Introduction

Any assessment of the health of a country’s political system, its democratic impulses or authoritarian tendencies, finds itself drawn inexorably to the role of the police in that society. The nature of the police system, its raison d’être, has great bearing on any judgement as to whether or not the subject qualifies as a democracy. As Anthony Sampson puts it, ‘[t]he police are inevitably the most visible arm of government …. Relations with the police are everywhere a touchstone of true democracy’. ¹ Operating at the interface between state and society, the police serve as an instrument of state power, exercising a monopoly of legitimate force; as a mechanism for social control, regulating public behaviour and deterring criminal activity; and, less obviously, as a symbol of stability and continuity, buttressing the status quo against sudden, unpredictable change — so much so that the police institution itself seems peculiarly resistant to change or reform. Indeed, David Bayley, author of numerous works on policing, maintains that ‘police systems exhibit an enormous inertial strength over time; their forms endure even across the divides of war, violent revolution and shattering economic and social change’. ²