Organisation of the English Police Force

How the Police were organised

• Each county had the own force during the 18th century, and within each county many towns and cities had their own separate forces. The home secretary in Westminster had little control of the forces outside of London. These were normally looked over by watch committees (local politicians and law professionals monitored the work of the police forces).
• The Metropolitan Force reported directly to the home secretary who was automatically appointed the head of the force. In 1889, the London County Council discussed taking over the force, and the government did not want to give up its relationship with the force as it feared it might fall under the influence of socialist members.
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The Force

• Manpower:
• Insufficient manpower made police business more difficult
• 1885 - the Metropolitan Police Force was made up of 13,319 men
• The population of Britain was 5 million
• Only 1,383 were available for duty at any one time
• Official Statistics:
• From 2009, records relating to 1.4 million criminal trials in England and Wales in the 19th century became available online (National Archive)
• The Home Office Archive details the growth in the detective force from 216 (1878) to 294 (1883)
• The number of arrests these detectives made rose from 13,000 to 18,000

Police and Court Records

• Statistics that come from individual police stations are great for analysis and understanding crime and punishment. However, one has to realise they can be misleading too. Further, freedom licences (release papers for prisoners) highlight convictions and punishments but police stations do not record them. There is extensive recordings of many of the court cases; people committing crimes at Whitechapel were tried at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey).
• Memoirs and reports:
• Police memoirs are a useful means to obtain information. Two Lancashire police, James Bent and Richard Jervis, recorded long accounts of the times as policemen. There is a tendency to present information in only a positive viewpoint when you are writing an account about your life. However, Bent and Jervis provide a detailed picture of work in north-west England in the late 19th century. They demonstrate that violence between police and locals was common.
• Recording Crime:
• It appears from statistical reports that the crime rate decreased at the end of the 19th century. Possibly, criminals thought improvements in the police force meant the likelihood of being caught was more realistic. However, when working with data as a historian one has to be careful to conclusion drawn from statistics. Adrian Gray (2006) warned that historians need to be aware of variations in the collection of data. Moreover, he notes that improvements in the police force could lead to more arrests, but all of this happened at the same time as the state became more regulatory (making up more laws which people could break).

The Media

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• The most convenient means to monitoring events is through local and national newspapers. However, it often seems that the editors of newspapers are more concerned about getting a good story out rather than the facts. This is evident in sensationalist newspapers such as the Illustrated Police News.
• Papers such as this attracted competition like the Police Review in the 1860s that aimed to challenge the negative views put forward of local policemen.
• At the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, James Keating (Superintendent of Bethnal Green) was interviewed about his own division's challenges for an article for the Evening Argus. Keating only described one serious incident and left out a number of significant events. This details why historians need other data, such as police station records, to provide a holistic picture of crime and punishment in the 19th century.

Criminal Investigation Department

• The main task of the Metropolitan Police was crime prevention and a detective department was further added to the force in 1842. However, that department was ineffective and ill-prepared to deal with crime for many years.
• A serious police scandal in 1877, led to Howard Vincent, a barrister, being appointed to establish the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). It was set up with 216 officers in 1878. Even with this greater distinction between crime detection and prevention, corruption continued within the force.
• Commissioner Charles Warren:
• After strikes and public distrust regarding government policy, the home secretary made Charles Warren, a former general, as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner in 1886. However, people still believed the police were just the government in uniform. Warren called in the army to quash protesters on Bloody Sunday. Further, people felt the police were just oppressing the poorer classes.
• When the Jack the Ripper murders caused mass terror in Whitechapel, Warren paid the price for the inability of the police to catch the killer and was forced out as the Commissioner.