The news papers and media would cover them up as best as possible by making the police sound great and them not doing any harm.
Also on the other hand, people thought police were defending order more than solving crimes. The police were there to stop bad behaviour, prostitutes drunks etc but never to stop crime. Why was this? This was because of the simple fact that in most cases they couldn’t and only extreme crimes were sent to court.
The police did in fact help London become more orderly but this just made the number in burglaries go up. Why was this? This was because criminals new they could get away with it as it was not a job for the metropolitan to catch them. Even attacks on police were happening such as the one who got attacked from behind and the attacker got a year’s sentence leaving the police man disabled for life. This was probably the work of a poor person because if it was a rich man, he would have gotten away with it, and poorer people were punished more. There would be no point in taking a rich person to court if you were poor because you would loose. This proves that rich people were favoured over the poor. Cases such as these were sent to court, but only serious cases. If they were petty things, people would know they would loose and would never bother.
Courts had seemed to be quite a problem too. Cases were only supposed to last minutes, when they lasted over an hour this was considered very unusual. The jury did stay in the same room when they made their decision on a verdict. This would have caused big problems and could have possibly caused death as the criminal would have known who said he was guilty and then he could have latter on got his own back. If a person was found guilty they would be sent to prison.
Prisons were small, tight and confined spaces. They were made to work; this was a way of entertaining them and keeping them busy. In 1850, two new prison regimes had become adopted in British prisons. This was to make criminals think about their crime and change them into a better person. This did indeed drive people insane leading up to some cases of suicide. Some criminals did change and picked up skills like gardening and wood work. In the past when life was given as a sentence, it meant life. If a child at the age of 10 or under was sexually touched by an adult they would be arrested, but if a child over the age of 10 was sexually touched, it was known as ok. Why was it ok to sexually touch a child with an age difference of one year? This has an answer in itself and that answer is that children obviously didn’t have many rites which meant children we looked down upon by adults.
By the latest of the nineteenth century the metropolitan police were given training, but very little. They would base their decisions of people from what they looked like, rather on their past experiences. One of the reasons for trouble was they no scientifically help such as dusting for fingerprints. New police men were just expected to pick up the work and people were lazy for not teaching the job right and even with training they still seemed to be no good. And this is one of the biggest reasons for trouble for law and order in the late nineteenth century.
