Modern police began only in the mid-nineteenth century as bureaucratic monitoring

Evidence

In a fascinating paper, “On the Demand for Order in Civil Society” (1967), Allan Silver has pointed out that the modern police organization goes back only to the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, police functions were generally handled by “ordinary, respectable citizens,” or, for purposes of internal peace-keeping, by the military. With increasing concentration of large populations in small areas, neither proved very efficient. But with the creation of the police, it became possible to exercise potentially violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely diffused throughout civil society in small and discretionary operations that [were] capable of rapid concentration. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 527

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to Weber’s theory of bureaucratic rationalization of violence and to Foucault’s disciplinary power — both plausible cross-reads for how monitoring became a diffuse civil-society institution.

Related

• Modern policing emerged only in the mid-nineteenth century to handle dense populations (similarity 0.93)
• Public policing as an institution emerged only in the mid-1800s (similarity 0.92)