The Politics of the Metropolitan Police

The 1880s were a pivotal moment in the history of British policing. The standard, set by Robert Peel and then pursued by Charles Warren, was crime prevention. But detectives weren't setting out to prevent crimes by force, so much as to solve them with clues. There's certainly a divide between uniform and plain clothes, the detectives. A detection has a bad press in England. And we didn't really want to have a detective in that way.