In police history, the 19th century was characterized by the spreading to several European capitals—Western and imperial alike—of organizational features borrowed from the London Metropolitan Police, which was held up as a model at the time. In opposition to a reading that restricts these forms of social control to national political types, or links this dissemination to a wider process of modernization, this paper reviews the circulation, adaptation, and redefinition that characterized the phenomenon, taking London, Paris, and Berlin as examples. The analysis, which assumes a wide range of perspectives and takes a connected and comparative approach, allows us to identify the complex patterns that emerge in the creation of urban police forces. Between state and urban ways of thinking, between local and transnational impulses, new “police capitals” gradually emerged. By the end of the century, they were characterized by common traits that were supposed to define urban modernity, by repressive practices, and by international brinkmanship. They were also characterized by differences, which can be attributed to and reinforced by national stereotypes. In these capitals, the policemen—those visible representations of order—were thus at the heart of the construction of the theme of a national police force that illustrated both a new urban civilization (with all its weaknesses), and new collective self-definitions. Taking into consideration the concomitant similarities and differences between the cities allows us to review how we interpret these common transformations and localized singularities, either in terms of changing power dynamics, the everyday experience of the big city, the place of the military in society, or (more broadly) in terms of societies’ relationship to the enforcement of norms and to violence. This paper argues for a new, collective approach to the practices and administrative bodies of the State, and in doing so, for a critical review of the major social processes that are generally supposed to accompany them.