Policing the City

This chapter assesses the impact of policing on urban order. It argues that the nineteenth-century police forces were especially attentive to local perceptions of nuisance and improvement in their efforts to tame urban popular culture and to sanitize urban public space. Police efforts to impose public order were modified by structural constraints, exercise of discretion in law enforcement, and resistance on the part of the public. And yet, the psychological repercussions of street order policing were profound, as large sections of the urban population came under an unprecedented level of official scrutiny. Hence, this chapter argues that—faced with a highly officious and, at times, repressive form of police authority—the urban public became ‘police-conscious’ in the nineteenth century.

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