peace-keeping officials in the City under stricter control and management and
helped to make some aspects of policing more effective well before the middle
of the eighteenth century—an important element, I shall argue, in the changing
character of urban policing.
The institutions particularly targeted in efforts to improve the policing of the
City were the night watch and (associated with that) the system of street lighting.
Both were crucial to efforts to increase surveillance over the City streets at night.
Surveillance was the principal defence against crime that the institutions of
local government were capable of mounting. That was also the duty—though it
was to be more broadly based, more highly organized, and carried out by more
full-time officers—with which the New Police were charged after 1829. The
method and the means were to be more effective, but the mandate of the new
metropolitan force—to defeat crime by intensive and perpetual surveillance—
was in fact the ancient duty of the old watch.
Another, and more modern, element of policing had also, however, developed
in practice in the eighteenth century, and although it formed at first no part of
the mandate of the new policing forces, that was soon to change: that is, the duty
and the capacity to discover, arrest, and prosecute offenders.^20 In this area, the
institutions of the criminal justice system were entirely undeveloped in the late
seventeenth century. Uncovering crime and identifying suspects were left to the
public, to the efforts of victims. An officer who saw an offence in progress had a
duty to act, but there was little expectation that magistrates, constables, or
watchmen would turn detective and investigate offences on their own initiative.
They responded to public complaints and acted only when an accused offender
had been identified. Little was to change in this regard within the established sys-
tem until well into the nineteenth century.^21 But the need for the vigorous detec-
tion and prosecution of offenders if crime was to be effectively controlled was
well understood in the seventeenth century and led to the introduction of en-
couragements, in the form of statutory and supplementary royal rewards, to per-
suade victims to prosecute offenders, and to encourage the enterprise of private
citizens in the detection of crime. Rewards gave rise to significant developments
in the culture of policing. The large sums offered for the conviction of certain
classes of offenders, and the even larger sums that were to be made available in
the second quarter of the eighteenth century, helped to encourage the thief-
taking business and introduced a new, often sinister, element into the adminis-
tration of the criminal law, and to episodes of serious corruption.^22
Most thief-taking remained private and unofficial. But it was inevitable that
rewards for the prosecution of offenders would have some influence on con-
stables and others appointed to combat crime on behalf of the crown. Over the
eighteenth century rewards and fees for service helped to encourage a more
City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution 85(^20) On this important theme, see Emsley, The English Police, ch. 2.
(^21) Hay and Snyder, ‘Using the Criminal Law’, 16 – 35.
(^22) Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London’, 301 – 42.