Confusion over the role of the army and the police lead to efforts to distance the Met from the army. The British people weren’t fond of the army because of the violent methods they dealing with riots. Met changed their uniform to blue because it was worn by the navy who were seen as national heroes. The police force dismissed the use of defence weaponary.
The Met’s reputation at the time was bad. The police force reinforced their reputation of being unpopular due to methods used for crowd control, such as the Baton charge. Two problems for giving the force a bad name was; early recruits were dismissed for drunkenness and the use of the Baton charge during riots lead to people dying. An example of an event that highlighted the publics’ repulsion of the use of the force was the death of P.C Culley. The murder was justified and the killer was let off.
The Met’s public image and reputation during the 19th century was mixed. Negative views were caused because the working class didn’t trust the police due to the use of force during demonstrations. The positive view was that they were dealing with street crime. The role of the Met was to prevent crime and not solve them, which lead to some crimes decreasing whilst others increased. For example street crimes went down and burglaries had risen. Policing at the time wasn’t effective because there was no immediate or effective change. There was poor organisation as the Met was not being of use throughout London. The police weren’t trained to solve crime, which was a big issue.
The Met introduced detectives in 1842. Detective work became more organised when methods were introduced to deal with criminal offences. The initial concerns were the corruption of the detectives and three out of four were found guilty of this. The problem improved when the CID (Criminal intelligence department) was introduced. Detective methods were introduced to help solve more crimes. The use of evidence from criminals introduced early forensics, which meant detectives were able to match evidence to criminals’ objects. The method of identification made it easier for detectives to identify criminals, e.g. finger printing and Bertillon methods. These were two major changes that led to the introduction of forensics. Police procedures were introduced to deal with crime scenes. These were important changes that took place because more crimes were being solved than the early 19th century. Each method was unique as they built up to introduce forensics, which was the key to solve major crimes. However the methods took a slow process to develop, there was still not enough detectives and police training was quite poor.
Police in the 19th century only received little training. They needed to have good behaviour and a personal appearance. Most forces trained while working. Hours were long for example sometimes the police had to work fourteen hours for seven days a week. They had to walk several hours a day. The training received was inefficient as it mainly involved military drill. It didn’t allow them to do their job effectively because many crimes were still not dealt with as inspections focused on parades rather than police work.
The use of the force was frowned upon by a number of incidents. The baton charge was used throughout most of the 19th century. The public didn’t like this method as it led to demonstrations. One such incident was ‘Bloody Sunday’ which occurred on 13th November 1887. The police were seen as favouring the middle and upper class rather than the poor and working class. Overall not much change was made for dealing with crime. The expected role of the force was to prevent and not solve crime. Lack of training for the force meant some crimes were increasing. Their poor reputation from methods used to deal with riots to drunkenness made them even more unpopular. The Met had brought about little change to make law and order more successful.
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