Recent Book: Both Sides of the Atlantic: Cops and Bobbies
| Author | Yvonne Craig |
| Date | 01 April 1978 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X7805100223 |
| Published date | 01 April 1978 |
| Subject Matter | Recent Book |
BIGGER ALL
THE
TIME!
SIR
LEON
RADZINOWICZ
AND
JOAN
KING:
The Growth 0/ Crime:
The International Experience. Hamish Hamilton. £6.95.
One of the strangest phenomena of This is a long and pretentious book,
the 20th Century is the acceptance of which is liable to leave the ordinary
the dogma of certain itinerant pundits, member of
our
occupation saying "So
if sufficiently stridently proclaimed.
what?"
Police officers, who are condemned Perhaps someday there will be some
to spend their days dealing with the more positive and helpful assistance
persons who commit crime for what- from all those graduate sociologists we
ever reason, strangely are never con- now have amongst our ranks.
sidered to have an opinion of any value. The contribution of the criminolo-
Even the carpenter is asked for his gists regrettably has been rather less
opinion and the wood never gets up than significant!
and hits him! T.D.C.
BOTH
SIDES
OF
THE
ATLANTIC
WILBUR
R.
MILLER:
Cops and Bobbies. Police Authority in New York and
London, 1830-1870. The University of Chicago Press, London. £6.25.
"Public response to both police
forces was as mixed as the public itself,
reflecting the social structure with its
stratification and conflicts." Professor
Wilbur of the New York State Uni-
versity History Department has
brought intellectual excitement and
contemporary relevance to his brief
but brilliant study of community rela-
tions in the nineteenth century, show-
ing the comparat ivesignificance of how
police institutions also evolved as a
response to these. Throughout his book
he raises questions referring to law and
order issues in the earlier London and
New York scenes which are equally
pertinent today:
"Are
the police to be
granted broad and unchecked dis-
cretion in the interest of public order,
even at the expense of individual
rights? Or are they to be checked by
the rule of law in the interest of the
individual rights, but at the expense of
public
order?"
He shows how the
social responses to this and other
conflicts, as expressed in shifting
legislation, police professionalism and
public opinion which he examines in
detail, developed pragmatically yet
from two distinctly different police
traditions, which, to this day, still
"remain influential shapers of their
image."
The London (indeed, English) police
were "agents of representative govern-
ment, appointed by responsible rulers":
the American New York police were
"servants of a self-governing people,
chosen by those among whom their
work lies." The former, therefore, were
characterized by impersonal authority,
military discipline
and
limited dis-
cretion, whereas the latter, who by
1855 and 1857 laws had an entrance
215
qualification of five years' residence in
the wards or districts where they
patrolled, were famous (and often
infamous) for their reverse roles.
Closer to the citizens of their local
community, they reflected the power
and conflicts
that
divided them,
whether in corrupt political admini-
stration, ambivalent social attitudes to
sabbatarianism and prohibition en-
forcement, or in the way in which Irish
recruits summarily and physically re-
pressed their own fellow-immigrants
during drunkeness and minor violence.
Wilbur relates the American "dele-
gated vigilantism" as action the
patrolmen was socially permitted to
take because most of his neighbours
would have done likewise, to the fact
that
they were entrusted with less
formal power than the English police,
whose work in public prosecution is
still being criticized today. By this
system of checking the balance of
power, the Americans had formal
restraints on their police force's broad
discretion through the district attorney,
who was elected and could be dis-
missed, whereas the English magis-
trates, viewed contemporaneously as
"acerbic, authoritarian old men", had
their life-appointment determination of
justice more informally checked by the
courtwork of "peelers" trained by
Richard Mayne to be impartial be-
tween rich and poor. His continual
efforts to remove corruption and create
a respected force are vividly described
by Wilbur (reminding one of Sir
Robert Mark), and show how personal
dynamism can catalyze social inter-
action powerfully, when the homeo-
static equilibrium of a social process is
in uncertain balance - as it was during
April 1978
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