ABSTRACT
This chapter compares four English police historians whose writings are principally concerned with the founding of the centralized English police in 1829. The four historians to be discussed are W. Melville Lee, Charles Reith, T. A. Critchley and Leon Radzinowicz, Except for Radzinowicz, who specifically limits his history of the English criminal law "from 1750," these authors begin with an inquiry into the police systems of their Anglo-Saxon forbears. The rationalizations developed by these authors can be reduced to some themes: that the need for police arises out of the division of society into good and bad citizens and that one result of the growth of police power is to protect the weak against the powerful. They also include: that the police is dependent for its effectiveness on public support, and that historically the business of policing has been confided to the people themselves.
