Before the Bobbies. The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830

(^164) Before the Bobbies
for lights and passable roads. In all these areas, though, a main concern was
rising crime, especially property ·crime. As crime came to be seen as a
problem more serious than other nuisances of urban living, the night watch
became the institutional focus for local efforts to police it. Thus, the key
motivation for police reform throughout the eighteenth century and into the
nineteenth, for most Londoners, was the need to prevent crime and, to a
lesser extent, detect its perpetrators. Although fears about riots or revolution
were important for some advocates of reform in the aftermath of the French
Revolution, the pattern and timing of parish watch reform clearly indicates
that fear of robbery and burglary loomed much larger. The move-
ment towards professional, centralized policing began in the 1720s and
1730s, long before the rise of the organized reform movements and the
fear of radicalism inspired by the American and French Revolutions.
The pattern of reform in policing tactics and organization followed the
pattern of rising crime rates, coming in times of peace and economic hard-
ship, and they were designed to deter robbery and other more common
crimes. This was the case in 1829 as well as 1735. Peel sold his police
scheme to Parliament and the parishes as the answer to rising rates of
property crime.
Finally, when we combine our better understanding of the elements,
process, personnel, and motivations that were involved in police reform in
London during the whole period from 1735 to 1829, it becomes clear that
Robert Peel's reform in 1829 was not revolutionary. It rationalized and
extended but did not alter existing practices. Centralization, by 1829,
seemed logical and worth attempting. The change was carried out with the
input and cooperation of local authorities, although not all were confident as
to its benefits. The new police took on the functions of the old and did
them in much the same fashion, drawing on the experience and expertise of
the parish watch system. Many of the people who staffed the new police
had staffed the parochial police. The continuity, then, between the
'Charlies' of the night watch and the 'bobbies' of the Metropolitan
Police may help to explain the relatively rapid acceptance of the new
force.^90
Finally, the formation of modem police forces has always been seen and
rightly so, as a key development in the extension of the power of the modern
bureaucratic state. This study has shown that the processes by which the
British state grew and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
happened at several levels, not merely at the centre. In the earlier eighteenth
century, the movement towards more formal, hierarchical forms of law
enforcement were initiated by local authorities, who used Parliament and
the central government as an enabler of their plans and an arena in which to
resolve local disputes. Over time, however, the role of the central
government became less passive. The impact of wider reform movements