The author focuses on a specific police authority area that typifies the challenges faced by the police in Great Britain this century, the area covered by the South Wales Police. This area involves a wide variety of communities, including isolated rural villages and urban industrial centers, and has the geography of a county police force and some of the problems of a metropolitan police area. The area also has some well-preserved police records that are analyzed in depth by the author who notes changes that have occurred in the nature of crime and policing during the past 100 years. In 1900, for example, modern problems of traffic and drug offenses were hardly mentioned, and police work early in the century was similar to police work 50 years earlier. In the late 1950s and 1960s, major changes occurred in the nature of criminal activity and these changes transformed policing and public attitudes. The author chronicles historical developments in crime and policing and ends the volume in 1989 when major changes were made in the territorial division and management of the South Wales Police. References, tables, figures, graphs, and charts