Colonel Sir Arthur Edwin Young KBE CMG CVO OStJ KPM (15 February 1907 – 20 January 1979) was a British police officer.

[1] He was Commissioner of Police of the City of London from 1950 to 1971 and was also the first head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to be styled Chief Constable.

Clive Emsley commented: Young shared the heroic vision of the British Bobby and was always focussed on the idea that police officers should enjoy good, even friendly relations with the people that they served.

Aged sixteen, Young left school to join the Portsmouth Borough Police, against his family's wishes.

[6][7] Young's father's business partner John Henry Corke secured him an initial placement in the office of Chief Constable Thomas Davies in December 1924.

During these years, Young was also entrusted with what he later cryptically termed "enquiries concerning the activities of subversive persons and propaganda, and also with other matters affecting state security".

In Eastney and Southsea, he gained his first taste of the complexity of the problems created by traffic, of measures to be taken for its efficient control and of the need to promote road safety.

They were a network of two-way microphone handsets across the borough, enabling the public to contact police stations and civil defence posts directly.

The base of the pillar contained first aid equipment while, a Leamington innovation, a flashing red light on the top called up policemen on patrol.

Shortly afterwards, Young was promoted colonel, and moved in July 1943 to be senior British police officer in the Mediterranean Theatre.

In 1946 he wrote He was appointed by the Home Office to a committee chaired by Sir Percy Sillitoe to consider the wireless needs of all forces.

Through Home Secretary James Chuter Ede he was appointed in 1947 Assistant Commissioner "D" of the Metropolitan Police in London, in charge of organisation, recruitment, training and communications.

The Convention People's Party was arousing police interest, ahead of the 1951 Gold Coast general election.

[22][23] Oliver Lyttleton, the Colonial Secretary, visited Kenya three times in the period 1952–4, before resigning from the third Churchill ministry in July 1954.

[24][25] Young arrived in Kenya in March of that year, and immediately required that policing should be carried out with minimal physical force.

[27][28] From 1951 CID had been under John Timmerman, a Canadian RCMP and WWII intelligence officer who was assistant police commissioner, brought in to reorganise it, and who from 1955 worked for the Department of External Affairs in security.

[37] Karl Hack reports Young's resignation as driven by the failure to have murders by the Kikuyu Home Guard investigated.

He comments also on the differences between Malaya and Kenya, stating that in Young's view efforts to make policing "friendly to the public" initially had failed in the latter, having largely succeeded in the former.

[38] On his return to the United Kingdom, Young met privately with the clerical activist Michael Scott and the politician Barbara Castle.

[39] The Christian Council of Kenya was split, with David Steel moved by Young's departure, coupled with a raid on Mombasa's YMCA, to preach strongly against Baring's administration in St Andrew's Church, Nairobi; while Leonard Beecher opposed him.

[42] Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, met Baring during December 1954, but Beecher asked him to leave matters to the churches in Kenya.

He said "It is in that context that I find disquieting the sending out of Colonel Young to investigate the affairs of the police and his coming back for some reason which I do not fully understand.

[46] In a 1959 debate on the Hola massacre, Castle accused Lennox-Boyd of repeated cover-ups, and suppression of reports including Young's.

Young's measures introduced the standard British rank system for police officers in Northern Ireland and disbanded the Ulster Special Constabulary.

[54] For his work in Northern Ireland he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 1971 New Year Honours.