Abstract
One of the principal functions of a policeman is combatting crime; popularly it is probably considered as the policeman’s chief function. Members of the public, and individual policemen, have described the police as being engaged in a war. Thus Louis Canler could write that ‘during the long years between 1820 and 1852, I found myself continually in a state of open war with the world of robbers …’1 The problem is that crime is not an absolute; and different crimes elicit different responses.
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References
Canler, Memoires, p. 151.
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (1976) p. 56; Styles, ‘Our traitorous money makers’, passim.
Quoted in Howard Zehr, Crime and the Development of Modern Society (1976) p. 28.
Garth Christian (ed.), James Hawker’s Journal: A Victorian Poacher (Oxford, 1961) pp. 62 and 109.
Canler, Memoires, p. 203.
Cal Winslow, ‘Sussex Smugglers’, in Douglas May, Peter Linebaugh, E.P. Thompson et al., Albion‘s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975); Styles ‘Our traitorous money makers,’ p. 246.
Leon Radzinowicz and Joan King, The Growth of Crime: The International Experience (1977) p. 62.
Nicole Castan, Justice et Répression en Languedoc à l’époque des Lumières (1980) pp. 24–5; Laurie Lee describes the murder of a braggart outsider in his Cotswold village just after the First World War: ‘the young men who had gathered in that winter ambush continued to live among us. I saw them often about the village: single jokers, hard-working, mild — the solid heads of families. They were not treated as outcasts, nor did they appear to live under any special strain. They belonged to the village and the village looked after them’ — Cider with Rosie (Penguin edn, 1962) p. 98.
Castan, Justice et Répression, ch. 1 passim; Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 50–1.
William Hunt’s Diary is the property of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society; see Clive Emsley, P. N. Furbank, Arnold Kettle, et al., Tom Jones by Henry Fielding Part Two Open University Course A204 (1979) units 4–5, pp. 10–12; Wilts RO Stourhead Archive 383/955.
A de G Yb787, concluding remarks on Provence Company 1771.
Victory Fourastié (ed.), Cahiers de Doléances de la Senechaussée de Cahors (Cahors, 1908) pp. 73, 326 and 332;
Francisque Mège (ed.), Les Cahiers des paroisses d’Auvergne en 1789 (Clermont Ferand, 1899) pp. 88–9.
J. M. Beattie, ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 1660–1800’ Past and Present LXII (1974) 47–95.
For a general survey of these associations, see Adrian Shubert, ‘Private Initiative in Law Enforcement: Associations for the Prosecution of Felons, 1744–1856’, in Bailey (ed.), Policing and Punishment.
PP … Select Committee on the Police … 1828, p. 66, see also H. M. Dyer (stipendiary magistrate) pp. 48 and 50; John Rawlinson (stipendiary magistrate) p. 57; Charles Lawton (Clerk of the Peace for Surrey) p. 155. Lawton, however, also believed that crime had increased significantly.
Porphyre Petrovitch, ‘Recherces sur la Criminalité à Paris dans la Second Moitie du XVIIIe siècle’, in André Abbiateci et al., Crimes et Criminalité en France sous l’Ancien Régime 17 e –18 e siècles. (Cahiers des Annales, 33, 1971) pp. 187–261; Ariette Farge, Le Vol d’Aliments a Paris au XVIIF e siècle (1974); Antoinette Wills, Crime and Punishment in Revolutionary Paris (Westport, Conn., 1981); Bernadette Boutelet, ‘Etude par Sondage de la Criminalité du Bailliage de Pont-de-1’Arche (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles)’, Annales de Normandie (1962) pp. 235–62; Jean-Claude Gegot, ‘Etude par Sondage de la Criminalité dans la Bailliage de Falaise (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) Annales de Normandie (1966) pp. 103–64.
Eric J. Hewitt, A History of Policing in Manchester (Manchester, 1979) pp. 60–1.
The Pocket Book of P.C. Hennessy is in the Bow Street Police Museum.
Beds RO Q.E.V.4: Chief Constable’s reports April, June, September 1869.
J.J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Sodety in the Nineteenth Century (1967).
21. V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Gatrell, Lenman and Parker (eds), Crime and the Law, pp. 238–337; see also V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge, 1972) pp. 336–96.
Zehr, Crime and the Development of Modern Society.
Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, ch. 2 passim.
John Styles, ‘An eighteenth-century magistrate as detective: Samuel Lister of Little Horton’, Bradford Antiquary (1982).
HO 42. 31 series of letters, June 1794.
Quoted in Clive Emsley, ‘An aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”: prosecutions for sedition during the 1790s’, Social History, VI (1981) p. 162.
Hawker’s Journal, p. 77.
A de G Yb 801 (reviews of Champagne and Lorraine).
Cameron, Crime and Repression, pp. 58–60 and 123.
A de G XF 12: Etat des sujets à renvoyer d’après les notes de MM les Inspecteurs, 1772.
Cameron, Crime and Repression, p. 186; for arrests by private individuals see p. 179, and also Grand, ‘La Maréchaussée en Provence’, p. 132.
John Styles has estimated that between 25% and 43% of men arrested for horse stealing and subsequently prosecuted on the Northern Assize circuit were apprehended, at least partially as a result of newspaper advertisements: ‘Crime in the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Newspaper’, in M. Harris (ed.), Newspapers in English Society (1982).
Petrovitch, ‘Recherches,’ pp. 194–5.
Ibid., esp. pp. 248–9; Williams. Police of Paris, pp. 190–97; Wills, Crime … in Revolutionary Paris, pp. 127–35 and 156–67.
PP Report from the Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis, 1834, q. 433; Edwin Chadwick, ‘On the Consolidation of Police Force, and the Prevention of Crime’, Fraser’s Magazine, LXXVII, (Jan. 1868) 17.
J.J. Tobias, Crime and Police in England 1700–1900 (1979) pp. 91–2.
Gatrell, ‘Decline of Theft and Violence,’ p. 278.
PP Report from the Select Committee on Gas Lighting, 1823, p. 4; Archibald Clow, The Chemical Revolution (2nd edn, 1970) p. 442; ‘Paris in 1828’, The London Magazine, 3rd series, 111 (1829) pp. 138–9.
Barbara Weinberger, ‘The Police and the Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Warwickshire’, in Bailey (ed.), Policing and Punishment, p. 85; Emsley, ‘Bedfordshire Police’.
Shubert, ‘Private Initiative,’ pp. 33–7.
Philips, Crime and Authority, p. 197; PP from the Select Committee on Dog Stealing (Metropolis), 1844, q. 196; and see also the evidence of Francis Keys, a former Bow Street ‘Red Breast’: qq. 429–31.
HO 45.6099.
Rey and Feron, Gardiens de la Paix, p. 194; ‘The Police of London’, Quarterly Review, CXXIX (1870) 100; Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, p. 108.
Cameron, Crime and Repression, pp. 58–9.
PP Report from the Select Committee on the Petition of Sir Frederick Young, and others … complaining that Policemen are employed as Spies, 1833 qq. 1127, 1759 and 1845; Hansard (3rd series) CLXXXI, 597.
Lucas, Projet d’Institution, p. 6.
Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, pp. 61 and 63.
For an introduction to the current research on preventive policing, see David J. Farmer, ‘Out of Hugger-Mugger: the Case of Police Field Services’, and George L. Kelling, Mary Ann Wycoff and Tony Pate, ‘Policing: a Research Agenda for Rational Policy-Making’, in R. V. G. Clarke and J. M. Hough (eds), The Effectiveness of Policing (Farnborough, Hants. 1980); and Michael Zander, ‘What is the Evidence on Law and Order?’ New Society (13 Dec. 1979) pp. 591–4.
A. K. Bottomley and C. A. Coleman, ‘Police Effectiveness and the Public: the Limitations of Official Crime Rates’, in Clark and Hough (eds), The Effectiveness of Policing; these clear-up rates are given on pp. 85–6.
The Prefect of Police reports are to be found in ANF7 3884–93. A selection of the reports is reproduced in Tulard, La Prefecture, pp. 124–64; Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, pp. 128–9.
One of the best examples of such a scare in the London Garotting Panic of 1862; many offences which would have been described simply as street theft became ‘garotting’ during the scare even when there had been no attempt to garotte the victim. (See Jennifer Davis, ‘The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in mid-Victorian England’, in Gatrell, Lenman and Parker (eds), Crime and the Law, and the cautions given about her conclusions by Peter W. J. Bartrip, ‘Public Opinion and Law Enforcement: the Ticket of Leave Scares in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Bailey (ed.), Policing and Punishment.) For several years after the scare gentlemen went out after dark armed with different kinds of life preserver. Early in 1866 P.C. Matthew Maddock was seriously injured when patrolling in plain clothes in Sydenham; he approached a gentleman who took him for a garotter and had recourse to his life preserver (Police Service Advertiser (17 Feb. 1866); Hansard (3rd series) CLXXXI, 597). Jean Tulard notes panics over street thefts in Paris during 1836 and again in 1843 (La Prefecture, p. 90).
PP Report from the Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis, 1834, q. 166.
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© 1983 Clive Emsley
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Emsley, C. (1983). Crime and the Police. In: Policing and its Context 1750–1870. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17043-2_7
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