A History of the Durban City Police by Reverend Jack Jewell (1989)

A highly exceptional institution in the context of global and South African law enforcement history.

Survival of a Unique "British Constabulary" Model

The most remarkable historical fact about the Durban City Police is its sheer institutional longevity. Established in 1854 as the Durban Borough Police (the same year Durban was proclaimed a borough), it was explicitly modeled on Sir Robert Peel’s British metropolitan police framework.

While almost every other local municipal police force across South Africa was systematically swallowed up and centralized into the national entity (the South African Police) in 1913, Durban steadfastly resisted. For 146 years, it maintained its fierce independence as a self-styled, locally funded urban constabulary, accountable to the local city council rather than national government headquarters—making it entirely unique in the country's policing landscape until it was restructured into the modern Metro Police in 2000.

A Tale of Two "Municipal" Systems

Jewell's book chronicles a history that stands in stark, ironic contrast to what the term "municipal police" came to mean in late 20th-century South Africa. During the 1980s (right around the time this book was being finalized and published), the apartheid state hastily established heavily armed, poorly trained "municipal police" forces to suppress political resistance in various townships.

Those forces gained a notorious reputation for violence and ill-discipline before being re-absorbed by the state. Meanwhile, the historic Durban City Police spent that same era operating under a completely separate, professional local tradition rooted in traffic policing, city by-laws, and localized crime prevention.

An Untypical Historian

Jack Jewell was the Rector of Sydenham (an Anglican parish in Durban). Having a local clergyman compile the definitive, council-sponsored history of a major urban police force speaks to the close-knit, civic-minded nature of Durban's institutional relationships in the late 20th century, resulting in a text that captures local anecdotes, archival records, and civic pride that a standard bureaucratic history might otherwise omit.

Dust jacket worn and chipped.

185mm x 250mm x 25mm

R850