ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter highlights problems of definition in writing police and policing history. Who are the police and what is policing? Is policing the work that police do, or are the police those who do policing? One tradition assumes that these terms are unproblematic and that their meaning can be read from the organisation and practice of the modern police, that is, the police created by the Metropolitan Police Act 1829 and later legislation. This has led to the characterisation of the period before 1829 as merely a defective prologue to the modern police. Without pre-empting too much any conclusions on that view, this chapter adopts the words ‘police’ and ‘policing’ as shorthand terms (see Radzinowicz (1956: 1–8) for the meaning of police before 1829). By policing is meant the maintenance of order, the control of disorder, the prevention of crime and the detection of offenders, and by the police is meant those officials concerned with policing matters.
