Historical perspective: British policing and the democratic ideal

This chapter looks back to the founding fathers (I regret the gender specific nature of this introduction the phrase is however accurate unfortunately; women’s highly important roles in adapting the culture of policing do not come for another century) of policing in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries and considers whether their thinking has any application in the governance reforms of the early twenty-first Century. Rather than history it is a practitioners reflective view of where policing came from and what is the significance for governance, leadership and management now of those earliest days?