Why read Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City?

Book cover of Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public

Book description

The history of modern crime control is usually presented as a narrative of how the state wrested control over the governance of crime from the civilian public. Most accounts trace the decline of a participatory, discretionary culture of crime control in the early modern era, and its replacement by a…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jill Leovy

Author

Another healthy dose of perspective, this time straight from the country that pioneered modern urban policing. Once again, we are forced to admit our present policing issues are in no way unprecedented. Police brutality complaints? Calls to abolish the police? It's all here – in nineteenth-century England.

Based on the lessons of Victorian policing, Churchill argues for a more complex understanding of Max Weber's "monopoly on legitimate force" argument, pointing out the degree to which so-called popular justice can exist alongside the state's monopoly. He shows how in England, he says, the two forms were "pluralistic."

Modern law enforcement still…

From Jill's list on The best books for escaping the true-crime rut.