police

police. For years Britons resisted having a proper police force, because they associated it with repression, especially of the French kind. They also feared it would raise their rates. This was despite rampant crime in the 18th cent., which in the absence of police was dealt with by draconian penalties, especially death, designed to deter. In the more humane 19th cent., however, the sight of poor folk being strangulated for minor offences became less acceptable, and other methods of crime prevention were sought. The middle classes also worried about public order, in an era (c.1790–1820) of serious riot and rebellion. Their only recourse was the army, backed up by even tougher sanctions. That could be counter-productive. Peterloo, for example, and the Cato Street executions set people against the government. A gentler means of public control was required.

Sir Robert Peel devised his first police bill while chief secretary for Ireland, leading to the creation of the Irish Constabulary in 1822. In 1829 he persuaded Parliament to accept something similar (though not so militaristic) for London, to be called the Metropolitan Police. For its first years it was clearly on trial. Its commissioners, therefore, proceeded cautiously. All policemen were put in a distinctive uniform, so that they could not be taken for ‘spies’. They were unarmed, except for short batons. Rules of conduct were demanding. Of its first 2,800 recruits, 2,238 were dismissed from the force, sometimes for simply taking a drink or a nap. But it worked. The police became accepted by a suspicious middle class, and eventually by large numbers of the working classes too. They may have deterred crime (though figures are unreliable; and other factors, like rising prosperity, were active). They developed methods of dealing with public demonstrations which were subtle but effective. Other areas of the country called the ‘Met’ in to help. After 1833 they were permitted to set up their own forces, on the London model. Most did. Those which did not were finally made to by Acts of 1856 (England and Wales) and 1857 (Scotland).

Another later development was the growth of a plain clothes detective branch. That began in London in 1842, but consisted initially of only eight men. They tended to be distrusted. In 1877 a scandal implicated three of the detective branch's four inspectors in a turf fraud they were supposed to be investigating. That provoked a shake-up, out of which the present-day Criminal Investigation Department was born in 1878. In the 1880s the latter spawned the police's first political arm: a ‘Special Branch’ formed initially to look after Irish-American Fenian bombers, but later extended to anarchists, suffragettes, and other sources of irritation to the government. The same period saw the police taking on other duties: regulating vice, drink, and gambling, for example, and watching out for foreign spies.

The police's most controversial role has always been its public order one. Its problem was that keeping order in times of civil unrest could be interpreted as acting for the state against the democracy. Strikes were the most difficult case. The 1890s, 1920s, and 1980s saw the police brought into the political arena in this way. In 1918 they had a strike of their own, which created another kind of concern. In general, the British police have maintained their image of being ‘consensual’, though periodically accused of racism.

Bernard Porter