Authority, Violence and Police Reform. Preventive Policing through English and American Historiography

Abstract

The professional and preventive policing have begun within a context of complex social and political changes, in which it started to have broader powers, especially over the every day life of urban population. The historians have been showing that, during the second half of 19Th century and the first half of the 20th century, the idea of police had spread all over the americans cities. The preventive police refleted a new conception of the role that public power played over the control of disorderly behavior and over the threats against the new social order. The preventive police was the answer that government gave to popular unrest against a permanent standing army. Little by little, the new police incorporated new initiatives: criminal investigation, technical devices, criminological theories, automobiles. Everything of that, with professionalism, increased the police intervention power over society and warranted the exercise of the police powers.