Describe Law and Order in the Nineteenth Century.

This essay will focus on law and order in the late nineteenth century. I will look at why Britain needed a police force, who set it up, and what it was like. I will also examine the developments the police made in the nineteenth century, and draw comparisons between the police in the 1800s and the police nowadays.

In the nineteenth century London was an extremely different place to how it is now. There were very distinguished boundaries between the rich and the poor. Most upper class Londoners had no idea about the way that thousands of impoverished people lived in London. The East End was one of the poorest areas in England. The streets were packed with the poor and homeless, and criminals and prostitutes were everywhere. Pickpockets, some still only children, stole things from people’s pockets and sold them just so they could feed themselves. Prostitutes were also a problem on the streets in the nineteenth century, although they were seen a normal thing to a lot of the people in the East End. The East End wasn’t a particularly nice place to live at the beginning of the nineteenth century but it would gradually get better over the next century.

In the early nineteenth century, before 1829, the vast majority of British towns and cities didn’t have a police force. These towns and cities used an old system that remained unchanged since the Middle ages. This system was run by Justices of the Peace (JPs), who were chosen by the King. The JPs would choose Constables to help them, and the Constables would then choose watchmen to assist them. Not much is known about how effective this system was, but it is thought that it was good for preventing theft and disturbances as the watchmen and constables would have known all the local trouble-makers. Since 75% of all recorded crime in the nineteenth century was petty theft, this system worked quite well. However when riots and protests started to occur this old policing system was somewhat less that effective. In 1780, when the Gordon Riots broke out and people were breaking into Newgate Jail and attacking the Bank of England, the system failed completely and the army had to be called in. The army had no training in this kind of crowd dispersal, but it was the only way of restoring the peace. In 1819, at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, a crowd had assembled to listen to a speech about the reform of Parliament. Local Magistrates wanted to disperse the crowd and, after the special constables and two detachments of a volunteer cavalry had failed, the army was called in to clear the area. Many people were killed and injured because the army couldn’t disperse the crowd peacefully. After that it became obvious that something needed to be done about Britain’s law and order system.

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In 1800 there were two police forces in London, both of which were in London. ‘The Bow Street Runners’ was set up in 1749 as an attachment to the Bow Street magistrate’s court; the Thames River police that patrolled the river in boats was set up in 1798 and is still in operation today. The rest of Britain was still using the old regime of JPs, constables and watchmen. That was until Sir Robert Peel stepped in and put an end to Britain’s Law and Order problems.

Sir Robert Peel was born in Lancashire in 1788, became England’s Home Secretary ...

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Sir Robert Peel was born in Lancashire in 1788, became England’s Home Secretary in 1822 and established the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. He also altered Britain’s Penal Code, lowering the amount of crimes punishable by death. The idea of the Metropolitan Police Force was to carry out the jobs of the constables and watchmen; Police constables were to patrol the streets, keep order and deter crime. Since there were no detective or forensics to solve crime and only way to catch a criminal was to catch them red handed, it was important for constables to be constantly vigilant. Police constables in the nineteenth century received very little training – no where near as much training police officers receive to today – because most of the money was spent on uniforms and the government wanted the out on the streets quickly. They spent a lot of time practising military drills and had to learn most of the skills they needed on the job. A constable’s job was to walk the streets of London for hours on end without any breaks, prevent minor crimes and generally keep order on the streets. The new police force was also created to deal with big disturbances like riots, and they did a better job of it than the army ever did. The police constables were armed with batons and, in particularly rough areas, cutlasses. So, unlike the army, they had no firearms, which instantly made them more popular than the army ever was. The police were meant to seem very smart and with great authority, so their uniform was very important. The blue tailcoat and top hat was designed to be look simple yet smart. Some forces took so much pride in the appearance of their constables, that they made them wear their uniform even when they were off duty. But the effort to look smart wasn’t really noticed by the public because they were more concerned about catching murderers, especially when the Ripper murders started!

At first the new police system was greatly disliked by many people, this was partly due to the fact that the new police constables wore a red uniform. The original red uniform was thought too similar to that of the army, whom the public distrusted, so the uniform was changed to a blue tailcoat and a top hat. Their method of crowd control was another reason as to why the public disliked the police. Baton charges were a common crowd control tactic and often ended in death of both constables and civilians. This is only one of the many ways in which the new police force was not very effective, even though they were somewhat more effective than the army were. Another reason for the ineffectiveness of the police was drunkenness. Police constables would often go on duty drunk or drink whilst on duty, this caused massive problems because it meant that they would be unable to effectively deal with disturbances. To make sure constables knew it was unacceptable to drink on the job, any officer caught drunk would be immediately dismissed - in 1847 a constable was dismissed for drunkenness after only four hours of service.

The setting up of the Metropolitan Police Force was not solely the cause of the revolution in law and order, this was because this system of policing was imitated in other parts of the country. The Rural Constabulary Act of 1839 allowed the magistrates of each county decide whether or not to set up a police force, but by 1855 twenty-two counties still had no police force. So in 1856 Parliament passed the County and Borough Police act which meant that all counties and boroughs that hadn’t all ready formed a constabulary, were required by law to do so. The government provided an annual grant of a quarter of the money that they needed to run the force and buy uniforms. But the grant was issued only to the forces that had been awarded their certificate of efficiency. A lot of the police forces, mainly the ones that were forced to open by the government, were run in very different ways to the London forces. In some places the police were used as lifesavers by the rivers, and in others they were used to collect tolls from traders. Since these weren’t the intended uses for the police, the forces that miss used and abused the power they had would not be issued with a certificate of efficiency. The County and Borough Police act meant that they had to keep the police forces running, which encouraged them to work efficiently so that they could get their grant.

By the late nineteenth century there had been major developments in the police already. One of these was the introduction of plain-clothes detectives in 1842, although the Detective Department wasn’t actually set up until 1869. The public thought that plain-clothes officers were a bad idea because they would be unidentifiable, but that was the reason why they were wanted. If public didn’t know that they were police officers, they would give them information or commit an offence in front of them. So that it was easier to catch criminals red handed, which was they only real way to catch a criminal at the time. The worry that the Home Office had was that the detectives would become to friendly with criminals and end up corrupt. In fact, many of the early detectives were corrupt and the corruption often went unnoticed until a major crime had been committed. Despite much speculation about the detectives, the amount of arrested made rose considerably with more detectives working. By hiring only 80 more detectives, nearly 5,000 more arrests were made. The significance of footprints was learned in the early nineteenth century but apart from that, the methods of detectives made very little progress in the nineteenth century. Their main method was simply to follow suspicious characters, which was pretty much what the constables did. However, progress was made in forensic investigation towards the end of the late nineteenth century. Detectives learned the importance of collecting and examining evidence found at crime scenes. In 1816 matching the impressions found in mud with a labourer’s trousers was how police solved a murder case. This was the starting point of forensic science. In 1884 another murder was solved using forensic science, this time by matching a piece of paper found in the victims wound to a piece of paper found in the pocket of John Toms.

Significant changes in the law and order system were made in the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century there were no actual police forces and the relied on unofficial watchmen to catch criminals in the act, but by 1900 there was a police force in every county and borough in the country and major developments in crime solving had been made. The new police force solved many problems, including problems with riot control, and made huge leaps toward methods of crime solving that we use today. The nineteenth century was probably the most significant era in the development of law and order. With the events that took place in the 1800’s our law and order system would be very different and no where near as efficient as it is today.