Police constables received very little training in the late nineteenth century and often learnt their trade “ on the job”. Police constables worked seven days a week and up to fourteen hours a day. In London in the 1870’s and 1880’s, a beat during daytime was seven and a half miles long whilst at night it was two miles.
Pick pocketing was rife in London in the late nineteenth century. Pickpockets were generally around the age of 6-10 years old and had normally been brought up in a life of poverty. Many of these children were taught to steal by their friends in the penny lodging houses where they lived, others were taught by professional “trainer of thieves”. It was widely believed that from children such as these sprang the professional criminal. A professional criminal could be an expert pickpocket, a house breaker, a mugger or even a murderer.
If they were arrested in the street by a police officer, the youngsters were known to make an extreme commotion, screaming “Let me go” and stubbornly lying in the gutter, until a crowd of angry bystanders would assemble and demand that the policeman “cease his bullying”.
Night was the main time when crime took place in London. When thieves and pickpockets mingled with the evening crowds of all classes. The most scandalous place in London was said to be The Haymarket, which linked Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly. The Haymarket was the focal point of prostitution in London. There was said to be many French, German and Belgian street walkers, in addition to natives born ones. In the small streets leading of the Haymarket there were many “Houses of accommodation where prostitutes could rent rooms by the hour instead of returning to their seedy lodgings. Some of the girls lived with ”bullies” or “fancy men” for convenience or protection.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century there were many changes and developments in the police force.
In 1842, the Metropolitan Police Force appointed the first ever detectives this consisted of two inspectors and six sergeants. There was a great deal of opposition at the time to the appointments of detectives. It was not until the 1860’s that detective work began to be organised. In 1878 work began to be organised. In 1878 the Detective department was reorganised and the Criminal Intelligence Department (CID) was set up. In 1879 instructions for dealing with murder cases ordered investigating officers that the ‘the body must not be moved, nor anything about it or in the room or place interfered with, and the public must be excluded’. There was a shortage of detectives in London compared to other major cities. As time went by detectives developed their methods in order to catch criminals. Forensic progress was made and in 1884 John Toms was convicted of murder because the torn paper used for his pistol wadding matched the paper recovered from wound in the head of the victim. In 1892, the Alphonse Bertillon method of identification was adopted; this involved measuring parts of the human body on the assumption that no two individuals would be the same.
Despite the improvements in police forces in the 1880’s the reputation of the police forces in Britain was hit very hard by a number of serious incidents. Such as ‘Bloody Sunday on 13th November 1887. The Metropolitan Police charged a demonstration by the Metropolitan Radical Federation and were backed up by squadrons of Life Guards and two companies of foot quards. The main results of these actions were demands in the House of Commons for inquiries into police actions and a general belief that the police were not acting impartially.
They were now seen as favouring the middle and upper classes against the poor and working classes. This made the work of the police in poor and working class even more difficult. One of the most difficult areas of all was the East End of London.
There were many different opinions of the police force in the second half of the nineteenth century, this is shown very clearly in articles from ‘Punch’ and the ‘Times’. The positive view of the police force was in Punch who wrote in 1851 that, ‘the police are beginning to take that place in the affections of people that the soldiers and sailors used to occupy. In these happier times of peace the blue coats, the defenders of order are becoming the national favourites’. Meanwhile at the same time the Times wrote, ‘Amid the bustle of Piccadilly or the roar of Oxford Streets, P.C.W 59 stalks along an institution rather than a man’. The reputation of the policeman as the ‘friendly bobby’ was not shared in many working class districts in London and other towns and cities. The Metropolitan Police frequently went on the beat in poorer areas armed with cutlasses, and attacks on policemen and even murders were not uncommon.
Statistics show that the Metropolitan Police force in 1885 was made up of 13,319 men, while the population of London at the time was 5,225,069. Most surprisingly, however of the 13,319 men, only 1,383 officers were available for duty at any one time. In the 1880’s police forces in Britain were very much in their infancy. Almost all of the methods of tackling and solving crimes that we now take for ranted were unknown. Police work was mostly concerned with the prevention of crime by officers on the beat. But even very regular patrols could not stop a determined criminal.