One: Who are the police and what is policing?
As Reiner (2010) points out, the term ‘police’ is primarily used to denote a body of people patrolling public spaces in blue uniforms, with a broad mandate of crime control, order maintenance and some negotiable social service functions. This appears to be a ‘common sense’ understanding, but to understand the nature and role of the term ‘policing’ we need to engage in a deeper analysis of its function within a given society.
Indeed, there is a school of thought that suggests a prerequisite for social order is the need for a police organisation; yet Reiner further suggests that many societies have, in fact, existed without a formal police force of any kind. The ‘police’ are therefore not found in every society, but ‘policing’ may still be undertaken by a number of different processes and institutional arrangements. What we come to understand as the state-sanctioned police agency today is only one example of policing.
The idea of ‘the police’ is therefore a relatively modern concept, while ‘policing’ is an old one (Johnston, 1992). Prior to the 18th century, the term ‘police’ was used to explain the broad function of ‘policing’ – that is, the general regulation of the government, morals or economy of a city or country. The word ‘police’ is derived from the Greek word ‘polis’ meaning ‘city state’. ‘Policing’ thus referred to a socio-political function, instead of a formal legal one, that was exercised in any civil society, not just within the confines of the state. It was only in the mid-18th century that the word ‘police’ began to be used in its ‘continental’ sense in Great Britain, to refer to the specific functions of crime prevention and order maintenance.
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