A social history of the police

Policing in the 19^th Century

The Metropolitan Police were formally established by the Conservative Home Secretary Robert Peel and were nicknamed ‘Bobbies’ in reference to their founder. The reforms of 1829 qualitatively transformed the nature of British policing.  Approximately 1,000 men, drawn exclusively from the working classes, became responsible for policing the city of London. By 1857, the reforms had spread to cities and counties throughout the UK. The new methods of policing, engineered by Peel and other reformers, replaced the old ‘night watchmen’ system which had existed prior to 1829. The reforms were designed to ensure that the police were equipped to meet new challenges that were social, cultural, and as we will discuss later, political. By 1829, the ‘night-watchmen’ system (the term ‘police’ did not get used until after 1829) was regarded by the political classes as anachronistic and generally ineffective in addressing the rising problems of modern society.

The Night Watchmen  

A parliamentary investigation in the 1820s described the ‘night-watchmen’ as ‘decrepit, drunken, useless and incapable of dealing with new levels of crime and disorder’. Typically the ‘night watchmen’ were householders who performed civic duties such as guarding the city gates after dark and occasionally patrolling the streets. When it came to crime detection the vast majority were incompetent and their primary concern was the protection of private property. Corruption was commonplace and the ‘night-watchmen’ were sometimes motivated only to solve crimes that involved a ransom. Meanwhile drunkenness was an issue as was ‘sleeping on the job’. It was also alleged that the some of the ‘watchmen’ were regular frequenters of prostitutes.

The reforms instigated by Peel introduced a degree of professionalism into the concept of ‘policing’. Yet problems remained. Of the 1,000 men who joined the new Police Force, a significant percentage were old ‘night-watchmen’ who had simply swapped one hat for another. Many of the bad habits remained.  For example, an 1834 Parliamentary Select Committee report highlighted that a disproportionate number of Police Officers were being dismissed for drunkenness.

To counter these problems Peel, an authoritarian by nature, introduced what he called ‘militaristic discipline’ into the Police Force.  Unlike the old ‘watchmen’ Peel’s ‘Bobbies’ were uniformed. The old guard, suspicious and fearful of change, were self conscious in their new uniform, and many thought it was embarrassing. For the new recruits however, the uniform symbolised their power and newly acquired status in Victorian society.

Policing in Practice

As noted, Policemen in the nineteenth century were recruited from the unskilled or semi-skilled working class.  The ‘Bobbies’ were seen by the general public as ‘hard men’; indeed they had to be, if they were to have any hope of maintaining law and order in troublesome communities. In contrast to the old ‘night watchmen’ system, the new work of the new Police Officers was tightly controlled with an emphasis on time keeping that was not too dissimilar to that of a factory worker of the same period. The ‘beat patrol’, seen as an effective method in preventing crime was a carefully timed and somewhat tedious procedure.  To ensure that ‘militaristic discipline’ was enforced district Sergeant’s made frequent and unannounced inspections designed to prevent the community Bobbie from idling whilst on duty, or to make sure that he was not getting drunk in a public bar. The Bobbie was instructed to keep a notebook and careful record of all his activities. This began the rank and file Police Officers universal dislike and contempt of what the Police call ‘paperwork’. 

From the beginning politicians and Chiefs of Police were sensitive to the Police’s relationships with the local community. Often a cynical officer would manipulate these relationships in order to detect information about criminal activity. But it is equally true that many of the Officers were sincere and joined the Force to fight crime and make a positive difference to the lives of working class communities.

The Politics of 19^th Century Policing

Political developments in British policing were uneven, at times contradictory, and need to be understood in terms of competing agendas from both politicians and public alike. Of particular concern was the growth of the ‘slum’, namely poor communities where lawlessness was believed to be common. The ‘slum’ was regarded as a breeding ground for criminality. According to the narrative the poor were a law unto themselves. What emerged from politicians and chiefs of police was the beginning of a discourse on how to ‘police the poor’.

Policing the Poor

Poverty, it was argued, had produced an incorrigible criminal class in need of state intervention and control. This new criminal class was regarded as a dangerous and a-moral sub-group whose very existence was a threat to the order of respectable bourgeois society. This narrative was complimented by the emergence of social scientific disciplines such as Criminology, which could prove ‘scientifically’ that the poor were pathologically criminal. Social sciences provided new ways of talking, even thinking about crime. Before Peel’s reforms crime detection and law enforcement were the main principles of policing. By the end of the century policing now emphasised a new approach conceptualised as crime prevention. The new discourses on poverty and criminality were gendered. Men were regarded as habitually violent whilst women were seen as dangerously promiscuous. Children did not escape the narrative.  By the 1850s, the very concept of ‘childhood’ hitherto influenced by Rousseau and eighteenth century Romanticism, underwent a change of narrative.  For the first time the term ‘juvenile delinquency’ entered pubic discourse.

At the core of the ‘policing the poor’ discourse was the application of the scientific method to policing. Criminality was quantified and measured with statistical data used to provide politicians with ‘crime figures’, which were used for the first time in political debate in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘Crime figures’ revealed a correlation between age and criminality with the 16-25 age group identified as those most likely to be involved in criminal activity. How do we tackle the growing menace of ‘juvenile delinquency’ was a question framed by criminologists, politicians and the police. Parliament responded by introducing a series of Acts designed to combat ‘juvenile delinquency’. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 and the Malicious Trespass Act, 1827 were not without their criticisms. Social liberals and progressive commentators argued that young people were being criminalised for behaviour which hitherto had been non-criminal, e.g. their very presence on the ‘street’ was seen as a threat to law and order. (Political liberals would make the exact same argument more that 150 years later about Anti-Social Behaviour Orders).  

Policing the Radicals

Increased political agitation in the latter part of the nineteenth century provided new ways of thinking about policing. One of the results was a move towards greater centralisation. The ruling elites feared the spread of social unrest, particularly in relation to an increasingly organised and politically aware industrial working class. The Police were given increased powers to combat the spread of political militancy.  There was concern that industrial agitation was spreading out of the work place and into the public sphere.  The Chartist movement sometimes referred to as the first mass movement of the working class, demanded democracy for the people. Government called upon the police to defend the system of privilege and elitism. As the shock troops in the war against democracy the Police did their best disrupt and even destroy the Chartist movement (I would like to point out that the extent to which individual officers were sympathetic to the Chartists is unknown. However it is not illogical to assume that some officers, drawn from the ranks of the working classes, would have possessed a degree of sympathy towards the Chartists). The Police arrested pro-democracy speakers, pulled down banners at rallies and arrested protestors.

At the same time the Police were called upon by the elites to halt the ‘growing menace of Trades Unionism’. Parliament passed strict laws designed to minimise the impact of picketing. The Police disrupted industrial action by ensuring that ‘black-leg’ or ‘scab’ labour was escorted through picket lines to defeat strikes. In addition to breaking strikes, the Police were called upon by bailiffs to evict strikers and their families from company housing. Police Officers would often meet great resistance when families who refused to leave their homes. For a time it seemed as if the Police were involved in a perpetual war against the working classes. The draconian Poor Law passed in 1834 intensified the war. The Poor Law introduced workhouses for the poor. These were miserable places of squalor, based on hard discipline and the view that ‘idle hands make for the devils work’. Naturally, they were despised by the poor and when protests eventually erupted against living conditions, the Police charged in on behalf of the authorities to maintain law and order.

By the end of the century, the role of the Police in disrupting the Chartist movement, in breaking strikes, and in enforcing draconian poor laws, ensured that the ‘Great British Bobbie’ was hated by the nascent trade unionist and socialist movement. Political radicals saw the Police Force as little more than a ‘national riot squad’. Militants regarded the ‘Bobbie’ as an agent of the political elites. At worst he was an enemy of the people they argued, at best a docile stooge of the authoritarian state. In working class communities the ‘Bobbie’ was called the ‘blue drone’ or the ‘blue locust’. 

However public attitudes were uneven. Some sections of the working classes were proud of the ‘Bobbie’ who was seen to be doing a ‘difficult job in difficult circumstances’. The conservative middle classes always the first to call for strong law and order held a romanticised view of the Police. This can be evidenced by the literature they read, for example in the popularised ‘detective stories’, a new genre for the novel enjoyed by a middle class audience. At the turn of the century Police Officer started to publish their memoirs and for a time these were very popular. They tended present a glamorous and sensationalised account of police work, which added to the middle classes romanticised view of the ‘Bobbie’.

Policing in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1945

By the beginning of the twentieth century there were common calls from the middle classes and ‘ratepayers’ for ‘more police on the street’. Populist politicians and the press had taken to calling the Metropolitan Police the best police force in the world. In contrast the working classes in the music halls and public bars regarded the Police as ‘brutes’ and ‘tricksters’.

The onset of the First World War changed the nature of British policing, in many ways for the better. For the first time, women now served in the Force, although their responsibilities were limited to police work that pertained to women and children. Besides the new female recruits were not ‘proper Police Officers’ because they had not been ‘sworn in’. For many years female members of the Police had no power of arrest. When the males returned from war they formed the Police Federation. This was an attempt by rank and file Officers to improve pay and better their working conditions. Yet they never intended for the Federation to be a Trades Union and no one in the Police would tolerate the suggestion that the Federation affiliate to the Trades Union Council (TUC). Members of the Police Federation were strictly forbidden to promote or engage in industrial action of any kind. Initially the Federation aroused fear and suspicion in the political classes of the day and in the elites of the Police. But they had little to worry about. In practice, the rank and file ‘Bobbie’ was bitterly opposed to Trades Unionism, and a war like mentality was evident in many. The battles against the political radicals intensified. Revolution in Russia provoked a widespread fear that Bolshevism might spread to Britain. Hard-line militants in the socialist movement were openly calling for the working classes to engage in revolution. In these circumstances the ‘Bobbie’ kept a firm grip on his truncheon.  

The ‘policing the poor’ discourse continued with particular attention given to violent men who were brutalised by the First World War. When the Second World War came once again it resulted in an increase in female personnel. For the ‘Bobbies’ who did not go to war their main jobs was to locate the men who had gone AWOL from the army. This often involved a game of ‘cat and mouse’ as families tired hard to protect loved ones who were too scared to fight. The decade that followed the Second World War has been described as a ‘Golden Age of British Policing’. This is period I will turn to the in the second part of this article.