154 Before the Bobbiescomplaint was that new police did not do the job of preventing crime and
nuisances as the night watch had done. The new system was not living up to
what Peel promised; the disappointment was strong. This is why protests
about the new police were loud after its implementation, not before.
A sociological study of modem policing argues that police officers need to
be convinced that their work represents what the community wants.^30 What
the community wants, however, is not always clear and the police are often
caught in the middle between the law and local values. Police are expected to
enforce the law and keep the peace but disagreement can exist about which
behaviours should be illegal or what constitutes disturbing the peace. Any
new organization of police adapts, learning what vices may be tolerated and
what laws selectively enforced.^31 Police officers need to be perceived as
enforcing the law yet if they anger those who want gambling or prostitution
available, they disturb the peace.^32 Like the night watchmen before them,
Metropolitan policemen walked fine lines between the values of the law, the
bureaucracy, and the community they policed. The result, most of the time,
was a rough equilibrium. Thus the ability of the ruling classes to impose their
values on the lower classes through the police did have limits even though
the police represented the authority of the law and state in a very real way. It
was not so much that the Metropolitan Police won the hearts and minds of
Londoners as that each adapted to the other.^33
There were some opposed to the police on principle. Hackney petitioned
against the Police Bill before its passage and protested its implementation on
the grounds of its unconstitutional nature. Hackney had an open vestry, its
population included a large number of dissenters, and its politics were
radical.^34 Other parishes that fit this mould and also objected to 'Peel's
Bloody Gang' included the united parishes of St Andrew, Holbom, and St
George-the-Martyr; St Luke, Old Street; and St Pancras.^35 But the vestry
that governed the impoverished residents of St Giles-in-the-Fields and that
responsible to the comfortable parishioners of Hanover Square found no
constitutional objections to the new police.^36
There was also a third possibility: a vestry that raised constitutional
objections to the Metropolitan Police only after the structure and socio-
economic character of the vestry changed. In St Marylebone, the aristocratic
select vestry was still in power when the Metropolitan Police replaced the
night watch in 1829. It had no objection to the new police except the cost.
However, things changed when John Cam Hobhouse's 1831 Vestry Act
allowed parishes to adopt elected vestries.^37 Elections were held in StMary-
lebone in May 1832 and the Radicals were big winners.^38 At the second
meeting of the new vestry, one of them proposed that the vestry should
petition the government about the 'burthensome nature of the Police
Rate.'^39 The new vestry also objected to the high cost of the new force but
it chose to emphasize the issue of constitutionality. Petitions were sent to