This article first appeared in the October issue of Total Politics
The current debate about our police service should include a reminder that Sir Robert Peel only managed to get his Metropolitan Police Act through Parliament in 1829 after a lot of political manoeuvring. The debates were not really about the need to do something about crime and disorder. London’s streets had not been properly under control for many years. The mob could wreak havoc, sometimes for days at a time, as in the Gordon Riots of 1780. If the army was called in to control a demonstration, there was the risk of a repeat of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, which had left about a dozen dead and several hundred injured. Crime was rampant, and even when those able to complain to the Bow Street magistrates were successful, stolen property was often returned to its owners for a reward, without the offenders being punished by the courts. People wanted peace on the streets and crime to be dealt with, but often disagreed about the methods of achieving it.
Our forefathers expressed mistrust of what a uniformed body of police might do to society, and its cost. They worried about ‘unconstitutional’ changes, and ‘fairness’. The City of London, which had its own more organised watchmen, did not want to be part of the new policing arrangements. Magistrates, such as those at Bow Street, had been used to directing officers to investigate crimes from their own courthouse, as well as organising patrols on horseback and foot, so they also resisted the idea of any new police organisation. Comparisons were made with other countries. There was widespread opposition to any system that might be imported from France in the form of using ‘spies’. Some of the vestries, accustomed to paying small amounts to elderly watchmen for their policing, complained bitterly about the cost.
Passing a law through Parliament is one thing: implementing it and maintaining public support is quite another. So, having got his law through, Peel acted quickly, not only to deal with problems on the streets, but also, one suspects, to make sure that memories of the issues and his political advantage did not ebb away. Within three weeks, he had appointed John Wray as the first Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District. Wray bought an empty house in Whitehall Place, converted it into offices and made a police station and recruiting centre from the servant quarters that backed on to Scotland Yard. He also acquired other police stations, ordered uniforms and equipment, and levied financial contributions from the local vestries to finance the new force. It was a triumph of rapid administration.
Peel appointed two commissioners, Colonel Charles Rowan from the army, and Richard Mayne, a barrister. They interviewed and selected 3,000 officers, divided them up into seven divisions, and appointed a superintendent in charge of each. It was a very lean command structure, by today’s standards.
The new uniforms were civilian dress, top hats and swallowtail coats, rather than red military-style tunics – the new units were not to be an army reliant upon force. Rowan had experience of deploying small patrols in a criss-cross pattern in the Peninsular War, so this became the inspiration for the 'beats', the patrols of individual police officers at set intervals. The whole force was concentrated on preventive patrolling. Rowan was familiar with a recent, more enlightened way of enforcing army discipline, where success was measured not by the number of floggings recorded, but by the absence of such punishments in the regimental records. So it was the absence of crime that became the main aim, rather than the number of arrests achieved. The reassurance of ‘bobbies on the beat’ is still strongly valued today, but measuring police efficiency has become far more opaque.
The first officers were duly marched out on to their beats three months after the Act had been given Royal Assent, and were firmly reminded that they were to act as public servants, aiming to win the respect of London’s sceptical, if not downright hostile, citizens. It was the start of the doctrine of ‘policing by consent’, which emphasises the fundamental importance of public agreement to the manner in which they are controlled by the law if policing is to be effective. This also applies to minority communities, and is no less true abroad. No country can maintain effective policing if its government is not recognised as legitimate.
An example of how the public viewed the police in this period was the 1833 Coldbath Fields Riot, when the National Union of the Working Classes, an organisation with republican sympathies, held a protest rally in Clerkenwell. The home secretary, Lord Melbourne, ordered the commissioners to stop the meeting, but the latter did not think they could legally prevent the people from assembling in the first place. The police tried to negotiate a peaceful compromise, but later moved in to disperse the meeting. Disorder broke out, during which an officer, PC Robert Culley, was killed. The coroner’s inquest jury insisted on bringing in a contentious verdict of justifiable homicide, on the basis that the police intervention had been "ferocious, brutal and unprovoked". PC Culley’s funeral was marred by the presence of a jeering mob. The jury disapproved of the demonstration, but deplored what they saw as the use of unnecessary force by the police.
From those early days of policing, rioting has often been a perverse form of furthering a grievance regardless of the counter-productive damage it does to the communities involved. The flash point of the initial disorder is soon overtaken by an angry form of mass hysteria, with people responding to a common passion and excitement when the social norms of behaviour disappear. Looting and arson can take place with a suspension of normal behaviour equivalent to the purloining of cargo from wrecked ships. So the consent given by the community for being policed is not always consistent, and can change rapidly in uncertain situations.
The tradition of negotiating the everyday police–public relationship in return for the public’s support for using force when required has been reasonably effective for many years, but it depends on the nature of our communities and the depth of consensus about commonly-held responsibilities and values.
Crime prevention being the Metropolitan Police’s primary object, there was some logic in the fact that for the first 13 years of its existence, the Met had no detectives. Most reported murders were solved, including the death of Lord William Russell in 1840, although The Times deplored the fact that the police had not made an arrest by the second day of the investigation. There was no way in which anybody at the Met had the inclination or means to ensure that the full facts of their investigation were quietly passed to the gentlemen of the press. Indeed, the first chief clerk of Scotland Yard was dismissed for leaking information to the press within a month of the creation of the new Met force. In April 1842, The Times pursued a [public] call for a detective force when the police failed to catch Daniel Good, who went on the run after a murder in Roehampton and was not caught for two weeks.
The campaign for introducing detectives, and the police’s lack of communication with the press, came together the following month when a man shot at the 23-year-old Queen Victoria as she rode down Constitution Hill in her carriage. The culprit, John Francis, had even been seen in the vicinity with a gun on the previous day, but no action had been taken. He was arrested by PC William Trounce of A Division. You can imagine the press interest in covering this story, and the frustration of the reporter for the Evening Standard of 31 May, 1842, who complained about the ‘strict injunctions’ given by the police to prevent witnesses presenting any details of the story to the newspapers.
How the police should investigate threats against the Queen was the final argument, and The Times won its case. Within a month, a detective branch had been formed at Scotland Yard. The home secretary agreed to fund an increase in beat officers so that London’s patrolling strength would not be compromised. In modern times, the proliferation of officers specialising in investigating particular crimes, from domestic violence to phone hacking, has invariably been drawn from the overall patrolling strength.
With the advent of detectives, journalists had a wonderful new angle on which to base their crime reporting. Not all newspaper stories were full of adulation about the success of clever detectives tracking down the perpetrators of atrocious crimes. There were corruption scandals, such as the Trial of the Detectives in 1877, which caught the majority of the senior detectives based at Scotland Yard, and the infamous collusion of CID officers, as a ‘firm within a firm’, was exposed by The Times in the 1970s.
Newspaper coverage has always relied on finding an extra angle to a story or some exclusive information, but gradually the police became more professional at releasing the facts of their investigations to the media. The first press officer employed by Scotland Yard was Percy Fearnley, who had been recruited by Commissioner Sir Harold Scott in 1945. Since then the Press Bureau has become a sophisticated 24-hour operation, pushing out information to feed the enormous number of news organisations that want the latest details about crime and policing in London. Without them, the operational officers would be swamped. It's in nobody’s interest for false stories and unrealistic analysis to be published.
Scotland Yard received a letter in 1948 from J Arthur Rank, asking for co-operation in making a film about police work. The project became The Blue Lamp and then Dixon of Dock Green, in which the fictional George Dixon set the tone for police-public relations. Promoting good, realistic and professional communication about police work at all levels is more effective than anything discussed over a dinner table with newspaper executives.
Alan Moss runs a website offering information about policing in London: www.historybytheyard.co.uk
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