that interest also extended ‘to the protection of the public against depredation
and fraud—and to the prevention of crimes’.^7 And it was on those tasks that he
placed his emphasis—on the police as a means of combatting crime, most espe-
cially as a force that would prevent robbery, burglary, and other forms of prop-
erty crime in the capital. That meaning of police as primarily a body of
crime-fighters (whatever else they might be called upon to do) was even more
firmly established by the act of 1829 that created the metropolitan police as a
force of paid and uniformed officers, hierarchically organized and centrally
controlled, who would patrol and keep ‘incessant watch’ on the whole metrop-
olis outside the ancient City of London.
The emergence of what appeared to be the modern idea of policing in the
second half of the eighteenth century and its embodiment in Peel’s New Police
has very largely structured the way the history of policing has been written. In
the debates in parliament and the press about the need for a more effective po-
lice, as in the parliamentary investigations into the established system con-
ducted in the early decades of the nineteenth century, proponents of reform
focused insistently on the deficiencies of the institutions inherited from the past.
The history of policing was until very recently heavily influenced by such argu-
ments, and as a result took the form very largely of a story of progress achieved
against the stubborn resistance of self-interested and entrenched local élites.
Much of the evidence deployed by contemporary advocates of reform was
particularly critical of constables and watchmen who were virtually to a man
condemned as old and infirm, cowardly, and ineffectual. Saunders Welch, the
experienced high constable of Holborn and associate of the Fieldings at Bow
Street, had complained in the middle of the century about such general criti-
cisms—about the way the office of constable was held in contempt ‘by incon-
siderate men’, and made fun of in court and on the stage.^8 Such portrayals were
to become more insistent as reform schemes were pressed forward in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^9 They tell us something about con-
temporary attitudes and anxieties, about changing expectations of the police,
and perhaps about social perceptions, since there is evidence that as a group the
constables of the City were being drawn from a distinctly lower stratum of soci-
ety by the middle of the eighteenth century than they had been in the last
decades of the seventeenth.^10 But they disclose very little about the day-to-day
work of constables, and the varieties of engagement and effectiveness that
almost certainly characterized that work.
Until very recently the perspective of the reformers provided much of the evi-
dence as well as the framework of explanation for police historians who saw in
Peel’s 1829 act the decisive breakthrough that swept away old and long-decayed
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 79(^7) [Patrick Colquhoun,] A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 2 nd edn. ( 1796 ), v.
(^8) Saunders Welch, Observations on the Office of Constable( 1754 ), 1 – 2.
(^9) Radzinowicz, History, ii. chs 7 , 10 , iii. ch. 13. (^10) See below, Ch. 3.