The narrative model of histories of police from the perspective of public security: a look into three examples of a diachronic historiography

Résumé

Public safety is the benign meaning instinctively associated with the concept of police. In reviewing Portuguese historiography about the police, we find that historians always operate according to this relatively recent definition. But what implicit norms inform such an approach through which the forces of public safety reconstitute their own history? What regular, common structure forms the basis for the apparently irreconcilable works of João Cosme (2006), Mascarenhas Barreto (1979) and Albino Lapa (1942, 1964)?