David G Barrie, POLICE IN THE AGE OF IMPROVEMENT: POLICE DEVELOPMENT AND THE CIVIC TRADITION IN SCOTLAND, 1777-1865 Cullompton: Willan Publishing (www.willanpublishing.co.uk), 2008. xii + 307 pp. ISBN 9781843922667. £45.
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001085 |
| Author | Lindsay Farmer |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Pages | 153-154 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
In 1790 members of the Faculty of Writers in Glasgow petitioned the Court of Session to seek legal exemption from their obligation to perform “watching and warding” duties in the city. This was a long-established form of voluntary service that householders were expected to perform to prevent crime in their communities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this reluctance, in 1800 Parliament passed the Glasgow Police Act authorising the city council to establish a Police Commission empowered to set up a permanent and full-time police force in the city. This Act, and the police force it created, then became the model for other cities and burghs as they sought the statutory powers to develop their own police. This movement culminated in national legislation from 1833 which first enabled, and then compelled, towns, counties and burghs to establish police forces. By the end of the century uniformed professional police forces had been established across Scotland. The story of this dramatic transformation in Scotland from a system based on (often reluctant) private participation in watch forces to a national, professional police force, is the subject of David Barrie's fascinating and important book.
There are two principal themes to Barrie's account. First, he is concerned to trace the rise of what can be termed “preventive” policing. While he is here primarily focused on the rise of the “criminal” police, that is of the modern idea of policing as being exclusively concerned with prevention and detection of crime, he is careful to set this in a wider historical context. Older European ideas of police encompassed a broader sense of community well-being and security, and included the management of public health, local markets, sewers, streets and so on, and Barrie wants to argue that this broader understanding influenced the development of policing in Scotland in the first part of the nineteenth century. Thus the development of preventive policing was not only a matter of putting police officers on the streets, but also involved transforming the urban environment through improved street-lighting, licensing schemes and even, for a brief period, the installation of street gates in Glasgow (202-203), literally reshaping public space. This connects to the second theme, which is the link between police and urban improvement schemes during this period. Here Barrie argues that police forces did...
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