The Arrival of the Control Room 1919–1975
Chris A. Williams · Manchester University Press eBooks · 2014
During the 1930s real-time control of police using telephones and wireless telegraphy was introduced as much to patrol the expanding suburbs as to respond to serious crime. It was backed by Home Office civil servants and involved some co-ordination with the Marconi company. This involved the centralisation of operational control at headquarters level, and the speeding up of feedback: most manifest in the use of CCTV in 1968 to monitor the performance of the Metropolitan police against demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. The initial introduction relied heavily on technologies and procedures developed for control of train movements in the early twentieth century and further refined to support air defence in the first world war. The overt embrace of technology and ‘police science’ in the interwar period helped police to control a crisis of confidence in their reliability. Personal radio, introduced in the 1960s, was similarly seen as a way to keep policing looking modern and thus head off criticism of liberalisation.