General History of Policing
| Author | Mitchel Roth |
| Pages | 1-10 |
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In our own century it was the revolutionary romantic, not the professional policeman, who glorified the omnipotence of Lenin's security chief Feliks Dzerzhinsky; the layman, not the specialist, who dreamt of government so meticulously engineered that its police could monitor the conversations of all passengers on every express train criss-crossing the continent at any hour. (Liang 1992)
In this brief historical examination of the history of policing since the eighteenth century it has been necessary to make a number of generalizations. This is particularly true when discussing the secret police forces that were central to many totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. There is a tendency in police literature to associate countries with one or two manifestations of policing. John D. Brewer noted in his investigation of South African policing that the greatest focus is placed on the South African Police, thus ignoring "other functionally compatible forces, such as the old South African Mounted Riflemen, railway police, mines police, the location police employed by the Native Affairs Commission, and latterly, Black forces in the homelands and townships" (Brewer 1994). Similar conclusions can also be applied to a number of police systems surveyed in this short overview. The intentions of this essay are to portray the complexities and experiments that have forged modern policing and to present a jumping-off point for anyone wanting to explore individual police forces in more detail.
It is beyond the scope of this introductory essay to offer the complete history of policing throughout the world. Rather, this essay is an attempt to trace the origins and major developments in police institutions since around 1700. Due to the expansion of the British Empire during this period, common law developments take up much of this examination, since British police institutions influenced the development of police institutions in countries as far-flung as South Africa, India, Australia, and Canada. Other important developments came out of continental Europe and Asia—these will be noted as well.
A perusal of police systems around the world demonstrates a remarkable diversity of police organizations. Some are religious in nature, or at least inspired by religion, such as Saudi Arabia's religious police, the mutawwiun, and the Ottoman Empire's police system. Others are based on legal traditions or are heavily influenced by ideology and political theory, such as the former Soviet KGB and the secret police networks in Cuba, North Korea, and China. The common law legal system has exerted its influence on police systems around the world, bringing common law policing to Singapore, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, while also indirectly influencing developments in policing in postwar Japan and many other countries.
Any comparison between city police in Tokyo, Moscow, Los Angeles, and London results in probably more similarities than differences. Regardless of the nature of policing around the world in the twenty-first century, police organizations share more common traits than ever. With the advent of sophisticated crime and terrorist networks, police battle the enemies of social order on a number of fronts, in many cases sharing a common enemy while thousands of miles apart. Police organizations also share many of the same frustrations, whether in Africa, Asia, or the Americas; jurisdictional disputes and
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turf squabbles continue to plague police organizations, large or small, coordinated or uncoordinated, centralized or decentralized.
Any meaningful examination into the origins and history of policing is shackled by the almost universal emphasis on 1829 and the establishment of the London Metropolitan Police. But, speaking for a number of scholars, police historian Philip Rawlings suggests that "the history of the police that is emerging" is much more complex than that, demonstrating that the history of policing "is one of diversity, both before and after 1829, and of slow evolutionary change" (Rawlings 2002). While Rawlings's work focuses on Great Britain, his statement can also be applied to the wider world of police.
The term police can be traced back to the Greek politeia, which alluded to all the affairs that affected the survival and order of the state. By the 1700s, European states used la police (French) and die Polizei (German) to refer to the internal administration, safety, protection, and surveillance of a territory. While the English eschewed the word police because of its absolutist connotations, the term gained increasing currency in France during the Napoleonic era. The term police was probably imported into England from France at the beginning of the eighteenth century and initially referred to good government through the introduction of sanitation, street lighting, and the like.
Any definition of policing prior to the modern era is problematic, due in part to the broad range of duties expected of so-called police in previous centuries. Regardless of their tasks, police duties were typically performed through mutual obligation by community members. Even in preliterate societies, individuals were often expected to act in a police capacity, whether bringing to justice a malefactor who threatened a community, or exercising personal vengeance prior to judicial institutions.
The tithing system was an early example of community law enforcement in Anglo-Saxon England. From the era of King Alfred (849–899), the main responsibility for keeping the peace fell upon each community through a well-understood principle of social obligation. Each tithing was essentially a collection of ten families, with each member inextricably linked by a pledge to be answerable to the lawful behavior of the other members of the tithing group. A world away in ancient China, a system similar developed in which order and security was maintained through clansmen. One deeply ingrained notion that persisted in China was that everyone should participate in the creation of order. As early as the 1100s, one Chinese writer described mutual responsibility as "when one family has a robber and cannot seize him themselves, then the group of neighbors is to arrest him." Similar developments heralded the evolution of law enforcement throughout the world prior to the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century.
Until the eighteenth century, military and paramilitary police forces were the rule rather than the exception. In 1285 England's Statute of Winchester codified a variety of time-tested notions about early law enforcement. Many of these had been developing for decades but had not yet been formally introduced by statute. Among the most noteworthy in terms of policing was the system of watch and ward, which introduced the town watchman, a fixture in urban life until the birth of modern policing some six centuries later. According to the Statute of Winchester, most English towns were required to maintain a watch of up to sixteen men. Watchmen were to be stationed at the walled gates of town between the hours of sunset and sunrise and all strangers within their jurisdiction (city limits) were to be confined during the hours of darkness. An unpaid, unprofessional position, all ambulatory men were required to participate as volunteers.
The origins of policing in continental Europe can be traced back to the Middle Ages, but major developments took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that laid the foundations for modern state police systems. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe's absolutist rulers, seeking a modern police force, looked to France, where Paris was considered the best policed city in Europe. European continental innovations stemming from Napoleonic France have had a dramatic impact on the development of centralized state policing throughout the world. Police historian Clive Emsley reported an exchange in which one lieutenant of the Paris police boasted that "when three persons gathered for a conversation, one of them was sure to be his agent."
By the 1790s, police states in Europe that were characterized by secret and oppressive police strategies flourished in the Hapsburg police system, which was considered the most centralized in Europe. At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), Czar Alexander I (1777–1825) of Russia was so impressed by the Austrian police (both civil and military) that he arranged for members of the Russian embassy staff in Vienna to draw up recommendations for the formation of gendarme regiments in Russia based on the Austrian model. It was not long before Russian gendarmes (often referred to as mounted police) were operating alongside the army under the direction of police commanders in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
In the eighteenth century, continental police functions transcended the traditional duties conducted by common law police. When police specialist Raymond Fosdick (1915) surveyed European police systems in the early 1900s, he noted that Prussia even had special forces
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devoted to individual tasks, including Insurance Police, Mining Police, Water and Dike Police, Field and Forest Police, Cattle Disease Police, Hunting Police, Fisheries Police, Building Police, and so forth. All of these forces represented state functions and were responsible to state oversight, with nary a governmental activity unregulated by the police.
City police functions were no less comprehensive in Prussia. In Berlin, for example, the police president issued ordinances regulating the color of automobiles, the length of hatpins, and methods of purchasing fish and fowl. In both Germany and Austria, police had...
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