In a 2014 article in Crime, History and Societies, David Churchill first presented his important riposte to what historians have come to call the “state monopolization thesis.” We now have the expanded version of his argument. The thesis under challenge, which has held the field since the mid-1970s, when historians first approached the subject, assumed that in the nineteenth century the participatory and discretionary justice of the premodern era made way for state command over crime control. The burden of responding to crime no longer rested upon popular initiative—that is, on the voluntary office holding of parish constables or on private prosecution—but upon new, professional police forces and their expanding control of discovering, apprehending, and prosecuting offenders. Only a few historians called for more research on civilian responses to crime in the modern era. If anything, the narrative of transition from popular to state governance hardened, with some historians dating the start of this transition to the later eighteenth century. Churchill sees the story differently. In the transition to a policed society, we should not conclude, he insists, that civilians lost influence over how crime and criminals were dealt with. Private initiative remained central to the governance of crime. Doing for the history of criminal justice what historians have done for welfare and health, Churchill asserts a “mixed economy” of state and private responses. He presents his argument with clarity and precision, and with a keen understanding of the existing historiography in English criminal justice.

Churchill sets his study in three of the most dynamic and modernizing cities—Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds—where one might least expect to find civilian participation in crime control. The sources for this study are newspaper crime reports and a small run of court depositions or witness statements. Evidence of autonomous civilian responses to crime is hard to find, hiding in the “dark figure” of crime, so Churchill has worked subtly to tease out the evidence of self-policing from his intractable sources. In part one he provides largely groundwork, though he manages to underline a number of important points. First, nineteenth-century policing met with only limited success in the suppression of crime, due in part to a lack of police resources (despite the growth in size of urban police forces) and in part to the enormous opportunity for theft in the Victorian city. Strangely, in view of the diffuse nature of the criminal threat, the police helped to consolidate the image of a “criminal class” and spent much of their time targeting known thieves. The result was what Churchill calls an “enforcement gap,” or a gulf between public expectations and street-level policing, a gap that only incentivized ordinary folk to involve themselves in crime control. Second, police forces made their presence felt less by enforcing the law against serious crimes of person or property than by enforcing urban order: arresting vagrants, drunks, prostitutes, and street gamblers and enforcing “nuisance” regulations or acting as poor-law relieving officers. By creating new norms of urban order, Churchill argues, urban policing reared a “police-consciousness,” an awareness that one's conduct in public space was always open to police surveillance and sanction.

Part two provides the heart of the argument. Here Churchill documents the scope for civilian activity. First came crime prevention, the press and the police enjoining people to take responsibility for the security of their persons and property, which some did, especially if rich enough to afford private watchmen, better locks, or safes. Next came the discovery of crime and the apprehension of offenders. Victims (male and female) along with others (neighbors, lodging-house keepers, and street crowds) assertively tracked down offenders and stolen goods and apprehended culprits. Clearly, concern about crime was an authentic part of popular culture; popular agency acted not only to resist authority but also to enhance the official grip on the criminal. When it came to prosecution, only gradually did police prosecutions supersede private ones in cases of felony. In the final section of the book Churchill challenges the view that police-public relations improved steadily from the mid-nineteenth century, the aversion to the interfering plod persisting in both working- and middle-class culture. If a measure of popular consent was increasingly extended to the rule of law, it failed to embrace the new police forces. Churchill closes the book with an interesting comparison between the Victorian mixed economy and the governance of crime in contemporary society, what many call a “postmodern” system of crime control. His evidence leads him to resist the view that the postmodern system is the profound break from Victorian modes of control that criminologists aver.

A few reservations come to mind. It is perhaps unfortunate that Churchill makes no attempt, however minimal, to incorporate violent crime into his argument, even though, as he suggests in passing, common assault was a misdemeanor, not a felony, and as such provided the necessary freedom to victims to settle with offenders outside of court. In short, civilian participation was doubtless stronger in relation to violent crime, and inclusion of assaults and the like would have buttressed Churchill's argument. Additionally, Churchill's account restricts the culture of self-policing to the response of victims to crime. There is nothing here on what he himself calls the “broader structures of civilian mutual assistance, surveillance, and norm enforcement” (9), yet were these not the structures in which victims also dwelt? And talking of surrounding structures, one wonders how crime control was affected by the brooding presence of prison, asylum, and reformatory school. Strangeways, Walton, and Armley prisons were the menacing bastilles of these three cities. In the “mixed economy” of criminal justice, moreover, there was no latitude for individual negotiation in the use of these state institutions, as there was in relation to the workhouse and other welfare agencies. In short, Churchill's account has a few gaps that need addressing. These reservations aside, no study has investigated Victorian crime control as a shared activity between police and public in this level of detail. This book will quickly be seen as a major new interpretation of Victorian policing, the first truly innovative study in this field for quite some time.