Typology of Police

• Author: George Kurian
• Pages: 69-73

Page 69

Across the modern world, variants of the word police are employed to describe institutions charged with the enforcement of laws, the maintenance of public order, and the prevention and detection of crime. These tasks can be very different; moreover, the institutions that are labeled with variants of the word police are not the only ones involved in these tasks. Landowners pay gamekeepers and factory owners employ watch guards to carry out policing duties on their property; traffic wardens enforce street regulations; forensic scientists are involved in the detection of crimes; and drug enforcement agents, immigration officials, and state functionaries all carry out law enforcement duties that could be defined as "policing." The complexity of these tasks have led some academic theorists to situate the defining characteristic of the police institution as being the police officer's ability to use force to enforce the law in his or her everyday dealings with citizens. But, in turn, this has to be qualified with an emphasis on the fact that in neither liberal democratic nor authoritarian societies do police officers spend their days swinging batons or firing guns. This article will describe some of the different types of policing and the ways in which they evolved, primarily in a broad European and North American context.

Although modern bureaucratic police institutions are largely the creation of the nineteenth century, the word police itself has roots in the ancient world. In classical Greece, the term politeia referred to all things relating to the survival and well-being of the city-state (the polis). In ancient Rome, politia meant simply "the state," an entity that, unlike any other, had the right to prescribe limits on both public and private behavior.

In the early modern period, police was used generally to describe the good management of a defined territory, particularly a city or a town. This could involve the cleanliness of streets, the management of markets, and the regulation of various forms of trading, as well as more precise issues such as the maintenance of public order and the apprehension of criminal offenders.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, princes in the German lands began to develop the concept of Gute Policey. To this end they published, sometimes in cooperation with their advisory estates, "police ordinances" designed to ensure the preservation of the established social order and of morality, but also to encourage economic growth. It was, however, easy to publish ordinances, but enforcing them required agents on the ground, and these were not always provided. Individual cities and towns usually funded their own systems of watchmen and agents who picked up vagabonds, prostitutes, and beggars. These workers enforced various urban regulations.

The emergence of the state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the impact of the French Revolution and Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821), fostered major developments in policing institutions, and while there were significant differences between each state, there were also sufficient similarities to enable a typology of police to be suggested with reference to situation, command, and management structures. Broadly, three types of police institution can be delineated as emerging during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: state military, state civilian, and municipal. The descendants of each of these types still exist in the contemporary world.

State military police, which may also be characterized under the generic term gendarmeries, originated in France under the old regime. While the Gendarmerie

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Nationale of contemporary France likes to situate its beginnings in the medieval period, a more realistic origin is in the companies of men established to police the royal army at the beginning of the sixteenth century. These companies were under the command of the military marshals of France, hence their name, maréchaussées. During the seventeenth century, they began to acquire more and more responsibilities for the policing of civilians. They were deployed in groups of up to half a dozen men, garrisoned in small barracks in towns and villages on the main roads. They made regular patrols of the roads and supervised fairs and village fetes, and their officers had their own courts and the judicial authority to deal rapidly with petty offenders.

In 1778 the different companies were amalgamated into a single institution called the Maréchaussée, but the corps itself maintained its military links and drew the majority of its recruits from army veterans. The Maréchaussée was a small body—fewer than four thousand men at its maximum, for a population of close to thirty million. On the eve of the French Revolution, it appeared to have been relatively popular. In the early, liberal stage of the Revolution, the judicial authority of the...