Before the Bobbies

Book excerpt: Historians, legal scholars, sociologists and crime readers will learn from this book that modern policing emerged long before Scotland Yard. Police reform developed over decades, the work of local authorities motivated more by fears of property crime than radicalism or riots. Local and national officials cooperated at many levels to provide relatively effective policing for London, culminating in Sir Robert Peel's centralized Metropolitan Police in 1829. The early modern British state was thus more responsive to urban problems than previously has been acknowledged.