Did the Victorian police displace popular responses to crime? This is the central question of David Churchill's study, which presents a compelling argument for the continued importance of a range of individual and communal responses to urban criminality. Churchill uses sources drawn from beyond police administration to enable the complex everyday reality of crime control to be understood. This original methodology makes the book of value to historians of urban social policy beyond the criminal justice field.
What the police actually did, and how this changed over time, are the focus of the earlier chapters. The book offers a useful study of continuity and change over the nineteenth century, centred on Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester. It considers indicators of effectiveness such as manpower, annual turnover (around 30 per cent in 1850–70) and patterns of deployment. We see that significantly increased public expectations about what urban policing would deliver placed great demands on limited resources. These demands stretched beyond property crime, meaning that combating public nuisances and petty disorder occupied much of the everyday work of the Victorian constable. Increased expectations, alongside financial constraints, ultimately limited the impact the ‘new police’ in Victorian cities could make.
This analysis supports Churchill's argument that a ‘state monopolization thesis’ which enjoys a ‘residual hold’ amongst historians requires revision. The thesis holds that the development of the ‘new police’ after the early nineteenth century saw professional, assertive police forces take a dominant role in the response to crime. In reality, far from seeking to establish a monopoly, the overburdened Victorian police actively encouraged informal restitution, and urged the public to take more responsibility for securing their property. The book is clear that by 1900 the cities under consideration enjoyed policing that was more systematic, disciplined and extensive than ever before. But policing's impact was far from absolute, with unintended consequences and awareness of previous reforms’ deficiencies being key drivers of change.
If the Victorian police failed to monopolize crime control, what did the mixed economy of responses look like? Examining everyday experiences of theft can help answer this question. Victims’ and witnesses’ testimonies, in particular, reveal instinctive responses, and are thus highly revealing of contemporary attitudes. By quantifying Liverpool's depositions from the 1840s, for instance, Churchill shows that police searched alone for suspects in just 31 per cent of cases. Similar points are made for arrests, and investigating stolen goods. The book argues that individual and communal initiative remained prominent, not just because of deficiencies in policing, but due to closely held and enduring attitudes towards crime, victimhood and civic duty. In this, police and civilian responses to crime are not necessarily mutually opposed. Churchill shows that victims often pursued a mixture of tactics in the pursuit of justice, perhaps calling on neighbours or bystanders first, before turning to the police. The book's choice of Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester for detailed case-study is particularly useful here: even in these newly expanded cities, urban anomie did not displace the crowd and community as enforcers of moral norms.
The book's use of a diverse collection of source materials gives its argument weight and originality. But what else might it have considered? The conclusion mentions that the Victorian police formed frequent, if ad hoc, relationships with local government, voluntary organizations, poor law authorities and many others. Describing this mixed economy of institutions, or at least discounting its significance, might have given additional insight into the impact of Victorian police reform. Certainly, institutions were important in the pre-modern response to crime with which Churchill often identifies continuity. Elsewhere, Churchill argues that physically resolving crimes without involving the police could be a means to assert masculinity. Consideration of gender could be a fruitful avenue for further research, be it performing gender roles through responses to crime, or simply by considering gender differences in tactics of crime response.
This is an original and readable book, which develops a persuasive account of the practical impact of the Victorian police. In its consideration of the complex interactions between governmental actors and an autonomous public, it offers a valuable contribution to the question of how we can attempt to understand everyday responses to social problems in the nineteenth-century city.
