A History of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and its Colonial Legacy

Anastasia Dukova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137555816
• eBook ISBN: 9781137555823
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book illuminates the neglected history of the Dublin Metropolitan Police – a history that has been long overshadowed by existing historiography, which has traditionally been preoccupied with the more radical aspects of Irish history. It explores the origins of the institution and highlights the Dublin Metropolitan Police's profound influence on the colonial forces, as its legacy reached some of the furthest outposts of the British Empire. In doing so Anastasia Dukova provides much needed nuance and complexity to our understanding of Ireland as a whole, and Dublin in particular, demonstrating that it was far more than a lawless place ravaged by political and sectarian violence. Simultaneously, the book tells the story of the bobby on the beat, the policeman who made the organisation; his work and day, the conditions of service and how they affected or bettered his lot at home and abroad.

Part 1
1780–1880

© The Author(s) 2016

Anastasia DukovaA History of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and its Colonial LegacyWorld Histories of Crime, Culture and Violence10.1057/978-1-137-55582-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Police Organisation: Enlightened Thought, Theories and Context

Anastasia Dukova¹

(1)

Brisbane, Australia

End Abstract

In 1840 James Henry, an Irish writer, published a brief depiction of an organised police and its impact on the order and welfare of a contemporary metropolis, a satirical City of Canton. To better the protection of peace and property, he wrote, Cantoners submitted an imperial legislation requesting new police, which was promptly established. Closely modelled on the metropolitan police of the capital city of Pekin, which had been organised only a short while earlier, the new force took to the streets. As the city folk bid farewell to ‘the old watch with their nightcaps and their wooden boxes, in which they used to snore away the night’, ¹ they welcomed in their place ‘a most respectable and efficient body of men, constantly on the watch both day and night … and what is still better, they kept to their duty without any trouble to [them]’. ² The ‘new government’ police kept continuous watch over the burghers of the city, but they also carried ‘little books’ and pencils in their pockets, and ‘they wrote down everything they saw and heard, and reported it every night to the superintendant [sic], and the superintendant to the chief commissioner, and the chief commissioner to the imperial government at Pekin’. ³

The first men to walk the beat were initially viewed in equal measure with suspicion and disdain by both the criminal element and the general public. To many the system of ‘round-the-clock’ policing was evocative of government-endorsed espionage, clandestine surveillance and tyranny. The road to acceptance was rocky and winding, further complicated by political and economic upheavals, which pocked the nineteenth century. The men in blue persevered and, as time progressed, became the embodiment of law and order.

According to the dominant theories of police development in England as in Ireland, ‘resistance to the idea of a police force was powerful and effective in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and even when the principle won more general support there was considerable debate and experimentation surrounding the precise form and nature of the new police’. ⁴ The structure of policing that finally came into being ‘was a product of compromise, comprising three distinct systems and philosophies which applied to the Metropolitan Police, the borough forces and the county forces’. ⁵ In the historical scholarship on the development of policing and police forces, according to David Taylor three theoretical perspectives apply. Orthodox theory views the new police as a response to the collapse of law and order, ⁶ responsible for enforcing the law and maintaining appropriate societal discipline. The revisionist approach, explained by Clive Emsley in Policing and Its Context, 1750–1870 (1983), examines the details of the social and economic context of historical developments where the new police were seen as agents of social control whose responsibilities transcended the scope limited solely by the basic definition of criminality:

The mission of the new police was a symptom of both a profound social change and a deep rupture in class relations in the first half of the nineteenth century. By this time, both the actions and the ‘language’ spoken by the urban masses were, if intelligible at all, deeply frightening …

For these reasons the police received an omnibus mandate: to detect and prevent crime; to maintain a constant unceasing pressure of surveillance upon all facets of life in working-class communities – to report on political opinions and movements, trade-union activities, public house and recreational life. ⁷

Finally, the more recent synthetic theory argues that the police had succeeded in finding its niche within the social structure and secured a degree of legitimacy. The police, as Robert Reiner in The Politics of the Police (2010) states, gained ‘increasing acquiescence from substantial sections of the working class, not only as the result of “soft” service activities, but in their “hard” law enforcement and order maintenance function’. ⁸

The case of Irish policing was less straightforward than the English experience. Sources show that though the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) became thoroughly integrated into the social fabric, it never gained the same degree of ‘acquiescence from the working classes’ as the London Force did. Orthodox and revisionist theories tend to oversimplify police development. These theories view the establishment and subsequent development of the organisation in general terms: crime and lawlessness were endangering the proper functioning of a given community. Consequently, centralised policing was then introduced as an antidote to the ailing society. The complexity and variance of the public response demonstrated that the introduction of the new element of control into the familiar social hierarchy was not at all simple or straightforward, or even welcome. According to Godfrey, Williams and Lawrence (History and Crime, 2007): ‘One message from a consideration of the historical evidence, therefore, is that we cannot consider policing as an abstract ideal which can be divorced from the social and, above all, political conditions of the society around it.’ ⁹

The importance of local cultural, social and political norms is demonstrated in David Barrie’s argument, which in essence questions the existence of a certain typology of police as an all-encompassing concept as it injects cultural and civic identities into the discussion thus adding further complexity to the police development theories. Invoking Scotland as an example, he stresses that ‘experiences in neighbouring burghs and the country’s deep-rooted commitment to the civic tradition and the intellectual discourse that emanated from Enlightenment thought’ ¹⁰ were integral in shaping the country’s police model’s specific form, setting it apart from the English experience. ¹¹ Arguably, the growing homogeneity between English and Scottish municipal police throughout the nineteenth century in response to rapid urban expansion obscured the distinct origins and features of the Scottish model. ‘Ideals of improvement, civic virtue and the common good were by no means a product of, or exclusive to, the Scottish Enlightenment’, Barrie maintains, but ‘they were given a Scottish voice and flavour, with Scottish philosophers locating such ideals in civic rather than republican terms’. ¹² In the absence of the indigenous context within the vast body of British crime and policing scholarship there is clear tendency to overgeneralise. Lack of independent Irish municipal policing discussion from contemporary historiography is a principal example of this tendency.

Barrie demonstrates that Scotland, unlike England or Ireland, had no clear divide between the old and the new modes of policing. This observation invariably invites a comparison with the French policing experience, as both the rural maréchaussée of 1536 (the date of the Edict of Paris which some see as the founding date of the maréchaussée) and the police of Paris (the creation of the Paris Police is usually set as 1667 by Colbert, a minister under Louis XIV, though there is debate about this ‘foundation’) ¹³ also remained effectively intact despite the drastic regime changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The notions of civic duty over factional interests and a man’s right to security and liberty, clearly developed from the Enlightenment ideas, were shared principles governing the respective French and Scottish police organisations. Beccaria’s treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) stipulated equitable laws, punishments proportionate to the crime and punishment as a deterrent not retribution, all of which crystallised much of the progressive thinking already developing in France. ¹⁴ ‘An effective system of police contributed to the certainty of an offender’s apprehension and thus to the certainty of punishment; it also ensured respect for the law, thus assisting in the prevention of crime.’ ¹⁵ Both Barrie and Emsley recognised the evidence of Europe-wide ¹⁶ borrowing among the policing organisations. ¹⁷ Civic duty, the pursuit of local needs and interests, and the non-political nature of police authority and law enforcement became key principles behind the new nineteenth-century English and Irish police regulations.

After a series of reforms, the regulations outlined in the 1835 Dublin Police Act reflected the principles derived from the concepts of prevention, utilitarianism and morality postulated by Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham and David Hume, as well as Locke’s treatises of reciprocal obligations. The terms of Locke’s social pact postulated that the citizens agreed to give up some societal freedoms in exchange for protection. In line with this, the new police constable duties were preserving peace, preventing robberies and other felonies, and apprehending offenders against the peace, or, in other words, to enforce the law in return for remuneration footed by the local tax payers, the citizenry. In the early stages of the police organisation, the limitations of authority, a key part of the social contract, was considered to be honoured by few and entirely ignore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. 1780–1880
• 2. 1880–1925
• Backmatter