The concept of classical liberal policing (henceforth “liberal policing”) has taken a beating in recent years, nowhere more so than in Britain and its former dominions. When Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, the flagship of Britain’s modern police forces, he envisioned it as a people’s police. Officers would defend British liberties on behalf of the public, not because the common people were incapable, but because it was more efficient to delegate the task to full-time professionals. To reduce undue political influence, officers swore an oath of allegiance to the Crown and to the law, not to the government of the day. They were unarmed and dressed in blue, as opposed to military scarlet, to emphasize their civilian status. The liberal image of British “bobbies,” as they were affectionately nicknamed, was immortalized in the television show Dixon of Dock Green (1955–1976). The main character, Police Constable George Dixon, lived among the community he served and upheld the law through routine foot patrols. His knack for subduing wrongdoers through words of wisdom meant that he rarely used violence.
Even as this television show was being aired,
however, British police forces were discarding the
liberal policing model. Constables have become
increasingly militarized, politicized, and distant
from the citizens they are supposed to serve.
Nowadays, they appear more likely to violate civil
liberties than to safeguard them. Two examples will
suffice to show this fact. In 2002, the police arrested
Harry Hammond, a British evangelical Christian,
for exercising his right to protest. Hammond held
up a placard in public criticizing homosexuality.
When offended hecklers began verbally and
physically harassing Hammond, the police were
called. In the old days, they would have protected
Hammond because freedom of speech is a central
pillar of British justice. Instead, an officer arrested
Hammond for hate speech. Even influential figures
find themselves targeted. In September 2025, counter-terrorism police detained George Galloway
and his wife. Galloway is a former member of
parliament who leads the far-left Workers Party of
Britain. Many of Galloway’s political opinions are
anathema to liberalism. Nevertheless, he has a right
to freedom of speech, and he is a brave critic of
British imperialism. Counter terrorism officers
informed Galloway and his wife that they were
being detained without charge and that they had no
right to silence. The elderly couple were grilled for
several hours about their views on Palestine, Russia,
China, and other areas of the world. Their devices
and documents were confiscated. Galloway, who is
in his seventies, says the stress of the ordeal has left
him with heart problems.
How could the British police have degenerated so
quickly from Dixon of Dock Green into an
overbearing state gendarmerie? This article argues
that there was always an illiberal streak in Peel’s
model of policing. Like many British liberals, Peel
supported the British Empire, which used repression
to keep subject peoples in check. From the outset,
this concession to imperialism left the door open to police authoritarianism. This threshold was crossed
irrevocably in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, as colonialism reached its apex
and the First World War militarized the country.
This tendency compromised the British police by
the 1920s, though it preserved some liberal aspects
until the 1960s, and one could find a liberal-minded
remnant well into the early 2000s.
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