Police Brutality, Media, and State Legitimacy from 1829 to the Present | Stephen Basdeo

Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police did not invent law-enforcement violence, but it transformed its meaning. In the 1830s, Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian framed police brutality as a crisis of state legitimacy, exposing how uniformed, centralised authority turned individual blows into political evidence of class oppression and democratic exclusion in Britain.