Policing: A short history

Philip Rawlings

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135997342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an overview of the history of policing in the UK. Its primary aim is to investigate the shifting nature of policing over time, and to provide a historical foundation to today's debates. Policing: a short history moves away from a focus on the origins of the 'new police', and concentrates rather on broader (but much neglected) patterns of policing. How was there a shift from communal responsibility to policing? What has been expected of the police by the public and vice versa? How have the police come to dominate modern thinking on policing? The book shows how policing - in the sense of crime control and order maintenance - has come to be seen as the work which the police do, even though the bulk of policing is undertaken by people and organisations other than the police. This book will be essential reading for anybody interested in the history of policing, on how differing perceptions emerged on the function of policing on the part of the public, the state and the police, and in today's intense debates on what the police do.

Chapter 1

---

Introduction

The ‘man in blue’, as the policeman is often called, is one of our best friends. His job is to take care of us, and of our houses, gardens, parks, factories, schools and everything that belongs to each of us or to all of us.¹

Police history

The establishment of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 has transfixed historians of the police. For some the new police emerged as a means of restoring the social cohesion that was claimed to have been lost through urbanization and industrialization. The police was, therefore, depicted as one of the nineteenth-century inventions which underpinned modern civilization and democracy: Critchley² wrote that the purpose of the police was to bring ‘the security without which civilisation is impossible’; Melville Lee³ thought ‘the restraining influence exerted by a good police system is as necessary to the welfare of society as are self-imposed moral and physical restraints to the health of the individual’.

Discussion of the period before 1829 has, therefore, been dominated by that date. People and events only acquire importance in so far as they can be linked to the establishment of the new police and earlier models of police are set up to be unfavourably compared with what comes later. Critchley promised A History of Police in England and Wales 900–1966,⁴ but sped through the first 929 years in 57 pages, while dallying over the next 137 years in the remaining 265 pages. His purpose in writing about the first period is made clear at the outset where he talks about finding the ‘origins of the English police system’ in the law and customs of the Danes and Anglo-Saxons and claims that ‘the nearest equivalent to the modern policeman is the Saxon tythingman’:⁵

The history of the first 1,000 years of police in England, up to, say 1729, is mainly the story of how the tythingman changed into the parish constable, and latterly of the constable’s slow decline; that of the next 100 years, in London at least, is the story of the way in which a medley of local parish officers and watchmen came to be replaced by a single body of constables embodied into a police force, the governing principles of which were unity of control and professional excellence.⁶

The old system, according to Critchley, was too corrupt and too inefficient to cope with the growth of population and wealth in the eighteenth century that brought criminality of an extent which ‘defies description’.⁷ Shakespeare’s Dogberry, Verges, Elbow and Dull are assumed to be fair representations of the quality of watchmen and constables and the contempt in which they were held: constables ‘were at best illiterate fools, and at worst as corrupt as the criminal classes from which not a few sprang’.⁸ Since contemporaries found the existing system ineffective or worse, it stands to reason that people must have been casting about for an alternative. Some far-sighted individuals, such as Henry and John Fielding in the eighteenth century, launched experiments in which Critchley detects the first stirrings of the Metropolitan Police. However, these efforts were thwarted by ‘apathy’.⁹ Yet, although he acknowledges this apathy to be widespread, the nature of the opposition is largely dismissed as a wrongheaded fear of the importation of continental models of police. His view is clear. There is little need to waste time on the opponents of the new police or other forms of policing because both were wrong and doomed: doomed because they were eventually and inevitably abandoned, wrong because their ideas were doomed.

The dawn suddenly breaks and the opposition largely vanishes: the 1829 Act is passed ‘without opposition and with scarcely any debate’.¹⁰ There then follows the inevitable spread of this new idea and its rapid acceptance elsewhere. Other measures that inconveniently crop up to spoil the neat arrangement, such as the forces established under the Lighting and Watching Act 1833, are ‘stop-gap’ measures.¹¹

By the 1960s the ideological bias of these histories was being noted by various writers.¹² The traditional histories certainly often seemed to have been prompted by a concern that the public failed to appreciate the police. Melville Lee was saddened that ‘the general public has shewn itself somewhat slow to acknowledge the debt which it owes to the men who undertake what is by common consent a thankless task’ and hoped that his history would contribute to an ‘increase in the tribute of public goodwill, that has been so well earned, and so long awaited, by the police forces of England.’¹³

Alas, fifty years on and Charles Reith still felt the lesson had not been learnt. He was prompted to write A New Study of Police History in 1956 by his exasperation with the general public and politicians who failed ‘to understand the peculiar values of our police’.¹⁴ In spite of its title, the aim of Reith’s book was to urge a return to the principles of preventive policing promoted by the first Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police. He argued that their neglect ‘accounts for much that is amiss in police administration in Britain today.’¹⁵

Those who, from the 1960s, sought to rewrite the history of the police tended also to focus on the establishment of the Metropolitan Police, to present it as inevitable and the police as social engineers. They believed, however, that industrialization and urbanization had led to a society divided along class lines and that the police reinforced those divisions and played an important role in the project of reducing working people to the discipline of industrial capitalism. Allan Silver agreed with the traditional historians that crime was rising in the eighteenth century, but he added a telling adjective to his description: ‘Peaceful and propertied people in eighteenth-century London … confronted a level of daily danger to which they and their spokesmen reacted indignantly.’¹⁶ He detects this class dimension as pervading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussion of crime: ‘even where the term is not explicitly invoked, the image persists – one of an unmanageable, volatile, and convulsively criminal class at the base of society.’ He adopts many of the arguments of the earlier historians, such as the view that before 1829 the police were ‘inefficient’.

The traditional historians saw the connection between the police and the public as the key to its success and popularity, whereas Silver believed that, although the police acquired ‘the moral assent of the general population’, this was a form of false consciousness slyly manufactured by the police: ‘even the earliest policemen were elaborately instructed in the demeanour and behavior required to evoke, establish, and sustain that assent.’¹⁷ The police were, for him, a valuable weapon in the class war: they ‘represented the penetration and continual presence of central political authority throughout daily life.’¹⁸

It is no coincidence that this first wave of rev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From the blood feud to the justice of the peace: 600–1400
• 3 Policing the poor and the bureaucratization of policing: 1400–1600
• 4 The professionalization of policing: 1660–1800
• 5 The Jenny Darbies: the New Police
• 6 ‘In the midst of hordes of starving plunderers’: 1850–1939
• 7 ‘The Foundations of law and order’
• 8 The long history of policing
• Bibliography
• Index