LAS DETERMINANTES DE LA PRÁCTICA PROFESIONAL DEL TRABAJO SOCIAL

Property crime drove change in the English criminal justice system from the Bloody Code and Bow Street to the establishment of the Metropolitan Police. It is surprising, then, that murder, a crime that occurred relatively infrequently, had such a significant impact on the development of London’s police.134 _{The coroner had always investigated}

murder and it was never made explicit that the new police should take on this

responsibility. Indeed, no one, including Home Secretary Peel, Police Commissioners Mayne and Rowan or anyone involved in the drafting of the Metropolitan Police Act seems to have thought about how the police were to interact with London’s coroners. Unsurprisingly, this led to frequent jurisdictional conflicts and a good deal of animosity between the two groups that lasted until mid century.

The new police had little formal investigatory training and high turnover among recruits meant that it was difficult to retain men long enough for them to gain experience.135 In this climate, the police were unlucky to have had six high-profile murder investigations in as many years and a newspaper establishment hungry for crime news. London’s papers supported the police during their investigations into Davis’s, Grimwood’s and

Westwood’s murders and recognized the difficulty of tracing suspects. The mood shifted

134

In 1842, for example, murder and manslaughter were 0.64 per cent (21 cases) of Old Bailey prosecutions while theft comprised 86.3 per cent (2,834 cases). OBP Statistics.

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noticeably after Russell’s murder. The slapdash inquest and allegations that the police planted evidence overwhelmed newspaper editors’ earlier tendency to give the police the benefit of the doubt, causing them to approach murder investigations more critically. The accusatory tone of reporting that accompanied the Jones investigation reflected this change. Crime reporting was a substantial part of metropolitan daily and weekly papers and the press happily publicized murders and police investigations for their readership. The heightened attention on an already strained Metropolitan Police exacerbated the situation and, by linking all six cases, the London press created a scandal that might not otherwise have arisen. Faced with public disgrace, Mayne, Rowan and Home Secretary Grey had little option but to satisfy the public with a token detective force to specialize in complicated investigations.

As the following chapters will show, the Detective Department, which began life as a response to public criticisms of the Metropolitan Police, quietly took on a life of its own. Its officers were respected and many became household names. They were championed by the likes of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who based characters in Bleak House (1853) and The Moonstone (1868) on Scotland Yard men.136 The popularity of these detectives helped rehabilitate the Metropolitan Police after a brief but intense period of public criticism. As an investigatory group, the Met’s first detectives became

indispensible to the police commissioners and the Home Office as a flexible group of experts who could be deployed within London and throughout England. These men and their working lives are the subject of the following chapter.

136

Haia Shpayer-Makov discusses police detectives and the fictional characters they inspired in The Ascent of the Detective, chapter 6.

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A Detective Police for London: Personnel and Practice

Police Commissioners Richard Mayne and Charles Rowan drew their detectives from the uniform ranks, although there were some notable exceptions hired from outside the force. On the whole, the men who staffed the new Detective Department were better educated than the average metropolitan policeman and had the opportunity, through better pay and frequent monetary rewards for good conduct, to attain a better standard of living than their contemporaries. Most had lengthy careers in the Metropolitan Police and many became household names, rising through the ranks to coveted leadership positions in the detective and uniformed branches of the service. Detectives used rudimentary forensics during their investigations because advanced techniques, such as fingerprinting, were not invented until later in the century. Instead, detectives relied heavily on information gathering to solve cases. Thefts, for example, were routinely solved by locating stolen property at pawnbrokers and tracing suspects backwards from there. Visual recognition was also vital and detectives had much success tracking down suspects already known to them through previous offences.

This chapter presents, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of the working lives of Metropolitan Police detectives in the early and mid-Victorian period. Little has been written about the career trajectories of the Met’s first detectives and references to detectives from this early period are scattered throughout official documents.1 Using a combination of government records, court transcripts, newspapers and secondary literature, I have compiled a list of sixty-nine men who served in the Detective Department between 1842 and 1878.

1 _{What literature does exist is dated and the information contained within unverifiable. See, for example,}

Douglas Browne, The Rise of Scotland Yard: A History of the Metropolitan Police (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973 (reprint of the 1956 edition); Belton Cobb, Critical Years at the Yard: The Career of Frederick Williamson of the Detective Department and the C.I.D. (London: Faber and Faber, 1956) and The First Detectives and the early career of Richard Mayne Commissioner of Police (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1957); Sir Ronald Howe, The Story of Scotland Yard: A History of the C.I.D. from the earliest times to the Present Day (London: Arthur Barker Limited, 1965); Basil Thomson, The Story of Scotland Yard (New York: The Literary Guild, 1936).