The Great War was the last and the most important part of the series of wars that the Ottoman Empire had been involved in since 1911. This was also a total war, as the boundary between the front and home front became more or less indistinguishable. State-society relations in the Ottoman Empire were permanently altered during the Great War. On the one hand, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the leading political party during the war years, controlled state power and suppressed any and all opposition in the country. On the other hand, the CUP aimed at influencing society through cultural and political associations and the press in order to mobilize civilians for war. This paper assesses state-society relations of the Ottoman Empire through an analysis of the Ottoman State’s attitude towards crime and its policies for the maintenance of public order during the First World War. There are three main parts in this paper. The first part briefly examines demographic characteristics and economic conditions of Istanbul during the Great War. In the second part, control mechanisms of the government for ‘maintenance public order’ will be analyzed. In fact these mechanisms aimed to control some ‘suspected’ elements such as foreigners, newcomers, vagrants and minorities. Therefore, this analysis will cover several policies of control targeting these 'suspected' elements. In the third part, two crimes -petty theft and profiteering- will be focused on comparatively in terms of the government’s attitude to these crimes. This analysis will help us to comprehend the CUP’s understanding of public order during the War years. This paper is based on the documents of the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, Istanbul, and especially on the documents of the General Directorate of Security and the General Directorate of Prison. In addition, this paper is based on documents from the National Archives of the United States, Washington D.C.