Thread: The Peelian Principles and American Policing 1.A long thread on the primary alternative to the US model of policing, with some history, mostly for context. Long thread. References at end. (And yes, there is synthesis here.)
2.The US police system is an independent evolution vs the rest of the Anglosphere. And a blighted evolution, since ours developed out of systems specifically intended to support racist institutions. The American system started with slave patrols. It’s fruit from a poisoned tree.
3.But our system is not the only system. The French gendarmes has roots in 13th & 14th century France; by the 18th century, was a couple centuries into an established urban police force... and a *political* police force under Royal authority. Which... came with issues.
4. Gendarmes were a factor in the French Revolution and agents of abuse under Bonaparte & remain agents of state authority to the present day. They were antagonists in the uprisings & rebellions that followed Restoration. (Think Javert in Les Miserables as mid 19th C exemplar.)
5. Across the channel, Londoners had been side-eying Paris & the gendarmes for many decades, and at best, were generally skeptical about the idea of a metropolitan police force. The idea would be proposed, but nobody trusted a consolidated system. The informal system felt fine.
6. Before the 1740s, public order was based at the parish (community) level. Metro London has always been a collection of villages, each with their own selected/elected constables, coroners & magistrates. This was prone to the same problems still apparent in small town policing —
7. — It was a semi-volunteer position, so tended to attract people who weren’t in the job for public service-minded reasons; rich dudes could pay someone else to be constable for them; local corruption was easy to maintain, there was no effective whistleblowing —
8. — but community based public order worked okay in a world that was still credulous enough to believe a woman gave birth to rabbits. (Mary Toft) Many historical novels aside, we’re not talking about a world with functional forensics or solid investigative procedures yet.
9. We know now that community based policing — police as members of the community, who live in the place they patrol & know their neighbors — is the most stable form of policing & the least likely to result in police riots or violence. Londoners liked their ability to protest.
10. In 1740, a London magistrate set his base at 4 Bow Street and recruited a small constabulary. A few years later, Henry Fielding took over & did something revolutionary: his Bow Street constables would investigate and prosecute crimes for free (thanks to a government grant).
11. Before then, if you were poor & someone hurt you or stole from you, judicial aid required the ability to pay a constable/agent to figure out the crime and bring it to a magistrate. Making public order available to all, regardless of wealth, was incredibly progressive.
12. After Henry died, his younger brother, John Fielding, took over the same job. Between the two of them, they professionalized community policing and detainment for the first time. 18th century jails sucked, but Westminster under the Fieldings was better than most places.
13 Disability note: John Fielding was blind from age 19 & lived before Braille was invented. He had a talent for recognizing & remembering voices & for recalling the details of at least 1000 crimes. Brilliant jurist & investigative mind. (Deserves a TV series.)
14 Slang note: Both Fieldings had enormous, hooked noses. GIANT honkers. They are the origin of “beaks” in the sense of cops/detectives. John was called the Blind Beak of Bow Street.
15 Now, was Bow Street perfect? No. They still partially funded themselves with reward money, so they were easy to corrupt. Investigative technique was in its infancy, and they were prone to the same cognitive biases and fallacies that befall today’s detectives.
16 But they were more reliable than whatever Good Ol Boy system was in place in most parishes. And that helped. The Bow Street Horse Patrol and the nighttime Foot Patrol endured until 1839, and established many methods and practices that the Metropolitan Police would inherit.
17 Elsewhere in England... In 1772, a legal case made slavery illegal in England. (England only, not the colonies, and the UK did not yet exist.) Bringing an enslaved person onto English soil freed them. Period. Was there still racism? Yeah. A lot of it. But...
18 Not an official, legally enforced system of racial inequality. A small difference, but policing hadn’t been established yet, except in the Fieldings’ corner of Westminster. England never had an official policy of “policing’s job is to return people to bondage.”
19 It took 35 more years (1808) to get the slave trade banned in all English territories, colonies & possessions. 30 more (1838), to get slavery itself finally banned everywhere. It was gradual, and a hard fight. It left too many people behind, but slavery was outlawed.
20 Unlike in America. At the birth of modern, London policing, the law recognized people of color as full citizens. And that matters so much. (And by the time the Metropolitan was established, punitive transportation to Australia was ending, and was seen as a failure.)
21 So... London came into the Metropolitan Police without an official, systemic policy of racism, and without a recent history of seeing other people as property. In 1829, when the Met was born, it had been almost two full generations since anyone had seen slavery in London.
22 BUT... Protest, rebellion and uprising were all over London and the UK in the early Industrial Revolution. I blame the Tories (same as they ever were) for insisting on high taxes on their primary product (grain), so the ability to *eat* was often precarious.
23 And the economy got VERY bad after Waterloo (1815). The government stopped buying materiel for the armed forces, men returned from conscription, a volcano screwed up the weather (1816) jobs were scarce, prices were high & only about 11% of British men had the right to vote.
23 In 1819, the Manchester yeomanry regiment (similar to National Guard, but not as disciplined) got called out to arrest a protest leader at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. They fired into the crowd. At least they had 1819 rifles, not modern ones.
24 At least 7 and as many as 19 people were killed outright, and 400-700 were wounded. No antibiotics, antiseptics or orthopedics then, so being injured was serious. The Peterloo massacre eventually shook out a lot of reform for the working class. But it was slow coming.
25 But for the next decade, the public mostly only knew what they didn’t want — they didn’t want the army in charge of public order. The military style of enforcing order was not acceptable. (This is a lesson the US keeps failing to learn the hard way.)
26 Enter, Robert Peel. Most important: Incredibly Not Stupid — first double firsts at Oxford, hit Parliament like a rock in a sock, became Home Secretary at 34, in 1822, 3 years after Peterloo, and with unrest still running. AND came from an industrial family, not nobility.
27 He was tasked with figuring out a civilian policing mechanism. His original Instructions are VICTORIAN. They were encapsulated in 1948 as the Peelian Principles. I’ll use the 1948, because they’re more concise; the late Regency/early Victorians were not known for brevity.
28 A note: the first few years of the Metropolitan Police were rocky. It took time to work out the kinks. The experiment could have failed and would now just be a footnote. Instead, it used the mission statement of the Principles to evolve. (That history is HIGHLY condensed.)
29 Principle 1: The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder. US policing has officially abandoned this concept, thanks to Antonin Scalia & 6 other Justices in Castle Rock V Gonzales. US Police do not have a duty to protect or prevent harm.
30 For much of the Metropolitan Police’s history, the duty to prevent crime and disorder was accomplished by assigning officers to specific neighborhoods. Officers lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, as with the older constabulary system. Obviously walkable.
31 Into the early 20th century, Metropolitan police were required to wear their uniforms at all times, except while sleeping. The public did not trust that police were safe, so the goal was to keep them visible at all times. It was an example of “who watches the watchmen?”
32 In the case of the Metropolitan Police, it was everyone in London. The uniform made them hard to bribe or corrupt, since everyone was watching. It reduced substance abuse (since sobriety was required). Ultimately, it built more of a public trust than US police ever managed.
33 By no means a perfect trust. There are significant populations in the UK who have been very badly served, and I am not diminishing the injustices they seen. Just... more trust is a little better than what the US has.
34 Principle 2: The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions. From the start of the Metropolitan Police, they answered to the government through the Home Office (functionally equivalent to the US Department of Justice).
35 In the United States, MANY municipal constabularies came into existence *before* the Department of Justice (Ulysses S Grant, 1870). Fr’ex, Boston’s merchants convinced the city government to publicly fund their formerly private security watch system by 1838.
36 USian police were established piecemeal, based on local prejudices and whims. Public approval for the US meant “the people of this town/county”, with no regards to other people or governments. Often, there was no higher authority to approve/control police actions.
37 The legacy of this disorganized establishment persists; it’s how we get “qualified” officers with a 12 week part time training certificate & so little interagency communication of employment records. We have minimal (and eroding) national standards of public approval.
38 Principle 3: Police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public. Since US policing was based in large part on slave patrols, this was never a part of the ethics of US policing.
39 Slave patrols denied that large parts of the public COULD make a voluntary observance of the law. And had no interest in earning the respect of that part. US policing never committed to securing the willing cooperation of community. And it’s probably the single largest flaw.
40 Since policing agencies have strong historical ties to slave patrols, the internal culture maintains strong historical & contemporary ties to white supremacy. Even in agencies that have become majority non-white (they do exist), the legacy of authoritarianism remains.
41 It’s basic social learning — a distinct culture can & does perpetuates behaviors learned several generations back. When trainers teach newbs authoritarian tactics, the newbs don’t know they can and should contradict this. And so it persists.
42 And authoritarians have zero interest in voluntary cooperation or the respect of the public. The only respect they understand or want is fear. (Go review your Bob Altemeyer on this one. It’s classic authoritarianism and perpetuation of dominance.)
43 Principle 4: The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force. Shorter version: you can’t make people cooperate better by beating & shooting them. (Subtext: so stop trying.)
44 American policing has been based on the exercise of force from establishment. Reducing force was rarely even attempted. The phrase “the third degree” comes from New York City policing in the 1880s, and specifically referred to torture as a means of securing confessions.
45 Nor was this rare. Mall cops are incredibly organized and professional compared to late 19th and early 20th century US policing. Literally the evidence for most convictions were coerced (beatings) confessions. And that culture of brutality has lasted.
46 Aside: the Reid technique, the infamously bad interrogation technique using leading questions, was considered a vast improvement over the 3rd degree. Reid used sleeplessness, repetition & lies to get confessions instead of clubs and whips. Reid dates from the late 1940s.
47 Principle 5: Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to the public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
48 This principle means no special treatment, at all. It’s the very antithesis of qualified immunity. In US policing, this principle is most usually seen in the absence. We saw a very rare demonstration of this principle in the Chauvin trial, when 10 officers testified.
49 Under Peelian Principles, it should be the norm for police officers to testify against their own & arrest their own. It should never be surprising. The Thin Blue Line absolutely violates Principle 5. As does the internal cultural antipathy to Internal Affairs.
50 The mere existence of Internal Affairs is a special status for police. IA exists to remove officer accountability from the community legal system, and sequester it inside an extralegal system. It’s a privilege they built to protect themselves (yet they still resent it).
51 In functional policing governed by Peelian Principles, internal investigations would be limited or not exist, because a complaint sworn against an officer would proceed like any other criminal complaint. There would be no special treatment of criminal behavior based on job.
52 Principle 6: Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient. This is probably the biggest difference from US police.
53 Early Metropolitan police were not armed. They carried a large noisy rattle, usually a whistle, and a baton. Their uniforms were designed with both visibility — blue to distinguish them from military red — and defense in mind. The early uniforms had a high collar to...
54 ... prevent strangulation and their top hats (before cork helmets) were specifically reinforced to be used as a step-stool. That was it. Very few were permitted guns. To be allowed to carry a gun meant impressing the hell out of the leadership, and it was always a privilege.
55 For this generation of American police, only using force when everything else has failed is completely foreign. For the past ~20 years, police have been trained — both in training & by the courts — to believe that anything is permissible as long as they live to clock out.
56 We don’t even train front line soldiers like that. Soldiers have a specific set of allowable actions called the Geneva Conventions to specifically restrain their behavior — to protect themselves and others. Not just from their opponents, but from their own minds.
57 Being given even tacit permission to cause unrestricted harm is psychologically damaging. It builds paranoia into every interaction. It teaches the officer that all people are a threat, to prioritize only their survival of any encounter, how to destroy everyone around them.
58 You need not be a shrink to see how damaging that mindset becomes. It doesn’t even have to be a conscious ideation, if it’s reinforced in tacit ways. It’s really not surprising that most US police officers display some level of PTSD. Their training and culture create it.
59 Guns were not illegal in the UK during the Metro’s first *century*. Handguns weren’t banned until 1996 (after a school shooting). Rifles and shotguns are still legal, but require a permit & regular training. And yet: most Metropolitan police officers have never been armed.
60 Sidebar: I note here that American access to guns is currently at an all time high. They are cheaper as a percentage of income and more available, and yet, only 22% of individuals own any gun, while a mere 3% of Americans own more than half of all the guns in the US.