Focusing on a time of profound social and political change, this book offers a detailed and engaging history of policing, covering the key themes of social stability, professionalisation and police reform, as well as the major events between 1974 and 2008 such as the Miners' Strike of 1984.

This book provides a comprehensive history of police reform, charting its history from its origins in the early 18th century to the most recent examples in the 21st century of the Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments. Each key reform programme is explored in the social, political, and intellectual context of its time, how the necessary legislation was passed, how each programme was implemented, and what its legacy has been. This is the first study that concentrates on the key reforms that shaped the modern police service, their enduring legacies, and their underlying flaws. It is an essential read for police historians, criminologists, police academics, policy makers, and everyone interested in police history.

A comprehensive history of policing from the eighteenth century onwards, which draws on largely unused police archives. Clive Emsley addresses all the major issues of debate; he explores the impact of legislation and policy at both national and local levels, and considers the claim that the English police were non-political and free from political control. In the final section, he looks at the changing experience of police life. Established as a standard introduction to the subject on its first appearance, the Second Edition has been substantially revised and is now published under the Longman imprint for the first time.

This is the fifth and final volume in the Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales. This volume covers the uneven and often irresolute evolution of policing from the late 1940s to the end of the 1990s, concentrating on the impact of a succession of scandals on the reputation and regulation of the police; and the fluctuating relations between central government, local authorities and police forces in shaping the control of police funding, policy and organisation, particularly in response to a growth in the scale and intensity of social protest, and, above all, on the shifting sands of the policing of public order illustrated in the prolonged miners’ strike and urban unrest of the 1980s. It is a complement to earlier volumes in the series that focused on the liberalisation of the laws on capital punishment, abortion and homosexual relations between adult men in the 1960s; the founding of the Crown Court in 1971 and the Crown Prosecution Service in 1985; transformations in penal policy, and the politics of law and order. It will be of much interest to scholars of British political history, criminology and sociology.