Policing Reform and Moral Discourse: The Genesis of a Modern Institution

• NCJ Number: 173174
• Journal: Policing Volume: 21 Issue: 1 Dated: 1998 Pages: 137-158
• Author(s): J L McMullan
• Date Published: 1998
• Length: 16 pages
• Grant Number(s): 410-93-1290
• Sponsoring Agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This paper explores some of the intellectual questions that gave meaning to the social activity of dealing with crime, disorder, and poverty in the writings of three key British police thinkers: Henry Fielding, Sir John Fielding, and Patrick Colquhoun.

Abstract

The author first examines the writings of Henry and John Fielding, with attention to their thoughts on criminal intelligence, police administration, monied policing, and moral regulation. He then turns to the more voluminous contributions of Patrick Colquhoun. The analysis addresses his thinking on preventive policing, social surveillance and discipline, and the police function of educating citizens. The discussion concludes by assessing the importance of early "police intellectuals" in constructing a "frame of mind of police" functioning as a broad social technology, an institution of state, and an ideology that defines the "crime problem" as a lower class phenomenon. The author argues that these early "police intellectuals" were not visionaries in the sense that they imagined a radically new apparatus of social control. All were linked closely to the London elite, as they were dependent on powerful patrons for their positions. Rather the writings of these police proponents are most significant because they established a context of "thought as felt and feeling as thought," in which modern policing emerged. This intellectual context involved a commitment to piety, ethical standards, and those institutions that supported or propagated them: family, commerce, and education, as well as considerations of better policing, laws, and punishments. What the Fieldings and Colquhoun wanted was a formal means of bolstering an older yet diminishing informal system of social control. Their writings are best understood as providing an enhanced role for the police in both enforcing order and in defining it. The police, in their view, were to provide both the oversight and the training in proper and responsible conduct that was no longer available to the urban poor in the wake of widespread social disorganization. 77 references