Law and Order in the Late 19th Century

Law and Order in the Late 19th Century

The origins of the police force go back to Saxon times. However, the

foundations of modern day British police forces were setup in the 19th

century.

The metropolitan police force was setup in 1828 by Robert Reed. In

1879, methods into dealing with murder cases had changed. These

adjustments were made by Charles Vincent, director of Criminal

Investigations. Such changes included that “the body must not be

moved; nor nothing about it or the room or the place of discovery”.

Although these changes were revolutionary, they were equally useless.

In a time before forensics and even fingerprinting, the only way of

catching a murderer is seeing him do it or catch him doing it. As one

can see, it would be quite hard to catch a murderer and many murder

cases would be left unsolved, the Whitechapel murders included.

The police themselves had very little training. Most training was

military. Therefore we can learn that murder investigation was not the

expertise of the police force at the time. The theme of the

metropolitan police at the time was prevention of crime, rather than

detection of crime. Thus, the whitechapel murders occurred in a time

where investigation of homicide was still in its youth.

The force was not only improperly trained, but they were also vastly

outnumbered. Statistics showed that in 1885 the population of London

stood at 5,255,069 people. The police force stood at 13,319 officers

of all ranks. This would indicate that there were 395 persons for

every police officer. Even more shocking is that on any given day,

there were only 1,383 PCs on beat duty. This meant that on any given

day there was an astounding 3800 persons per PC.

The reputation of the police force was disintegrated by a series of

events that made them out to be violence loving enforcers. Such

incidents included the 1984 parade of Orangemen and Cumberland. This

parade turned ugly when the police started beating people with batons.

Another unpleasant occasion was the election demonstration in