the

extension of the new police into the many districts that made up an expanding metropolitan

area. But he did not attempt to disguise ‘the necessity and advantage of having an efficient,

vigilant and well-regulated patrol, both by night and day, controlled by one authority, and

acting under one head’(The Times, 16 Apr 1829, p. 2).

We have already seen that the recent historiography emphasises the continuity between what

was established in 1829 and what went before it. But it is also important to acknowledge just


9

what a significant innovation this was in the context of an emerging liberal state. By

establishing at the very heart of an emerging second Empire, police accountable not to local

authorities but directed by the Home Secretary, the British government signalled its

willingness to apply the lessons of governing a more disturbed part of the union, namely

Ireland, to the largest city of the United Kingdom. The view that this outcome of 1829

represented the defeat of British fears about a continental police has been challenged in more

recent accounts. Even Stanley Palmer in his formidable comparison of English and Irish

policing developments was inclined to interpret 1829 as the effective displacement of

a“wearying” run of committees opposing proposals for a new urban police (Palmer 1988).

More recent scholarship focused on the transformation of London policing has highlighted

the degree to which the diehard opponents of a new police were being challenged and

displaced by new thinking during the 1820s. Most recently John Beattie has emphasised the

innovative work of the committees enquiring into the police needs of the metropolis well

before 1829, suggesting that earlier historians have misread the depth of opposition to the

new police (Beattie 2012).

The 1829 act created a norm rather than mandated an exception, which was arguably what

characterised the 1786 Dublin act. Its governance arrangements on the other hand highlight

its distinctiveness compared to the prior developments in urban policing in Scotland. As we

have seen those developments owed a great deal to the traditions of civic government and

ideals of urban order closely linked to a broader cultural, legal and political identity of the

Scottish part of the union (Barrie 2010). Precisely because of its strong links to this very local

if intellectually and culturally influential movement of the Scottish Enlightenment and its

liberal political culture, Scottish policing was arguably less likely to shape the future of

policing than the London, central government-mandated, solution to the problem of urban

order.

It was indeed the actions of a central state, the British state through the Westminster

Parliament, which proved to be the norm in the development of the modern public police. A

modern police was public police, not a mechanism for the security of a particular location or

interest, for which various forms of private policing continued to be available (Miller 2013).

One did not have to cross the Irish Sea and encounter the problems of Ireland to recognise

that a modern police was a police that would serve an overarching mandate for public

security, whatever other functions it might have. Hence, even in the developing era of a


10

laissez-faire state, when English counties proved uneven in their uptake of the new

institution, the Westminster Parliament enacted a measure in 1856 making it compulsory for

English counties to establish a police along the lines of that which had been mandated by the

1829 act for London. Well before this, however, the preference of political elites for a

preventive police on the London model had started to win the day against those who favoured

continuing reliance on the older traditions of policing governed by local magistrates. Within

only a few years, in the 1830s, the image of London police in English provincial discourse

signalled the very essence of what modern police might be, namely full-time, paid, in

uniform, and capable of exercising authority without a display of military force (Philips and

Storch 2001).

Yet it was prevention above all that characterised what distinguished the new police. This

became very clear across the Atlantic as governing authorities in American cities wrestled

with their choices in the face of burgeoning crime and disorder in Jacksonian America and

after. Less than a year after its establishment the London police appeared already an

outstanding example to the Philadelphia Recorder James M’Ilvaine in 1830 (Johnson, 16–

19). Addressing the grand jury on the challenges faced by the city, M’Ilvaine channelled a

generation of reform rhetoric when he represented the 1829 English initiative as a triumph of

modern system in place of ramshackle decay.

The case was the more compelling because American urban policing was so clearly a legacy

of English origins. It was characterised by a dependence on night watchmen and a tradition of

locally appointed constables whose primary function was to assist in arrest of wrongdoers for

the purpose of prosecution (McConville 2005; Lane 1967; Richardson 1970). ‘The

fundamental principles of our present police’, said M’Ilvaine, ‘were borrowed, together with

other municipal regulations, from those of England’. They had not adapted ‘to the

circumstances of a crowded metropolis, and have not kept pace with the progress of criminal

art or general refinement’. For this Philadelphian reformer the new police model was one

that would address growing crime through its more effective system of intelligence collection

and powers of arresting criminals and prosecuting them systematically. Three years later the

Recorder had the chance to repeat his preferences for a more effective system of public police

in a more wide-ranging report of a city commission appointed to inquire into the state of

police. By that stage these American observers were noting the appeal of the new system in

London, where there now prevailed ‘an admirable degree of order, regularity and decency,


11

and where ‘the most perfect security is afforded to every person during all hours of the day

and night’. The attraction to defenders of liberty of the London police system was that ‘its

effects had not arisen from any additional or arbitrary powers conferred upon the officers, but

are entirely referable to its regular, organized and systematic operation’(Hazard’s Register of

Pennsylvania, XII, 1833, 285). The republican suspicion of central government delayed the

emergence of such regularity and system. And when it did come the vulnerability of police

leadership to the whims of urban political factions remained a feature of the American ‘new’

police (Johnson).

We have highlighted throughout this account of the origins of modern policing the central

role played by an expanding central state, taking on itself the general task of public security

not through military means but through a permanent institution whose last resort was force

but whose intermediate responsibilities were the exercise of an authority won through the

wearing of a uniform and the exercise of legal warrant for public security. There was

however nothing inevitable about a central government mandate. The policing of American

cities demonstrates the possibility of another path that has been remarkably resilient. There

the persistent autonomy of self-governing communities, the jealous defence of local interests,

has been played out in ways that preserved almost in amber the British-origin context of

police structures accountable to local communities. Like other criminal justice institutions,

including that of the prosecution service in the office of district attorney, police authority

flowed from democratic election. Notoriously in some circumstances this delivered police

into the hands of sectional interests and nurtured distinctive traditions of corruption.

The particularity of these patterns in North America was highlighted during the 19th century

by periods in which there was a struggle between city and state government over the control

of police. For a period of some years in New York in the 1860s there were even two

competing urban police forces, one mandated by the state legislature, the other controlled by

the city government(Richardson 1970). Such conflict did not endure and the tradition of

urban self government prevailed. It would be wrong however to highlight such examples as

something uniquely American. For it has been a characteristic of the two-sided aspect of

modern policing that institutions with overlapping jurisdiction have frequently clashed in

other political cultures. In 18th and 19th century France for example and in Italy, the tension

between a local police responsible for the security of towns people and a national

gendarmerie, was not infrequent(Emsley 1999a). Indeed any state which sought to defend its


12

national security interests through the formation of centralised gendarmerie left open the

possibility of conflict with local police. Even within police forces, the dual functions of crime

prevention and crime detection might be a source of aggravation, for example between a

detective force and the demands of the patrol police whose every day associations with the

local community created a different set of allegiances and commitments.

III The scope of modern policing

The English model deserves attention for the extent of its influence, historical and

ideological, and even historiographical. Yet we have seen that it was far from being the only

model of modern police. And if we think of modern policing as an assemblage of techniques

that are part of modern government then each police has its own point of origin as well as its

history of borrowings, transmissions and impositions. In a series of studies Emsley has

sought to abstract what the great variety of modes of policing and police forces in the modern

world owe to their contextual conditions, developing a typology of three styles of policing,

state military, state civilian and municipal (Emsley 1999b). Such an approach acknowledges

not only the breadth of policing styles and institutional forms in abstract, but points also to

the political conditions that shaped the emergence of modern public policing. The scope of

modern policing was not however simply a result of executive decision. The functions of

police were also the product of those being policed, of the uses made of police powers by

local elites and by the common people. Sometimes those functions fitted uneasily with what

police saw as their preferred work; at others, or in certain places, the relative responsibilities

of police (crime detectors, crime preventers, defenders of state security?).

We can capture some of this scope of modern policing by examining the uptake of policing,

primarily in the English-speaking world and its transformation in a variety of settings. First

we note what happened to change one type of gendarmerie, the Irish constabulary, into

something much more hybrid. Second we consider the styles of policing that resulted from

transporting the idea of police into different kinds of colonial settings.

The London police was, famously, preventive. Through its systematic patrolling of the city,

every day of the year, the police would limit occasions for crime. It was also the case

however that the elements of regular patrol were what spoke to the advantage of gendarmerie

policing, in its continental and its Irish modes. It was the systematic, routine practice of

patrolling which rendered the Irish constabulary as they were established in 1836, a modern


13

police. There is no doubting the importance of rural disorder and urban conflict in the half

century shaping the emergence of the Irish Constabulary, from 1786 to 1836(Palmer 1988).

But what made the police different from a military was again the ambition to limit the

occasions for crime that would flow from a routine government by constant inspection and

surveillance of the population. Such a mode of control was consistent with the ambition of

Dublin Castle to manage Ireland comprehensively with all the tools of a new mode of

governing (MacDonagh 1977; Andrews 1975). The constabulary was tasked not merely with

the prevention and detection of crime but the gathering of data about the range of social

conditions characterising the people and their modes of living. Hence, and in spite of all the

work of the Irish Constabulary in the repressive control of agrarian outrage and political

disaffection, the modern Irish police was also from early days burdened with responsibilities

which made them cousins of their unarmed counterparts in Britain(Griffin 1997). We can see

this for example in the roles undertaken by police in the detention and processing of the poor

insane into that very modern institution of nineteenth century Ireland, the lunatic asylum,

later the mental hospital (Finnane 1981). From this dual function of Dublin directed policing

directed at protest and disorder, and a more mundane, every-day policing of welfare, springs

the phenomenon observed by the end of the nineteenth century of what has been described as

a now domesticated Irish police (Malcolm 2006).

For large parts of the contemporary world modern policing is synonymous with the legacy of

empire. This was not simply a matter of imperial imposition. The styles, functions and the

impact of modern policing were also shaped by the context of reception of imperial

authority(Arnold 1986). The sharpest differences perhaps are those between the settler

society colonies, largely of the British Empire, and those colonies of European colonists bent

on extraction of resources and wealth of the Imperial domains. The modes of rule and

legacies of these different imperial regimes must always be distinguished, between those

societies where colonists came to stay and those where colonists imagined they would one

day return home (Veracini 2010). The unpredictability of Imperial enterprise means that there

are fuzzy boundaries between these two models, places like East Africa for

example(Anderson and Killingray 1991) or the Dutch East Indies before 1945(Cribb).

Moreover the scope of influence of imperial policing cannot be restricted to European empire

alone, for the modes of transmission of the modern idea of policing must be traced in East

and Southeast Asia through the sophisticated and influential Japanese policing models that

developed as a synthesis of aspects of French, German and English law and policing(Myers


14

and Peattie 1984). For every society of the contemporary world the origins of modern

policing have in the end a very local meaning, whose scope must be understood as the

product of interaction between an idea, its transmission through particular agents and

institutions, and the local social and political context in which it was being applied.

Those societies which imagined themselves as outposts of Britain, the settlements of British

North America or the Australasian colonies above all, brought with them the institutions of

the night watch, the magistrate and the constable. The century of origin of particular

communities, which is also a proxy for the demography and political economy of the settler

colonists, shaped profoundly the kinds of police that emerged in the first half of the 19th

century. This is evident, as we have seen, in the development of policing in the American

states, formerly British colonies, whose police and judicial systems are characterised by a

degree of municipal organisation that is quite foreign to the structures that developed in the

Australian colonies and New Zealand. The tradition of local self-government that was

expressed in the institutions created by the predominantly British settlers of North America

was a very powerful determinant of policing arrangements. We might emphasise this even

more so in Canada, since there the ideologically powerful institution of the Royal Canadian

Mounted Police, shaped by the demands of the colonists’ westward movement into the

Prairies and western Canada, did not displace the assumptions of a political culture that saw

public policing primarily as a local function(Marquis 1997). Since policing was a

responsibility of local towns, communities or even provinces then the policing functions of

the Mounties would be exercised by contractual arrangements between that institution and the

local government responsible for policing (Macleod 1978; Marquis 1993).

It proved quite otherwise in the Australasian colonies, but not without a historical process

exhibiting the variety of choices that faced communities and governments concerned with

securing safety and justice. It might be imagined that the penal colony character of initial

British settlement of Australia brought with it the very weighty presumption of a state-

centred organisation of policing. But along with the convicts came not only the soldiers to

guard them but free settlers whose expectations of a new start in a new land were of a kind

with those brought by the British emigrants to North America. There was a tension from the

beginning between the policing requirements demanded of an open society in which there

were large numbers of convicts, and the pressing expectations of free settlers about their need

for security and guarantees of justice of a kind that they still associated with life at home. The


15

effect of this tension was then complicated by the increasing awareness of another kind of

threat to security, that arising from the presence in all the colonies of indigenous peoples,

whose land was been dispossessed (Finnane 1994).

The working out of such a tension has been considered by the principal historian of New

Zealand policing to be best accommodated through a model of development that sees the

origins of modern policing lying along a continuum between coercion and consent(Hill

1986). At different points in the half century after the foundational event of the Treaty of

Waitangi (1840) the New Zealand Constabulary was called on to exercise its force against the

Maori. But equally it was expected to become a responsive and responsible constabulary

guaranteeing social order and urban amenity in the towns and emergent cities of colonial

New Zealand. The unique, (at least in the Australasian colonies) character of New Zealand

colonisation with its ambiguous constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples, even found

expression in the creation for a short period of a Maori Constabulary that would be capable of

exercising force against the Pakeha settlers(Hill 2005). Such an experiment was unimaginable

in the Australian colonies. There indigenous people were indeed recruited into police forces,

especially the native police, but for the purpose above all of suppressing or controlling

Aboriginal resistance. When the resistance had been quelled there was no longer a need for

the native police forces which were disbanded(Richards 2008).

The British legacies of local self-government, including a key role for magistrates who would

be assisted by police constables, are nevertheless very evident in the Australasian colonies

during the points of the emergence and consolidation of public police forces. Even during the

convict era in Sydney, long before the emergence of forms of local self-government, the

creation of a Sydney police involved the appointment of the magistrate who would be

assisted by constables. The control of magistrates over police constables was a model

displaced only at mid-century in most colonies. By then, persuasive criticism of police

inefficiency in dealing with urban public order and then with the massive disruptions caused

by the gold rushes, brought most colonies to the point of establishing a centralised police with

jurisdiction over an entire colony, including towns and cities, rural and remote regions, and

under the command of a police Commissioner or Inspector General. Only in Tasmania, but

especially noteworthy since it also was originally a convict colony, did a tradition of

municipal control of police continue past mid-century, being brought to an end only in 1898


16

as the Australian tradition of the consolidated police force brought its own normative weight

to bear on this exceptional arrangement (Petrow 2005).

IV A modern police: powers, functions and governance

The politics of contemporary policing has contributed to a revised interest in the origins of

modern police (Reiner 2000). Are the police of the 21st century radically different from the

forces created during the great changes we have discussed here? Is policing only or primarily

the work of public police forces? What are the primary functions and responsibilities of

police? What is the role of force in the exercise of police power and how was this shaped

historically? Are these a legacy of the founding moments or a significant departure from

them? How are police governed and how should they be governed? To whom are they

accountable? Is the police an agent of the central state, or is its primary responsibility to a

community of citizens expecting the aid of police in combating crime and preventing social

harms? These are the kinds of questions that have also informed the writing of police history

in the last three or four decades.

To the contemporary social scientist who argues that policing is being radically transformed,

historians now point to the antecedents and foundations of early 19th century police. Hence

Zedner argues the need for a historical corrective to the presumption that all is new, finding

in conceptions of police and their embodiment in the broad range of functions of the

eighteenth century police forces, a valuable corrective (Zedner 2006). Investigating the

origins of modern policing brings with it a recognition that the field of policing has a richer

and deeper history than can be captured in a simple statement that police were crime fighters

or even street cleaners. In such arguments we see in play the overlap between the work of

historical accounts of the emergence of modern police and contemporary normative

discussions about what kind of police we should have today.

In addressing this very large subject, the origins of modern policing, we have emphasised the

need to address the topic always in its local context, but aware of the powerful effects of

diffusion of ideas, practices and even personnel between jurisdictions and nations. We have

also highlighted the important and continuing tension between two models of policing, the

gendarmerie with its paramilitary structures and its state-centred functions versus the

omnipresent local police, civic or civilian in character and more oriented towards the

maintenance of domestic order, that is the security of individuals and families and


17

communities in their localities of cities towns and even rural environs. In practice the models

are frequently transformed into a hybrid. But in order to address what makes modern policing

modern it will be important to remember not only the conditions of formation of a public

police in a particular place, nation or state but its substantive content, namely what do police

do, how do they do it and how are they governed.

The establishment of modern police forces was the affirmation by government of a particular

way of exercising power, something other than the brute display of military force by a

supreme authority. Police powers would be exercised with the authority bestowed by

legislation or magistrate’s warrant. The fact that such power might be exercised by officers

who in some places were unarmed signalled both the self-limiting aspiration of state (or

municipal) authority as well as a significant degree of consent on the part of those policed.

Such consent inevitably might be imagined more than readily discovered. In states or cities

with a high degree of social conflict the exercise of police power without force of arms might

remain only an aspiration. Nevertheless it was this aspiration to the use of limited force that

distinguished civilian public policing most clearly from its military cousin. On the other hand

the extensive and influential tradition of the gendarmerie speaks to the ultimate sanction of

police power, its exercise at the direction of state authority. The modern police can never

escape the question of police power, which is at bottom a capacity to use force to achieve

results, because this power lies at the very heart of the institution. What is striking about the

creation of modern police is the desire to make that power the more effective by limiting the

need for its exercise.

From the beginning the functions of modern police were manifold. The revived interest in

eighteenth-century conceptions of police responsibilities, recognising their wide-ranging

ambition for the security and welfare of the people as the bedrock of national security, has its

legacy in often unacknowledged degrees in modern police functions. This legacy may not

have flowed from the direct application of an idea of police. Instead rapidly changing

demands on urban government drove the regulation of urban spaces, customs and

workplaces, for the ends of prosperity and good order. Many such mundane tasks were

devolved later to other agencies of government or local government. There remained a

tension between these functions of police (closely linked to the idea of a preventive police

whose constant presence would limit crime and depredations) and the function of police in

the detection of crime, ensuring a high probability of arrest and subsequent prosecution.


18

Whether gendarmerie or civilian police, the new police forces of the early nineteenth century

generally included a range of crime prevention and social ordering functions - for

gendarmerie the control of suspicious characters as well as highway robbers; for civilian

police a watch over the poor, the vagrant and the disorderly on the streets and in the

marketplaces of rapidly growing towns and cities. The crime detection functions of police

developed more slowly, however much they became associated with popular representations

of heroic police deeds (Emsley and Shpayer-Makov 2006). Whatever the particular array of

functions possessed by any particular police institution, the characteristic mode of a modern

police was its systematic address to its functions. The work of police was laid out in laws and

regulations and carried out with a highly routinised recording of the patrols, crimes and

incidents reported, matters investigated, warrants delivered, persons arrested. In turn these

functions of police, so numbered and ordered, gave rise to the collection of official statistics

as a mark of accountability for the public work performed and a measure of the effectiveness

of this modern force for order.

Finally we should note the important question of governance. What made police modern was

not only this bureaucratic organisation of a body of (originally all) men with particular

powers of force and a wide array of functions, but the accountability of this bureaucratic

structure to organs of government. What distinguished and continues to distinguish modern

police from the array of other bodies that carry out policing work (the private police, security

companies, protection officers) is the ties to executive government, whether democratically

accountable, autocratic or authoritarian, whether centralised, provincial, municipal or local.

What kind of governance a modern police was subjected to was in turn a function of the

particular forms of state at a point of origin. It goes without saying that this also rendered

police vulnerable to changes in state formation, in particular shifts in the balance between the

responsibilities and powers of local government and the tendencies towards the consolidation

and strengthening of the central state, changes especially evident in the governing structures

of English policing (Reiner 2000; Emsley 2009). All the same police institutions have been

remarkably resilient in form, whatever the larger changes in state formation. What better

example of this is the persistence in the United States of the vast numbers of local police

forces.

The modern police is both an idea and an institution, an indispensable apparatus of state and

government. It is also a fixed element of popular consciousness and politics, dominating the


19

night news casts and proving to be the element indispensable even to states, and

governments, that seek to disperse and evolve other instrumentalities of government.

Alletz, P. Julien. 1820. Dictionnaire de police moderne. Paris. http://archive.org/details/dictionnairedepo03alle.

Anderson, David M, and David Killingray. 1991. Policing the Empire : Government, Authority, and Control, 1830-1940. Manchester ; New York: Manchester University Press.

Andrews, J. H. 1975. A Paper Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon. Arnold, David. 1986. Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859-1947. Delhi; New

York: Oxford University Press. Barrie, David G. 2008. Police in the Age of Improvement : Police Development and the Civic

Tradition in Scotland, 1775-1865. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. ———. 2010. “A Typology of British Police Locating the Scottish Municipal Police Model

in Its British Context, 1800–35.” British Journal of Criminology 50 (2): 259–77. Beattie, J. M. 2012. The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing

of London, 1750-1840. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Brodeur, Jean-Paul. 1982. “High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks About the Policing of

Political Activities.” Social Problems 30: 507. Cameron, Iain A. 1977. “The Police of Eighteenth-Century France.” European History

Quarterly 7 (1): 47–75. doi:10.1177/026569147700700103. ———. 1981. Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720-1790.

Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press. Clive Emsley. 1983. Policing and Its Context, 1750-1870. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cribb, Robert. “Legal Pluralism and Criminal Law in the Dutch Colonial Order.” Indonesia,

no. 90: 47–66. Dodsworth, Francis. 2004. “‘Civic’ Police and the Condition of Liberty: The Rationality of

Governance in Eighteenth-century England.” Social History 29 (2): 199–216. doi:10.1080/0307102042000207859.

Emsley, Clive. 1999a. Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-century Europe. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1999b. “A Typology of Nineteenth-century Police.” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 3 (1): 29–44. doi:10.4000/chs.934.

———. 2009. The Great British Bobby: a History of British Policing from 1829 to the Present. London: Quercus.

———. 2012. “Marketing the Brand: Exporting British Police Models 1829–1950.” Policing 6 (1): 43–54. doi:10.1093/police/par061.

Emsley, Clive, and Haia Shpayer-Makov. 2006. Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950. Aldershot, Hants, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Finnane, Mark. 1981. Insanity and the Insane in Post-famine Ireland. London: Croom Helm ; Totowa N.J : Barnes & Noble Books.

———. 1994. Police and Government : Histories of Policing in Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Griffin, Brian. 1997. The Bulkies: Police and Crime in Belfast, 1800-1865. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.

Hill, Richard S. 1986. Policing the Colonial Frontier: The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and Racial Control in New Zealand, 1767-1867. Wellington, N.Z: V.R. Ward.


20

Hill, Richard S. 2005. “Maori Police Personnel and the Rangatiratanga Discourse.” In Crime and Empire, 1840-1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, edited by Barry S Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall. Cullompton, Devon, UK; Portland, Or., USA: Willan Pub.

Johansen, Anja. 2013. “Lost in Translation: The English Policeman through a German Monocle, 1848–1914.” History 98 (333): 750–68. doi:10.1111/1468-229X.12020.

Johnson, David Ralph. Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800-1887. First Edition edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Lane, Roger. 1967. Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lentz, Susan A., and Robert H. Chaires. 2007. “The Invention of Peel’s Principles: A Study of Policing ‘textbook’ History.” Journal of Criminal Justice 35 (1): 69–79. doi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2006.11.016.

Ludtke, Alf. 2009. Police and State in Prussia, 1815-1850. Translated by Pete Burgess. 1 edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MacDonagh, Oliver. 1977. Ireland: The Union and Its Aftermath. London: G. Allen & Unwin.

Macleod, R. C. 1978. The North West Mounted Police, 1873-1919. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association.

Malcolm, Elizabeth. 2006. The Irish Policeman, 1822-1922: a Life. Dublin, Ireland: Portland, OR : Four Courts.

Marquis, Greg. 1993. Policing Canada’s Century: A History of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=149500.

———. 1997. “The ‘Irish Model’ and Nineteenth‐century Canadian Policing.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25 (2): 193–218. doi:10.1080/03086539708582998.

McConville, Michael. 2005. Jury Trials and Plea Bargaining: a True History. Oxford ; Portland, Or: Hart.

Merriman, John M. 2006. Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815-1851. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mildmay, William. 1763. The Police of France; or, An Account of the Laws and Regulations Established in That Kingdom, for the Preventing of Robberies, to Which Is Added, a Particular Description of the Police and Government of the City of Paris. London, Pr. by E. Owen and T. Harrison. http://archive.org/details/policeoffranceor00milduoft.

Miller, Wilbur R. 2013. “A State Within ‘The States’ : Private Policing and Delegation of Power in America.” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 17 (2): 125–35. doi:10.4000/chs.1434.

Myers, Ramon Hawley, and Mark R Peattie, eds. 1984. The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Palmer, Stanley H. 1988. Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pasquino, Pasquale. 1991. “Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital–police and the State of Prosperity.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, 105–18.

Petrow, Stefan. 2005. “The English Model? Policing in Late Nineteenth-century Tasmania.” In Crime and Empire, 1840-1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, edited by Barry S Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall. Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Pub.


21

Philips, David, and Robert D. Storch. 2001. Policing Provincial England, 1829-1856. Leicester University Press.

Reiner, Robert. 2000. The Politics of the Police. Oxford University Press. Reynolds, Elaine. 1998. Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in

Metropolitan London, 1720-1830. 1 edition. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Richards, Jonathan. 2008. The Secret War : a True History of Queensland’s Native Police / Jonathan Richards. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press.

Richardson, James F. 1970. The New York Police, Colonial Times to 1901. New York: Oxford University Press.

Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism: a Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zedner, Lucia. 2006. “Policing Before and After the Police: The Historical Antecedents of Contemporary Crime Control.” British Journal of Criminology 46(1): 78–96 46 (1): 78–96.

Documents

The origins of \" modern \" policing