Blue devils, blood-seeking vermin, blue bottle force, a little band of tyrants, a plague,

of blue locusts. Those were just some of the epithets in the radical press that greeted attempts to

establish a new police force for the north of England back in the 1840s, understood as thinly

disguised soldiers and hated for their work in suppressing workers' organisation and their

encroachment on liberties like free association and simple enjoyment of life outside of work,

there is a long but forgotten tradition of skepticism and hostilities, the exercise of police power

in Britain. You are listening to Navara FM here on resonance 104.4 FM London's finest radio station

I am James Butler. Police are on the political agenda more than ever out of the miserable racist

violence of America's police. There has arisen the first serious movement in decades to ask

questions about their purpose and even to raise the question of abolition. That has been less

the case here in Britain, though perhaps that's changing with police power much clearer during

the pandemic and especially its crushing of the vigil for Sarah Everard, a woman murdered by a

serving police officer just a couple of weeks ago. And yet it's sometimes difficult to get a grip

on what police power is and what it's for. Here in Britain you might look at the founding of

the Metropolitan Police in 1829 as a key moment prompted at least partly by a crisis precipitated

by the use of the military to directly police the working class. But it's roots in police

science go back much further, even the word might suggest something to us police from the same

route as politics or policy intimately connected with the idea of government, the idea of the state.

And is it an accident that the police emerge at the same time as the modern order of property

and from the pen of economic thinkers who seek a total science of human social life?

You might well look around and ask is there any limit to police power?

We're going to answer some of those questions today, but before we do, here's something else that fits.

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