| dc.description.abstract | This study examines the City of Edinburgh Police and establishes that organisational
and operational aspects during the Second Word War were characterised by both
continuity and change. These aspects were influenced by both the centralised
direction of the war effort on the home front and by a specific combination of
strategic police decisions and broader political, social, economic, and religious
factors. These included the failure to implement a system for warning juvenile
offenders; the desire to control vagrancy; the desire to control public disorder
attendant to anti-Catholic sentiment; the extension of the spatial extent of the city;
and financial constraints imposed by the town council. In this latter regard, the
concept of ‘reactive underestimation’ is created and explored. That is the policy of
imposing harsh conditions on the workforce until its stability was threatened.
Utilising extensive and previously unseen primary sources, including reports by
Special Branch, minutes of the Scottish Police Federation, and police officers’
Service Records together with Rhodes’ theory of ‘power-dependence’ the study
examines the interplay between aspects of the police organisation as well as local
policing within a macro-structural context. In doing so the study contributes to the
‘relational’ historiography of the ‘new’ police, the social history of police officers,
and revisionist accounts of the home front.
The study establishes that, despite the introduction of the Defence Regulations giving
the central state more control over local policing, the police authority was not
marginalised in the governance of the police. Furthermore, as a consequence of the
legacy of its creation, the Police Federation remained an ineffective mechanism of
representation for rank-and-file officers. Given the context of the war there was even
less of an imperative for central government to create an effective means of
collective bargaining. The study also demonstrates that, whilst operational policing
and consequently the profile of personnel had evolved since the late nineteenth
century, both aspects changed dramatically in response to the war. The additional
demands associated with policing the home front and the consequent recruitment of
auxiliaries together with the release of younger regular officers to the armed services
and industry and the retention of those who would otherwise have been
superannuated, however, created a problem of capacity. As a consequence, the use
of discretion at a strategic and tactical level was a significant feature, whilst aspects
of core policing and the regulation of traffic were less effectively discharged. | en |
