Police history has come back to the fore in recent years after a relative gap since the field first took off in the 1970s. Scholarly interest in police history seems to track broader popular debates about policing. It is in periods when the public is divided on the virtue of policing, and openly debating both abolition and the need for law and order, that scholars turn to history to understand the intensity of the present conflict. This article revisits the first wave of police history scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, which focused greatly on issues of class and anti-Black racism, and then considers some shifts in focus that the current wave is developing, centering slavery, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and colonialism.