Policing high and low

POLITICAL policing’ can naturally be a somewhat confusing and ideologically charged term and it is perhaps made all the more so in this instance by the fact that this work is not, strictly speaking, a history of the British police. The focus here is rather on policing as a security-enforcing practice, planned at and enacted by several different levels of the British government. In this sense my understanding of political policing is indebted to Jean-Paul Brodeur's notion of ‘high policing’ which stands in contrast with the ‘low’ policing of ordinary, non-political crimes and which he took to mean ‘not only… a certain number of programs and operations undertaken by specialized units inside a police force [but also] a definite pattern of relations between a set of goals and the means to achieve them’.

More concretely, Brodeur identified four main characteristics to high policing which I take to apply equally to political policing as understood in this work. High policing, Brodeur argued, ‘is first of all absorbent policing’, in that it is focused on the acquiring and control of intelligence. It is also ‘not uniquely bound to enforce the law and regulations as they are made by an independent legislator’. This second feature is of particular import in the present narrative given that extra-legality came to be one of the main features of the early political police in Britain. The third characteristic is that ‘protecting the community from law violators is not an end in itself for high policing [as] crime control may also serve as a tool to generate information which can be used to maximize state coercion of any group or individual perceived as threatening the established order’. This in effect means that a political police is not reducible to the policing of (subversive) politics by a legally constituted government; it is also, as the German criminologist Hans von Hentig put it, ‘a form of political activity [for that government] through the medium of the police’.