Books reviewed

Schmidt, Daniel, Schützen und Dienen: Polizisten im Ruhrgebiet in Demokratie und Diktatur 1919–1939 (Essen: Klartext, 2008), 512 pp, €34.90, ISBN 9783898619295.

Schulte, Wolfgang, ed., Die Polizei im NS-Staat (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, 2009), 707 pp, £21.20, ISBN 9783866760936.

Blaney, Gerald Jr, ed., Policing Interwar Europe: Continuity, Change and Crisis 1918–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 256 pp, £57.00, ISBN 9781403992642.

Lüdtke, Alf, Reinke, Herbert and Sturm, Michael, eds, Polizei, Gewalt und Staat im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011), 353 pp, £33.99, ISBN 9783531182667.

Jackson, Louise A., Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 224 pp, £47.50, ISBN 9780719073908.

Mladek, Klaus, ed., Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 288 pp, £57.95, ISBN 9781403979865.

Source collections:

Rafter, Nicole, ed., The Origins of Criminology: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 376 pp, £32.29, ISBN 9780415451123.

CD: The Copper's Story: Policing Community and Diversity in London 1946–2007, available at: http://www.metpolicehistory.co.uk/fomphc/downloads/Terms_&_Conditions_Oral_History.pdf (accessed 12 March 2013).

Web pages:

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/index.jsp (accessed 12 March 2013).

The Open University and Metropolitan Police Authority, `Resource Material for Students of Social History from Police Archives': http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/history-from-police-archives/welcome.html (accessed 12 March 2013).

It seems that the history of policing and police forces is not a sexy topic. Review essays on security studies or crime-related books can be found easily,Footnote ¹ while recent pieces on the history of policing remain scarce. In 2010, the twentieth anniversary of the annual German police history conference passed almost unnoticed.Footnote ² In addition to a lack of institutional support often indicating that police history is not fully integrated into academic history writing, a more substantial question comes to mind: is there nothing new to discuss? A look at a number of recent books on the police and policing reveals a different picture. Many of these historical studies try to offer more than solely defining the police in its law-and-order function. Gender, violence and culture, combined with the political function of the police, have started to influence our understanding of the varied roles created for – and sometimes by – police forces. Due to the range of the books discussed here, I will first focus on new studies on police forces in Germany followed by two edited volumes on policing in Europe. The third part will examine gender and culture as fruitful influences on police history. At the end of the article, a number of source collections will be presented.

Historians have explored the political function(s) of police forces for a number of European countries – though not all in equal proportion.Footnote ³ Far from having exhausted the important area of police work, it is time to ask what social and cultural history can offer for the study of police history.

I. The Police in Germany

Up to now, it has been commonplace to lament a lack of methodologically inspiring approaches to German police history. Richard J. Evans ended his 1996 review essay with the words ‘it is time for something new’.Footnote ⁴ Seven years later, Klaus Weinhauer demanded that police history must incorporate to a far greater degree the influences of social, everyday and cultural history.Footnote ⁵ Taking these suggestions seriously, Daniel Schmidt has demonstrated how insightful social and police history can be combined. His book, Schützen und Dienen: Polizisten im Ruhrgebiet in Demokratie und Diktatur 1919–1939, embeds the police, especially the under-researched Schutzpolizei (uniformed police), in its urban and social environment with the focus on a highly interesting time frame.Footnote ⁶ Breaking up political categories of German history with its conventional turning points in 1918/19 and 1933, Schmidt illustrates how, within two decades (1919–1939), the police went from supporting the Weimar Republic to stabilising the Third Reich. It was, according to Daniel Schmidt, not an inevitable transformation, but one that was made easier through the propagation of allegedly mutual enemies, the invention of rituals and the necessity of adapting to new political leaders.Footnote ⁷

The focus of the book lies first on geographical space, presenting the urban, social, political and demographic structures of the Ruhr area and the police's presence there in the first half of the republic (Chapters 2 and 3). This is followed by a close examination of the members of the Ruhr police. Based on exemplary CVs reconstructed from personal files, Schmidt gives an impression of those at the centre of the book: the policemen (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 continues the chronology of Chapters 2 and 3 and concentrates on the difficult last years of the Weimar Republic, described by Schmidt as a period dominated by political violence. The sixth and last chapter deals with the police in the Nazi state until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Schmidt divides this chapter into three parts that characterised the police's position in the Third Reich: terror, integration and participation.

More verve and concision would have made the 440-page manuscript livelier and the formulation of his main ideas clearer, but despite this minor criticism Daniel Schmidt's study is extremely well researched and presents a wealth of archival resources. The focus on the Schutzpolizei allows Schmidt to examine everyday police work and to concentrate on what policing the Ruhr area in these twenty years might have meant for members of the police. In so doing, the book shows contradictions between officially promoted role models for policemen in the Weimar years and everyday experiences in which the police were often confronted by hostility. At the same time, Schmidt refrains from describing the inevitability of a police-assisted Nazi seizure of power. He reminds us that, until the last year of the Weimar Republic, the police protected the republican state and that insecurity, opportunism and a number of other motivations led to a willing, but at the beginning not overtly enthusiastic, co-operation with the Nazis in power. Eventually, this co-operation turned into integration and participation in the policies of the National Socialist regime. Daniel Schmidt has written an excellent book that focuses on a tumultuous and eventful transition period (1919–1939), whilst leaving space for the ambiguities of the time, as well as the confusion and opportunism of the police.

In addition, Wolfgang Schulte's edited book Die Polizei in NS-Staat is a recent contribution on the police's role in the Nazi dictatorship.Footnote ⁸ Based on a conference, it assembles an impressive number of experts who present their work in twenty-five articles. The book is to be praised for focusing on police branches other than the perhaps more obvious German secret police (Gestapo). In so doing, it mirrors research trends of the last twenty years that have started to shed light on the involvement of all parts of the police in the Nazi regime. Patrick Wagner's insightful overview essay at the beginning of the book places the police at the centre of National Socialist persecutions.Footnote ⁹

Divided into four parts, the coherent sections ‘II. The German Police in the East’ and ‘III. Cooperation and Collaboration’, concentrate largely on the occupation of eastern and south-eastern Europe by German police battalions. Crimes against the Jewish population as well as Sinti and Roma are examined in detail.Footnote ¹⁰ Katrin Stoll and Stefan Klemp focus in their articles on the perpetrators, on the talking about and investigating of police crimes.Footnote ¹¹ These two sections also extend our view to areas of collaboration and co-operation between police forces, for example, between those of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, as well with those of occupied Greece.Footnote ¹² It was this co-operation with local administrations that made policing continental Europe in the Second World War so horribly efficient.

However, Schulte's volume also illustrates certain blind spots. An unconvincing division into sections named ‘I. The Police in the Third Reich and afterwards’ and ‘IV. Beyond Gestapo and Ordnungspolizei’ make these gaps strikingly apparent. The catch-all character of these two sections does little justice to the quality of the contributions. The first section includes pieces on the Gestapo and two articles on the police's dealing, or rather not dealing, with its Nazi past in both West and East Germany.Footnote ¹³ ‘Beyond Gestapo and Ordungspolizei’ includes articles on the criminal police and its crime-fighting policy, which often resulted in the persecution of people labelled as ‘enemies’ by the Nazis.Footnote ¹⁴ Two insightful essays deal with the role of women police and cover developments that were rooted in Weimar Germany's welfare policy and reinterpreted in the Nazi period. Both authors ably illustrate that strategies relating to the policing of young people hardly changed from a democracy to a dictatorship.Footnote ¹⁵

Die Polizei im NS-Staat offers a good overview of works dealing with the role of the police in the Second World War and the involvement of police battalions in Nazi crimes. It summarises and, in some cases, extends the state of research in this area. The volume also sharpens our eye for the field of co-operation between police forces. Other pieces in this book hint at big research gaps, while some areas are completely neglected. The role of the police on the home front during the Second World War, in addition to air raid protection measures,Footnote ¹⁶ police propaganda and the illusion of creating more security in Nazi Germany, Geschichtspolitik (the politics of history) after 1945 (mentioned briefly in the first section) and a greater focus on the administrative police are only some of the topics that deserve closer examination.

II. Policing Europe

Moving away from an explicit focus on Germany, the book Policing Interwar Europe, edited by Gerald Blaney Jr, concentrates on police forces in Europe from 1918 to 1940.Footnote ¹⁷ Partly overlapping in themes and contributors with two earlier volumes,Footnote ¹⁸ this volume complements a previous focus on western Europe with three pieces on eastern Europe, which examine policing in Poland, Bulgaria and the Czechoslovak State from 1918 onwards.Footnote ¹⁹ These contributions greatly enhance our understanding of the period as analyses of policing eastern Europe in edited books have long remained confined to police battalions in occupied eastern territories during the Second World War. Within its ten chapters, Policing Interwar Europe also covers France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands and England. Gerald Blaney cleverly avoids dividing the contributions into democracies and dictatorships but stresses the role of the police as ordering agency in politically and economically uncertain times.Footnote ²⁰

While most chapters explore the political order in different European countries in this period of change, Joanne Klein focuses on internal reforms of policing urban areas in interwar England. By examining traffic policing and new technologies, she traces how new demands placed upon the police also changed the perception of those policed. Klein illustrates that the inter-war period meant changes for the police as well as the public.Footnote ²¹ Sara F. Hall's contribution on the use of police training films in the first years of the Weimar Republic also deals with an unusual and exciting topic.Footnote ²² However, confining the book's only contribution on Germany to the years 1919 to 1920 is a questionable choice. It would have been of great interest to see how and if police training films and their messages changed between Weimar and Nazi Germany, and whether they were radicalised with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Policing Interwar Europe is a very good volume that brings eastern European case studies up to par with western Europe. Chapters by established experts on police history, such as Jean-Marc Berlière on France, Jonathan Dunnage on Italy or Jos Smeets on the Netherlands, fit well alongside the work of younger scholars. Although Blaney's study takes its thematic framework of order/disorder more seriously than other volumes on policing, it gives much leeway to its authors. This has advantages when dealing with the diverse situation in interwar Europe, but with three edited volumes on policing Europe from 1918 to the 1950s published between 2003 and 2007, a future publication would benefit from a concrete thematic focus.

Violence and its multi-layered links to police work is the overall theme of the 2011 study Polizei, Gewalt und Staat im 20. Jahrhundert. Bringing together sociologists and historians, the broad focus of the book allows for very interesting perspectives under this thematic umbrella. The division into the state's monopoly on violence, police officers as victims and perpetrators of violent acts and the link between violent police forces and violent societies gives the book a coherent structure that starts with a familiar topic (state and violence) but moves on to more uncharted territory. The volume's editors and police experts, Alf Lüdtke and Michael Sturm, begin with an introductory essay in which they present the historiographical development of research on violence and its greater concentration on historical actors and actions from the 1990s onwards.Footnote ²³ For the police, this shift should not direct attention away from the importance of the state. Lüdtke and Sturm show that the framework for police violence was (and still is) shaped by individual actions within state political expectations and demands.

The fourteen articles that follow the introduction are uneven. We find detailed empirical pieces alongside cursory overview essays. Very insightful are the pieces that focus on policemen/policewomen either as those implementing violence or as the ones experiencing violence directed at them. For the first post-1945 years in West Germany, Gerhard Fürmetz examines violent acts against the police and Thomas Ohlemacher does the same for the period from 1985 to 2000.Footnote ²⁴ Fürmetz links his findings particularly to societal feelings of lawlessness and disorder after the Second World War. Anne Mangold shows, though based on a very small sample, how policemen and policewomen talk about violent encounters and their role(s) within them.Footnote ²⁵

Changing the focus from individuals to the interaction between police and society when confronted with violence brings us to another set of issues examined in the book. In a reprinted article Thomas Lindenberger analyses the relationship between police and citizens in twentieth-century Germany by taking innovations in police weapons, which heavily determined the nature of physical encounters, as his focal point.Footnote ²⁶ Klaus Weinhauer also explores confrontations between the police and the public. West German police behaviour at 1960s youth and student protests was, according to Weinhauer, strongly influenced by police constructions of masculinity, order and preconceived assumptions regarding those protesting.Footnote ²⁷ In the volume's last piece, Michael Sturm breaks the violent encounter down into its very physical dimension when he provides an overview on the history of the police truncheon and asks important questions about the emotions and experiences of those who were beating and those who were being beaten.Footnote ²⁸

It is unfortunate that the book, apart from two exceptions,Footnote ²⁹ concentrates on Germany and leaves out comparisons with other European countries. However, Polizei, Gewalt und Staat im 20. Jahrhundert presents a seemingly traditional topic in so many exciting and nuanced versions that it can serve as inspiration for examining other countries. Gendered debates on violence encountered by the police, the use and misuse of archetypal ‘state enemies’Footnote ³⁰ or the focus on the physical impact of violence linked to police weapons and constructions of masculinity are stimulating areas of research that go beyond national borders.

III. Gender and cultural history

When issues of gender are analysed in male-dominated professions, the concentration tends to be solely on women. This holds true for some of the first studies on women in the police, too. Extending this focus, recent works try to examine women's and men's perceptions of females in the police. From the nineteenth century onwards, the association of women with the police was carried out in most European police forces by allocating special tasks to them, namely dealing with children and juveniles. Women entered the police because of allegedly female qualities relating to their caring nature. Published in 2000, Gender and Policing raises a number of important points that are explored more extensively in successive works.Footnote ³¹ From the perspective of social policy and psychology, the authors comment on the history of women police and on the present situation of female police officers. Not just focused on one country, the book provides a broad overview on general questions linked to women police.

Louise A. Jackson's study on English women police in the twentieth century takes up these insights and explores the framework of female police work by incorporating women's voices through interviews.Footnote ³² Jackson traces the development of women policing from the early twentieth century until the 1970s and examines thematic fields such as the respectability of police work, beat policing, undercover operations, and the policing of female and young offenders. Within eight chapters, a number of identities are created for and accepted by female police officers. Uniformed beat patrol (Chapter 4) offered, according to women interviewed by Louise Jackson, more leeway for them than for their male colleagues. Policewomen were perceived as less aggressive and thereby the ones often expected to defuse conflicts. Beat patrol was concentrated on spaces linked to prostitution. This meant in the first instance picking up women and children who were out of place there. While the task was a typically female one, some policewomen remembered how the uniform provided them with a sense of authority and self-confidence that allowed them to enter areas they otherwise would not have.Footnote ³³ Equally diverse were the expectations policewomen fulfilled in undercover operations (Chapter 5). When they posed as glamorous customers of nightclubs, they had to keep up their disguise and act as a professional police officer at the same time. Some women, according to their own accounts, enjoyed being part of these operations. Others felt this was not their role.Footnote ³⁴

Jackson's fine study offers a nuanced view on the multi-layered reasons for women to join and stay in the police. Some found the welfare aspect and social work in line with their conception of womanhood; others saw it as a respectable job until marriage or were keen to be part of undercover operations. For most, issues of gender strongly influenced self-reflection(s) about their work. Striking are the book's wonderful photographs – for example, Metropolitan police women in 1919, the Manchester City promotional campaign of 1950 or a 1964 conference of senior police women. Ambitiously, Women Police covers a century of policing in 220 pages, and it is regrettable that the book is not longer. Many times one would have liked to know more and would have appreciated a contextualisation of policewomen's self-image more closely linked to societal developments. Still, Louise A. Jackson shows convincingly how the topic of gender linked to issues of self-image, public spaces and identity-construction creates fascinating insights when applied to police history.

Continuing a focus on cultural history, Klaus Mladek's edited volume Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution assembles eleven chapters that range from the sixteenth century to the present.Footnote ³⁵ Unfortunately, the question of what cultural history can tell us about the institution of police forces, for example, linked to institutional rituals or to the communication between the police and the public (in contrast to internal police communication) remains neglected. But the contributions of literary experts and scholars of cultural studies, which are only loosely linked to each other, shed light on exciting areas for police history. Due to this article's concentration on twentieth-century Europe, only a selection of the book's chapters can be examined here.

Sara F. Hall offers the first piece (Chapter 4), on the early twentieth century that partly provides an overview on women police in the Weimar Republic and partly describes reactions to these female police officers.Footnote ³⁶ Interesting examples show that the idea of presenting a ‘gentler’ force through a few female units frequently clashed with popular perceptions. According to Hall, the general public in the 1920s predominantly found women in police uniforms irritating. Due to limited supporting material, the chapter promises more than it delivers. The concentration on how a (gendered) image of a police force can be constructed could also be extended to explore language and context in which police forces as agents of caring, possibly paternalistic, states were debated.

Film scholars have found the depiction of crime, criminals and detectives a rich field of investigation. Todd Herzog (Chapter 5) and Hans Christian von Herrmann (Chapter 8) have found this too, but they have also paid close attention to the depiction of the police and of police work.Footnote ³⁷ In so doing, both add something more exciting to the long-predominant focus on the representation of crime in films. Herzog links Fritz Lang's masterpiece ‘M’ to a concerned public in early 1930s Germany, which had been shaken by a number of stories on serial killers. But he equally offers insight into how the police dealt with, and sometimes tried to utilise, the population's fascination with crime.Footnote ³⁸ Hermann investigates the police work depicted in Hitchcock's ‘The Wrong Man’ and outlines the real case that formed the film's basis.

In Chapter 7, the last piece of Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution to be examined here, Sven Spieker explores office reforms and new ways of information gathering in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁹ While historians interested in the policing of criminals as well as information gathering have long been interested in police methods of identifying people,Footnote ⁴⁰ in his investigation, Spieker includes seemingly humdrum aspects of administrative processes such as the changing of filing systems or the labelling of folders in different colours. These reforms show a side of police work often neglected by historians but essential in modernising administrative work that often resulted in more effective control of the public. Furthermore, paperwork also played an important role in the everyday experiences of police officers in the last century.

IV. Source collections

Source collections on police history remain few and far between, and this holds true for those in English as well as those in other languages.Footnote ⁴¹ For the English police, the most easily accessible documents are presented online through co-operation between the Metropolitan Police and the Open University. This collection provides an invaluable treasure trove of written and visual material with short, but knowledgeable, explanations.Footnote ⁴² Equally impressive, though with a different focus, is the online presentation of Old Bailey court proceedings.Footnote ⁴³ The records of London's biggest criminal court, from 1674 to 1913, can be searched by names, crimes or convictions. Clearly structured background information with sections on policing London or trial procedures provide the necessary context for the material. While the rich historical framework presented as part of the Old Bailey project already makes the site worth visiting, the online access to court records turns it into one of the most spectacular collections for teaching and research.

Adding to written sources, the oral history project ‘The Copper's Story’ consists of recorded interviews with former Metropolitan police officers who served between 1947 and 2007. Based at the Friends of the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection, the project makes hundreds of interviews available. A six-hour CD offers extracts from this collection.Footnote ⁴⁴ In short sequences police officers talk about the miners’ strike, police measures at protests or detective work. A large number of themes relate to the duties and integration of policewomen, and their male colleagues’ views. The booklet accompanying the CD provides a list of interview topics, although it would have been useful to include dates next to such themes as ‘Policing Public Order’. These are only given at the beginning of each interview on the CD. Occasionally, the time lengths dedicated to different topics, with fourteen minutes on ‘uniforms’ and six minutes on ‘1968 riots’, require more explanation than is provided. Perhaps police officers found uniforms more interesting than anti-Vietnam protests, but a few words on the selection of themes would have been helpful. Nevertheless, the CD ‘The Copper's Story’ is very useful in offering manageable sound bites with often more than two police officers reflecting on the same topic. For more extensive research, the CD extracts are too short, but it is a marvellous taster.

Shifting the focus to common ground between police history and criminology, Nicole Rafter's 2009 reader The Origins of Criminology deserves attention.Footnote ⁴⁵ Focused on the nineteenth century and divided into ten main parts with concise introductions to each, Rafter's documents illustrate the development of criminology as a scientific discipline. Primary sources (sixty-one altogether) on crime statistics (Part IX), ways of identifying criminals (Part VII), criminal anthropology (Part VI) and a number of other topics are collected here. Nicole Rafter does not confine her focus to English or American scholars, but presents pioneers and their methods in the field of criminology. Her volume brings together pieces by Cesare Lombroso, Alphonse Bertillon, Emile Durkheim and Francis Galton, to name but a few. The Origins of Criminology illustrates vividly different influences and solutions for seemingly similar issues. This can be easily transferred to policing. Observations on ‘the underclass and the underworld’ (Part V), stereotypes of the ‘dangerous classes’ or different methods tried out to identify the ‘habitual’ criminal influenced the public and the police. This is primarily a source collection on the beginnings of criminology, but Rafter has made available in English numerous documents that influenced and shaped police practices well into the twentieth century.