Forging the job: a crisis of 'modernization' or redundancy for the police in England and Wales, 1900-39

After 1918, policing 'modernized' by switching resources from drunks and vagrants to motorists and indictable offenders. Since the late nineteenth century, traditional preventive policing practices had been under threat. By the end of the first world war a crisis had developed when the Exchequer replaced municipal authorities as the dominant paymaster, policy pay soared, and police numbers were frozen. Suddenly, the police began to report escalating statistics of indictable crime and road accidents creating supply-led pressure for new police services. Management targets were set to cut more traditional non-indictable police prosecutions to make space in the courts for motorists who were more lucrative to the Exchequer than drunks, and indictable crime which was of greater interest to the Home Office than the enforcement of municipal regulations.