Modern policing emerged only in the mid-nineteenth century to handle dense populations
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. … And were it not for the police, the effects of many of the other instruments of spatial order maintenance would be largely vitiated. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 527
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to Lofland’s broader framework of how strangers are ordered and controlled in public space; the bureaucratic surveillance angle ties to Michel Foucault’s disciplinary power and the shift in urban control mechanisms.
- DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘police’ as a modern institution is historically recent, distinguishing it from citizen- or military-based peacekeeping.
Related
- Modern police began only in the mid-nineteenth century as bureaucratic monitoring (similarity 0.93)
- Public policing as an institution emerged only in the mid-1800s (similarity 0.93)
- Urban police forces originated partly to suppress class rebellion (similarity 0.78)