Policing reform and moral discourse: the genesis of a modern institution

Abstract

In this paper, I explore some of the intellectual questions which gave meaning to the social activity of dealing with crime, disorder and indigence, in the writings of three key police thinkers: Henry Field, Sir John Fielding and Patrick Colquhoun. My argument is that these early “police intellectuals” were not visionaries in the sense that they imagined a radically new apparatus of social control. Rather, the writings of these police proponents are most significant because they established a context of thought as felt and feeling as thought in which modern policing emerged. That intellectual context involved a commitment to piety, ethical standards and those institutions which supported or propagated them ‐ family, commerce and education as well as considerations of better policing, laws and punishments. Their writings, I suggest, are best understood as providing an enhanced role for the police in both enforcing order and in defining it. Police intellectuals, I conclude, created a frame of mind of police which functioned as a broad social technology of control, an institution of government and an ideology representing the crime problem as a lower class phenomenon.