Invisible Men. The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, 1900–1939 (review)

Professor Joanne Klein, in her book Invisible Men. The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, 1900–1939, sets out to investigate the lives of police constables both on and off duty in three major urban forces in England. She manages to do so admirably. The literature on police history is extensive; what makes her work particularly worthy is that it combines police history with working-class history.

While highlighting important developments in policing, such as the introduction of new technologies, the author also reveals the extensive array of duties performed by the rank and file—not only in the domain of law enforcement but also in providing such services as taking stray pets to the nearest police station. This micro approach is also applied when examining the intricate and shifting relations between the police and the public. Three chapters are devoted to this topic, including one dealing with how this macho and predominantly male institution policed women. Detailed descriptions reveal a broad spectrum of interactions, ranging from verbal and physical confrontations—both police violence and assaults on police officers—to acts of charity and incidents when the public came to police aid. Besides conflicts and animosities—a prevalent emphasis in other scholarly studies of police-public relations—the book illuminates aspects of fraternization and the mutual benefits and friendships that developed between civilians and beat officers, providing many engrossing examples.

Focusing on officers at the bottom of the police ladder, who were almost entirely recruited from the working class, and examining them as part of ordinary working-class life, Klein writes in the tradition of research of policemen as workers. She traces their police careers, whether brief or long, from the moment they entered police service, through their probation period, formal and informal training, and everyday life as full-blown officers, as husbands, as fathers and as neighbors, until their retirement. She discusses the process of accommodation to police life, the discipline to which constables were subject, the paternalistic intervention in their private lives, the favoritism operating in each force, their reward structure, and in fact what working as a policeman entailed. In bridging the two fields—police history and labor history—the author firmly places constables in a class context, showing that policemen, despite their position of authority and their coercive role, remained part of the working-class community even after years in service, and that their working-class culture shaped how they carried out the law.

The book is also an exercise in the wider school of history from below. Although Klein uses police instruction books, police orders and other documents which reflected management’s policies, priorities and expectations, she is mainly interested in the preferences, calculations, temptations and self-image of the constables themselves, who formed the bulk of each police force. In addition to providing a panoramic view of the occupational culture of policemen, she homes in on the meaning of police life as they saw it, on their frustrations, stresses and sources of satisfaction, the difficulties they confronted and their response to them, their motivation to join the police force, and their interpretations of varied features of their work. Their views and attitudes are presented not only vis-à-vis those above them in the hierarchy, but also towards their peers. Klein pinpoints the rivalries, bickering, jealousies and internal dissentions among serving policemen, generational and denominational conflicts, tensions between newcomers and veterans and between street policemen and the office staff. In aiming to cover the breadth of relationships in each force, she also exposes internal solidarities and the camaraderie and cooperation between the men.

Police officers are given not only voice but agency. Apparently, despite the heavy penalties meted out to them even for minor transgressions, police constables, as the subordinate elements in the force, nonetheless found ways of maneuvering between the rigid regime and their own...