Conclusions

This concluding chapter explores how, over the last half century, there has been a change in police investigations. Almost everyone drives a motor vehicle of some sort now, and this, together with the spread of urban areas, has required the police to become mechanized also. The internet and increased computer literacy and use have also created new difficulties. Yet probably the most serious problem, in particular for Western police, has been the rise of terrorism and its encouragement on the web by both the extreme right and Muslim extremists. Much of the corresponding investigation is done by the security services, but the police usually have to confront the radicals. The chapter then considers the attitude towards the police shown by an ordinary member of the public, which probably depends on the kind of faith an individual has in the institution. Attitudes can depend on the tradition from which people come—political, racial, and social. Moreover, they can depend on what people have recently gathered from news reports, or from a recent meeting with a policeman. The chapter also studies police attitudes towards and relations with the public.

From the Classical World to the Medieval

This chapter examines the presence of the police and policing from the classical world to the medieval. The Greek city states had no significant bodies of people organized specifically to ensure survival and welfare, though militias could be brought together to defend the state and suppress popular disorder. Some officials were charged with checking weights and measures and grain supplies. However, there were no institutions to prevent assaults and thefts, or to detect and pursue offenders. Both Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome were similar. Offences that affected the individual rather than the state were usually left to victims, their kin, or passers-by, if they were prepared to get involved. Victims, any servants that they had, their kin, or passers-by did not have to fight, though they sometimes did; but they could act as witnesses when a suspect was accused or brought before a court. Sources for police and policing in the classical world are thin, and much has to be gleaned from between the lines. Meanwhile, the sources for the medieval period are better, and, while these show the similar kinds of divisions and institutions, there are gaps in the sources and little to explore for those looking for police institutions.

International Policing, Wartime, and Innovations

This chapter addresses the impact of the First World War on police development. During this period, there was a gradual increase in the introduction of women police, often just to fill the gaps filled by men but occasionally, and especially in Britain, to relieve men of the task of having to police women and children. The war also encouraged the use of some technological innovations such as motor vehicles and radio. In the United States, some forces stressed mechanization and the need to train policemen as professionals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were moves to bring police institutions together to deal with international threats and problems, but in the interwar period, different national attitudes tended to split such links. Equally, such attitudes impacted upon the way that the police of different states dealt with similar problems. The chapter then considers international policing.

From Concepts to Institutions

This chapter details how the changes resulting from the growth of royal power, from Enlightenment rationality, and then from the turmoil of the French Revolution and its wars led to significant developments in police as an institution. Yet this did not necessarily give them the key role in the pursuit of criminal offenders. During the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, the range of police tasks was not greatly dissimilar from that of the classical period. But during the Enlightenment, princes in much of Europe began to issue ordinances clearly defining the role of police as involving the general well-being of their territory. The men working at the top of the organization responsible for what was known as ‘police’ often had legal training and worked as much in the courts as elsewhere within their jurisdiction. Dealing with crime and criminals did not figure greatly in these ordinances; nevertheless, the ministers of Enlightenment princes tended to have views about offenders and tended to stigmatize as potential criminals both the unemployed and those members of the poor moving around the country acting as harvesters or looking for other forms of work.

Monks, Bailiffs, Constables, and Others

This chapter discusses how, during the period known as the Dark Ages and then the Middle Ages, a few policing institutions began to be developed, but often their existence could be brief and limited in scope. Throughout the period, princes had to fight to gain or maintain territory, and ensuring the safety of frontiers meant that they appointed administrators and/or warriors to protect territory, or to bring in soldiers and revenue as and when necessary. The warriors, increasingly known as knights, established themselves as hereditary rulers over the territory granted to them by the prince. Municipalities could acquire a significant degree of independence from the local prince, and they were permitted to establish their own laws; they also recruited men to enforce those laws, which included market regulation, the supervision of abattoirs, watching for fire, and ensuring the safety and tidiness of the streets. The municipal guards, often backed by all fit men in a town, might also be called upon occasionally to defend the walls and outlying territory. The chapter then considers the role of warrior monks, clergy, and feudal municipalities. Ultimately, officers such as bailiffs, sheriffs, or constables, and institutions such as the watch, emerged across medieval Europe, but they were not police officers in the sense of people seeking to prevent crime or regularly gathering information about offences and pursuing offenders beyond their boundaries.

Beyond Europe

This chapter looks at other parts of the world that were mainly absorbed into European empires and what this meant for their experience of policing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonists tended to see native peoples as primitive and without any of their own ‘civilized’ ideas and institutions like police. As a result, and where possible, they increasingly re-created versions of the police in their homelands when they arrived in the virgin lands which they intended either to exploit or to make their new homes. A re-creation of the police deployed in the metropole was claimed to be something towards which the empires were moving, especially during the nineteenth century. It was assumed to be another aspect of the white Europeans’ civilizing process. Yet a police similar to that at home was most often to be found in the colonial towns and cities where white men made the city their own and were seen as requiring the same kind of police protection and order maintenance. The indigenous peoples, especially those living nomadic lifestyles, were thought to require something different, and, while some of the white men deployed to deal with them might be called ‘police’, their organization and behaviour were often far away from Europeans’ behaviour in their lands of origin.

Shaping Institutions

This chapter focuses on the period of the French Revolution, which saw a greater emphasis on the creation of police institutions and particularly fostered developments in political policing designed to check any one or any group that appeared to threaten the state. The revolution, the wars, and the politics of the period helped to shape the police institutions of Europe for the generations that spanned the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. They also contributed to the extension of what the French term haute police and which, in 1841, had its essence defined by a prefect as ‘everything related to the security of the king and of the state and also related to public spirit, opinions manifested, news that circulates as it arrives, and the men known to be opposed to the government’. Successive regimes in France—revolutionary, Napoleonic, Restoration—developed political police to investigate internal and external threats; opponents of the French acted similarly. Political police were developed to cope with threats to what increasingly resembled the modern state, and so too were ideas and practices regarding police who could prevent crime in the streets and countryside. At the same time, popular policing and the victim’s or community’s investigations and pursuits still continued, as did victim and community discretion about how to treat a suspect.

Another War; Another Peace

This chapter describes how, during the Second World War and immediately afterwards, many British, certainly government officials and senior police officers, maintained the belief that their police were superior to others. Attempts were made by the British and American allies to develop forms of liberal-democratic police in their defeated enemies, but these were not always particularly successfully. Initially, a mixed system of British and American police worked well in liberated Europe, but there were potential divisions. Racial divisions could be found among the police in many states, as the old European empires came to an end. In some instances, American police officers may have been critical of the European empires; but racial prejudice remained present among many American communities and their police. This was especially apparent among American cops in states of the Deep South, where the residue of black slavery remained. Ultimately, decolonization, the cold war, and a determination to shore up and assist some very dubious regimes ensured a difference between the use of police overseas and their use at home, while protest movements often linked with international concerns prompted similar police responses in different countries.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of policing and the institution now known as ‘police’. In many of its early understandings, policing was a system to enable the well-being of individuals and the growth and welfare of the community. This book traces the manner in which the enforcers and helpers developed into the institutions now termed ‘police’, polizei, polizia, policia, politsiya, or any one of the other linguistic forms. The word ‘police’ has its origin in the Classical Greek politeia, a word that also provided the root for ‘policy’ and that concerned all matters affecting the survival and welfare of the city—the polis. This raises two assumptions that need to be considered at the outset: first, that the police institution alone is responsible for policing, and, second, that it is easy to set a date for the founding of the institution. The chapter then presents a brief history of the English police.

Patrolmen, Detectives, and Policing by the Community

This chapter assesses the different kinds of police trades that emerged during the nineteenth century, looking at patrolmen and detectives. The new police institutions were permanent, disciplined bodies, but they continued to do the kind of things that had been done by various others, such as watches and constables, or their equivalents. They maintained order on the streets and the highways and byways; and order meant relative tidiness and no obstructions as well as breaking up fights. They arrested offenders, and, in some places, they were responsible for fighting fires. Specialist units began to take on specialist tasks. The detection of offenders, for example, had long been a role for those engaged in the wider role of policing, but detective bureaux became significant, if relatively small, branches of many police institutions, especially in the big cities. The new police, however, could not be everywhere and cover every policing problem. In some instances, the local population continued to act on its own, sometimes with the knowledge and agreement, even the participation, of the police, and sometimes without. The chapter then examines popular policing, as well as representations of the police in fiction.