A Short History of Police and Policing by Clive Emsley

Author:Clive Emsley [Emsley, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192583062
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2020-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Detective

The patrolman was to prevent crime and to sort out any problems of order maintenance, which could range from a street accident or runaway horse to a more significant problem involving a serious fight or disorderly assembly. The investigation of crimes was the task of detectives—men who, generally, wore no uniform and rarely conducted beat patrols. Such individuals had existed before; in Paris, for example, they worked for the lieutenant general and in London they worked out of Bow Street and then later from the police offices. The early nineteenth century gave them a new and significant prominence across the European world as part of, or at least linked to, the uniformed police.

The individual that brought the detective branch of the Paris police into the public eye was Eugène-François Vidocq. He offered a reality to the classic image of ‘set a thief to catch a thief’. The son of a baker in Arras in 1775, Vidocq spent his youth stealing and fighting duels, then he twice deserted from the army. His criminal behaviour led to some time in prison, but in 1809 he became involved with Henry, ‘l’ange malin’, the head of the bureau of the Paris Prefecture that was responsible for sûreté, specifically crime and public safety. Henry used Vidocq initially for information about criminals who were with him in gaol. Greatly satisfied with Vidocq’s information, Henry arranged for his release and continued to use him as an informant until, at roughly the end of 1811, he made him the head of a detective unit of four ex-convicts. In six years it grew to a dozen men and then, during the 1820s, to twenty-eight. The commissaires and the officiers de paix did not like Vidocq’s sûreté, and the squad was given its own offices at 6 Petite Rue Sainte-Anne, which was not part of the Prefecture building but ran off the Quai des Orfèvres; in future years, the Quai was to become well known as the headquarters of the Paris police detectives, the Sûreté.

Vidocq was a classic example of much that worried the English about the French police, and translations of his memoirs were available in English from when they first appeared in 1828, the year before the Metropolitan Police was created. The old police offices in London, in which magistrates had their own constables, were closed nine years later. The stipendiary magistrates survived, and their offices became London ‘police courts’, though not directly linked to the new police. Some of the runners, patrols, and constables transferred into the Metropolitan Police; Inspector Nicholas Pearce, for example, a former patrol, went to ‘A’ Division, where he was regularly employed on ‘special detective duties’. Henry Goddard, like several others, became a private detective, but, the moment that he saw the post advertised, Goddard applied for, and became, Chief Constable of Northamptonshire. The dislike of police as spies remained, but, as one of the Metropolitan Police superintendents told a parliamentary committee in 1833, ‘a man in uniform will hardly ever take

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