On the Mersey Beat: Policing Liverpool Between the Wars

A different kind of police history, this book tells the story from below -- from the rank and file officers trapped between the authoritarian dictates of their superiors and a realistically distrustful public. Historically, the major police mission has been to keep the streets clean of any group (young people, vagrants, bookies) that challenged by their presence and demeanor the moral mandate of policing. According to this oral testimony, police work in Britain was traditionally one of "policing strangers by strangers." Recent accounts of "community policing" have no historical pedigree. This account of between-the-war policing dicusses the effects of the Police Strike of 1919 on its participants, considers the ramifications of policework on family life, and documents the tedium of lonely beat work. It discusses the relationship between City Police, industrial workers and ethnic minorities, and recounts in individual testimony police interaction with bookies and prostitutes and the pettiness of CID work. This in-depth study will be of interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and police studies.