ABSTRACT
The policed society is unique in that central power exercises potentially violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely diffused throughout civil society in small and discretionary operations that are capable of rapid concentration. The police also had a mission against the "dangerous classes" and political agitation in the form of mobs or riots. The London police, created in 1829, were from the beginning a bureaucratic organization of professionals. One of their tasks was to prevent crime by regularly patrolling beats, operating under strict rules which permitted individual discretion. In the London and Paris of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, people often saw themselves as threatened by agglomerations of the criminal, vicious, and violent—the rapidly multiplying poor of cities whose size had no precedent in Western history. The urban and industrial propertied classes, however, were much less eager to take up the tasks of self-defense as volunteer or co-opted police.
