In a fascinating paper, "On the Demand for Order in Civil Society" (1967), Allan Silver has pointed out that the modern police organization goes back only to the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, police functions were generally handled by "ordinary, respectable citizens," or, for purposes of internal peace-keeping, by the military. With increasing concentration of large populations in small areas, neither proved very efficient. But with the creation of the police, it became possible to exercise potentially violent supervision over the population by bureaucratic means widely diffused throughout civil society in small and discretionary operations that [were] capable of rapid concentration. … And were it not for the police, the effects of many of the other instruments of spatial order maintenance would be largely vitiated.

DEFINE: Establishes that the police as a bureaucratic, distributed peace-keeping institution is historically recent, not ancient.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 527