policing
concepts
DefinitionDr Johnson acknowledged in his Dictionary of the English Language that the word ‘police’ was borrowed from the French and meant ‘the regulation and government of a city or country, so far as regards the inhabitants’. This definition accords with that proposed in 1779 by J.C.P. Lenoir, then the French General Lieutenant of Police: policing is ‘the science of governing men and doing them good’. The word ‘police’ originally came from the Greek ‘politeia’, meaning polity, and was synonymous with the word ‘governance’. The first treatise on policing was published in 1722 by Nicolas De La Mare in France. Policing therein applied to 11 fields that became traditional thereafter: religion; morals; public health; food supplies; public roads, bridges and buildings; public safety; sciences and the liberal arts; commerce, factories and the mechanical arts; servants and labourers; and finally, the poor. [Source: The SAGE Dictionary of Policing; High Policing]
high policing