It is curious this suspicion of the police which sometimes affects otherwise clear-headed people. You pick out men whose character is without flaw from their childhood upwards. You put them into a blue uniform, and lo! their whole personality alters. They are hypocrites and bullies, bribed by bookmakers and prostitutes, and capable of any sort of baseness.
Let us return to the Riddle Department. The secret of dealing with such a happening as I have painted above lies naturally in the organisation. Every division has a certain number of reserve men—approximately 10 per cent.
They are picked veterans of not less than eight years' service, who receive an additional eighteenpence per week, and must always be ready to carry out special work when called upon. These, then, are first called out, and other men are taken as occasion demands.
There are other branches of the Metropolitan Police where a mistake would make havoc in a department or division; here it would affect the service as a whole.
The Executive Department is as much concerned in the work of every other part of that complex machine as the engineers of a great ship are in keeping the vessel moving. Sir Frederick Wodehouse, who is at its head, in his quarter of a century's service as police administrator—twelve of which have been spent with the City Police and the remainder at Scotland Yard—has always been keenly alive to the necessity of keeping pace with the science of organisation. He has as his right-hand men Superintendents West and White, who split up the work between them—one in charge of the Executive Department itself, the other supervising the Statistical Department.
It will be understood why I call it a Riddle Department when I explain some of its duties. It is concerned with the discipline and administration of the force as a whole; the organisation of men when they have to be used in mass; it controls the public and private telephone and telegraph service of the force; it compiles statistics on all sorts of police subjects: it edits and issues "Informations," "The Inebriates' List," "The Cycle List," "The Pawnbrokers' List," reward bills, and police notices; it makes traffic regulations; it works with the Board of Agriculture when cattle disease breaks out; it issues pedlars' and sweeps' certificates; it keeps a gruesome record—a sort of photographic morgue—of all dead bodies found in London; and it has to give its consent before any summons may be taken out by a police officer.
That is the merest inadequate list of its duties. While other departments are clean-cut, knowing where their work begins and ends, the Executive Department has no limit.
Anything that does not properly belong anywhere else goes to the Executive Department. That is why it specialises in solving riddles.
It is in such a department as this that alertness of mind and elasticity of resource are developed. When war broke out, it had to spend many sleepless days and nights in what was practically a redisposition of the force. Hundreds of the force had enlisted, and innumerable new duties and problems arose. A system of co-ordination between the immense new bodies of special constables and the regular force had to be evolved. Depleted divisions had to be readjusted, men selected for particular work, a system of co-ordination with the Special Constabulary made, and a hundred re-arrangements made.
So, when a great procession takes place, as at the Coronation festivities, the most meticulous organisation is necessary. It seems simple to order so many men to arrange themselves at so many paces apart over a certain number of miles. But the problem is much more complex.