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Crime & punishment - Metropolitan Police Force

60 second histories

This video covers:

A description of Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Force.  It highlights what it took to be a police officer and how the force improved over the years with the introduction of police detectives

Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police Force in eighteen twenty-nine replacing the previous Bow Street Runners. To join the new Metropolitan police force you had to be under the age of thirty-five, of good character and able to read and write. Officers are issued with a uniform complete with reinforced top hat, a rattle and a truncheon. At first this new style of Policeman wasn’t at all liked or trusted, many were even assaulted in the streets, but all that was a long time ago. The metropolitan police have come along way since then and we’ve proved how effective we can be with more arrests and convictions and a falling crime rate. I’m one of a new kind of police officer, a plain clothes detective, we first appeared on the streets in eighteen forty two and deal with crimes that vary from petty theft to robbery and murder, and we’re always looking at new ways of fighting such crime. Right now I’m studying the Galton-Henry system of fingerprinting, which enables us to link a suspect to a scene of a crime.
Eras: 
Victorian
Topics: 
Law & order
Crime & Punishment
Character: 
Police detective
Key words: 
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