106 Before the BobbiesHarrison also found that antipathy to police reform was especially strong in
the aftermath of political violence. For example, Bristol suffered a riot during
the campaign for the Great Reform Bill that left between 120 and 250 dead and
wounded and £150,000 worth of property damage. However, there was con-
siderable 'hostility in Bristol in the wake of the 1831 riots to the prospect of
police reform, since it was thought that this would invest an already incompet-
ent body with even greater power'.^19 The same can be argued for London after
1815 -deep political divisions within the ruling classes made the centralization
of London's police in government hands even less likely, in spite of the
problems of public disorder, because so many regarded the government as
untrustworthy. Property crime continued to be more important as a motivating
factor for reform than the problems of crowds for local authorities and Whig
reformers, such as Henry Grey Bennett.
So virtually everyone concerned with crime prevention and detection -
Thry ministers, Whig reformers, local authorities - could agree that law
enforcement needed improvement. However, everyone was not agreed on
how to improve policing. Centralization was only one option to which there
were still serious political and constitutional objections. In three different
reports between 1812 and 1822, Parliamentary Select Committees on the
Police of the Metropolis explicitly denied the need for centralization. Pro-
fessionalization continued but central and local authorities worked within
considerable financial constraints - retrenchment was the order of the day.
When Henry Grey Bennett raised the issue of 'the Police of the Metropolis'
in 1816 what worried him was the rising number of property crimes, not the
crowds who had mobbed Parliament the previous year to protest the Com
Laws. Bennett began the debate with reference to rising committal rates and
noting that convictions had increased by almost fifty per cent between 1807
and 1814.^20 Grey's Select Committee ranged over a number of topics includ-
ing prisons, pub licensing, and juvenile delinquency, indicative of the con-
tinued use of police in its broad meaning, but not crowd control. Those
witnesses who testified about law enforcement in London were almost
entirely from the police offices: police magistrates and their clerks, Bow
Street Runners, police office constables. Patrick Colquhoun was a witness
who urged increased centralization and regulation of the lives of the labour-
ing poor.^21 The only local officials to appear were two parish constables and
a churchwarden from Shoreditch.^22 Police magistrate L.B. Allen criticized
Bennett for using biased witnesses:
He has sometimes examined discharged officers, to prove that magistrates
and clerks have been negligent of their duty; - and parish constables, that