CHAPTER XVII
POLICE STATISTICS AND PENOLOGY
Attention has already been directed to the excessive zeal of the opponents of the "New Police"; but no mention has been made of those enthusiasts who looked for an instant millennium to follow upon the adoption of the measures they advocated. Yet there were many such who formed extravagant hopes too high for realization. It is seldom easy for the observer to arrive at a just estimate of the value of a new institution until his standpoint is far enough removed from the stress of the moment to secure him from the current partisanship which every novelty arouses. We, however, who have crossed the threshold of the twentieth century, can disregard the extreme views of both parties, and heedless of the outpourings of admirers and detractors alike, can gauge the issue by the light of ascertained results, supported by facts and figures. Judged by this standard, and viewed from the standpoint of to-day, the police reforms inaugurated between 1829 and 1856 will be found to justify all reasonably conceived expectations, disappointing as they no doubt appeared to over-sanguine extremists at the time.
Since the ideal standard of excellence aimed at by every properly constituted police force is the complete prevention of crime, and as there can be no record of offences prevented, it is obviously impossible to arrive at an entirely satisfactory conclusion as to the efficiency of police by means of any arithmetical process. At the same time it will be allowed that if, whilst population increases, recorded offences are a stationary, or better still if they are a diminishing quantity, there is at least strong presumptive evidence that the result is largely due to the efficiency of the established police. Unfortunately there is no infallible method of discovering the amount of criminality existing in the country at any given time; but, of all available statistics, the best for our purpose are certainly those, which give the annual total of commitments for indictable offences from 1834 until the present day. Before 1834 the records are not altogether trustworthy; but the Parliamentary Committee which sat in 1828, stated that in the ten years between 1811 and 1821, during which the average increase of population was about nineteen per cent., the average increase of commitments for the same period was no less than forty-eight per cent. There can therefore be no doubt that prior to the establishment of the new police the increase of crime was outstripping the increase of population; but taking only those figures which are generally acknowledged to be correct, we get the following interesting table.
| Census Years. | Population. | Number of Commitments. | Proportion. |
| 1841 | 15,914,148 | 27,760 | 174·6 per 100,000 |
| 1851 | 17,927,609 | 27,960 | 156·2 " " |
| 1861 | 20,066,224 | 18,326 | 91·3 " " |
| 1871 | 22,712,266 | 16,269 | 71·6 " " |
| 1881 | 25,974,239 | 14,704 | 56·6 " " |
| 1891 | 29,002,525 | 11,605 | 40·0 " " |
Such is the remarkable result obtained by taking the whole number of indictable offences sent for trial at Assizes and Quarter Sessions in each Census-year since 1834, nor is there any reason to suppose that the process of amelioration has slackened to any appreciable extent during the last decade. When the Census returns for 1901 are published it will probably be found that the population of England and Wales now totals to about thirty-two millions; and assuming that the amount of crime committed during the current year is not abnormal, the number of commitments will work out at a little more than thirty for every hundred thousand inhabitants. That is to say, during the last sixty years, serious offences have decreased nearly sixty per cent. in actual volume, and some eighty per cent. if considered relatively to population—or in other words, between two-thirds and five-sixths of the type of crime, which sixty years ago brought men to trial, is now prevented. These figures, of course, deal with detected crime only: if it were possible to include all grave offences, irrespective of whether their authors were discovered or not, the results would be even more striking, because owing to the increased activity on the part of the police, and to the greater readiness to prosecute on the part of the public, comparatively few serious crimes now remain mysteries for any length of time. Calculations based on the number of offences disposed of by Courts of Summary Jurisdiction are valueless if the object in view is to estimate the prevalence of crime, because not only are new minor offences continually being created (thus rendering such returns too intricate for purposes of ready comparison) but the inclusion of trivial breaches of the Licensing Acts, Education Acts, Vaccination Acts &c. reduces the plane of the enquiry from one which deals only with crimes to one which is mainly concerned with misdemeanours.
If we confine our attention, therefore, to the Commitment Returns, the most noteworthy feature which strikes us, is the drop between 1851 and 1861—the decade in which the Obligatory Act gave the coup-de-grâce to the parochial system, and for the first time covered the whole of England and Wales with a network of stipendiary police. At first sight it would appear that here was cause and effect, that is, that the signal improvement indicated by these statistics was primarily due to the Act of 1856; it is more likely, however, that the result must, in the main, be placed to the credit of the police reforms of the previous decade, for reasons which will presently appear.