CHAPTER IX.
The School of Police.
In the long chain forged for the preservation of law and order in the metropolis the constable is the chief and, in some ways, the most important link. The heads of Scotland Yard have to make it certain that at moments of unexpected strain or heavy stress no link will fail. To that end every candidate for the Metropolitan Force is rigorously tested and prepared, physically, morally, and mentally, before he becomes an accredited member of the service.
For, to vary the simile, the constable is the foundation on which all the rest is built. Every man in grades right up to the superintendent has begun at the bottom of the ladder. You will have seen the constable, placid and unemotional, pacing the streets at the regulation beat of two and a half miles an hour—do you know how much he has to know before he is trusted alone on his duty?
He has to be ready to act decisively and firmly at an instant's notice, to solve on the spur of the moment some intricate problem of public order, to know the law, so that he may arrest a person on one occasion, and let him go on another, to act as guide or consultant to the public, to aid at a fire, or capture a burglar.
He must know everything out of the common that comes in his sphere of duty, enter the particulars fully in his note-book, and be prepared to swear to the accuracy of his notes at any time. It would be easy for a man less carefully selected and trained to make a slip of judgment, to succumb to a temptation.
It would be futile to pretend that there are twenty thousand plaster saints in the Metropolitan Police—there are not. Yet, man for man, in efficiency, in honesty, there is not their equal in the world in any profession.
The Metropolitan Police is a business body, controlled by business men, and run on business methods. But it is a specialist business, and so it has to train its recruits, making sure, first of all, that they are of the right material.
Before Sir Edward Henry's time a candidate had only to fulfil a medical qualification and a test of character, and then, after a few weeks' drill at Wellington Barracks and a few days' watching the procedure in a police court, he was turned out into the street to get on as best he could. A veteran detective officer told me how he was treated twenty years ago.