Police, public spaces and the surveillance state

The strength and cost of the policing developed continuously throughout the nineteenth century. The extension of the function of the police to encompass broad areas of human activity and the growing surveillance of the working-classes in particular led to the pervasive presence of the ‘bobby’ across society and a growing belief that Britain had become a regulatory and policeman state. The police became a central element of state power and, for some historians, ‘domestic missionaries’ charged with bringing order and discipline to the disorderly and robust nature of working-class attitudes and culture. Different sections of the community were united in their initial opposition to the establishment of the Metropolitan Police. Some Whigs and aristocratic Tories saw the centralised police as an attack on the liberties of Englishmen. Radicals commonly regarded the police as a ruling-class instrument that could be used to combat calls by disenfranchised middle- and working-class groups for wider participation in the political system. Parish vestries and magistrates objected to the reduction of their power and influence and some ratepayers opposed the cost of the new force. Yet as the nineteenth century progressed, the work of the police was viewed more favourably by many sections of society.

The poor expected little sympathy from the police and had always been the targets of the law.[1] Several statutory weapons put poor people centre-stage on law enforcement. The Vagrancy Act 1824, the Metropolitan Police Act 1839, police acts and bye-laws, the Habitual Criminals legislation of 1869-1871 combined to give police immense discretionary powers of arrest on suspicion of intent to commit a felony. The police had equal discretionary powers of defining obstruction, breach of the peace, and drunkenness. They could decide whether or not to arrest, whether to bring charges and what charges. Against these powers the poorer people had little defence. Early police orders told constables not to interfere with ‘respectable’ working people. Stop-and-search powers resulted in the arrest of vagrants, suspicious people and, with luck, some actual criminals. This resulted in vulnerable and accessible people being driven into courts. Magistrates convicted or committed them for trial on very little evidence often, little more than police testimony as to character.

In the nineteenth century, many more people had a direct experience of the disciplinary and coercive effects of policing and the law than is widely believed. When arrests or summonses in any one-year are considered as well as convictions, the results are even more startling. In 1861, 1 in 29 of men and 1 in 120 of women were either arrested or summonsed. By 1901, the figures respectively were 1 in 24 and 1 in 123. Summary prosecutions rose by 73% between 1861 and 1901. The immediate threat that the police offered to the social life of the poor had greatly increased in those decades when the policeman state was making its major bureaucratic advances.[2] The Edwardian working-classes were in this sense more closely regulated and supervised than their parents and grandparents. There was inevitable resentment. Robert Roberts wrote of Salford in the first quarter of the twentieth century in these terms

Nobody in our Northern slums every spoke in fond regard of the policeman as ‘social worker’ and ‘handyman of the streets’. The poor in general looked upon him with fear and dislike...The ‘public’ (meaning the middle and upper classes)....held their ‘bobby’ in patronising affection and esteem, that he repaid with due respectfulness; but these sentiments were never shared by the undermass, nor in fact by the working class generally. [3]

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, anti-police riots had expressed this frame of mind forcefully. These confrontations declined after 1850 but the significance of this can be misconstrued. It indicated less the growing acquiescence of an incorporated working-class than the isolation, marginalisation and defeat of its poorest and most turbulent sectors. The decline of their collective opposition to police reflected growing effectiveness of crowd control by the police and the obligation imposed on an increasingly marginalised residuum to come to terms with the permanence of the social order, even when they benefited little from it.

Many working-class communities were becoming more settled and the regularly employed working-class assimilated to bourgeois standards of order and indeed conceptions of criminality. Those in stable employment were distanced from the street economy of social crime and consciousness of the value of property acquired from the wage and from savings assimilated the working-classes to attitudes to crime shared with the middle-classes. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the modern ‘moral panic’ about crime and violence becomes a feature of urban life, especially in London during the garrotting panic of 1862 and the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. The earlier middle-class panic about the lower orders in general was displaced by a fear, shared across the social classes, of the marginal criminal stranger and the middle-class fear of the ‘underclass’.

By 1914, the police had established their authority and presence in the working-class communities not just to deal with crime but for wider task of surveillance and disciplining of working-class daily life. They were part of what Robert Storch called ‘the bureaucracy of official morality’ keeping an eye on the streets, pubs, music halls, etc.

The imposition of the police brought the arm of municipal and state authority directly to bear upon key institutions of daily life in working class neighbourhoods, touching off a running battle with local custom and popular culture which lasted at least until the end of the century...the monitoring and control of the streets, pubs, racecourses, wakes, and popular fetes was a daily function of the ‘new police’...[and must be viewed as]...a direct complement to the attempts of urban middle class elites...to mould a labouring class amenable to new disciplines of both work and leisure.[4]

The police were resented by the poorer sections of the working-classes precisely because of their moralisation strategy.

The streets provided the largest and most accessible forum for the communal life of the poor. It was in the streets that members of the community came together to talk and play, to work and shop, and to observe (and sometimes resist) the incursions of intruders such as school board visitors, rent collectors and police officers... for most of the nineteenth century the poor were intensely hostile to the police, and...this hostility resulted in large measure from resentment at what was regarded as unwarranted, extraneous interference in the life of the community.[5]

Working class life had become regularised and disciplined. The police were an agent of the Victorian middle-classes and their fear of working class exuberance as examples of the behaviour of the ‘dangerous classes’ who needed to be habituated to an ordered and disciplined working life. They were part of mechanisms of social control and by 1914 this task was largely completed, at least for the better-off sections of the working classes.

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[1] Storch, R.D., ‘The policeman as domestic missionary: urban discipline and popular culture in northern England, 1850-80’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 9, (1976), pp. 481-509 and ‘The plague of the blue locusts: police reform and popular resistance in northern England, 1840-57’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 20, (1975), pp. 61-91 and Swift, R., ‘Urban policing in early Victorian England, 1835-86: a reappraisal’, History, Vol. 73, (1988), pp. 211-237.

[2] See, for example, Bramham, Peter, ‘Policing and the police in an industrial town: Keighley 1856-1870’, Local Historian, Vol. 36, (2006), pp. 175-184, and Sheldon, Nicola, ‘Policing Truancy: Town versus Countryside: Oxfordshire 1871-1903’, History of Education Researcher, Vol. 77, (2006), pp. 15-24.

[3] Roberts, R., The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, (Manchester University Press), 1971, p. 77.

[4] Ibid, Storch, R., ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary; Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England 1850-1880’, p. 481.

[5] Benson, J., The Working Class in Britain 1850-1939, (Longmans), 1989, p. 132

Being a policeman

By 1900, working as a police constable meant a steady job with low income but attractive benefits. Employment was independent of the business cycle and pay was not linked to individual performance. Such work was in demand and only one-in-five applicants were accepted. In the Metropolitan Police during the nineteenth century, only about 10% of the force was born in London. This reflected the preference of senior officers for country men because they were regarded as healthier, tougher and more willing to take orders and they did not have the conflicting loyalties exhibited by some Londoners who policed their own neighbourhood. Initial recruits to the Metropolitan Police were between the ages of 18 and 35 years but as policing became more attractive recruitment was limited to those between 20 and 27. Most were still labourers though the number of recruits from non-manual backgrounds increased, a process aided by the increasing status of the job and with the provision of pensions from 1890, its job security.[1]

The early constables were usually recruited from the agricultural labour force or from the army, were paid low wages and were often quick to leave the force. Men who left on their own will tended to be from more skilled occupations, with a background of better work before joining the force. In the early twentieth century, though, economic pressures encouraged more of these men to join the force. Veterans tended to be men from unskilled or semi-skilled backgrounds, for whom the police service was an avenue of upward mobility. Although men from poorer backgrounds remained longest in the police, those from better-off backgrounds who did remain were most likely to rise through the system into the higher ranks. Others were dismissed for drunkenness. A parliamentary select committee in 1834 heard that 80% of dismissals were for drunkenness.

Initial formal training was about three to five weeks by 1900 and about half that in 1850. Until the early-twentieth century, most training was military drill for purposes of crowd control, with only brief training dedicated to behaviour on the beat and this was largely remembering laws and instructions.What counted was the informal training learned on the beat and the habits picked up from established officers. Isolated by uniform, discipline and function from the working-class communities and upholding ‘order‘ in the face of chronic hostility and abuse from their targets, career policemen developed a distinct occupational culture with its own values and standards that strengthened bonds between fellow officers. The police generated their own, often discretionary, operational standards on the streets, passed on via ‘apprenticeship’ from officer to officer, that were often less respectable and at odds with those of the rulebooks and the letter of the law.[2]

Some degree of tension between the command structure and the ordinary station-men was endemic in British policing. It stemmed from grievances about working conditions. In 1848 a number of constables petitioned their superiors that their pay was not sufficient to support a family. In 1872, when over 3,000 constables and sergeants turned up for a meeting to discuss demands for a pay rise. Senior officers at Scotland Yard were so concerned that a pay rise was quickly granted but later 109 men involved in the action were sacked. There were abortive Metropolitan Police strikes in 1879 and 1890. In 1890, there was n attempt to form the Metropolitan Police Union, but granting of pensions removed a major source of complaint. Since the police were used against industrial unrest the fact that officers were appropriating the language of trade unionism was viewed as a potential threat to discipline and in conflict with the demands of the job. A further attempt to unionise occurred in September 1913 with the resurrection of the Metropolitan Police Union that the following year changed its name to the National Union of Police & Prison Officers. A police order was issued in December 1913 threatening the dismissal of officers associated with the union.

Bridgnorth Borough Police Force c. 1880

In addition, there was the remoteness of commissioners and chief constables, often trained in the military or colonial services, from the lower-rank notions of ‘good policing’ that focused on detection rather than deterrence, action rather than service, physical engagement rather than administration.[3] There were sporadic campaigns against their corruption and malpractice. These surfaced during the trials of 1877 and of Inspector White in 1880 and during the public disquiet that resulted in the issuing of Judges’ Rules on interrogation and arrest procedures in 1912. The 1906-1908 Royal Commission was initiated over the alleged wrongful arrest of Mme D’Angely, a lady of dubious reputation but a lady nonetheless. In this case, the police made the mistake of doing tactless things to articulate people. [4]

A high number of complaints were brought against the Metropolitan Police in their early years. Between 1831 and 1840, the average number of complaints against the police was 411 per annum. The number of complaints was at its highest, at 511, in 1840. Of these, 273 were made against individual officers; the remainder concerned the small strength of the force and the frequency of robberies. The 1906-1908 Royal Commission upon the Duties of the Metropolitan Police found that only nineteen of the complaints it invited were worth examining and only a few proven satisfactorily. The impoverished public that did not matter but might have known better about police malpractice did not speak out; when it did, hostile questioning discredited it. What is clear from the evidence of the Royal Commission is the long-standing system of wheeling and dealing between police and underworld that had its own unwritten rules and at which command officers had no choice but to connive. Blind eyes were turned, favours exacted and reciprocated, informers employed, bribes exchanged and some brutality was standard practice. Relations between police and law-breakers were necessarily close and it would be surprising then as now, if they were not also contaminating. Witnesses before the 1878 confidential detective committee drew a thin veil over the implications of detectives ‘using’ a certain class of people among the criminal class from whom to get information by small payments or other means. Officials recurrently compromised in their efforts to police the streets.

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[1] Martin, John and Gail Wilson, Gail, The Police, A Study in Manpower: Evolution of the Service in England and Wales, 1829-1965, (Heinemann), 1969 and Shpayer-Makov, H., The Making of a Policeman: A Social History of a Labour Force in Metropolitan London, 1829-1914, (Ashgate), 2002.

[2] Taylor, David, ‘The standard of living of career policemen in Victorian England: the evidence of a provincial borough force’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 12, (1991), pp. 108-131 and Lowe, W.J., ‘The Lancashire Constabulary, 1845-1870: the social and occupational function of a Victorian police force’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 4, (1983), pp. 41-62.

[3] Wall, David, The Chief Constables of England and Wales: a socio-legal history of a criminal justice elite, (Ashgate), 1998, pp. 13-86.

[4] Clapson, Mark and Emsley, Clive, ‘Street, Beat, and Respectability: The Culture and Self-Image of the Late Victorian and Edwardian Urban Policeman’, Criminal Justice History, Vol. 16, (2002), pp. 107-131.