NEWS – “without comment”
Why we should privatise the police
Privatised police forces would be cheaper and more effective
Artillery Row – By Charles Amos
February 17, 2026
Recently the government has announced it intends to centralise the police by reducing down the number of forces by up to two thirds. This is aimed at increasing efficiency and creating a uniform level of good service across the country.
Let me make a countersuggestion that might strike some readers as ambitious. British policing does not need centralisation: British policing needs privatisation. The success of Georgian prosecution associations in Britain shows the public goods problem is far from insurmountable. And competition in private policing today would deliver increased efficiency, proper responsiveness to consumers and reduced corruption. Instead of trusting short-termism politicians, we should reject the Victorian socialism of public policing and reembrace the freedom to choose who fights crime on our behalf.
It is often argued policing cannot be provided privately because you cannot exclude people from its benefit. No one will pay for a foot patrol if they’re going to get its benefit anyway — thus, no one pays and foot patrols aren’t provided at all. This is the public goods problem. While anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard and Gustav de Molinari have long maintained that the free market can provide private policing, most people are still not convinced. They want evidence not theory. Well — England during the late 18th Century and early 19th Century provides evidence of effective private policing keeping a lid on crime. And today, no doubt, a far better job could be done too, as demonstrated by businesses such as My Local Bobby Ltd here in England and the 10,380 private security firms operating in South Africa.
Before the Metropolitan Police’s establishment in 1829 and the County and Borough Police Act of 1856, which required all local authorities to establish police out of local taxes, Britain did not have paid public policing. Instead, each parish had an unpaid and part time constable who would follow up crimes. The urbanisation of Britain from the 1750s, and the connected greater anonymity of criminality, led to the widespread perception it was rapidly increasing. In response to this arose prosecution associations. These private organisations financed the investigation and prosecution of criminals through subscriptions which individuals alone couldn’t bear, and, from the 1820s, even started to put on foot patrols too. People mainly subscribed to deter criminals from targeting them which was achieved via spreading knowledge of their membership via word of mouth, handbills, and newspapers.
Examples of such prosecution associations include the Tanworth Prosecution Association in Warwickshire, The West Bromwich Association for the Prosecution of Felons, and The Clapham Association for the Prosecution of Felons. The most famous example is Thomas Dimsdale’s Barnet Association in north London, which from the 1820s was running foot patrols; Kingson upon Thame’s prosecution association, which also ran foot patrols, even had 1 in 5 residents subscribed by 1828. Overall, from 1750 to 1850 between 1,000 to 4,000 prosecution associations existed, most having between 20 to 60 members each.
Into the 19th Century, though, the private good, i.e., deterrence for the paying subscriber, could also be bundled up with the public good of foot patrols, as in the Barnet Association mentioned, because, the private good mentioned plus the public good of foot patrols was still large enough to warrant the cost for most subscribers. This is the bundling that Ronald Coase refers to. The prosecution associations were not unaffordable either as over half charged 10s and 6d or lower when average weekly wages in 1800 were 12s 7d. For context, today policing costs about £300 per person, or, just under half a weekly salary. Given most goods and services are cheaper today, it isn’t outlandish to think private prosecution would have fallen in price too had it continued until today and not been crowded out by public policing.
Did private policing actually work though? Yes, adequately well. Two pieces of evidence exist for this verdict. From 1800 to 1850, during the time private associations were the chief law enforcers, the homicide rate was 1.85 per 100,000 while from 1850 to 1900 it was 1.45. A minor difference: besides which, the long run trend of homicide was going down anyway. Obviously, there are a thousand confounding variables to those figures, but they show private policing was not disastrous at the very least. Historians have also found that home insurance rates for subscribers to prosecution associations who displayed their membership on plaques on their homes were substantially lower than for nonsubscribers, showing that criminality was reduced by them. Why else would insurers offer lower premiums?
Why then did Victorian politicians vote to create public policing? The broad consensus among historians is that the Royal Commission on the Constabulary Force of 1839 was made to come to a pro public policing conclusion by the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, because prosecution associations were failing to stop moral crimes such as public soliciting, drunkenness and lewd behaviour. This is despite 80 per cent of the respondents to the Royal Commission stating no state force was needed. Prosecution associations didn’t tackle moral crimes because most of their customers simply didn’t care about them. Public policing then emerged not because of any failure of justice but rather because politicians wanted to control people.
Private policing in 19th Century Britain worked. Today efficiency, reduced corruption and responsiveness to consumers could all be improved by competition in private policing too because profit maximising firms which ignored those three factors would go out of business; a situation which simply isn’t possible under public policing. For the moment, we need not worry about poor people being deprived of protection as we can assume a policing voucher could be given to them.
Private policing would respond to consumer demands because a firm’s existence immediately depends on doing so. Contrastingly, should state forces not do so, voters can only punish them via a clunky mechanism of an election. Currently, public police are making 30 arrests every day for speech crimes and 174 arrests every day for drug related crimes. Now if people cared about those things, it would be profitable to include them in police packages. But I suspect that just as Victorian consumers didn’t care about prosecuting public soliciting, most would not pay a penny for them. Unlike public policing, private police simply couldn’t afford to enforce victimless crimes no one cares about. A society with private police would probably be a more liberal society.
Reduced corruption is likely, too, for at least three reasons. Under public policing today the personal cost to an officer of turning in a colleague is higher because the centralised nature of it means making senior officials annoyed can seriously impact your career advancement. Turning in your colleague in a free market of private police will be less of a problem because you can just change firm for a promotion. Second, accrediting organisations would probably emerge to conduct vetting to ensure compliance with ethical standards. The Association of British Investigators which has existed since 1913 and regulates private detectives is an example today. Third, private police will have an incentive to investigate each other in order to ruin their competitors’ reputations, and, thus, drive consumers into their own arms.
Take the shameful grooming gang’s scandal. Were one private police force in cahoots with the Rotherham traffickers, the incentive for another private police to show them up would be huge profits and public esteem. It is the type of thing you could advertise your company on for uncovering. A cartel of private firms can’t be ruled out, but it should be less of a problem than the monopoly we have today. Wouldn’t private police fabricate evidence to get their prosecution rates up though if large profits were on the line? This is possible; however, it should be mitigated by impartial courts run by the state, private police investigating each other, and consumers switching away from corrupt companies.
Today local police forces also spend a highly variable amount of money on a great number of items, e.g., the Leicestershire force spends £20 on a standard baton while the Northamptonshire force spends £120. Extracting mobile phone data, which is very important to police investigations, costs £5,100 in Derbyshire but only £1,100 in Staffordshire. It might be thought the monopoly power of state forces could reduce costs — however, unlike private firms competing, there is no entrepreneur who will gain a lot from cost reductions and thus will drive through cuts ruthlessly. This is particularly so when it comes to staffing.
Many readers will still believe private policing is pie-in-the-sky thinking which will never work. South Africa today shows private policing can work. Despite public policing being financed out of taxation, South Africa has four private security guards for every one police officer. Response times from private security firms are often just five minutes in contrast to an average of 27 minutes for serious crimes from public police. If private security firms were useless then no one would pay for them, yet 10,380 registered companies are paid for by consumers, so they obviously are not useless.
While politicians are in charge of a monopoly which faces no effective deterrent for poor performance, policing will always be subpar at best
Going from public policing to private policing cannot be done overnight. Private police should be granted the same powers as public police which ultimately boil down to enforcing individual rights to self-defence and punishment. Then people should be granted a tax rebate for opting out of public policing. If private policing can deliver, then public policing will increasingly shrink and if they can’t things will remain the same as today. At the very least, it will make public police more like firms needing to attract consumers than bureaucracies complacently assuming they’ll always be shovelled money from the taxpayer.
Police privatisation is a radical idea today, but Georgian British history shows it has worked in the past. The profit motive under competition would ensure increased efficiency, better responsiveness to consumer demands, and reduced corruption. While politicians are in charge of a monopoly which faces no effective deterrent for poor performance, policing will always be subpar at best. We need not tolerate that anymore. Britons must have the freedom to choose their own private police.
Read the full article at: https://thecritic.co.uk/why-we-should-privatise-the-police/
Posted by: Ian (D. Withers)
www.WAPI.org
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