Police practices in a transforming city, Madrid 1908-1923

  • Rubén Pallol Trigueros Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Abstract

Police forces during Spanish Restauración have been studied primarily in their role as a repressive force of protest and very tangentially in its development as an institution designed to guarantee the law and prosecute crime. This research incorporates approaches applied to other contemporary police systems to address two questions: the extent to which police modernization occurred in Spain between 1908 and 1923 to meet the challenges of the new urban life and how to characterize the Restauración as a regime of rights and liberties in the light of everyday police practices. The case study chosen is the city of Madrid and the primary sources obtained from the court records including police reports, affidavits, and other police, that provides us very rich information on police action. The analysis is divided into three sections. First, the study of the different actors involved in the maintenance of order in the streets, which shows the dependence of the police on other auxiliary figures such as doormen, janitors, street night watchmen. Second, the introduction of new identification technologies following a increasingly interest in exercising control over the identity of citizens. Thirdly, the implementation of crime prevention strategies by judges and security forces based on an excessive use of imprisonment and arrests, mostly executed upon popular classes.

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Published
2026-01-14
How to Cite
Pallol Trigueros R. (2026). Police practices in a transforming city, Madrid 1908-1923. Historia y Política, 54, 133-162. https://doi.org/10.18042/hp.54.05