“Stop thief!”

Whilst reading Robert Shoemaker’s excellent book The London Mob I was idly distracted thinking about the interaction between the public and law enforcement. On witnessing a crime we are told the early 18th century common man would get involved to apprehend the criminal. Without an external policing force there was a group responsibility to enforce law and order, the hue and cry was not just an obligation but something people actively took part in without considering not to. There was perhaps an unspoken (or possibly spoken) understanding that if a man came to the aid of another when he was the victim of crime then people would come to his aid.

By the end of the century at the very least a paid watch was in place in most large towns and cities and the City of London had something approaching a police force. There are already reports that people choose not to apprehend criminals themselves but instead seek out the authorities or even expect that they will deal with it and let crime occur. Perhaps this change is related to the sense of externality of the police. Now that there is a separate body doing the task the people feel they have lost their role within it, they are now separated from the law-enforcement process. Or perhaps it is more connected with the financial relationship, they are paying people to perform this task thus they should ensure they get there money’s worth and not perform their task for themselves.

Certainly we can all see that by the early 21st Century we are a long way from the form of community law enforcement of the 18th. Most people would not consider stepping in to stop a crime and suspect that if they did they would risk some form of lawsuit from the criminal or the state. We have become completely divorced from the process. Our relationship between that authority we put in place in the late 18th Century and the common man has changed dramatically to a point of some-time opposition.

Of course it is easier in some ways to understand that sense of opposition and oppression that the police are often perceived to represent when we compare them, not to early police forces, but to the army. After all the 18th Century tool of control and defense against unrest was the troops. Since the civil war there had been something akin to a standing army and it served as a tool to prevent the ever present dangers of the mob. The sheer speed at which troops appeared whenever Londoners rioted through the century (and there were very many) demonstrated their purpose as tools of social control. The fact this continued well into the early 19th Century (consider Peterloo) suggests it would be a long time before the police took on this role. They were the tools of law enforcement which had replaced the hue and cry, the roaming magistrate and the mob bent on securing criminals. “Stop thief!” had become a cry to summon the authorities rather than a mob.
However they were not yet the tool of social oppression they would become in some eyes, the troops still held that role and would continue to into the 20th Century.