ABSTRACT
Looking to an idealised model of the London Metropolitan Police, critics of New Zealand detectives in the early 1930s urged that there be an interchange of British and New Zealand officers, that two detectives be sent to London each year to get 'thorough grip of English methods of crime detection'. While methods of investigating crime in London did not vary greatly from those employed in New Zealand, there were clearly significant differences in the size, organisation and context of policing. In the decade from 1898 the New Zealand Police Force was more consciously modelled than hitherto on the London Metropolitan Police. In the face of mounting pressures to reform its police force, the New Zealand government looked overseas in 1897 for a commissioner. From 1920, the development of peacetime political surveillance by detectives added another dimension to the popular perception of 'demons'.
