… One thing that the English constable absolutely was not to be was an enforcer of whatever happened to be the current fashionable ideology or creed of the governing party. In fact, the police constable was not to be political at all. He was a fellow civilian and subject just like everyone else, what Peel called a mere “uniformed citizen.” As Peel wrote elsewhere, the English policeman was just “a person paid to perform, as a matter of duty, acts which if he were so minded he might have done voluntarily.”
