'I am just the man for Upsetting you Bloody Bobbies': popular animosity towards the police in late nineteenth-century Leeds

Most historians of police-public relations in the later nineteenth century have asserted that popular animosity towards the police rested on the contexts of specific encounters, rather than any broader, principled opposition to the police as an institution. However, scholars have yet to engage with the voices of the policed, and have instead relied on inferring popular attitudes from other evidence. This article uses police occurrence books from three out-townships of Leeds to explore popular responses to the police in unprecedented detail. It highlights how various norms within working-class culture – domesticity, masculinity, communal autonomy – precipitated opposition to the exercise of police authority. Moreover, it demonstrates that hostile reactions to the police were motivated both by the contexts of particular interactions and underlying, unsavoury notions of the police as an institution. Hence, police-public relations can only be adequately understood as an interaction between these two factors.