Policing in London

How Suspects were Apprehended

The period from 1674 to 1913 witnessed the transformation of policing in London from a system
that relied on private individuals and part-time officials, through the development of salaried
officials and semi-official "thief-takers", to a modern professional police system. In the process
the mechanisms by which the people tried at the Old Bailey were identified and apprehended
was radically transformed, and ultimately brought under the control of the state.
The Role of Private Individuals Before the Police

Throughout the period 1674 to 1829 many victims of crime were able to identify and apprehend
the culprits before contacting a constable or a justice of the peace to secure their arrest. Those
who witnessed a felony were legally obliged to apprehend those responsible for the crime, and
to notify a constable or justice of the peace if they heard that a crime had taken place.
Moreover, if summoned by a constable to join the "hue and cry", inhabitants were required to
join in the pursuit of any suspected felon.
Although these legal obligations were rarely enforced, Londoners continued to help apprehend
suspected criminals. As the Proceedings frequently illustrate, cries of "stop thief!" or "murder!"
from victims often successfully elicited the assistance of passers-by. This sense of individual
responsibility for law enforcement was eroded over the eighteenth century, however, as
increasing numbers of men were paid to carry out this task. For example, victims frequently
paid thief-takers to locate and apprehend suspects. Moreover, the difficulties the authorities had
in identifying and apprehending criminals led them to offer rewards to those whose arrests led to
the conviction of serious criminals, and pardons to accomplices who were willing to turn in their
confederates. Increasingly, ordinary Londoners left the task of securing criminals to people who
were motivated to do so by the prospect of financial or other rewards.
Back to Top
Introductory Reading
Constables and the Night Watch
Constables were required to apprehend anyone accused of a felony, and bring them before a
justice of the peace. They also had a general responsibility to keep the peace, but there was no
expectation that they should investigate or prosecute crimes. Night watchmen patrolled the
streets between 9 or 10 pm until sunrise, and were expected to examine all suspicious

characters. In the City of London, daytime patrols were conducted by the City Marshall and the
beadles. Like the night watch, their primary responsibilities were to apprehend minor offenders
and to act as a deterrent against more serious offences. Over the course of the eighteenth
century, however, the arrangements by which men served as constables and watchmen
changed significantly, in ways which altered how felons were detected and apprehended.

Traditionally, householders served in the office of constable by appointment or rotation. During

their year of office they performed their duties part-time alongside their normal employment.
Similarly, householders were expected to serve by rotation on the nightly watch. From the late
seventeenth century, however, many householders avoided these obligations by hiring deputies
to serve in their place. As this practice increased, some men were able to make a living out of
acting as deputy constables or as paid night watchmen. In the case of the watch, this procedure
was formalised in many parts of London by the passage of "Watch Acts", which replaced
householders' duty of service by a tax levied specifically for the purpose of hiring full-time
watchmen. Some voluntary prosecution societies also hired men to patrol their areas.
The advent of salaried constables and watchmen meant that several characteristics of a modern
police force were already present in eighteenth-century London. The streets were regularly
patrolled by men whose job it was to prevent crime and arrest suspects. These men walked
regular beats, and some wore uniforms. The evidence from the Proceedings suggests that
men employed in these roles increasingly spoke self-consciously in terms of their duty. While
they were more experienced than the part-time householders they replaced, because they were
low paid and the job was of a low status, they were not necessarily more respected or more
effective. Indeed, there were concerns that some paid watchmen and constables developed too
close a relationship with the underworld they were supposed to police, and many believed that
such officers were corrupt. This was especially true of those officers who became, or were
linked to, the practice of thief-taking.
Back to Top
Introductory Reading
Thief-Takers
Concern about high levels of crime in London in the late seventeenth century led the
government to adopt the practice of offering substantial rewards for apprehending and
convicting those guilty of specific serious crimes, such as highway robbery and coining. This
practice expanded in the eighteenth century, and was supplemented by individual victims of
crime who offered rewards for the return of their stolen goods. Both practices were facilitated by
the development of daily newspapers in the early eighteenth century, which allowed information
about such rewards to be widely advertised. The introduction of these financial rewards
fundamentally altered the character of criminal justice in the metropolis.

Thief-takers used their knowledge of the criminal underworld to profit from both types of
rewards. They negotiated between thieves and the victims of thefts to return stolen goods in
exchange for a fee. They also occasionally used their insider knowledge to inform on criminals
and prosecute them at the Old Bailey in order collect the substantial rewards offered by the
state. This second activity arguably facilitated the administration of criminal justice, but the more
corrupt thief-takers went further: they blackmailed criminals with threats of prosecution if they
failed to pay protection money. Some even became "thief-makers" by encouraging gullible men
to commit crimes, and then apprehending and prosecuting them in order to collect the reward.
Such practices illustrate the point that not all "crimes" prosecuted at the Old Bailey had actually
taken place; some prosecutions were malicious.
The man who most thoroughly developed all aspects of the thief-taker's trade was Jonathan
Wild, the self-styled "Thief-taker General of England and Ireland", who dominated London's
criminal underworld in the early 1720s. Wild was eventually tried and convicted at the Old Bailey
for receiving stolen goods and hanged in 1725. Many other prosecutors and witnesses in
the Proceedings were also thief-takers, though they were rarely identified as such, except by
defendants trying to discredit the case being made against them.
Despite the bad publicity surrounding Wild's activities, and those of the McDaniel gang at midcentury, the authorities continued to offer rewards and encourage the legitimate side of thieftaking. Without such rewards and the activities of the thief-takers apprehending criminals would
have been much more difficult.
Back to Top
Introductory Reading
The Bow Street Runners

In order to encourage victims to report crimes, magistrates in both the City of London and
Middlesex established "rotation offices" in the 1730s where Londoners could be certain of
finding a magistrate at fixed hours. One of these rotation offices was set up in Bow Street, near
Covent Garden, by Sir Thomas De Veil in 1739. This was taken over by Henry and John
Fielding in 1748 shortly after De Veils death. The Fieldings introduced a new practice by hiring
thief-takers on a retainer who, when a crime was reported, were sent out by the magistrates to
detect and apprehend the culprit. They became known as the Bow Street Runners, though the
men themselves preferred their official title of Principal Officer of Bow Street. These men, such
as John Sayer and John Townsend, acquired considerable reputations. They also made a
comfortable living out of the fees they charged for their services, the rewards they received from
victims for identifying suspects, and the rewards from the state for successful convictions.

The aim of this new system was to deter criminals by increasing the certainty that they would be
detected and prosecuted. By supervising their activities, the Fieldings hoped to improve the
reputation of thief-takers, who they believed were essential in the fight against crime. In order to
improve the detection rate the Fieldings introduced other innovations: they collected and
disseminated information about crimes and suspected criminals, making their Bow Street office
the centre of a criminal intelligence network; and they organised horse and foot patrols of major
roads by part-time paid constables in order to prevent robberies and other serious crimes.
The Fieldings' approach to thief-taking proved influential, and their runners frequently appear in
the Proceedings. More rotation offices were set up in Middlesex and Westminster. In 1792 the
Middlesex Justices Act created seven police offices in the metropolis, each with three
stipendiary magistrates and six constables charged with detecting and arresting criminals. In
1800 concern about thefts from the docks and shipping led to the opening of a Thames Police
Office at Wapping, which eventually employed three stipendiary magistrates and one hundred
constables to police the dockside parishes and the river.

By the end of the eighteenth century London already had both a substantial body of watchmen
who were employed to prevent crime, and a system of detective policing designed to play a
major role in apprehending suspected criminals. The first response of victims of crime was now
as likely to be to report the crime to a rotation office as it was to try and locate the offender
themselves. In contrast to the start of the century, many of the defendants who appeared at the
Old Bailey had been detected and apprehended by salaried officers or quasi-official thief-takers,

and the testimony of such people formed a significant part of the Proceedings. This altered the
character of the criminal trial. Lawyers for the defence (when defendants were able to afford
them) frequently questioned the honesty of such witnesses since they stood to receive a
financial reward if the defendant was convicted.
Back to Top
Introductory Reading
The Metropolitan Police, 1829
In the first decades of the nineteenth century attempts to combat crime focused on the
prevention of crime, as opposed to the detection of criminals. New horse and foot patrols were
introduced both at night and during the day, with the men involved frequently referred to as
"police". Efforts to rationalise and further extend London's system of policing culminated with the
passage in 1829 of Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act. This set up a centralised police force
of 3,000 men under the control of the Home Secretary, with responsibility for policing the entire
metropolitan area, except the City of London. Uniformed and carrying only wooden batons, the
new "Bobbies" (referring to Robert Peels Christian name, and the most polite of the many
nicknames the officers received) patrolled the streets on prescribed beats. It was expected that
the frequency of their patrols would significantly reduce the opportunities to commit crime.
In many respects the only really novel aspect of the Metropolitan Police was its centralised
control by the Home Secretary. Nevertheless, the new arrangements placed much greater
weight on the prevention of crime (with detection left to the constables who continued to be
employed by the stipendiary magistrates). The impact of the new police on
the Proceedings should have been to reduce the number of trials coming to court. There was,
however, no such reduction, which suggests that the advent of the Metropolitan Police was not
as momentous a development as has sometimes been claimed. Furthermore, in some of the
wealthier parishes the number of police officers patrolling the streets immediately after the
Metropolitan Police Act was in fact lower than the number of watchman patrolling those same
streets before 1829.
The Impact of the Police
Even after the creation of the Metropolitan Police the role of the individual victim remained
central in identifying offenders to the authorities and prosecuting them. It was only very
gradually that the police assumed full responsibility for prosecuting offenders. Nevertheless the
state invested enormous faith in its new police. In 1839 a second Metropolitan Police Act
confirmed the institutions continuing existence, extended its jurisdiction from ten to fifteen miles
from Charing Cross and increased its establishment to 4300 men. The Act also abolished the
post of constable in the employment of the old magistrates offices. At the same time another Act
created a similar police organisation for the square mile of the City of London. The preventive
policies of the New Police probably had a significant impact reducing minor public offences such
as drunkenness and street fighting the kinds of offences that were heard before magistrates
rather than at the Old Bailey. But it soon became apparent that a detective force was needed to
work in conjunction with the uniformed, beat patrol officers. Authority was given for the creation
of a distinct detective force within the Metropolitan Police in 1842. The new detectives were
lionised by writers such as Charles Dickens, who thrilled at experience of going on patrol with
Inspector Field.
But, as the Proceedings demonstrate, it was not Dickenss Inspector Charles Frederick Field
who gave evidence time and again at the Central Criminal Court in the 1830s and 1840s, but
John Field, Inspector of Coins at the Royal Mint, who appeared regularly, contributing to the
prosecution of coiners. Moreover in 1877, the Metropolitan Police Detective Department
acquired the unenviable distinction of having several of its leading figures appear as the
accused in what was, at the time, the longest trial ever heard at the Central Criminal Court.

The Turf Fraud Scandal resulted in a complete reorganisation of the Metropolitan Police
Detectives and the formation of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), initially comprising
around 250 men out of a force of just under 10,000.

By the turn of the twentieth century the CID could claim to be modern and scientific in its pursuit
of offenders. TheProceedings contain the cases of the first use of fingerprints in a successful
prosecution (Harry Jackson for burglary in 1902) and the first use of fingerprints to secure a
murder conviction (Albert and Alfred Stratton in 1905). But on the eve of the First World War,
when the Proceedings ceased publication, the overwhelming majority of police officers were
still uniformed men, patrolling specified beats. Moreover a high percentage of the crimes
brought before the Central Criminal Court continued to depend not on careful police detection or
even on the vigilance of the beat officer, but upon victims reporting crimes to the police and
upon victims and witnesses making positive identifications. What had changed most
dramatically since 1674 was the introduction of uniformed, salaried officials, controlled by the
Home Office, with the responsibility for tracking down suspects and making arrests.
Back to Top
Introductory Reading
Searching for the Police

You can search for men who were identified as acting in a policing role in two ways, either by
searching by "occupation" on the Personal Details Search Page or by conducting a Keyword
Search. When using the occupation search facility you will only find defendants and victims or
prosecutors who were given an occupational descriptor in the Proceedings. In undertaking this
kind of query you will be searching on the actual text associated with each individual, and will
need to take account of variant spellings. Using keyword searching will locate all incidences of
the words such as those listed below, whether or not they are associated with a specific

defendant, victim or prosecutor. Keyword searching will provide a larger number of results, but
some will be irrelevant. Some words that produce a large number of results include:

Constable

Watchman, Watch-man, or Watchmen

Runner

Thief taker

Police, Policeman

Bobby, Bobbies

Peeler, Peelers
When searching by keyword it is useful to add the * wildcard after the main letters of a word to
account for plurals and some variants. For example, searching by Peeler* will find all incidences
of Peelerand Peelers.