The Fist of Modernity

The foundations of modern policing are based not on justice, but on the punishing of poverty, the imposition of the status quo, the disciplining of the public, the constriction of liberty, and justified as the protection against an ugly, sinful, idle, greedy, and organised criminal class that has no basis in reality.

In this video I look at the birth of the modern police force in Britain, what the historian V.A.C Gatrell calls ‘the policeman state.’

The nineteenth century was a period of great transformation. Urbanization, industrialization, technologicalization , were all, at the heart, a change in the routines of humans.

Modernity, at its simples

t, was about efficiency, speed, production, of the maximizing of health, wealth and profit.

It was about scientifically searching for those rules, those methods, those laws, that would bring about the ideal human order.

The first modern, standardized police forced – the Metropolitan Police – was created in 1829, and continued to expand across the century, increasing from around 20k in 1860 to 54k in 1911.

The preventative police were to be visible, wear uniforms, be of good physique, intelligence, and character – ‘domestic missionaries’ as historian Robert Storch called them.

There was protest:

The Gazette called it ‘a base attempt upon the liberty of the subject and the privilege of local government’ and that the purpose of the police state was to ‘to drill, discipline and dragoon us all into virtue’

A parliament inquiry concluded that ‘such a system would of necessity be odious and repulsive, and one which no government would be able to carry into execution ...the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence’

And that ‘It is difficult to reconcile an effective system of police, with that perfect freedom of action and exemption from interference, which are the great privileges and blessings of society in this country; and your Committee think that the forfeiture or curtailment of such advantages

would be too great a sacrifice for improvements in police’.

In 1867 the commentator Walter Bagehot wrote that:

‘The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked;I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom. If the original policeman had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order.’

Despite all of this, the fist of modernity raised its clenched rational plan, and swung.

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Sources:

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England: 1750-1900, 3rd ed., Harlow: Pearson, 2005

David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914, London: Macmillan Press, 1998

V.A.C. Gatrell, Crime, Authority and the Policeman State

Clive Emsley, Hard Men

Credits:

Policeman photo