Colonial Policing

• Author: George Kurian
• Pages: 11-14

Page 11

In at least seventy-six countries of the world, the earliest police forces were established by colonial powers. This was done not for altruistic purposes, but for reasons associated with maintaining imperial authority in occupied countries. The principal European colonial powers were Britain and France in the first tier, and also the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, and Italy in the second tier. Together, these powers ruled more than one hundred countries that are now independent states. Most of them were in Africa. In fact, not a single country in Africa escaped imperial domination. Most countries in Asia, with the exception of China, Nepal, and Thailand, also experienced colonial rule some time during their history. In Latin America, all countries were under the control of Spain and Portugal until the early decades of the nineteenth century, and some, such as Guyana and Suriname and all Caribbean countries, remained colonies well into the middle of the twentieth century.

Colonialism had a major formative influence on the history of policing. The colonial powers did not merely establish the first law enforcement forces in colonized countries, they also provided the constitutional and legal mechanisms that undergird them. For example, most Francophone countries still have such law enforcement bodies as the gendarmerie and sûreté built into their organizational structure, whereas Anglophone countries are modeled on the London Metropolitan Police, the mother of all police forces in the Anglo-Saxon world. Effective law enforcement is one of the great legacies of colonialism in the modern world.

Colonialism is essentially a form of military occupation in which the ruling powers use the army to maintain law and order, repress any liberation movement, and generally suppress localized armed opposition. The function of the army is to inspire fear. Policing and law enforcement are afterthoughts that come into play only after an entire country has been pacified and brought under the authority of the sovereign colonial power. At this stage, the rulers become more benign and assume what the French call mission civilisatrice, or the "civilizing mission," part of which involves "winning the hearts and minds of the natives." Law and order are essential to achieving such a civilizing mission. Law enforcement is not merely critical to the suppression of criminal elements but also to restoring a sense of normalcy to the general population. A society in which anarchy prevails works against the long-term interests of the colonial power.

There is the further need to establish a court system that is perceived as impartial and unbiased and an administrative structure that is respected, even if the natives have no access to it. Colonial powers introduce a patron-client relationship vis-à-vis the ruled whereby the benign administration is able to provide basic services that will make up for the lack of autonomy and self-government. Many ethnic groups came to believe that they were better off under colonial powers than they could ever possibly be under the rule of fellow ethnic groups. The system worked well in all colonies well into the middle of the twentieth century.

In most colonies, the colonial powers never used the military to conduct law...