Diagrama de Flujo de Proceso de Producción

The men of Scotland Yard’s Detective Department were the first police detectives in England. Their exertions on behalf of private victims and the English government helped overcome public skepticism about the use of detectives by the state and transformed police detectives into indispensible public servants and – in some cases – celebrities.145 Understanding how police detectives worked and the climate in which they operated between 1842 and 1878 is crucial for understanding developments in policing, prosecution, and public order in nineteenth-century England.

Although property crime was the principal focus of Victorian policing, murder had an effect on the public psyche out of proportion to its actual incidence.146 Chapter 2 explores the cultural climate of the late 1830s and early 1840s that led to a sea change in public opinion about who should investigate murder. Before the foundation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829, London’s coroners investigated suspicious death. Local press, however, advocated for greater police involvement in murder cases and newspapers paid close attention to the quality of police investigations. Several failed inquiries in the six years

144 _{Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of}

Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 96 and 133.

145

The Commissioners of Police at Scotland Yard were extremely cautious about the use of officers out of uniform and they repeatedly attempted to restrict their use to avoid accusations of spying. MEPO 7/16, 23 January 1854.

146

Murder only ever made up a fraction of prosecuted crime in London; statistics from the Old Bailey indicate that 480 murders were prosecuted there between 1830 and 1880 out of nearly 83,000 total criminal trials, constituting less than one per cent of prosecutions. The only decade where murders made up more than 1 per cent of trials was the 1870s, where the total was 1.35 per cent. OBP statistical calculator.

following Victoria’s ascension to the throne resulted in significant negative press for the police and calls for a professional detective force. The Met and the Home Office

acquiesced to this pressure and the new Detective Department was formed in August 1842. This was an extraordinary volte face after nearly fifty years of anti-executive feeling and fears that a centrally controlled police would be used, as on the Continent, to spy on citizens and police their politics. Following the establishment of the new detective branch, property crime remained the greatest policing priority, although the new

detectives were usually involved in murder investigations, especially if a case gathered press attention.

Chapter 3 offers, for the first time, a concrete picture of who staffed the Detective

Department and the details of their operational lives. The police commissioners recruited detectives from the uniform ranks, with a few additional men brought in from the public, based on alacrity and education. In an era where formal education was still unsystematic for working-class Britons, literacy and foreign language skills were in high demand in a police force that required constant written reports and interactions with people of varied backgrounds. Detectives learned on the job and, without advanced forensic techniques such as fingerprinting, relied on accumulated experience and information gathering to solve cases. They were well compensated for their work and, after a promotion to the rank of inspector and above, could maintain a comfortably lower middle to middle-class lifestyle. Many detectives had challenging and rewarding working lives, receiving coveted promotions and retiring with pensions.

Chapter 4 investigates detectives’ caseloads, based on their appearances in felony trials at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey. A decade-by-decade breakdown indicates that detectives’ role as felony investigators evolved over time. Although the Detective Department was established in response to concerns about murder

investigations, there were not enough murders to sustain their attention and London’s new detectives reverted quickly to investigating property crime during the 1840s. During the 1850s they branched out to provincial investigations on behalf of the Home Office and also trained divisional officers in detective and surveillance methods, resulting in a diminished detective presence at the Old Bailey during this decade. By the 1860s,

divisional men with detective training acted more independently of the central detective force, allowing Scotland Yard’s detectives to refocus on London crime. During the 1860s and 1870s government concerns about white-collar crime escalated and central detectives spent a great deal of time investigating forgery and fraud. Investigations into white-collar crime were time consuming and required the attention of a specialized and flexible force like the detective squad at Scotland Yard.

The fifth chapter examines the spread of detective policing in the Met more broadly, arguing that that the Metropolitan Police was, from its inception, far more oriented towards detective policing than historians have acknowledged. Local superintendents regularly used plainclothes officers for official and unofficial duties. The commissioners approved the use of undercover officers to detect pickpockets and other thieves during significant state occasions, fairs, regattas and races. Also approved were detective-led night patrols to deter and detect burglars during long, dark winter nights. Less official was the use of planted men to monitor subversive groups and a significant scandal erupted when one undercover officer was found to have participated in Chartist political meetings and encouraged illegal activity. By mid-century, however, Police Commissioner Mayne was won over by the success of detective activity in London and authorized the use of undercover men in the divisions. These divisional officers became official

divisional detectives in 1869, sanctioning a practice that had unofficially existed from the very earliest days of the Metropolitan Police.

The final chapter examines Scotland Yard’s investigations for the Home Office, including the surveillance of foreign nationals and political dissidents. This was a new priority for the government in the wake of European revolutions in 1830 and 1848. Government concern focused on possible homegrown dissent but more immediately on waves of refugees, some highly politicized, who appeared on England’s shores in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. Scotland Yard’s detectives monitored foreign nationals in England and on the Channel Islands to ensure safety and public order, often at the request of frantic European ambassadors. Detectives also helped a Home Office increasingly overburdened with legislative responsibilities by evaluating applications for

choices to investigate applicants and their references so the Home Office could determine whether or not to grant citizenship. The government allowed detectives a great deal of discretion when it came to surveillance of foreigners and naturalization applications and, by relying heavily on detectives’ evaluations, gave Scotland Yard detectives a

discretionary part in determining who was allowed to remain on British soil. Extradition was another complicated and laborious process with which central detectives helped the Home Office by executing extradition warrants, tracking offenders in England, on the Continent and in America, gathering witnesses, and extraditing offenders to and from Britain. The Detective Department quickly became an important force that the home secretary could use to alleviate intensifying pressure on his own office.

2

Investigating Murder

This chapter examines the role played by murder in the creation of the Detective

Department. Before 1829, property crime had been the traditional focus of both criminal justice legislation and local policing activity. After 1829, however, homicide, for the first time, became a police priority. The first half of the chapter considers who investigated murder, a crime not traditionally investigated by constables or even Bow Street.1 As evidenced – and fed by – the press, murder would assume a new, and not entirely

explicable, prominence in the public imagination and began to dominate crime reporting in the early Victorian period.2

The ostensibly preventive new police were expected to play a role in the investigation of this crime. This expectation especially appears to have been shared by the police

themselves, resulting in conflict and something of a ‘turf war’ or jurisdictional battle between the new agents of law and order and the ancient office of the coroner that would span decades. Although murder comprised a minuscule fraction of metropolitan crime, press attention lent it an impact out of proportion to its incidence and placed significant pressure on the police to solve homicides quickly and diligently. Six murders perpetrated in the years around 1840, which received extensive reportage in London and the

provincial papers, seemed to indicate a pattern of police incompetence. The final portion of this chapter investigates what went wrong in these investigations and how they led senior police and Home Office officials, spurred by negative publicity, to form a dedicated detective force, the first in Metropolitan Police history.

1 _{J.M. Beattie notes that the Bow Street Runners were rarely involved in homicide investigations in}

London. Outside London, however, murder and attempted murder were their biggest caseload. David J. Cox indicates that provincial magistrates requested Bow Street Officers to help when locals were reluctant or lacked to skill to conduct a homicide investigation. As Beattie notes, however, the Runners’ provincial homicide investigations were closely linked to public order offences, especially arson and damage to property. J.M. Beattie, The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 182; David J. Cox, A Certain Share of Low Cunning: A History of the Bow Street Runners, 1792-1839 (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2010), 105-109.

2 _{Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians: Popular entertainment in nineteenth-century London (Manchester}

and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012); Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London: Harper Press, 2011).