Histories of policing tend to give short shrift to the interwar period. Philip Rawlings’s Policing: A Short History (2002) barely mentions it, and Clive Emsley’s The Great British Bobby (2010), while recognizing the novelty of automobile traffic and women police officers, portrays policing between the wars as a postscript to Victorian beat policing. Keith Laybourn and David Taylor, however, see 1918–39 as an era of tension between prewar practices and postwar experimentation and innovation. This work identifies the interwar as the key transition from Victorian beat policing to modern professional policing, pioneering new policing techniques and technologies that became standard after the Second World War.

Laybourn and Taylor’s most important contribution is their analysis of national versus local tensions. Their book makes clear that the persistence of small forces could be beneficial and that large forces were not necessarily innovators. It was sometimes chief constables of smaller forces who experimented with new tactics and technologies only later adopted by their larger, more tightly controlled neighbors. Resistance to change was not always bad; it gave forces a chance to see which ideas worked, as well as where national standards were needed. The authors make a convincing argument that we need more nuanced study of complex responses to traffic, nationalization, professionalization, and other interwar challenges. They explore in great detail how large-scale problems such as public protests and modern forensics finally exerted pressure for more unified action, but the authors seem ambivalent about whether this was a positive development in all cases. Escalating volumes of traffic show these tensions especially well. Motoring required national cooperation, and national standards were necessary to bring order to Britain’s roadways. However, local trial and error was essential before consensus could be reached on what those standards should be. Pedestrian crossings provide one small example, where the system developed at Leeds proved to be more successful than those in larger cities of Manchester and London. Policing needed that local and national interaction. Laybourn and Taylor’s research suggests that too much of one or the other undercuts the dynamism and innovation of having both together.

Part 1 explores public order and police professionalization, setting up the interwar political climate of extreme ideologies and a desire to keep policemen safe from contagion. After the police strikes of 1918 and 1919, this meant suppressing any hint of police unionism and weakening the Police Federation as much as possible. Policing public order brought forward the central interplay of local chief constables and national politics, with an attempt to establish central standards. During the 1926 General Strike, the Home Office and police took an aggressive approach, experimenting with “flying squads” to send men to where they were most needed. However, this created problems in communities where the Labour movement became established in local government, especially where chief constables helped remove Labour magistrates thought to be friendly to strikers. Tension between local power and national standards came into play with detection as well. Modern forensics required scientific equipment and laboratory personnel. Officers needed to be trained in skills such as fingerprinting and information shared across jurisdictions. The Home Office suggested a national detective force, but local forces resisted. They preferred to wait for modern detection to come to them.

Part 2 is the strongest half of the book. It explores the impact of the tenfold increase in motor vehicles from 1919 to 1939 on the police and the public. With traffic came new definitions of proper police work and practical realities. Road congestion and safety issues were not new, but they became bigger, faster, and higher in class. The increasing resources required for traffic raised fundamental questions of policing. If so many policemen were directing traffic, what became of their central duty of fighting crime? Crime itself had to be redefined to include new categories of law breaking. Police had to overcome the “motorist as victim” mentality held not just by drivers but by magistrates and juries, who resisted convicting even in clear cases of vehicular manslaughter and injury. The idea of the “criminal driver” was too close to home for too many. Inconsistent and lenient enforcement created pressure for national standards and the passage of the 1930s Traffic Acts. Here, national consensus made more sense finally than local autonomy. The authors explore innovations such as police cars with radios, but these remained pilot programs. In many forces, bicycle theft remained a larger problem than car theft. Police box and pillar systems were often adopted to enable fewer men to patrol beats and free men for traffic duties. Overall, traffic had a fundamental impact on policing, bringing policemen into direct contact with the upper classes, encouraging specialization, and undermining beat policing.

Laybourn and Taylor take an institutional approach that is on target for showing how interwar policing rose to the challenges of motor cars and modern politics. They see this book as the first in a series to correct for the neglect and negativity that currently characterize interwar policing history. Hopefully, their fascinating analysis of the tug of war between local and national control will be given more emphasis in later volumes. Focus also needs to be given to the impact of these decades on the policemen themselves. In exploring unionism, for instance, Laybourn and Taylor gave policemen too few options, either disaffection or compliance, without exploring gray areas. They might have explored the impact of police boxes on the men, who tended to dislike them, as well as the impact of telephones, which increased the ease of the public’s ability to summon policemen for often trivial reasons.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book. It is thoroughly researched, with a good balance of treatment among many forces of many sizes and from all corners of England and Wales. No other in-depth study of policing history between the wars exists, particularly not a genuinely national one.