ABSTRACT
Max Weber's criteria describe the police as law enforcers, with bureaucratic 'dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality'. Comparing the creation and early development of the London and New York City police in the nineteenth century gives an opportunity to expand Weber's concept of rational-legal legitimization. Weber seemed to assume that legitimacy of the larger state makes subordinate agencies legitimate in the eyes of its citizens or subjects. In an authoritarian society like Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, the administrative apparatus derives its authority simply by embodying the dominant state. New York City's police were the first in the United States, in 1845, to follow the London preventive model. New York officials were much less conscious of selling the police, generally letting it be legitimated simply as an agency of a democratic state. This led to less formal or legal power for the police officers but much broader leeway for informal, personal discretion.
