Robert Reiner The Politics of Police

 Research on the presence of police in 1829 - 1856. 

Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.39-66.

Interpretations of Police History

‘The police were seen as an inevitable and unequivocally beneficent institution, a cornerstone of national pride, which had been developed by English pragmatic genius as a response to fearsome threats to social order and civilised existence.’ P.39

Examining police history appeared in the 1970s along with other Marxist historiographies in which ‘the police were seen as a means (together with associated reforms of criminal procedure, punishment, social policy, and political representation) of maintaining the dominance of a ruling class against the interests and opposition of the various sections of the working class, who constituted the majority of the population.’ P.40

The Orthodox View

‘the need for police reform as a straightforward rational response to the twin pressures of urban and industrial revolution. These brought new problems of order which were met by the new police.’ P.40

Motives for Police Reform

‘The large and rapidly growing cities were seen as breeding grounds of crime and disorder. The novelist and lawyer Henry Fielding was a Middlesex judge in the 1740s and 1750s, and an early advocate of police reform… Fielding compared London to ‘a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia’. P.41

‘the orthodox view recognised the importance of public disorder as a motive for police reform. This was a concern about disorder in the double sense of declining moral standards, and the threat of riot.’ P.42

‘the notorious 1819 Peterloo Massacre was underplayed by the orthodox view. The notorious 1819 Peterloo Massacre… does not feature in the standard orthodox reference of Critchley. It got the slightest mention after and was assimilated to the crime industry.

‘the overall theme of the orthodox histories, then, was that police reform was motivated mainly by fear of crime, but also by moral and mob disorder, engendered by the problems of rapid transition to an urban industrial society.’ P.41

Revisionist Account

Opposition to the new police came partly from sections of the upper class… the source of ruling class opposition was a distinct sector of the class, the landed gentry. The gentry did not need to support public police out of rate-payers money, when their own security was adequately protected by private means. They could rely on ‘large numbers of personal servants to guard their plate and their wives.’ Their local political power bases would be undermined by a more rationalised and professional police. They remained a strand of the opposition to each increment of standardisation from 1829 – 1856. It was feared that the development of a more rationalised system of crime control would rupture the delicately constructed relationships of deference and condescension that were the microscopic basis of order. This opposition from the gentry evaporated as the threat of Chartism grew.

The deepest opposition to the new police were the working class, indirectly reflected in Parliament, as the working classes did not have the vote. But in places with class-conscious working-class majorities, following the 1832 Reform Act, pressure could be put onto MPs for some working-class parliamentary representation.

Motives for Police Reform

Fear of rising crime, however it was unclear whether crime was increasing. Debates on the 1839 and 1856 Bills, opponents were ready to jump in with the argument that the police reformers were using rising crime statistics to justify the extensions of a preventive police, how efficient this was, was called into question by those figures.

Outside of London there was little indication that offending was the work of people exploiting crime for a livelihood, or making rich pickings out of their offences. Most offences were ‘prosaic and undramatic, involving small amounts being stolen, squalid robberies, burglaries and assaults.’ P.59

Punch, Blind-Man's Bluff, Engraving, 1888.