Policing, Crime and Social Order

Abstract

As the above quotation suggests, the concept of what Kinsey, Lea and Young (1986) have called ‘minimal policing’ was already a familiar one in Elizabethan England. Maintaining ‘law and order’ or the ‘civil peace’, or controlling the dangerous classes, have, as we have seen already, been constant items on the agenda both of public debate and, when it began to develop as a discipline, sociology itself. There were, it could be said in sweeping summary, a major and a subsidiary agenda for the subject. First, there were all the central projects of the ‘founding fathers’, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, directed at explaining and understanding the development of society and its institutions, especially of industrial society and its characteristic institutions of class, power structures and status systems.

DOGBERRY: YOU are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch; therefore bear you the lantern. This is your charge; you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand, in the prince’s name.

SECOND WATCH: HOW if a’ will not stand?

DOGBERRY: Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go; and presently call the rest of the watch together and thank God you are rid of a knave.

(Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, scene iii)