Self Check Q&A

Consider the below questions to check your understanding of topics covered in the book. Click on the question to reveal the answer.

1. What features characterised policing in England between the 1740s and 1850s?

Answer: self-policing, community engagement in street patrols, and private sector provision of many policing services

2. Name the constitutional arrangement that enshrined the key features of policing from the 13th century until the establishment of the ‘new police’ in the 19th century

Answer: Statute of Winchester

3. To what did Sir John Fielding attribute the crime problems of the 1740s?

Answer: illegal drinking establishments

4. Who addressed the Chartist rally at St Peter’s Field, Manchester 1819 that fuelled concern about using the military to control crowds?

Answer: Henry Hunt

5. How did Storch characterise the role of the police in the mid-19th century?

Answer: ‘domestic missionaries’

6. What measures were introduced in an effort to overcome public suspicion of the ‘new police’ in the early 19th century?

Answer: emphasising the service role of the police, deploying police in uniforms distinct from the military, the appearance of the police as unarmed

7. What proportion of the 3,000 officers recruited to the Metropolitan Police, when it was established in 1829, were still in post four years later?

Answer: Bailey suggested the figure was one-sixth

8. What legislation required counties to establish a police force?

Answer: the 1856 County and Borough Police Act

9. How do orthodox perspectives explain dissatisfaction with the use of the military to respond to political and social unrest?

Answer: practical difficulties compounded by fears that soldiers might side with protestors and ‘the mob’ rather than the authorities

10. How do revisionist accounts tend to explain the development of the ‘new police’?

Answer: in terms of the changing demands of early industrial capitalism, which required the suppression of political disorder and the greater regulation of the urban working class