A History of Police in England

by W. L. Melville Lee

The members of the English police are public servants in the fullest sense of the term; not servants of any individual, of any particular class or sect, but servants of the whole community—excepting only that part of it which in setting the law at defiance, has thereby become a public enemy. The strength of the Man in Blue, properly understood, lies in the fact that he has behind him the whole weight of public opinion; for he only wages war against the law-breaker, and in this contest can claim the goodwill of every loyal citizen. If a police constable is in need of assistance, he can call upon any bystander, and in the King's name demand his active co-operation; should the bystander refuse without being able to prove physical impossibility or lawful excuse, he can no longer be considered as a loyal citizen, but is guilty of an indictable offence and becomes liable to punishment.

The basis upon which our theory of police ultimately rests, is the assumption that every lawful act performed by a police officer in the execution of his duty, has the sanction and approval of the great majority of his fellow-citizens; and under our constitution it would be impossible for any constabulary force to continue in existence, if its actions persistently ran counter to the expressed wishes of the people.

The actual continuance of the English police is therefore dependent upon the consent of the people; but this mere acquiescence is not enough. If the police are to be efficient, they must earn for themselves the respect and sympathy of all classes, they must be popular. It is only on the rarest occasions that a policeman is actually the eye-witness of a crime, nor in the nature of things is he likely to be in the confidence of the criminal. As a rule he must rely on information, and generally speaking the public is the only source from which the necessary knowledge can be obtained. If the public are hostile, the one source of information is closed, and the police are rendered powerless. This difficulty has often been experienced in Ireland, where, on several occasions, it has proved a practical impossibility to discover the authors of agrarian crime, even when all the facts were well known to dozens of people, simply because the whole neighbourhood had entered into a conspiracy of silence. Such a manœuvre instantly paralyzes the civil executive. In the olden days, when an offence had been committed and there was no culprit forthcoming, a fine was levied against the hundred or hundreds implicated, and justice was satisfied; in mediæval times, the "peine forte et dure" was employed to elicit information; but since the abolition of torture no effectual method has been invented by means of which an unwilling witness can be forced to tell what he knows; in Ireland, especially, the inducements held out by Government, to tempt a man to speak, are of little avail against the terrorism that the other side can invoke by the mere whisper of the word "informer."

But there are other reasons, besides this important question of obtaining information, why a measure of popularity is of such extreme value to every police force. There are a thousand ways in which the members of an unpopular service can be embarrassed and thwarted. No matter how capable and painstaking a man may be, he cannot do himself justice, nor can the best results attend his labours, if his every act is questioned, and if at every turn he has to surmount some obstacle set up to annoy and discourage him. The constabulary has been described as "The great army of order that is always in the field"; the protracted campaign in which this army is engaged is under all circumstances extremely arduous, but it becomes doubly so when its operations have to be conducted in an enemy's country.

We demand intelligence, good personal character and great physical strength from those to whom we entrust the duties of peace maintenance; and if we are to obtain men of the right stamp, men, that is, who possess these qualifications, it is essential that the police service should be held in popular esteem, and that the position of a constable should be sufficiently well thought of, and sought after, to create a keen competition for the vacancies as they occur. It would never do to have to beat up recruits for the constabulary forces, and to fall back on the expedients that the military authorities have to resort to to fill the ranks, nor to enlist immature lads in the hope that some day they will grow into well-developed men.

From every point of view, then, popularity is of the utmost value to the police; and yet, from the very nature of their duties it is extremely difficult for them to win it. A policeman who will lend himself to the screening of crime, or who is conveniently blind on occasions, may quickly become the object of a worthless and fleeting popularity; but it is not the friendship of the publican nor the applause of the rabble that is desirable; what is wanted is the respect and approval of all good citizens.

Year by year, in spite of occasional set-backs, the English police have risen in the estimation of their fellow-countrymen until they have won for themselves a position in the minds of the people which for respect and regard combined is without a parallel in Europe. "Weak in numbers as the force is," wrote Mr Munro, the late Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, "it would be found in practice altogether inadequate were it not strengthened, to an extent unknown, I believe, elsewhere, by the relations that exist between the police and public, and by the thorough recognition on the part of the citizens at large of the police as their friends and protectors. The police touch all classes of the public at many points beyond the performance of their sterner duties as representatives of the law, and they touch them in a friendly way.... The police in short, are not the representatives of an arbitrary and despotic power, directed against the rights or obtrusively interfering with the pleasures of law-abiding citizens: they are simply a disciplined body of men, specially engaged in protecting 'masses' as well as 'classes,' from any infringement of their rights on the part of those who are not law-abiding."

The wisdom of fostering cordial relations between the people and the civil defenders of their lives and properties seems so obvious, that it is a source of wonder that so little attention has been given to the study of how best to promote this desirable entente cordiale. Before the new police was instituted constables were merely despised; after the re-organization was completed they were generally feared and often hated; the fact that they won their way to popularity is to be attributed almost entirely to their own merits. At the beginning of the century Colquhoun, who was a long way in advance of his contemporaries in his conceptions of what a police force should be, wrote: "Everything that can heighten in any degree the respectability of the office of constable, adds to the security of the State, and to the safety of the life and property of every individual," but at the time only a very few people heeded what he said; and parish authorities persisted in the idea that it did not matter who or what a constable was so long as he was cheap, whilst in more recent years, politicians of a certain stamp, who ought to be alive to the fatal consequences of their action, have not scrupled to try and stir up bad blood between the constabulary and the uneducated section of the public, whenever it has suited their purposes to do so, though happily without much success.

If the co-operation of which we have been speaking is to be complete, it should rest on a more substantial basis than goodwill: it is not sufficient that private citizens should be well-disposed towards their allies, it is necessary also that they should be acquainted with the conditions that govern the mutual relationship. The sphere of police utility is seriously limited by reason of the ignorance which commonly prevails, both as to the executive powers that private persons can assume as citizens, and with respect to the functions that officials may exercise by virtue of their office. In his "History of the Criminal Law," Sir James Stephen thus explains the position. "The police in their different grades are no doubt officers appointed by law for the purpose of arresting criminals, but they possess for this purpose no powers that are not also possessed by private persons.... A policeman has no other right as to asking questions or compelling the attendance of witnesses than a private person has; in a word, with a few exceptions, he may be described as a person paid to perform as a matter of duty acts, which if he so minded, he might have done voluntarily."[220] The law on the subject is further defined by another authority in these words. "If a constable be assaulted in the execution of his office, he need not go back to the wall, as private persons ought to do; and if, in the striving together, the constable kill the assailant, it is no felony; but if the constable be killed it shall be construed premeditated murder."[221] For all practical purposes, however, the only real difference that exists between the powers that are actively made use of by the police, and the latent powers that are vested in every British citizen, is this:—A police officer may arrest (without warrant) if he has a reasonable suspicion that a felony has taken place; a private person cannot arrest unless he has certain knowledge that a felony has actually been committed.

Within these limits, and according to our opportunities, the duty of each one of us is clear and inalienable, remaining the same to-day as it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when it was written "So that every English man is a sergeant to take the thiefe, and who sheweth negligence therein do not only incurre Evil opinion therefore, but hardly shall escape punishment."[222]