Charlies to Bobbies 165for economical, impartial government and an enlightened criminal justice
affected all law enforcement officials. But while much has been made of the
expansion of state power at the centre, less attention has been paid to the
reasons and process by which power was shared. It has been assumed that
local leaders either were overborne by the centre or were co-opted by
reformers. This was indeed the case in Westminster in the early eighteenth
centuty, when the Court of Burgesses was clearly overborne by the power
and influence of West End vestries and their parliamentaty allies. By the
1820s however, the concept of 'police' and the rising expectations of what it
could accomplish had changed significantly. Ironically, it was the success of
many local reforms that had raised expectations for crime prevention and
detection. But policing came to be defined in such a way that even con-
scientious and diligent local leaders had come to believe that the best
solution was the relinquishment of their power to the centre. One recognizes
in the testimony of men like Frederick Byng of Hanover Square, Alexander
Richmond of St Luke, Old Street, and the watch trustees of Stoke New-
ington the frustration that even their best efforts have not been enough.
Even though their best may have been vety good, the perception was that it
was not sufficient. They were helped, of course, to this conclusion by Robert
Peel, but we have to appreciate the extent to which such local leaders
believed that the benefits of transferring power to the central state would
outweigh the potential for the abuse of that power. Power brings respons-
ibility as well as authority. Just as the growth of professionalization freed
individual householders from the responsibility of watching their streets,
centralization lifted the burden of police administration from the shoulders
of parish vestrymen and paving commissioners. There were undoubtedly
some who deserved to be stripped of their power but certainly not all,
perhaps not even most. And those that chose to relinquish their authority
did so not necessarily for selfish or frivolous reasons but after decades of
trying to cope with the seemingly endless and expanding problem of theft,
robbety and assault. Thus the British state on the eve of parliamentaty
reform had already shown considerable strength, competence, flexibility,
and adaptability, a state that included these hard-working local leaders and
their officers.
Walter Bagehot's classic Victorian study, The English Constitution contains
the following passage:
The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The
introduction of effectual policemen was not liked; I know people, old
people, I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of free-
dom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France. If the original police-
men had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been
dubious; there might have been the ety of militaty tyranny, and the inbred