Clive Emsley - A Short History of Police and Policing

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, it means what I choose it to meanneither more nor less.

Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass

It can be argued that most people want a peaceful, quiet life. Most sensible community, civic, or national leaders are keen to provide this. Furthermore, it is difficult to contemplate a society in which some body of individuals are given, either by the community as a whole or by the individual or individuals that have authority, the power to enforce the norms generally held by the members of that society. No one wants to have taken from them what they understand as their personal possessions or their rights, or to suffer personal injury, or to see such injury inflicted upon their immediate kith, kin, or even a friend or neighbour. There can be different ways of resolving such issues. It is difficult, probably impossible, to envisage a society that forbids a victim or his or her representatives from resolving an injury or tort. In many instances, resolution used to involve bloodshed, sometimes leading to a feud. At times, religion or some form of sorcery was employed to discover or injure the perpetrator. When the offender was (or is) known, a victim, or his or her kin, could be permitted to inflict punishment themselveshence the feud. There might also be some kind of enforcers and/or helpers who can bring parties together to settle matters or to bring those accused of doing harm before people with some authority such as elders, community headmen, or magistrates who can impose some sort of sanction without necessarily having any recourse to formal law. Moreover, in significant groupings of people larger than a hunter-gatherer group or a small rural community, the enforcers, even if only ordinary members of the larger community, can be organized into bodies required to provide help or assistance when necessary to maintain the general welfare. In broad terms, that is what policing was in many of its early understandings: a system to enable the well-being of individuals and the growth and welfare of the community. The aim of what follows is to trace the manner in which the enforcers and helpers developed into the institutions now termed police, polizei, polizia, polcia, politsiya, or any one of the other linguistic forms. Separating policing from the institutions known as police helps to warn against a simple linear development of the institution and the assumption that nothing like it existed particularly before the Enlightenment and that it has gradually grown more effective and more responsive to the communitys or the individuals needs.

The word police has its origin in the Classical Greek (politeia), a word that also provided the root for policy and that concerned all matters affecting the survival and welfare of the citythe polis. This raises two assumptions that need to be considered at the outset: first, that the police institution alone is responsible for policing, and, second, that it is easy to set a date for the founding of the institution.

Briefly, and to begin, in the English-speaking world there seems to be an assumption that the institution called the police is primarily concerned with doing policing. Elsewhere there is often no precise link between the police and policing. In French, for example, there is no single verb for policing and the term faire la police (literally translated as to do the police/policing) is commonly used. In German, a variety of words such as