We live within institutional arrangements which influence our ways of thinking and responding to the world around us. Those institutions often seem part of the natural order of things – necessary and immovable, defining particular social artefacts as problems and predefining the range of possible responses, reforms, and solutions. The institution of policing is no exception, and its historical weight carries us along well-trodden paths. Instrumental arguments by policymakers, politicians, and police administrators reconfirm the necessity of the police to control crime and to uphold the law, even as a wealth of evidence throws into question the basic claims of these assertions. Indeed, the problems of police violence, ineffectiveness and corruption are as old as the institution of policing itself. And there is a sense of déjà vu every time another official inquiry reports on some particularly egregious atrocity that has risen above the normal levels of police violence and mismanagement. The script is time-honoured – it usually begins with the need for upgraded training and improved accountability, followed by more resources, and perhaps something on the requirement for better community engagement and strategies to rally social legitimacy.

What is often ignored is the recognition of policing as a socio-historical process that maintains itself for reasons other than controlling crime. One is reminded of Foucault’s discussion of the failure of the prison in Discipline and Punish. This failure is recognised in the early 1820s and is constantly re-articulated to the present day – including its failure to rehabilitate and to reduce crime. Yet the institution appears resistant to change and continually re-invents itself to the point where, 200 years later, we are talking about the problem of hyper-incarceration. Foucault poses the questions: What does the prison produce? What interests are served by the prison? I want to shift those questions back to the police. What does the history of policing tell us about the control and maintenance of social divisions including class, race, gender, disability, and their intersections; or about the economic exploitation of labour and political control? What does it tell us of the use of power, both at the local level and more broadly through macro socio-historical movements of colonialism and imperialism? And finally, why is an understanding of this history so important to contemporary calls to defund the police?