Forging the job - A crisis of 'modernization' or redundancy for the policein England and Wales, 1900-39

After 1918, policing 'modernized' by switching resources from drunks and va grants to motorists and indictable offenders. Since the late nineteenth cen tury, traditional preventive policing practices had been under threat. By t he end of the first world war a crisis had developed when the Exchequer rep laced municipal authorities as the dominant paymaster, police pay soared, a nd police numbers were frozen. Suddenly, the police began to report escalat ing statistics of indictable crime and road accidents creating supply-led p ressure for new police services. Management targets were set to cut more tr aditional non-indictable police prosecutions to make space in the courts fo r motorists who were more lucrative to the Exchequer than drunks, and indic table crime which was of greater interest to the Home Office than the enfor cement of municipal regulations.