Samenvatting

This article explores police-citizens relations in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and attempts to demonstrate that these were not as unequivocal as is commonly assumed. While historians approach the modern police as an instrument of coercive state control imposed ‘from above’ onto a passive population, current policy debates tend to assume that police-citizen relations were friendly and that cops learned from citizens, leading to well-informed and neighbourhood-sensitive policing. The author argues that police-citizen relations were not friendly, but all about the negotiation of ‘tacit contracts’ between both parties, that allowed the police to carry out their duties within the boundaries of public tolerance, and the public to take all sorts of small conflicts and demands for aid and assistance to the police. This explains why police intervention was never merely repressive: in order to preserve these precious ‘contracts’, the police operated selectively, acting only against certain groups and offences, and watching particular city areas.