ABSTRACT
Many people in England and Wales are not aware that the police there are still divided into forty-three independent forces, each with its own CID and separate police authority. These vary in strength from less than 850 in Warwickshire to over 20,000 in Metropolitan London. British suspicion of a national police force is an old one, recently reinforced by twentieth-century experiences of Germany and Russia. Originally it found its roots in national xenophobia: early English opponents continually muttered about Fouche, Naples, or Austria. Sir Robert Mark says that the British have ‘a growing distaste on the part of both army and people for the involvement of troops in the homeland in a peacekeeping role, and this has become traditional’. A separate criticism of new police authorities established by the Police Act is that many people feel it is quite wrong for magistrates, who must appear impartial in their judicial capacity, to form one third of the membership of such committees.
