Police control systems in Britain, 1775–1975

From parish constable to national computer

Chris Williams

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719084294
• eBook ISBN: 9781526102591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

During the last two centuries, the job of policing in Britain has been transformed several times. This book analyses the ways that police institutions have controlled the individual constable on the 'front line'. The eighteenth-century constable was an independent artisan: his successor in the Metropolitan Police and other 'new' forces was ferociously disciplined and closely monitored. Police have been controlled by a variety of different practices, ranging from direct day-to-day input from 'the community', through bureaucratic systems built around exacting codes of rules, to the real-time control of officers via radio, and latterly the use of centralised computer systems to deliver key information. Police forces became pioneers in the adoption of many technologies – including telegraphs, telephones, office equipment, radio and computers – and this book explains why and how this happened, considering the role of national security in the adoption of many of these innovations. It will be of use to a range of disciplines, including history, criminology, and science and technology studies.

1

THE ‘OLD’ POLICE

1780–1840

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the main features of the ‘old’ police systems, concentrating on the issues of organisational control raised in the Introduction. This thematic approach provides a defence against one cogent criticism that could be levied against its title: that there was no ‘old’ police system. Policing before 1829 was heterogeneous (in fact, more so than afterwards) and, crucially, its systems were dynamic. Wherever historians have looked in depth at policing, they have found structures and practices which were amenable to change, and did in fact change, in response to perceived needs. The idea of a monolithic ‘old system’ derives chiefly from ‘Whig’ historians of the new police, who were over-anxious to justify the legitimacy of their subjects, and generally did so by repeating as objective fact the polemics and propaganda which the early partisans of new policing aimed at their opponents.¹

This chapter will concentrate on the watchman and on the parish or petty constable, also called a tythingman in some jurisdictions. The ‘High Constable’ had similar powers to his parish counterpart, covering a broader geographical area. Despite the title, he had no authority over parish constables, thus need not feature in this analysis.² Also absent are the various uniformed patrols run from the Bow Street police office which were created from the 1760s, funded by central government and under the control of a stipendiary magistrate. It leans heavily on the work of Rock, Storch and Philips, and those historians who have described policing in London before 1829, but it is not intended as a substitute for, and certainly not as a summary of, their work.³ Here, the emphasis will be on the lines of responsibility within the institution. It will describe the office of constable as it functioned in the late eighteenth century, in a variety of different ways which varied between the amateur ideal and the activity of part-time and full-time entrepreneurial officers, some of whom were able to attain positions of considerable power and wealth through their police work. Via a consideration of instruction books and press reports of court cases, it will analyse the ways that constables were controlled: indirectly through the law, which was one element in a marketplace of incentives and rewards. Another police institution – the urban watch – existed alongside the constables, and the very different way that this was disciplined will be examined, with a view to demonstrating the ways in which it was within watch institutions rather than the constables that the true antecedents of the new police forces can be found.

There were several key features across the old systems (albeit not evenly distributed) which were not characteristic of the new, and it is these which will be described here, in order to try to get to the heart of the contrast between the two. The most characteristic aspect of the old police system (not just in the context of this book, but universally) was the dispersal of authority. The old police system was a response to a lack of capability to closely control events from any one centre, and as such Beniger’s concept of the ‘Control Revolution’ can help us to understand how it differed from those institutions which came after it. The role of the old police was analogous to that of ‘factors’ – representatives in the periphery of a merchant in the core who made deals at a distance, before systems of direct commercial control grew up in the mid-nineteenth century.⁴ Factors were just one example of the phenomenon of the ‘agent’: someone empowered to do business on behalf of another, who was unable to do it themselves owing to separation. Another example is workers in the pre-factory ‘putting-out’ system, subject to market discipline but not under close supervision.⁵ Like these, the old police also need to be understood as the ultimate product of an economy with very limited capacity to create surplus value compared to the modern age. This in turn led to a relatively weak state, with significant limits on the number of people it could employ and the amount of resources it could mobilise. Thus, especially outside the ‘fiscalmilitary’ core of the state, and doubly at local level, its functions were generally carried out by part-time amateur officials and, rather than create many institutions to ensure compliance, its usual mode of activity was to create incentives.⁶ These incentives were intended to guide the governance of territory and populations, which at this time was dominated by local self-government.

Constables

Each parish (and sometimes townships within large parishes) had a constable, appointed annually to serve for a year. They could be appointed by the parish vestry (an assembly elected by the ratepayers, usually consisting of some of its richer property-owners), the court leet (an annual meeting of the tenants and landowners convened under the auspices of the lord of the manor) or, in some towns, by the corporation (the town’s public body, which was sometimes elected but more often an oligarchy) but in all cases the body which appointed them neither supervised nor disciplined them.⁷ They were in theory subject to direction by the justices of the peace, who were (outside London) all amateurs but nearly all from the gentry or nobility. One of their key roles was to serve legal warrants – for arrest, search, and seizure – issued by these justices. The constable was, in theory, a householder and property-owner, as well as literate and healthy. The constable himself was responsible for dealing with law enforcement, crime and disorder in his parish, but these were not his only responsibilities: notably much of his activity concerned the administration of relief to the parish poor.⁸ He was also responsible for maintaining accurate lists of inhabitants liable to serve in the militia, and for finding billets as necessary for any regular troops, tasks rendered more important by the wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The parochial constable system lacked bureaucratic support or any system of ongoing records outside of account books.

He was able to claim expenses and some fees from the parish and from any higher courts on whose behalf he acted.⁹ These fees were generally set at a rate which would make it worthwhile for most self-employed artisans to carry out the duties: anyone whose business was more lucrative than this would suffer a penalty, and many wealthier men paid poorer substitutes (often termed ‘acting constables’) to serve in their place, or gave a fine to the appointing body, which could then be used by them for this purpose. He was expected to respond to reports of crime, and had the power to arrest (and to enter premises in search of) those suspected of felonies – the category of serious crimes triable at Quarter Sessions or Assizes, which contained burglary, robbery, and most theft. In addition he had a general duty to secure order in his parish. The overall picture of the constable’s activity, and his ability to perform it, is best summed by Storch and Philips thus:

a local man who, by dint of his physical powers and other personal qualities, could command enough respect to conciliate people at odds, break up petty village brawls, deal with disputes before the parties resorted to the courts, and preserve the peace under normal circumstances.¹⁰

The legal position of the constable varied considerably depending on the kind of activity he was engaged in. The law laid out that constables were immune from being personally sued if they were acting under the authority of a justice of the peace.¹¹ So to this extent the constable did not always serve as a wholly autonomous agent but rather as one whose job it was to enforce the judgements of the governmental representative – the justice – who had both autonomy and legal responsibility. In certain circumstances (detailed below) litigants who sued constables would be put in a weak position by being liable to excessive damages if they lost. What these legal privileges had in common was the method by which they were expected to be enforced: by altering the constable’s degree of responsibility during an action for damages in the courts of the common law.¹²

The ideal of the constable fitted into the broader conception of eighteenth century governance. He was, at least in theory, to be independent, responsible and reasoning. In this ideal of governance there was no distinction between those inside and those outside the structures of local government, composed as these were of self-governing citizens.¹³ There was also an association between masculinity and freedom on one hand and femininity and oppression on the other: as Francis Dodsworth has shown, the constable’s masculinity was constructed in ways which emphasised his independence. Ideally, he needed to be a property owner, in order to maintain the principle of self-government, and physically capable to perform his duty in person but the most important qualification was that he should be an independent man, and nobody’s servant. Only then would he be able to exercise his judgement properly.¹⁴ He must not be poor – this would render him dependent on others, and unable to devote his time to the job, which needed to be carried out by the respectable head of a household.¹⁵ Owning property also implied that he would be aware of the law and able to engage with it.

When it was allocated on a rota basis which was associated with those who owned or rented particular properties, the nominal office of constable itself could sometimes pass into the hands of a woman. She would be expected to pay for a substitute if she could afford to, or if not the task devolved on another male parishioner. Perhaps in order to underscore his point to one wealthy man who was refusing to serve as a constable, Lord Justice Kenyon observed ‘women were eligible into this Office’ in order to illustrate that there were no legal boundaries set on who could be appointed.¹⁶ However, no cases of a woman acting in the office of constable during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries appear to have come to light.

Entrepreneurial constables

The idealised system of one amateur constable per year, per parish, was no longer the most prevalent one by 1780. The system evolved in three main ways: the hiring by constables of paid substitutes; paying the constable’s salary from the public purse; and constables relying on fees, but serving for longer periods.¹⁷ The system of informal paid substitutes is hard to track, although there is more evidence for the formal payment of long-service constables.¹⁸ A substitute constable could count on fees and a payment from hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The ‘old’ police, 1780-1840
• 2 The proletarianisation of police labour, 1800-1860
• 3 Drilled bodies and zealous minds, 1820-1890
• 4 Time, bureaucracy and the new policeman, 1830-1930
• 5 Real-time communication, 1848-1945
• 6 The arrival of the control room, 1919-1975
• 7 Computerising the back office, 1955-1980
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index