Police

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POLICE

POLICE. Police, services composed of trained, full-time, paid officers dedicated to reducing the causes of crime, deterring its commission by regular patrols, and investigating lawbreaking and apprehending its perpetrators, are central to the operation of modern, bureaucratic, and centralized states. But at the start of the early modern period, most European states lacked effective professional police forces, and such agencies developed only slowly, in part because of the relative weakness of early modern state institutions and the fiscal limitations under which they labored. Also, the very word "police" described for early modern administrators all those institutions and regulations necessary to establish a well-ordered state, not just to fight crime. Thus officials encumbered some early police agencies with far more duties than those of their modern counterparts.

Everywhere too the effectiveness of early modern policing was limited by the reluctance of much of the population to have recourse to the police. Historians find this reticence revealed in several ways. Early modern Europeans often themselves regulated much of the behavior controlled by modern police. Among established populations, disputes that produce police action in modern societies often entirely escaped the attention of the authorities in the early modern period, when they concluded with subjudicial settlements mediated by priests, notaries, or local dignitaries. Additionally, interpersonal violence frequently resulted in vendettas that endured for years before coming to the cognizance of the authorities. Indeed, citizens sought state judicial and police authority only under certain circumstances. For example, local residents readily reported to authorities the activities of outsiders, like wandering vagrants, and they also sought the assistance of agents of the state against neighbors whose misdeeds transcended local thresholds of tolerable behavior. Early modern police agencies, both traditional institutions and newer forces that proved to be the precursors of modern policing, depended on such civilian cooperation for the limited effectiveness they possessed.

TRADITIONAL POLICE AGENCIES

When they did have contact with representatives of police authority, most early modern Europeans dealt with agents of seigneurial, municipal, or royal courts charged with executing arrest orders issued by magistrates in response to citizen complaints. On the Continent, larger courts often had paid officers for such duties, men bearing a variety of titles, including sergents in many French jurisdictions and sbirri in the Papal States. The numbers of such officers were always limited, and they were at a great disadvantage in the face of concerted opposition to the execution of their orders. In late-seventeenth-century Amsterdam, for example, the force of the schout, an official who functioned much like a public prosecutor and police chief, numbered only eighteen men in a city of 200,000 inhabitants. The same number of officers served the criminal court of Florence, the Otto di Guardia e Balìa, in the mid-sixteenth century when the city had sixty thousand citizens.

At even greater disadvantage were the unsalaried officers of justice common in several countries. In England, western Germany, Sweden, and much of the Dutch Republic, justice and policing were in the hands of unpaid citizens serving terms of office that punctuated their everyday occupations. Often without formal legal education, the justice of the peace of England, the länsman of Sweden, the Schultheis of Württemburg, and the judge of the Dutch schepenbanken sought execution of their orders by unpaid officers also drawn from the local community. These men, including the English constable and the Dutch baljuw, ruwaard, or drossard, might sometimes be in considerable danger while fulfilling their duties because they usually acted alone. Their only possible aid might have been the citizen participation in a general hue and cry required by ordinances in England and many German jurisdictions.

In addition to these agents of the courts, most European towns had various forces that also performed police functions. Even small cities on the Continent possessed ceremonial municipal guard units composed of local citizens who turned out armed and uniformed on such occasions as a royal visit, but they were ill-trained and of little practical use for law enforcement. More common were various sorts of watch units enlisting men who sometimes drew municipal salaries, like those of the guet of Bordeaux in the eighteenth century. The Bordeaux watch was quite typical of many such units in its numerical weakness. It had but seventy men to patrol a city with a late-eighteenth-century population of about 100,000 persons. Night watch arrangements in England were even less formal and until the eighteenth century depended on the Statute of Winchester of 1285, which required individual citizens to take unpaid turns in nightly patrols of their local parishes.

TOWARD PROFESSIONAL POLICING

Only slowly did some European states manage to create full-time, paid, professional police forces, and France led in this process. France was the only European state to create and maintain a centrally administered agency of rural policing in the early modern period. That force, the Maréchaussée, originated in an armed military police force that not only maintained order along the army's line of march and pursued deserters but also had the power to try in its own courts those it apprehended. By the sixteenth century the French monarchy added to that force's military duties competence over a growing list of nonmilitary offenses, including highway robbery, vagabondage, popular disturbances, and other offenses that the crown viewed as fundamental threats to France's stability. Until the French Revolution the Maréchaussée retained its dual power to arrest certain kinds of criminals and to judge those it apprehended in military courts, whose verdicts were not subject to appeal.

The number of lawbreakers who experienced this summary justice of the Maréchaussée was limited chiefly by the force's manpower. By 1789 the Maréchaussée mustered only 4,114 officers and men assigned to outposts throughout the kingdom. Such numbers were inadequate for effective rural policing, and in the Bordeaux généralité in 1790, for example, only 111 mounted policemen patrolled 26,000 square miles of territory. Thus the blue-uniformed Maréchaussée officers must have been rare sights indeed in most rural hamlets, and their effectiveness, like that of more traditional police agents, ultimately depended on the cooperation of those they policed. Nevertheless, many French people recognized the importance of professional rural policing, and their demands (cahiers de doléances) for the Estates-General of 1789 frequently called for an improved force. As a result, legislation in 1791 created the gendarmerie nationale, an enlarged Maréchausseé deprived of its judicial authority, that still served rural France in the early twenty-first century.

France also led Europe in the creation of modern urban policing. In his edict of 15 March 1667 Louis XIV created the office of lieutenant général de police de la ville, prévôté et vicomté de Paris. The holder of this office was a magistrate who presided over a police court once weekly but, more importantly, was the administrator charged with maintaining all aspects of order in a growing capital city whose population reached 600,000 by the 1780s. The traditional early modern definition of police functions initially shaped the work of subordinates of the lieutenant général, and street lighting, trash collecting, firefighting, care of foundlings, building inspection, enforcement of commercial regulations, censorship, and other duties occupied many of them. But in 1788 the lieutenant général also commanded 1,931 men who did the work of a modern police force. He deployed various types of uniformed units for mounted and foot patrols of the city, coordinated the efforts of police investigators and spies, and administered police justice through his own court, aided by forty-eight commissioners (commissaires), magistrates stationed throughout the city and empowered to initiate criminal procedures and to order arrests.

The only other early attempts by a European central government at large-scale policing operations originated in the lands of the Spanish monarchy. In their Castilian lands, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella created the Council of the Holy Brotherhood (Santa Hermandad) in 1476 to consolidate locally funded militias into a federation of rural forces that had police and judicial powers, like the Maréchaussée, over a select group of crimes, including murder, rape, highway robbery, and rebellion. Founded in response to the disorders of the succession crisis of the early reign of Isabella in Castile and to lawlessness accompanying the Granada War of 1482–1492, these armed and uniformed forces never developed into a permanent national police. The monarchs never gave the council crown funding, failed to extend it to the rest of their Iberian territories, and disbanded it entirely in 1496 with the end of the Granada War. For over two centuries thereafter, rural policing responsibilities were entirely in the hands of local governments, not all of which had the will or means to fund forces. Even when the crown established a number of royal police units in the eighteenth century, these forces lacked central direction and adequate funding. Only in 1835 did Spain achieve national policing with the advent of the guardia civil.

Spanish monarchs also attempted to establish rural policing in their Netherlands territories. There, a force endowed with both police and judicial powers operated in Artois from about 1517 until the county's annexation by France in 1659. Other such forces emerged in the seventeenth century in the counties of Flanders and Namur, but all had limited effectiveness because of insufficient funding and manpower, problems that continued to hamper the work of police brigades functioning in these areas even after they passed to Austrian Habsburg rule in 1714.

Elsewhere in Europe efforts at improved policing, funded by growing state resources and driven by a rising fear of crime rooted in several developments, appeared only in the eighteenth century. Certainly the growth of a cheap popular press highlighted existing crime for government officials and encouraged them to improve police services. Officials also sought to bolster police resources in response to new threats to public order. Historians of British crime, for example, show that property crime increased in periods of economic distress, and these periods frequently followed the conclusions of the century's many wars. Additionally, population growth and structural economic changes, like enclosure, everywhere produced large numbers of vagrants, who generated considerable fear in settled populations.

Greater London, Europe's largest metropolitan area, produced a number of developments in eighteenth-century policing. Composed of numerous independent municipalities, it presented significant problems in policing. Until 1735 the various municipalities of the metropolis attempted to meet their police needs within the provisions of the Statute of Winchester, that is, with constables and unpaid night watches whose authority ceased at individual parish or municipal boundaries. In 1735 two parishes, St. James, Piccadilly, and St. George, Hanover Square, secured legislation permitting them to levy local taxes to pay permanent, professional patrols for their jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions followed suit, and slowly thereafter local and national authorities created a variety of police units, including highway and river patrols, with general jurisdiction in the metropolitan area. One of these units, the Bow Street Runners, initially privately employed by the London magistrates Henry and John Fielding, was the prototype for the modern detective branch of policing. Only in 1829, however, did Parliament create the London Metropolitan Police, a unified force with jurisdiction encompassing all of Greater London.

The middle and late eighteenth century witnessed experiments in rural policing too, especially on the European continent. Southern German states, including Baden, Bavaria, and Württemburg, employed mounted police units called Hatschiere, composed of former soldiers, to patrol rural areas and especially to search for vagrants. These states also used hussars, cavalrymen drawn from the regular army, for patrols and arrests, but neither these units nor the Hatschiere seem to have had sufficient discipline or numerical strength to provide effective policing. The same problems seem to have afflicted the mounted police units created by Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont-Sardinia in the 1770s and 1780s.

European police agencies remained relatively weak by modern standards through the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the foundations of modern policing are evident in developments in the late early modern period.

See also Crime and Punishment ; State and Bureaucracy .