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The Development of Civilian Policing:
Lessons for Contemporary
Post-conflict Operations
Dr B.K. Greener and Dr W.J. Fish
w w w.c i v m i l co e . gov. au
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this Civil-Military Occasional Paper are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the position of APCMCOE or of any
government agency. Authors enjoy the academic freedom to offer new and
sometimes controversial perspectives in the interest of furthering debate
on key issues.
The content is published under a Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0
Australia (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/) licence. All parts of
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by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-921933-16-5
Published 2011.
Abstract
This article considers the historical separation of policing from military
functions by outlining the key roles of police forces and analysing why
policing was purposefully developed to differ from military structures
and roles. In doing so, this paper contributes to our understanding
of contemporary challenges with respect to identifying appropriate
policing and military roles in international contexts. Focusing primarily
on the Anglo experience of developments in policing, the paper also
addresses the question as to why alternative forms of ‘Continental’
policing arose in Europe. In particular, the paper considers the
question as to what constitutes legitimate forms of policing in such
different contexts as, in understanding the genesis of current policing
models and alternative possibilities for the relationship between police
and military forces, we may hope to better understand the options
for police and military roles in post-conflict settings.
Key words: police, military, history of policing, Continental policing,
legitimacy in policing
Dr Fish is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Massey University.
Dr Greener is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Massey
University and has published widely on international security-related
matters; her book The New International Policing was published in 2009.
The Development of Civilian Policing: Lessons for Contemporary Post-conflict Operations
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The Development of Civilian Policing: Lessons
for Contemporary Post-conflict Operations
Contemporary peace and stability operations currently involve military personnel in
policing tasks. This paper outlines why this development is problematic by returning
to first principles. The paper first of all seeks definitions of key concepts such as
police and policing, noting dominant definitions but arguing that a police force is
an organisation that has the proper,lo099 in England and on the Continent to
perform the policing function, rather than simply charging the military with policing
tasks. These discussions highlight the relevance of legitimacy, and also provide some
clues as to how policing might best develop in post conflict sites. The paper, then,
draws on the history of police forces to establish why we don’t use military for
internal security, what might constitute legitimate policing in post conflict situations,
and begins to lay the groundwork for establishing a stronger understanding of
appropriate police and military roles within post-conflict societies.
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Defining Police
In attempting to mark out what distinguishes a police force from other bodies
—such as armies, private security companies, organised criminal gangs, and so
on—a number of important authors have fixed on the fact that police forces are,
as the name perhaps implies, authorised to use force. For instance, in his influential
1967 paper, ‘The Demand for Order in Civil Society’, Allan Silver contends that:
The policed society is unique in that central power exercises potentially
violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely
diffused throughout civil society in small and discretionary operations
that are capable of rapid concentration. (2005: 10; see also Wilson 1968;
Bittner 1970; Slovak 1986; Bayley and Garofalo 1989; Terrill 2001).
Here, Silver (2005) suggests that police are present in a society when ‘potentially
violent supervision’ is imposed on a population in particular ways.
Another prominent police scholar, David Bayley, more clearly lays out a definition
of police. In the introduction to his book, Patterns of Policing, Bayley (1985: 7)
states that:
Whenever the word police is used in this book, it will refer to people
authorized by a group to regulate interpersonal relations within the group
through the application of physical force. This definition has three essential
parts: physical force, internal usage, and collective authorization.
Given Bayley’s comparative focus and the specificity with which he enunciates his
definition of police, it is useful to discuss these three supposedly defining features of
police in order to start at first principles, before moving to consider how police and
military forces may differ.
Interestingly, whilst Bayley’s official definition does have three key features, it is
the use of physical force that looms largest; the other two features being used
to distinguish police from other bodies that may use physical force—thereby
being somewhat derivative of this principle. Indeed, Bayley (1985:8) goes so far as
to say that:
The Development of Civilian Policing: Lessons for Contemporary Post-conflict Operations
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Though police are not the only agents in society that are allowed to lay
hands on people in order to mould behaviour, they would be unrecognizable
as police without this authority.
This clearly states that the (potential) use of physical force is a necessary condition
for being police—a body simply could not be conceived of as being police unless it
had the capacity to use physical force. Yet this claim can be challenged.
For instance, New Zealand’s Maori Wardens are charged with the provision of a
number of functions that are usually associated with police, such as crowd control,
traffic management and security patrolling (http://www.nzmwa.co.nz/about.htm).
Maori Wardens also have a small number of police-like powers, such as able to
order intoxicated or violent Maori to leave licensed premises, to enter and search
meeting places where they believe intoxicating liquor to be present and seize said
liquor, and to be able to disable or impound a motor vehicle where they believe
that vehicle will be driven by an intoxicated Maori person (sections 30–35 of the
Maori Community Development Act: http://www.nzmwa.co.nz/resources/
Maori%20Community%20Development%20Act%201962.pdf). Maori Wardens
also wear a blue uniform which bears marked similarities to the standard blue
police uniform that is familiar around the world. Yet Maori Wardens undertake
these police functions, have these powers, and wear these uniforms whilst being
explicitly disbarred from using physical force in the performance of their duties
(http://www.nzmwa.co.nz/role-of-the-warden.htm).
Whether or not we think that Maori Wardens count as a kind of Indigenous
community police force or not, the very fact that the question (of whether they
count as police or not) makes sense suffices to undermine Bayley’s claim that a
group of people would be unrecognisable as police without the ability to use
force. We can also extend this idea to conceive of a group that had other police
functions—perhaps investigative functions, for example—whilst lacking the
authorisation to use physical force. Whilst it may well be that a police force that
was not permitted to use physical force across the board would be a decidedly
ineffective police force, the fact that we might nonetheless describe it as an
ineffective police force is enough to show that the authorization to use force is not,
pace Bayley, a defining feature of police.
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Of course, as a matter of historical fact, the vast majority of police forces are
indeed authorized to use force in the performance of their functions. Yet this does
not show that they count as police in virtue of being so authorised—perhaps
instead they count as police because they are required to perform a certain role
within society, and the authorisation to use force comes later, as something that
is required to enable them to adequately play this role. This suggestion will be
considered in more detail below.
As intimated above, the remaining two defining features—internal usage and
collective authorisation—are in place as a means to distinguish police from other
bodies within society that employ force to achieve their ends. One of these bodies
is a society’s military, and ‘the stipulation of internal usage is essential in order to
exclude armies’ from counting as police (Bayley 1985: 8). Armies are bodies that are
authorised to use their force external to a given society; police are authorised to
use force internally, within a society.
As with the use of force, the feature of internal usage does seem to identify
something central to the very idea of police. Police do operate internal to a
society. Yet to count this as a defining feature of police is somewhat problematic.
In discussing the difference between armies and police, Bayley suggests that, ‘when
military formations are used for order maintenance within a society, they should be
regarded as acting as police’ (1985: 8). Indeed, strictly speaking, Bayley is committed
to a stronger claim than this: if the military is (iii) authorised to (i) use force to
maintain order (ii) within a society, then on Bayley’s definition, the military actually
become police, rather than merely act as police. Yet we might be worried about
this claim: surely actually being police requires rather more than this; armies can, on
occasion, perform police tasks, but they don’t thereby become police. This is why
we have a special name for the internal usage of the military (MACP—military aid
to the civil power). These issues are discussed further below.
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Bayley’s claims that his final defining feature of police, collective authorization,
is necessary:
in order to exclude from the term police persons who use force within a
society for noncollective purposes. This would include robbers, rebels, and
terrorists, as well as, on some occasions, parents, employers, landowners,
schoolteachers, and priest (1985: 8).
Once again, this feature does highlight an important feature of most modern police
forces, but it does face an obvious problem explaining the historical existence
of repressive police forces, such as the Cheka, the NKVD and the Gestapo. In
none of these cases were the police forces in question operating under anything
approaching collective authorization. Even though they may have been authorised
by the State in some sense, they were not authorised by the group they policed.
On Bayley’s definition, then, such ‘secret police’ agencies ought not count as police.
Bayley recognises this problem, but responds by saying that a force’s ‘status as acting
for the community is necessary conceptually for police to be said to exist, just as
four legs are necessary in the definition of a horse. But exceptions do occur. Some
police lose their legitimacy, as horses lose legs’ (Bayley 1985: 10). The thought here
appears to be that collective authorization is necessary for a police force to come
into being, but that it may remain a police force, at least for a certain amount of
time, once this authorisation has been lost.
It is not clear, however, that this solves the problem. Bayley (1985: 31) later
describes Russia’s first state public police, the Oprichniki as a ‘dreaded’ force which
‘scourged the countryside suppressing resistance to Ivan’s rule’. The Oprichniki
were developed in the very first instance as a repressive force, so even with
Bayley’s revision in mind, this would not count as a police force as at no point was it
ever authorised by a group to regulate interpersonal relationships within that group.
Whilst each of Bayley’s three key features doubtlessly identifies something that is
important about police forces, the claim that they are each necessary conditions
of an organisation’s counting as police does lead to difficulties. We would like, in its
place, to offer a definition of police that makes use of the notion, from biological
science, of a ‘proper function’.
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An Alternative Definition of Police
According to Millikan, the ‘proper function’ of a natural biological device is ‘a matter
of [its] having been ‘designed to’ or of being ‘supposed to’ ... perform a certain
function’ (1984: 17). So, for example, even though ‘some hearts are diseased and
some are malformed in such a way that they are unable to pump blood’ (1984: 17),
these hearts still have the ‘proper function’ of pumping blood in as much as that is
what they are supposed to do. Correlatively, a device such as a water pump, which
is capable of pumping blood, does not count as a heart because this is not what it
was designed to do. Yet this talk of being ‘designed to’ or ‘supposed to’ perform a
function is not supposed to imply a designer. Instead, the functions that something
is ‘designed to’ or ‘supposed to’ play ‘are, roughly, the functions upon which their
continued reproduction or survival has depended’ (1984: 3). So it is because hearts
played the role of pumping blood that evolution ensured their continued survival
within living organisms.
Proper functions can, of course, be used in definitions. In this case, we can
define a heart as something that has the proper function of pumping blood. We
recommend a parallel definition of the notion of a police force in terms of proper
function. In doing so, however, we want to be clear that the proper function of
a police force is not (necessarily) the function that it was originally introduced
to perform or designed to perform (in the sense of conscious design), although
this may be the only function we can assign to a police force in its early stages.
In mature police forces, however, the proper function of a force will be, not the
function it was originally introduced to play, but rather the function that it plays on
an ongoing basis, which explains why it has persisted within a society.
In considering the functions of police that explain their social persistence, we
should aim to remain as universal as possible to ensure that our definition of
police does not run the risk of excluding police forces that do not replicate a very
specific model. But such universal statements of police function have been made.
As Bayley (1985: 18) says, ‘the prevention of crime and the improvement of public
safety is considered the responsibility of police the world over.’ Silver also fixes on
crime prevention and public order maintenance as the two cornerstones of police
function (2005: 10), Michael Banton distinguishes two key functions of the police
The Development of Civilian Policing: Lessons for Contemporary Post-conflict Operations
9
officer—the ‘law officer’ and the ‘peace officer’—which resemble these two roles
(1964: 127), and even the Metropolitan Police Force defines the police as the force
employed to ‘ensure that inhabitants [of a country] keep the peace and obey the
law’ (http://www.met.police.uk/history/definition.htm).
It is, of course, possible to come up with more precise specifications of police
function. In his book, Violence and the Police, William Westley (1953: 17–18)
includes a detailed statement of the duties of a police force taken from a
1905 police handbook:
DUTIES OF POLICE FORCE. It is hereby made the duty of such police force,
and the members thereof are specially empowered at all times, within such
city, to preserve peace; prevent crime; detect and arrest offenders; suppress
riots, mobs and insurrections; disperse unlawful and dangerous assemblages,
and assemblages which obstruct the free passage of public streets, sidewalks,
parks and places; protect the rights of persons and property; guard the public
health; preserve order at elections and meetings; direct the movement of
teams and vehicles in streets, alleys or public places; remove all nuisances
in public streets, parks or highways; arrest all street beggars and vagrants;
provide proper assistance at fires; assist, advise and protect strangers and
travellers in public streets or at railroad stations; carefully observe and inspect
all places of business under license, or required to have the same, all houses
of ill fame or prostitution and houses where common prostitutes resort or
reside, all lottery or policy shops, all gambling-houses, cockpits, dance houses
and resorts; and to suppress and restrain all unlawful or disorderly conduct or
practices and enforce and prevent the violation of all ordinances and laws in
effect in such city.
However, for the reason mentioned above, we should be wary of insisting that an
organisation counts as police force if and only if it plays these, and only these, roles.
Instead, we recommend defining a police force as an organisation that has the
proper function of policing a society, where ‘policing’ involves the performance of
the two broad functions noted by Banton (1964). We can then use this idea, that
police forces have the proper function of policing society, to help clarify the kinds
of things that ‘policing’ might involve at a particular time, in a particular context, or
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for a particular culture. Taking this approach enables us to allow that different police
forces across the globe will not have identical duties, yet counts them all as ‘police’
so long as the forces in question perform the two broad functions of ensuring
that members of a society keep the peace and obey the law. A further important
feature of this method of defining police is that it enables us to accommodate
Bayley’s insights about the importance of the use of force, internal ambit and
collective authorisation in such a way that avoids the kinds of problems Bayley met.
For example, when we look at the more detailed account of the ‘policing’ function
just given, the feature of internal usage is a direct consequence of the internally
directed quality of the different policing roles. Yet, as calling policing the ‘proper
function’ of a police force entails that the organisation persists because it engages in
policing, it enables us to maintain that an organisation, such as the army, which may
on occasion take on a policing role, does not thereby fall under the definition of
police. The persistence of the army within society is not explained by the fact that
it plays policing roles but by the fact that it plays a military role—that is the proper
function of the army. So, even when the army is used for order and maintenance
within a society, we need not allow that the army thereby qualifies as police.
In addition to this, some of the organisations that police societies will be authorised
by the communities they police; others—the kinds of secret police forces
discussed above—will not. We might, therefore, distinguish between legitimate
and illegitimate police forces in terms of the level of support they have within
the communities they police. The importance of collective authorisation can
therefore be explained, not as a defining feature of a police force, but rather as
being required for a police force to be legitimate, to be successful in its policing role
and, in turn, to be likely to persist within the society (particularly through changes
in government).
Finally, as mentioned in our discussions above, it may also be that the vast majority
of bodies that have the proper function of policing a society have been given the
authorisation by that society to use physical force in order to successfully perform
this function. This would explain why the use of force is so prevalent and also,
perhaps, why Bayley takes it to be a core defining feature of a police force. Yet
according to our definition, any organisation that has the proper function of policing
will thereby qualify as police; it may just be that, because of the nature of modern
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society, most organisations are unable to play that role well (in particular, well
enough for the organisation to persist within society) unless they are authorized
to use physical force in the performance of their duties.
A police force is, therefore, an organisation that has the proper function of
policing a society. Yet this doesn’t explain why, for example, the military might
not have policing as a proper function alongside its role in providing for security
from external threats. In the next section, we therefore go on to consider why
the force charged with policing has typically been distinct from the forces charged
with external security.
The Development of Modern Police in England
Police are the organisation whose proper function is the performance of
police functions. Yet when we look at the history of policing, we find that the
establishment of an organisation charged with the performance of police functions
is a relatively recent invention.
In the latter half of the Middle Ages, public order in England was maintained ‘by
a system of collective responsibility [in which] families were grouped into tens, or
tythings, and made responsible for the good behaviour of each other’ (Emsley 1996:
9). Each tything chose a representative, who was known as a ‘tythingman’ or ‘petty
constable’, and groups of ten tythings were established, known as ‘hundreds’, who
were led by a ‘high constable’ (Burn 1754: 671–2). In this system, a ‘constable was
simply a citizen on duty. All able-bodied men were expected to give their services
in turn, being elected for a year and serving without payment’ (Banton 1964: 135).
Prior to the establishment of dedicated police forces, ‘police functions were often
carried out—if at all—by citizens rotating in local offices (sheriffs, constables,
magistrates) or acting as members of militia, posses, Yeomanry corps, or watch
and ward committees’ (Silver 2005: 11).
So although the world had not yet seen the like of the modern, centralised police
force, by the mid-eighteenth century:
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various kinds of what can loosely be termed police forces were already
familiar in Continental Europe ... . At the same period, moreover, the City
of London itself has a force of over seven hundred paid watchmen. In other
words, the idea of a force of men paid to uphold aspects of the internal
security of parts of the country was neither entirely new in England, nor
without well-developed continental parallels (Styles 2005: 85).
However, this traditional system was coming under pressure from a number of
different directions. For one thing, individuals were becoming more unwilling to
undertake unpaid public office. As early as 1714, Daniel Defoe contended that
the office of constable had become one of ‘insupportable hardship; it takes up
so much of a man’s time that his own affairs are frequently totally neglected,
too often to his ruin’ (quoted in Webb and Webb 1906: 68). Moreover, as the
process of industrialisation gathered pace, it became clear that the new urban and
industrialised propertied classes:
were much less eager [than agrarian landowners] to take up the tasks
of self‑defence as volunteer or co-opted police. ... Not only did the
manufacturing classes wish to avoid personal danger and inconvenience
while protecting their property, but they also saw that ... the use of social and
economic superiors as police exacerbated rather than mollified class violence
(Silver 2005: 12).
Alongside a growing unwillingness to undertake public office, the eighteenth
century also brought a growing fear of crime and mob violence.
In the countryside it was possible to ignore the poor … but in the city the
propertied classes could not fail to be made constantly uneasy by the vast
underworld of men who made the streets so dangerous at night [and]
composed the mobs which almost any unusual event seemed to conjure
out of the ground (Hayter 1978: 128).
There is no exaggeration in saying that, at the dawn of the nineteenth
century, England was passing through an epoch of criminality darker than
any other in her annals (Lee 1901: 203 (see also Mainwairing 1822: 3).
The Development of Civilian Policing: Lessons for Contemporary Post-conflict Operations
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This led Daniel Defoe to address a pamphlet to the Lord Mayor of London,
declaring that:
The Whole City, My Lord, is alarm’d and uneasy; Wickedness has got such a
Head, and the Robbers and Insolence of the Night are such, that the Citizens
are no longer secure within their own Walls, or safe even in passing their
Streets, but are robbed, insulted and abused, even at their own doors. …
Violence and Plunder is no longer confin’d to the Highways … The Streets of
the City are now the Places of Danger; men are knock’d down and robb’d,
may, sometimes murther’d at their own Doors, and in passing and repassing
but from House to House, or from Shop to Shop (quoted in Silver 2005: 7).
The challenges of urbanization and industrialization, coupled with a growing
unwillingness of the newly propertied classes to undertake public office, had the
consequence that ‘by the eighteenth century [the traditional] system [of citizen
policemen] had broken down completely in London’ (Banton 1964: 135). In England,
then, industrialization altered the social fabric of the community, destroying the
parish ‘as a unit of community regulation’ (Bayley 1985: 34).
The traditional view of the growing need for a dedicated internal security force,
then, tells us that the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation in the early
nineteenth century lead to increasing levels of both crime and public disorder that
could no longer be controlled by traditional means (Silver 2005: 7–10; Miller 2005:
31; Finnane 2005: 48). Modern police forces, according to this interpretation, came
into being in response to a general public need for a new way of providing for
security within society.
The factor impelling movement from private to public policing is not simply
a growth in insecurity but a growth in insecurity traceable to a decline in the
efficiency of customary enforcement auspices (Bayley 1985: 35)
However, other authors have suggested a more cynical rationale, whereby it
was argued that the processes of industrialization and urbanization led to new
challenges to the privileged status of the propertied classes; challenges that could
no longer be met using the traditional means of keeping the populace in order.
According to this interpretation of events;
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Modern police forces are marked by the conditions of their emergence in societies
socially divided, above all by class. Police forces are not socially neutral instruments
of a general social will for order, but the creation of specific interests seeking to
maintain their conditions of privilege in an unequal society (Finnane 2005: 48; see
also Brogden 2005: 72).
The privileged classes therefore decided that they needed to come up with a new
way of supporting the status quo, which lay in the establishment of an organisation
dedicated to internal security.
Regardless of how we choose to conceptualise this process, however, it appears
to be the case that the need for an organisation to provide internal security in
England had its roots in rises in both crime and public disorder. The question we
now face is that, given that societies by this point in history tended to have armies
that could be deployed, why were they not tasked with providing internal as well as
external security?
The Origins of the Police—Military Divide in England
Throughout the eighteenth century, the British army was repeatedly called upon
to suppress riots and other forms of mob disorder (Hayter 1978). Yet this did
not lead to the military being tasked with internal security on a more permanent
basis. The literature suggests a number of possible reasons, and the first relates
to operational issues.
The army faced a number of operational difficulties when required to deal with
civil disturbances. For example, the army would only attend a disturbance when
requested to do so by a magistrate and, because of this, often acted as though
their authority to act was delegated from the magistrate.i Yet it appears that
magistrates often acted as though their role had been fully discharged by calling
in the army, and so did not attend the disturbance to give the directives that the
army felt they required in order to act. Magistrates and the commanding officers
of the detachments sent to assist with civil disturbances would only come across
one another in such settings, and this lack of operational familiarity between civilian
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magistrates and military officers meant that, on occasion, the army would refuse to
act without a direct order, even though they were fully aware that public disorder
was occurring (Darvell 1934: 267–8).
As well as lacking familiarity with the magistrates who they took to be commanding
them when called out to civil disturbances, the army would also often be unfamiliar
with the geography—particularly urban geography—of the locations in which
they were required to act. ‘In some cases a unit might know the district, but often
they marched into one which was strange to them and were entirely reliant on
information and guidance from local civil officers’ (Hayter 1978: 25). The army
was also unaccustomed to operating in this way: ‘it was difficult for the army to
act continuously in small dispersed units in civilian society, although it might do so
on an emergency basis’ (Silver 2005: 13). This highlights both the physical and the
emotional distance placed between military forces and society at large. Military
forces have typically purposefully been segregated out from society so as to avoid
military impingement upon politics and to allow for a particular culture to flourish
that enables a particular military ethos to be inculcated into personnel—a situation
far removed from one whereby ‘The British policeman is a civilian discharging
civilian duties and merely put into uniform so that those who need his help know
exactly where to look for assistance’ (Banton 1964: 136).
In addition to this, the urbanisation of civil disturbances had the consequence
that it could be difficult to get a military force to the disturbance in an adequately
timely fashion.
Riots in [the eighteenth] century … were often difficult to deal with by
virtue of their remoteness from the capital, but at least they usually lasted
for some time and offered a fair mark to the forces marching towards the
district. In London, mobs often appeared, caused immense damage and
vanished within a short time, giving no opportunity of interference from
troops (Hayter 1978: 128).
In Wigan, a mob rioted, attacking two houses. ‘Military aid was requested
from Ashton (five miles away), ‘but before their arrival the work of
destruction has been consummated and the mob retired jeering and laughing
at the Military for having come when all was over.’ ‘ (Hamburger 1964: 206).
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The simple fact that it takes time to get a military detachment to a civil disturbance
was therefore cited as an argument in favour of localised police forces. ‘Instances of
riot have often occurred and considerable damage has been sustained, when the
aid of the military has been called in, but which easily might have been suppressed
in its origin by the civil power had there been a sufficiently numerous and properly
organised police force’ (Redford 1940: 370).
Moreover, the arrival of the army at a public disturbance could often make things
worse, not better, as demonstrated in the following case:
Early in September 1893 the Chief Constable of the West Riding found his
force of 1,042 men impossibly stretched by the demands of [an ongoing
miners’] strike and the crowds expected at the Doncaster races. Unable
to spare any constables when strikers entered Acton Hall Colliery at
Featherstone to force an end to continuing surface work, he arranged for
a squad of 28 soldiers to rendezvous with a magistrate at the scene. The
appearance of the soldiers at the colliery inflamed the situation: the soldiers
were stoned and they responded, eventually, by firing on the crowd, leaving
two dead and fourteen wounded (Emsley 1996: 116).
In addition to these types of operational problems that made it difficult for military
forces to control citizens in times of public disturbance, army personnel also did
not much like being used for riot control or public order roles either. Thus ‘policing
duties appear to have been unpopular with the soldiers, both officers and men’
(Emsley 1996: 14) and ‘soldiers have been used from time to time to combat civil
disorder since the days of the empires of the ancient world, but they have seldom
accepted it as part of the military task’ (Hayter 1978: 3). Hayter (1978:27–28) then
goes on to expand on this, asserting that:
The army resented the view that it should be used in peacetime for
unmilitary tasks [… and] their chief distaste was reserved for the riot duty.
For differing reasons neither men nor officers relished it. … The men quite
simply came from the same social group as the mob and often sympathized
with it [whilst the officers] had never been given any guidance as to how
they were to act in controlling mobs, and in particular how far they could
use force without becoming liable in law’.
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As the previous quote indicates, the army not only believed public order
maintenance to be an ‘unmilitary’ task, they were also unsure as to whether they
would be adequately protected if they did act. The trial and subsequent lynching of
Captain John Porteous in Edinburgh in 1736 was an example of what they feared:
At the execution of a noted smuggler, the mob pelted the hangman and the
city guard with stones: John Porteous, captain of the guard, seized a musket
and fired into the crowd. His men at once followed his example, and several
people were killed. A Scottish jury sentenced Porteous to death, but he was
pardoned by the British government. This news was received in Edinburgh
with a roar of indignation. A mob broke into the Tolbooth, where Porteous
was imprisoned, carried him to the usual place of execution at the Grass
Market, and there hanged him to a dyer’s pole (Longley 1933: 100).
This concern led to the army being reluctant to be employed in public order
maintenance, and there was some sympathy with their position:
If soldiers when attacked by a mob and most barbarously beat and abused
must upon firing in their own defence be imprisoned and run the risk of
being hanged, (and ‘tis too well known that the Juries here will very readily
contribute all in their power towards it,) it is not to be expected our officers
can have any further assistance from them’ (Commissioners of Customs to
Lord Justices 1728, quoted in Hayter 1978: 32).
Finally, the performance of internal security duties also appears to have detracted
from their performance of their core external security tasks: ‘The riot duty
[together with] a host of other non-military factors … combined to make
a coherent programme of training impossible, and contributed to the poor
performance of the army at the commencement of eighteenth-century wars’
(Hayter 1978: 35).
In our discussions so far, we have already made mention of at least one situation in
which the army did not intervene despite being fully aware that public disorder was
occurring (Darvell 1934: 267–8), and two examples of situations in which the army’s
intervention led to significant loss of life (Acton Hall and Captain Porteous). The
infamous Peterloo Massacre provides another. On 16 August 1819, the Manchester
Patriotic Union, who were agitating for parliamentary reform, organised a
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demonstration on St. Peter’s Field, at which radical orator Henry Hunt was due to
speak. Shortly after the meeting began, magistrates called in the yeomanry to arrest
Hunt and the other organisers of the demonstration, and to break up the assembly.
The yeomanry was met with resistance from the crowd, which led a regiment of
hussars to perform a cavalry charge to rescue the yeomanry, leaving fifteen dead
and hundreds wounded.
The faith of the members of ... government in their power to control the
menace of disorder by military force alone was rudely shaken. ... An event
in the following year increased their fears. During the disturbances which
accompanied the return of Queen Caroline to London, a battalion of the
Guards staged a comparatively mild mutiny, and there were signs of mutiny
in other units. Wellington’s blatant self-confidence in his ability to control
disorder by means of the army alone, which he has asserted earlier, was
shaken to an extent which inspired him to address a long memorandum to
his cabinet colleagues demanding the immediate creation of a police force
(Reith 1943: 27).
This supposed lack of alternatives for the military—either the absence of action or
the use of lethal force—was picked up by those arguing that a distinct police force
was needed for internal security matters.
A policeman ‘could handle a truncheon with one hand, whereas a soldier’s
musket is as much as he can manage, and lends him no assistance ... if a
soldier is called upon to act he is obliged to charge or fire, and by doing so
he stands a great chance of killing the parties, and cannot apprehend them
very well’ (Martin, quoted in Emsley 1996: 55).
This idea—that a soldier’s weapon occupies both of his hands and therefore leaves
him little alternative other than to use it to inflict lethal injury by firing or stabbing,
whereas a policeman’s baton leaves one hand free for apprehension and restraint—
was widely offered as a problem that attended the use of the military in public
order maintenance.
Yet as Emsley (1996:60) notes, ‘Army officers were well aware of the impact of
musket fire or of a cavalry charge on crowds and such actions were not, [as these
quotes may suggest], the only resort of soldiers engaged on riot duty, but always
the very last’.
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A further significant problem with using the army for internal security is that use of
the army had significant political overtones. This was in part a feature of the time.
As Bayley (1985:42) points out:
As a result of the commercialisation of agriculture and the destruction of
cottage industries, people were forced into cities. … Protest increasingly
involved vast numbers of people, often spearheaded by the urban mob, and
was directed against general political authority … In these circumstances,
introduction of the army became a political act, not simply a technical
solution to a law and order problem.
To call out the army to deal with civil disturbances, then, was too easily seen as a
political act, when it was not intended to be one (or, according to the more sceptical
interpretation of the need for police, was too obviously a political act, when it was
not intended to look like one).
In addition to this, there was a more general political element to the use of the
army for internal security in that it would require there to be a standing army
maintained for this purpose. Yet, at least in the English experience, there was
a deep and significant opposition to standing armies, and their use in policing,
stemming from ‘Oliver Cromwell’s experiment with a national Military Police from
1655 to 1657’ (Bayley 1985: 37; see also Reith 1956: 125).
During the Interregnum, for the first time, there were well-disciplined,
professionally-led soldiers, who could be, and were, called upon to suppress
rioting. The use of troops in this way was disliked and resented; ... The
memory of the ‘tyranny’ of [Cromwell’s] major-generals ensured that the
idea of a standing army remained unpopular in late Stuart and Hannoverian
England (Emsley 1996: 13–14).
So ‘while troops might be used to put down disorder, the rhetoric of the
eighteenth-century ‘freeborn Englishman’, looking back to Cromwell’s
major‑generals, was highly critical of a standing army and its deployment for
internal policing’ (Emsley 1996: 253). ‘For most men, the most important element
was political—the fear that permanent soldiers would destroy Parliament, law, and
liberty, would impose tyranny, and would disrupt England’s mixed and balanced
government either by force or by corruption through patronage and influence’
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(Schwoerer 1974: 190). Indeed, as we shall see below, the British public’s dislike
and distrust of a standing army was a significant hurdle for the police force itself to
overcome in establishing itself as a legitimate provider of internal security.
The final significant obstacle to tasking the army with policing was that the army
were just not capable of performing the wide variety of tasks that were required in
order to establish internal security. As Reith argues, ‘it was impossible to use troops
for the purpose of controlling crime. They were able to repress mob disorder, but
they could not prevent its recurrence’ (Reith 1943: 9). Mather (1959: 102) further
claims that;
whereas the employment of the military was attended by lethal
consequences, and, therefore, deferred until property had actually been
destroyed, policemen could often prevent a riot by going singly into the
crowd to seize the ringleaders.
An adequate internal security force will not only seek to repress public disorder
once it has begun, but will actively seek to prevent its beginning in the first place.
Moreover, an internal security force would need to control crime, as well as
disorder, and again by prevention as well as detection and prosecution. Thus ‘the
creation of the police was the direct consequence of the failure of the army, as an
instrument of law, in checking and controlling the steady increase of crime and mob
disorder in the early years of the nineteenth century’ (Reith 1943: 9), and hence
the ‘police were designed to penetrate civil society in a way impossible for military
formations and by doing so to prevent crime and violence and to detect and
apprehend criminals’ (Silver 2005: 13).
The British experience therefore brought to light a number of obstacles to involving
the military in policing. Operational issues such as a lack of familiarity with the area
where the public disturbance was occurring were compounded by the military’s
dislike of ‘unmilitary’ tasks and concerns about the levels of protection (physical and
legal) personnel who responded to such events could expect. The military was also
only capable of acting in either a very forceful way or not at all, and was only able
to carry out a very limited number of policing tasks. Despite significant differences
in the genesis of internal policing between England and Europe, some of these
issues have resonance in the case of the experiences of European states.
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The Continental Experience
The British experience of developing a dedicated police force from the ground
up, we find it was relatively unusual. Many Continental European countries did, in
fact, develop police forces out of their already existing external security forces. It
will therefore be instructive to compare the salient differences between the British
experience and that of their Continental European neighbours.
When we do, the first significant feature that stands out is the fact that Continental
European countries were much more familiar with standing armies than the British.
Britain’s island status insulated itself from the need to have a force standing by to
protect itself from sudden aggression from neighbours, but this was not the case
on the continent. Yet as we have seen:
On account of the limitations of their structure and organization, armies
have always been incapable of controlling crime and disorder and of keeping
internal order in a community. The problem was met by [continental] rulers
by adjustment of their [standing] armies to the needs of the situation. Troops
were adapted for use by dispersal in small numbers, and they were called
gens d’armerie, or ‘armed people’ (Reith 1943: 15).
So whilst the British developed a new form of police, many Continental European
countries adapted parts of the military that already existed. In France, the body that
was so adapted was in fact a form of military police.
The [French] gendarmerie originated in the maréchausée—the men of the
military marshals (maréchaux) of France. The maréchausée was established
in the sixteenth century to control the royal army in France which was as
much a danger to the native population as it was to the king’s enemies. ...
The maréchausée acquired its authority… y virtue of the fact that there was
no other body, or bodies, to undertake the task for the centralising state
(Emsley 1996: 252–3).
This adaptation of a standing army for internal security provision led to a more
militarised form of police, known as a constabulary force or a gendarmerie. This
type of policing is found in a number of Continental European countries, with
contemporary descendants of the early gendarmerie being found in today’s Italian
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Caribinieri, the Spanish Guardia Civil, the French Gendarmerie, the Netherlands
Koninklijke Marechausee, and the West German Landespolizei. As Bayley notes, links
to the military remain fairly strong in Italy and Spain, but are weaker in France and
Germany and negligible in the Netherlands (1985: 41).
One important feature, it seems, of the development of constabulary‑style policing
is the prior existence of, and the familiarity of the populace with, a standing army.
This is stated quite explicitly by Bayley (1985: 46) who states that a military role in
policing persists:
when a large standing army is created early in the state experience and
when the development of state capacities is met with prolonged or severe
civil strife. Gendarme police systems developed in France, Prussia, Italy,
Spain, and the Netherlands, where these conditions obtained. They did not
develop in Britain, the United States, Japan, or Scandinavia, all of which were
spared the need to develop substantial standing armies until late in their
national experience.
Another important feature seems to be the centralisation of the States at the time
the need for an internal security force was growing. Whereas Britain’s new form of
police was built on the existing decentralised form of policing, in the body of local
constables and justices of the peace, French policing institutions, for example, owed
much to two characteristics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century French
state. As Styles (2005: 85) notes;
First, and more importantly, to the state’s efforts to establish centralised
institutions of administration to challenge the entrenched and highly
particularised power of local elites. Second, to its policy of financing the wars
resulting from its ambitions on the international stage through the creation
of a multiplicity of venal (including police) offices.
Connected to the more centralised nature of the state in Continental European
countries is the prominence of Roman or Civil law, in which written, codified laws
are made centrally. Gendarmes were therefore the representatives of central
governments ‘which increasingly had developed their own laws based on the jurists’
conception of justice as order, defined, imposed and maintained from above by the
state’ (Emsley 1993: 79).
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Emsley also argues that a significant feature in the need for a constabulary-style
police force is that it was needed to play a ‘colonising’ role, in which the police were
used in part to ensure that peasants from outlying areas were made aware of the
State that they belonged to. In the English case, Emsley suggests:
The majority of the English population appear to have some sort of
notion of ‘Englishness’; as late as the nineteenth century parallel notions
of ‘Frenchness’ were lacking among large numbers of peasants who lived in
France but who had little idea of what France was and did not even speak
French (Emsley 1996: 253).
However, in the case of the European model of policing, Emsley argues that;
Gendarmerie-style policing fulfilled a role largely different from that of the
kind of policing which developed in states, or parts of states, where the
population acknowledged some kind of national identity. Members of the
gendarmerie nationale, the Carabinieri, the Guardia Civil, the Third Section were
as much involved in turning peasants into Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards and
Russians and marking out ‘national’ territory, as members of the Northwest
Mounted Police or the Royal Irish Constabulary were involved in turning
indigenous peoples into loyal subjects of the British Crown and marking out
imperial territory (Emsley 1993: 87).
The small brigades of gendarmes either patrolling in their smart military
uniforms, or just resting in their barracks with the national flag flying over the
top, were a demonstration to rural communities that the pays natal of the
members of those communities was not simply a village and its immediate
environs but a developing nation state. ... The rural dweller was to fulfil his
obligations to the nation state by paying his taxes and yielding conscripts; and
the gendarme was to ensure that these obligations were fulfilled, by force if
necessary (Emsley 1993: 84).
Emsley argues that a more militarised style of policing was developed on the
Continent in order to fly the flag of the State. To support this claim, he considers
the British Imperial experience, and contends that disorder in the British Empire
(where societies existed with some similarities to those in Europe) could lead
to paramilitary forms of policing, suggesting that the obvious example is Ireland
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with its gendarmerie-style Royal Irish Constabulary (Emsley 1993: 85). He therefore
contends that, as the Irish were resistant to the concept of being policed by
the English:
When it came to colonising, showing the flag, or seeking to turn recalcitrant
natives into loyal subjects of the British Crown, then militarised police forces
along the gendarmerie model were deployed by those same governments
that gloried in the English Bobby’s unique nature (Emsley 1996: 254).
There are therefore three key differences between the Continental European
experience and that of England—the possession of, and familiarity of the populace
with, a standing army; a more centralized state and legal system; and a need to
assert State control and dominance o citizens who did not antecedently feel a sense
of belonging to the state. These differences seem to be significant in the explanation
of why these countries developed a more militarised style of policing.
As a final point of comparison, consider the experience of the United States.
According to Schwoerer (1974: 195):
The anti-standing army bias was transmitted to the American colonies in
the eighteenth century, where it was enthusiastically received. There the
sentiment became a basic assumption of almost every political leader.
So Americans had as much, if not more, of a distrust of standing armies than the
British—so much so that the Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution to
provide insurance against one being instituted (Zakaria 2003). For similar reasons,
Americans were also highly suspicious of centralised government and adopted a
common law legal system (Stephen 1825). American citizens also had a strong
sense of national identity (Miller 2005). As an aside, it is worth noting that those
countries which have gendarme-type police forces also have other national police
forces to operate in urban areas. For example, Italy has the Corps di Caribinieri,
but also the Guardia di Pubblica Sicurezza (Bayley 1985: 53); the Netherlands has the
Royal Marechausee, together with the Rijkspolitie (State Police) and Gemeentepolitie
(Municipal Police) (Perito 2004: 41); the French Gendarmerie is also supported by
the Police Nationale which has a presence in towns with over 10,000 inhabitants
(Bayley 1984: 57); and the Spanish have both the Policia Aramada and the Policia
Muncipal to supplement the constabulary Guardia Civil (Bayley 1985: 57).
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This feature of the policing of countries that have a constabulary style force lends
weight to our claim, above, that the military is not capable of performing the entire
range of policing function.
To summarise, a working definition of the police is that this is a body that has
the proper function of policing; that is, such police are selected to do that job,
and continue to exist so as do that job. Police exist because they carry out the
job of policing though the form of these agencies may vary. In an autocracy, the
continued existence of police forces is at the whim of the regime in power, whilst in
a democracy the continued existence of police is at the whim of the people being
policed, with a spectrum of policing here ranging from more consent based Anglo
models to more top down based Continental models. The issue of how such police
forces present themselves as legitimate in the eyes of people they are policing is
critical to the concept of policing in democratic states.
Legitimising the Police
As has already been noted, the English of the early nineteenth century had a deep
distrust of standing armies. This suspicion caused significant difficulties for those
who advocated a police force, both in getting the requisite bills through parliament,
but also in overcoming the public scepticism. Indeed, the establishment of the police
was greeted with a vehement reaction from the English public. In November 1830:
when the King stepped down from his carriage in St James Palace Yard
after opening parliament, the crowds surged against the line of blue serge
protecting him and called out, ‘Down with the Raw Lobsters! No Martial
Law! No Standing Armies!’ ... In the cry, ‘No Standing Armies;, there
resonated an echo of the 18th century commonwealth and country party
comparison between ‘continental despotism’ (meaning standing armies,
police spies, lettres de cachet and Bastilles) and ‘English liberty’ (meaning
rule of law, balanced constitution, unpaid constables and local justices of
the peace) (Ignatieff 2005: 25–6).
Those charged with establishing a police force therefore faced a significant
challenge, if the ‘new police [was] to survive the Tory government which created
them’ (Millar 2005: 31).ii It was therefore noted that:
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London’s Police Commissioners, Rowan and Mayne, had an especially difficult
task: they had to develop a force sufficiently strong to maintain order but
also restrained enough to soothe widespread fears of police oppression. The
combination of strength and restraint became the foundation of the London
Bobby’s public image. To achieve acceptance, the Commissioners sought to
identify the police force with the legal system, which embodied the strength
of national sovereignty and the restraint of procedural regularity and
guarantees of civil liberties (Miller 2005: 32; see also Mainwairing 1822: 24).
Rowan and Mayne realised that they needed to establish the legitimacy of the new
police force, and quickly. They sought to do this in two ways. First, they attempted
to present the police, not as an agent of government, but rather as an embodiment
of the cherished British tradition of the rule of law and the protector of traditional
civil liberties. This was a particular requirement in certain urban settings where
trust had broken down and police were losing legitimacy. As noted by Mather
(1959:23–240:
Modern police principles recognise that the power of police depends upon
public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and their ability
to win respect ... This was particularly so in Birmingham, where both the
Chartists and the members of the corporation were in arms against the
police. Immediately after his arrival, however, Captain Burgess set about the
task of breaking down the opposition to his force by raising it above the
spirit of faction, and by representing it to the public as an impartial guardian
of the law.
This notion of the police needing public approval has been thought to be a
particularly ‘Anglo’ trait. Indeed Reith explicitly argues that the ‘outstanding
difference’ between British police and the police of many other countries ‘is not that
the British police are unarmed, but that their principles, methods, and constitution
make it impossible for them to oppose the will of the people, and to enforce laws
in the face of sustained public refusal to observe them’ (Reith 1943: 10). Banton
(1964:134) further reinforces this view, arguing that the police officer:
obtains public cooperation, and enjoys public esteem, because he enforces
standards accepted by the community. This gives his role considerable moral
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27
authority and sets him apart from the crowd socially, much as does the
role of minister of religion.
As an example of the importance of public approval, Rowan and Mayne placed a
great deal of emphasis on the importance of police being polite to all members
of the public and to be restrained even under severe provocation. Indeed, in the
period 1829–1835, 14% of general orders focused on reinforcing this requirement
(Reith 1956: 141–2).
Furthermore, in addition to presenting the police as nonpartisan agents of the rule
of law, Rowan and Mayne were also at pains to try and present the police as a
development of, rather than alternative to, the traditional system of local policing.
Therefore, it was intended that the authority that the new police exercised was
still that of the citizen constable (Banton 1964: 135). Although the police officer had
some common law powers as acknowledged by judicial authorities, the core of the
police officer’s authority stemmed from:
his responsibility as a citizen and as the representative of citizens. Judicial
decisions of both English and Scottish courts make it clear that the constable
is not the employee of the local authority: he exercises his powers
and discharges his duties as the independent holder of a public office
(Banton 1964: 135).
Emsley (1993: 85) suggests that the English police officer was therefore a ‘hybrid’
developing out of the twelfth or thirteenth century when the duty to maintain
‘the king’s peace’ was something grafted on to the pre-existing office of the
constable, an office which originally only mean local responsibility for presenting
offenders to local courts. Bayley (1985: 29) similarly notes a strong continuity with
past tradition in commenting that ‘the modern English police constable is the
medieval Tythingman, still acting under royal authority but now serving at public
expense in a chosen career’.
In addition to the decision to connect the new police to older traditions, other
legitimating features of the new police force in England were nicely captured by
Reith (1943: 3–4), in his ‘nine principles of police’; principles which we believe are
worth quoting in full:
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I: To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by
military force and severity of legal punishment.
II: To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions
and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, and
behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
III: To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval
of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public
in the task of securing observance of laws.
IV: To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the
public can be secured diminishes, proportionately, the necessity of the use
of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
V: To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion,
but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to Law, in
complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or
injustice of the substance of individual laws; by ready offering of individual
service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their
wealth or social standing; by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good
humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and
preserving life.
VI: To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and
warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent
necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order; and to use only
the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular
occasion for achieving a police objective.
VII: To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality
to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are
the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give
full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen, in the
interests of community welfare and existence.
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VIII: To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police‑executive
functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the
judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging
guilt and punishing the guilty.
IX: To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of
crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing
with them.
In these ways—by presenting police as an agent of the impartial rule of law rather
than the agent of an incumbent government, and by fitting the new police into the
pre-existing system of policing—they quite quickly came to be seen as legitimate
and, indeed, important parts of the English social order. In part, this was because
they were so successful in their performance of police functions. Silver (2005: 10)
noted that ‘fear of mob or riot diminished when early police showed that fluid
organization can overcome numbers’ as it became clear that:
There seems to be no fear a London mob will ever prove a serious thing
in the face of our present corps of policemen. ... A mob in London is
wholly without cohesion, and the individuals composing it have few feelings,
thoughts or pursuits in common. They would immediately break up before
the determined attack of a band of well-trained men who know and have
confidence in each other (quoted in Silver 2005: 11).
What is more, this accomplishment was in part because Rowan and Mayne
successfully identified the police with ‘the moral force of the Nation’.
The baton may be a very ineffective weapon of offence, but it is backed by the
combined power of the Crown, the Government and the Constituencies. ... The
mob quails before the simple baton of the police officer, and flies before it, well
knowing the moral as well as physical force of the Nation whose will, as embodied
in law, it represents (Anon. quoted in Silver 2005: 14).
In addition to these factors, there were also more pragmatic reasons for the
success of the police. In particular the ‘peaceful and propertied classes’ appreciated
the role of police in relieving ordinary citizens of the obligation to discharge police
functions, and the existence of the police made it less likely that the State would
resort to the military for the purposes of internal peace-keeping (Silver 2005: 11)
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In addition to making recourse to the military less likely, Reith argues that it also
provides a safeguard against their using excessive force when they are called out
in aid of the civil power. Reith contends that, when police are present, the military
will be called out in their support, rather than on their own terms. As they would
be supporting the police, they would therefore be constrained by the police’s
conception of the role of force in their function, (as outlined in Reith’s principle VI
above): ‘The existence of the police provides a powerful and formidable check on
the use of armed force against the people, so long as it is allowed to function only
in support of the police’ (Reith 1943: 9).
Conclusions
To conclude, we would briefly like to suggest some considerations raised by these
discussions that will be of relevance to the issue of using police in post-conflict
settings. These considerations relate to the overall definition of police, the question
of whether or not police can perform policing functions, and the issue of the
paramount need to achieve legitimacy in policing.
First, when we discussed the definition of police, we argued that the fact that police
is the organisation responsible for the provision of internal security is a consequence
of its being the organisation whose proper function it is to perform police functions,
which are internally focused. This definition allows, however, the precise nature
of internal police function may differ across different contexts. One key feature
in post-conflict environments, then, will be to determine what functions count as
policing within the communities that are to be policed. Performing what the policed
society takes to be the police function will be important when it comes to the issue
of legitimacy or collective authorisation, which we will come back to shortly.
On the question of whether the military can be used to perform policing functions
in post-conflict environments, our discussions provide reasons to think that this
may not be the most optimal solution. Although some of the historical issues
that counted against the military taking on the policing role no longer apply—
in particular, the modern military is more familiar with aspects of the police role,
more comfortable with the idea that this is expected of them, and more familiar
with differing degrees of use of force—other considerations are still relevant.
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For one, it remains the case that the use of the army to perform policing functions
is a more overtly political statement than using police. Moreover, in post-conflict
environments in which these functions are played by outsiders, the regular use
of the military in frontline policing runs the risk of making the population feel as
though they are under occupation, particular if this persists for a length of time.
In addition to this, yet equally importantly, the army’s ability to perform police
functions remains limited; in particular, the ability to prevent, as opposed to simply
repress, public disorder, and the capacities to prevent and detect crime, and to
present offenders for prosecution, are functions that the military is still not capable
of adequately performing.
Given this, we propose that any successful post-conflict security force will need
to include a police component. Emsley’s discussions of the colonial role played by
constabulary forces suggests that the level of population commitment to the peace
process may be relevant when it comes to determining what the force structure
of the police component should look like. In particular, it suggests that if there is a
significant proportion of the population to be policed who are entirely opposed to
the peace process and any international forces deployed as part of these efforts,
then it may be important to consider a constabulary force, for these areas at least;
both for force protection reasons and to enforce national dominance. On the other
hand, if the community to be policed is broadly committed to the peace process,
then such a constabulary force may not be necessary and a focus on an AngloAmerican form of policing by consent may be more successful.
Finally, whilst we did argue that being authorised by the community was not a
defining feature of a police force, we also contended that legitimacy will be critical
when it comes to the likelihood of any organisation that performs the policing
function persisting. This is particularly pertinent in post-conflict scenarios when
we recognise the need for the institutions to persist after the international forces
charged with rebuilding the society leave. A key issue for consideration, then, will
be to look at how we can make a police force that is imposed as part of postconflict rebuilding, legitimate in the eyes of those policed. Our discussions of the
English case have suggested two key ways in which this might be achieved. Firstly,
to raise the force above any factions in the society and also detach it from being an
agent of external governments by representing it as an impartial guardian of law.
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Secondly, to try and create a force that has connections to any existing mechanisms
of policing that exists within the community. Only by taking these considerations
seriously will the organisations charged with performing the policing function in
post-conflict societies be likely to persist, which as we have seen, is necessary for
that organisation to become a true police force.
Endnotes
iInterestingly, this appears to have been incorrect. In a notable parallel with the traditional system
wherein policing tasks were the responsibility of citizens, in English common law the requirement to
maintain public order is also placed upon the citizenry: ‘any private person could lawfully endeavour
to suppress a riot, even taking up arms to do so. It was a duty as well as a right to give help to a civil
officer if called upon … the soldier had the same rights and duties as a civilian in the suppression
of disorder, and was subject to the same penalties at law if he refused to obey lawful commands’
(Hayter 1978: 9–10). So although the army was often called upon to suppress riots, it was in their
capacity as civilians, rather than their capacity as soldiers, that they were entitled to act: ‘suppression
of disorder was one of the incidents of citizenship, and … the status of citizen was not lost by the
man who put on a red coat’ (28).
iiNeither the police in the United States nor the police in Continental Europe seemed to face quite
this problem. In the case of the US, this was in part because the need for a new police force was
to deal, not so much with existing elements of the populace, but rather with immigrants who
threatened the existing social order. ‘America’s propertied and working classes alike saw a political
order they valued threatened by irresponsible foreigners [immigrants] who did not appreciate
democracy. Since the New York police upheld the political institutions of representative democracy
which most American’s valued’, they had little difficulty in being seen as legitimate (Miller 2005). In
the case of France, for example, there doesn’t appear to have been this kind of general acceptance
of the gendarmerie. Indeed, according to Emsley (1993: 82), ‘peasants in France prayed to be
delivered from evil and from ‘justice’, and these peasants’ definition of ‘justice’ invariably made some
reference to gendarmes’. To the extent that there was an attempt to legitimise the existence of
a gendarmerie, it appears to have been due to their performance of policing functions. ‘National,
and imperial, governments justified the gendarmes’ presence by their role in order maintenance,
especially their repression of bandits and vagrants, and such activity could bring the gendarmes a
degree of community acceptance’ (Emsley 1993: 88).
The Development of Civilian Policing: Lessons for Contemporary Post-conflict Operations
33
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