Local initiative, central oversight, provincial perspective: governing police forces in nineteenth-century Leeds

Abstract

This article examines police administration as a branch of urban government, based on a casestudy of Leeds between 1815 and 1900. Making extensive use of local government and police records, it takes a longer-term view of 'reform' than most existing studies, and privileges the more routine aspects of everyday governance. It thus provides an original exploration of centrallocal government relations, as well as conflict and negotiation between distinct bodies of selfgovernment within the locality. Previous studies have rightly emphasised that urban police governance was primarily a local responsibility, yet this article also stresses the growing influence of central state oversight and an extra-local, provincial perspective, both of which modified the grip of localism on nineteenth-century government. University of LeedsThe governance of nineteenth-century police forces has long attracted scholarly attention.Many early accounts -habitually referred to as 'Whiggish' histories -tended to portray the provincial forces as ineffectual; lacking sufficient oversight from Whitehall, their potential was dashed under the more-or-less incompetent and corrupt leadership of unaccountable local magistrates and penny-pinching town councillors.2 By contrast, subsequent police historians have offered a more nuanced picture, by demonstrating that local authorities were often instrumental in pioneering new forms of police organisation;rather than opposed to police reform per se, it is now recognised that local governors were anxious primarily to retain control over local forces (and the local resources they consumed). Furthermore, the reputation of the provincial police has been somewhat rehabilitated by these sympathetic scholars; provincial forces were often adequate responses to local problems, rather than pale imitations of the centrally-directed