The word "police" is currently used to identify that institution of social control which, for the community, attempts to prevent crime and disorder and preserve the peace, and for the individual, attempts to protect life, property, and personal liberty. Prior to the 19th Century, protection was afforded through "folk police" as exemplified by the old "hue and cry," "watch and ward." Full-time governmental policing, as we know it today, is a product of the industrial revolution, and dates from the Peelian reforms of 1829.
Historians have rightly concentrated on the establishment of the "new police" in early Victorian communities and on the political and ideological motives for police reform. They have perforce neglected the organization and daily activities of the reformed police: the origins of police recruits, their pay, pensions, and promotion, the functions performed by the first constabularies, and the relations between the police and their paymasters (Kelling et al., 1990). Yet the County and Borough Police Act of 1856 was not simply the culmination of a long campaign to compel all areas to establish police forces, but also the departure point for the evolution of a policed society.
Policing continued to be a local service under the close supervision of rural magistracies and urban watch committees. The local powers of local governments were endorsed, moreover, by Home Office staff whose personal experience of county government led them to rely on the local interpretation of the law. Provincial police forces were not, therefore, mere carbon copies of the metropolitan model, as many historians would have it, but were based on distinctively rural patterns and precepts of policing.
Then, the second and more substantial section the processes by which police recruits, largely ex-rural labourers, were made and made themselves into a modern constabulary, one that increasingly became the agency of central rather than local government (Radelet et al., 1994). Recruits enlisted for different reasons: to escape rural poverty, as a means of migration, as a temporary relief from unemployment (a civil equivalent of taking the King's shilling). But few stayed for long. Of the 48,000 men who joined county forces between 1839 and 1874, over 24,000 resigned and 12,000 were dismissed. A minority of career policemen struggled to find a corporate identity and to secure the rewards of professional men. Police authorities helped this process by enforcing regulated patterns of life and work. More crucially, policemen themselves sought better pay (with strikes in Manchester and Hull in 1853) and campaigned for pension rights. All this undermined the autonomy of local police authorities, and promoted the vision of a national police organization (Radelet et al., 1994).
Again, policing is one of the most masculinized of all occupations. The ideal policeman has long been conceived as a tough, aggressive crime fighter.
A unique feature of the Australian and New Zealand community policing is that they were designed and conducted by police personnel as well as by academics. From these presentations, it is evident that the successful community policing program depends not only on the support of the …