In recent decades, historians have examined British police officers in many ways: as defenders of an increasingly civilized social order, as “blue locusts” imposing bourgeois standards on the poor, as symbols of a particularly British national identity, and, more recently, as workers. There are echoes of all these perspectives in Joanne Klein’s well-researched and engaging study of early twentieth-century policing in three British cities. Her emphasis, however, is on the policeman as a man (at a time when the overwhelming majority were, in fact, male), and she effectively reconstructs the daily lives of ordinary constables whose job “brought the criminal justice system and working-class culture together in unexpected ways” (2).

There are several recurrent themes. Klein describes a common police culture, while also emphasizing the impact of individual personalities, such as the chief constables who imposed diverse disciplinary regimes on the men they supervised. More generally, the book highlights how constables personally negotiated the tensions between policing ideals as expressed in manuals and the real circumstances on their beats. Alongside a deeply felt police camaraderie, Klein finds a “legion of disharmonies” (110) caused by differences in age, rank, education, religion, and temperament. She stresses the effects of the 1919 Police Act, which not only improved conditions but also increased recruitment requirements, resulting, among other things, in “generational conflicts” (114). Another chronic tension involved money, as watch committees’ parsimonious tendencies to “put economy before efficiency” (24) undermined the quality of everything from training to uniforms. Such strains grew as the extent and complexity of police duties increased.

Constables learned their jobs “on their feet” (24). Soon disabused of the common working-class opinion that policing was “easy” work, they found it difficult to live up to more idealized notions of their profession. “The police constable who carried out his duties without question,” Klein notes, “existed only in fiction and police instruction books” (72). Daily practice (and colleagues’ advice) taught them not only how to do their jobs but also how to bend the rules. Neglect of duties made up the bulk of disciplinary cases, even if the influence of alcohol declined dramatically throughout this period. Other constables were reprimanded for excessive zeal, having sought to “enforce laws that did not exist but which they thought should exist” or distribute “rough justice” (95). As Klein shows, officers walked not only their beats but also a fine discretionary line between strictness and generosity. The difficulties were particularly acute when suppressing behavior—such as street betting—that most people did not even see as “criminal” and that offered temptations for bribery and corruption.

A key issue—which takes up three of the book’s ten main chapters—concerns police relationships with the public. These were characterized by patterns of conflict and comity that varied by class and gender. The working classes were most likely to respond to police interference with violence, while the middle and upper classes were more prone to be “patronizing” and send letters of complaint. Klein sees a general improvement in police-and-public interactions, noting an increased civilian willingness to assist constables in trouble and, more generally, to cooperate with investigations. Constables had friendly relations with the public through gossip, assistance, favors, perks, and charity. Such contacts show, Klein argues, that constables “remained part of the working-class community” (221). One tricky issue, however, involved police relationships with women, which took both consensual and coercive forms. One of the book’s most interesting aspects concerns the multifaceted relationship between policing and new transportation and communication technologies, particularly the growth of motoring and the expanding use of the telephone. Both sorts of tasks—whether directing traffic and ticketing motorists or responding to telephone requests for assistance with a myriad of (often petty) problems—not only interfered with what officers saw as their main duty (i.e., fighting crime) but also contributed to tensions between police and public: notably, the growth of motoring meant the “higher classes” had more encounters with (working-class) police officers.

Klein’s focus on provincial cities is indeed a valuable, refreshing corrective to a historiographical tendency to view policing in Britain chiefly through the prism of London; however, while one can applaud the desire to emphasize the distinctive character of policing in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, greater engagement with events in (and the existing literature on) the capital would have enabled more direct comparison and improved clarity about the revisionist potential these other contexts offer. As Britain’s largest and most high-profile force, London’s Metropolitan Police surely disproportionately influenced the image and practice of British policing. The late 1920s, for example, saw several high-profile scandals in the nation’s capital, involving topics such as street offenses, interrogation procedures, and corruption. The results were not only heated press and political debates but also parliamentary investigations, which, while briefly referred to, are not contextualized. The introduction of female police (or at least the intense debate around the issue) is also curiously absent from an otherwise comprehensive analysis of the police issues of the time. Police relations with foreigners or ethnic minorities are only mentioned in passing, which is surprising given that in all three urban areas—particularly Liverpool—such groups would have been a significant presence.

Nonetheless, this is a lively and remarkable book. If one of Klein’s goals was to break down the public’s view of the police (perhaps held as much now as then) as a “monolithic entity” (110), she has succeeded magnificently by offering a complex portrait of how everyday policing was experienced as a mixture of boredom, excitement, violence, humor, tragedy, and, at times, absurdity. In a strikingly original chapter, the extensive institutional supervision to which constables were subjected even allows Klein to provide insight into police officers’ domestic lives. An effective combination of detailed research and clear writing, Invisible Men joins the ranks of the must-read books about British policing.