ABSTRACT
The police exercise their state-sanctioned authority over citizens and they regulate conflicts between them. This means that policing is inherently controversial and inevitably contested. This chapter aims to plot the history of policing, discuss the roles, cultures and functions of the police, look at police deviance and mechanisms of accountability, and examine some recent changes in policing. In the fourteenth century, towns and villages were generally policed by community-based systems of the ‘watch’, local constables and private ‘thief-takers’. The ‘new police’ were to be highly visible, work under strict military-style discipline and bureaucracy, use only the minimum of force, and be responsible to the Home Secretary yet independent from direct government control. From around the 1880s in England and Wales there was an early role for women to act as ‘Police Matrons’ who could search and supervise children and other women who were being detained.
