ABSTRACT
A comparison of the mid-nineteenth-century London police—the first modern full-time patrol force, created in 1829—and the New York City police—the second such force outside of the British Empire, created in 1845—reveals how different political and social developments influenced the principles and practices of police authority. The statutes which established London and New York's police forces provided only a skeleton around which a definition of authority and a public image of the police could develop. Although the British metropolis was a much larger city than the "metro-polis of the New World," both were heterogeneous cities marked by gulfs between wealth and poverty and recurrent social conflict. Disraeli spoke of England's "two nations, the rich and the poor" despite their ethnic homogeneity, and social conflict in London had more serious political implications than ethnic squabbles in New York. New York did have its own local disorder, the ethnic conflicts which punctuated the era.
