Policing the Factory by Barry Godfrey David J. Cox

Author:Barry Godfrey, David J. Cox [Barry Godfrey, David J. Cox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 19th Century, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781441152527
Google: mgAEWu3IzeUC
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2013-02-28T01:12:01+00:00

5

Private Policing in the Industrial Age

In recent years historians and social scientists have begun to emphasize the episodic nature of publicly funded policing, with the inference that the private organization of policing will prove more durable than publicly funded organization (South 1987; Johnston 1992; Reiner 2000). Indeed, the modern police are now viewed by some as merely a lengthy ‘experiment’ in public policing which is now returning to the ‘traditional’ organization of prosecution and apprehension forces which operated before the New Police. As South (1987, p. 72) noted, ‘the modern police are indeed a ‘new police’ and in some important respects it is they and not the modern phenomena of agencies within the private security sector that are out of step with the historical lineage of policing forms’. By this he meant that the borough and county police forces created in the nineteenth century were only the most recent of a wide range of policing services which included the borough watches, parish constables and Poor Law officers, inspectors of nuisances and factories in the public sector and the many subscription-funded policing agencies in the private sector (Philips 1989; King 1989).

Thanks to studies by historians such as John Beattie, Alistair Dinsmor and others, it is now largely accepted among crime and police historians that modern policing in Britain did not begin with the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 (see Beattie:2001, 2012; Cox 2010; Dinsmor 2000; Reynolds 1998). Recent research into pre-Metropolitan policing has revealed a wide range of both publicly and privately funded policing bodies, ranging from the creation of the first detective force in the Western world, the Bow Street ‘Runners’, founded in the winter of 1748/9 by Henry Fielding, the celebrated novelist and Chief Magistrate of Bow Street Court in Westminster, to the creation of full-time professional police forces in various Scottish cities in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Bow Street Police Office operated a complex and hierarchical structure which included regular night and day patrols in the centre of London, horse-mounted patrols of the turnpike roads leading into the metropolis, and a small force of experienced plain-clothes detective Principal Officers, better known to us as the Bow Street ‘Runners’. By the end of the eighteenth century Bow Street’s model of policing had been adopted by several other London police courts and there were several hundred patrol constables pounding the streets of the capital.

However, despite the fact that the Principal Officers were used throughout Britain on the investigation of serious crimes such as murder, arson and bank robberies, they were small in number (never more than eleven officers served at any one time) and were also very expensive to employ. Often the only viable alternative was to utilize the age-old system of the parish constabulary.

Recent research has demonstrated that the parish constabulary system was not entirely peopled by individuals in the mould of Dogberry and Verges, Shakespeare’s comic interpretation of constables in Much Ado About Nothing. Work by Sharpe has shown that the parish constabulary could occasionally prove effective in preventing and detecting crime (Sharpe 1984).

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