forward for solution arose most insistently in urban environments, and the no-
tion of ‘police’ as civil administration came to be focused largely on towns and
cities.^3 The word was used to describe a range of measures that would support a
more salubrious urban environment—the creation of safer, cleaner, and better-
lit streets, the provision of drinking water and the management of sewage, as
well as the control of vagrancy and the regulation of vice and other visible social
problems. At its most general, the idea of a well-managed ‘police’ expressed be-
lief in policies and institutions that lay behind what has been called the ‘urban
renaissance’ of the eighteenth century.^4
This broad meaning of ‘police’ did not disappear in the second half of the
eighteenth century, but by then a narrower, more modern notion of police was
also gaining currency, sharpened by a discourse of policing that emerged from
arguments put forward from the middle of the century by the Fieldings and
others about the need for more effective prevention and detection of crime.^5
Ideas about policing were brought into sharper focus in the 1780 s in the me-
tropolis by the Gordon Riots and by the huge increases in criminal prosecutions
after the American war, and the subsequent effort to reorganize the London
magistracy and encourage criminal prosecutions—first in the unsuccessful
London and Westminster Police Bill in 1785 , then in the Westminster Justices Act
of 1792 , which established seven ‘police offices’ or ‘public offices’ at which crim-
inal business would be concentrated.^6 The public discussion after 1750 of the
problem of crime and criminal administration as well as institutional changes on
the ground gave substance and currency to the narrower meaning of‘police’.
Patrick Colquhoun employed both senses of the word in his analysis of the
police of London in 1796. He admitted its broader meaning in his Treatise on the
Police of the Metropoliswhen he argued for the importance of ‘civil police’ and
‘municipal’ regulation. He thought his work would be useful, he said, because
every member of the community had an interest ‘in the correct administration
of whatever is related to the morals of the people’. But he also went on to say that
78 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^3) For the shifting uses of the word in England over the eighteenth century, see Radzinowicz, History,
iii. 1 – 8 ; Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 69 – 71 ; Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police:
London Charity in the Eighteenth Century(Princeton, NJ, 1989 ), 6 – 7 ; Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The
Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720 – 1830 ( 1998 ), 1 ; Mark Jenner, ‘Early Modern Eng-
lish Conceptions of “Cleanliness” and “Dirt” as Reflected in the Environmental Regulation of London,
c. 1530 – c. 1700 ’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1991 ), 141 – 2 ; Hay and Snyder, Policing and Prosecution, 5.
(^4) Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660 – 1770 (Oxford,
1989 ).
(^5) Radzinowicz, History, iii. 2 – 5 ; see in particular iii. 4 n. 19 , for a list of pamphlets published in the 1770 s
and 1780 s in which the word ‘police’ appears in the title with something like the narrower, more modern,
meaning.
(^6) Radzinowicz, History, ii. 188 – 94 , iii. chs 4 – 5 ; David Philips, ‘ “A New Engine of Power and Author-
ity”: The Institutionalization of Law Enforcement in England, 1780 – 1830 ’, in V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce
Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500
( 1980 ), 163 – 71 ; Ruth Paley, ‘The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 : Its Origins and Effects’, Ph.D. thesis
(Reading, 1983 ); Palmer, Police and Protest, 84 – 92 , 117 – 18.