‘Policing the Peelers’: Parliament, the Public, and the Metropolitan Police, 1829–33

  • David A. Campion
Chapter

Abstract

The year 1833 was a difficult one for the Metropolitan Police. In August, the House of Commons convened two separate committees of inquiry to investigate alleged misconduct and abuses of authority among the rank and file of the organization. Prompted by concerns raised in these investigations, parliament then convened a third committee to review the overall state of the police. The 1833 investigations constituted the first significant governmental scrutiny of law enforcement after the Police Act of 1829 that had replaced London’s localized networks of night watchmen and parish constables with Sir Robert Peel’s centrally controlled and organized Metropolitan Police. The subsequent investigations brought to the forefront of British public attention the acute political controversies that had surrounded the ‘New’ Police since its inception four years earlier. They helped determine, as much as the establishment of the Metropolitan Police itself, the model that urban policing would follow in Britain for the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

Keywords

Police Department Select Committee Metropolitan Police False Identity Police Misconduct 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 1.
    F. Engels (W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, trans.), The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford, 1958 [1844]), p. 258.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    R. Peel (C.S. Parker, ed.), Sir Robert Peel, from his Private Papers, Vol. II (London, 1891), p. 115.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    R. Paley, ‘“An Imperfect, Inadequate, and Wretched System?” Policing London before Peel’, Criminal Justice History, 10 (1989), 95–130.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    T. A. Critchley, A History of the Police in England and Wales 900–1966 (London, 1967), p. 42.Google Scholar
  5. 8.
    C. Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (London, 1991), p. 3.Google Scholar
  6. 9.
    For the large secret police network in Metternich’s Austria, A. Sked, The Decline and Tall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (London, 1989), pp. 41–88.Google Scholar
  7. 10.
    L. Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992).Google Scholar
  8. 11.
    J. P. Smith, An Account of a Successful Experiment (1812).Google Scholar
  9. Quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), p. 82.Google Scholar
  10. 12.
    For traditional accounts of British police history, C. Reith, British Police and the Democratic Ideal (London, 1943).Google Scholar
  11. D. Ascoli, The Queen’s Peace. Origins and Development of the Metropolitan Police, 1829–1979 (London, 1979).Google Scholar
  12. For the policeman as enforcer of social morality, R. D. Storch, ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in Northern England, 1850–1880’, JSH, 9 (1976), 481–509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 13.
    R. D. Storch, ‘The Plague of the Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840–57’, International Review of Social History, 20 (1975), 61–90 and ‘The Policeman as Domestic Missionary’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. 43.
    For the tensions this could provoke, D. Philips and R. D. Storch, ‘Whigs and Coppers: the Grey Ministry’s National Police Scheme, 1832’, Historical Review, 67 (1994), 75–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 44.
    The orthodox (‘cop-sided’) view, and the revisionist (Top-sided’) view, are compared in R. Reiner, The Politics of the Police, (Brighton, 1985), pp. 9–47.Google Scholar
  16. 45.
    C. D. Robinson, ‘Ideology as History: A Look at the Way Some English Police Historians Look at the Police’, Police Studies, 2 (1979), 35–49.Google Scholar
  17. 49.
    Thompson, Making of the Working Class in England; E. J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution (London, 1962) and The Age of Capital (London, 1975).Google Scholar
  18. 53.
    D. J. V. Jones, ‘The New Police, Crime, and People in England and Wales, 1829–1888’, TRHS, 5th series, 33 (1983), 151.Google Scholar
  19. 55.
    F. C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester, 1959).Google Scholar
  20. 56.
    S. Inwood, ‘Policing London’s Morals: the Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829–1850’, London Journal 15 (1990), 131–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. 57.
    B. Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State. The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch Before the First World War (London, 1987).Google Scholar

Copyright information

© David A. Campion 2005

Authors and Affiliations

  • David A. Campion

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations