June 1780, Sir John Fielding, head of the Bow Street Runners, lies near death in his country home.
Meanwhile, London is burning. June 2nd, Lord George Gordon leads a procession to Parliament.
They carry a petition demanding the government
reinstate the anti-Catholic laws 
Parliament repealed 2 years earlier.
The petition is overwhelmingly defeated. But outside, the mob riots and forces their way into Parliament.
Soldiers disperse the crowd. But that night, it reforms, and attacks Catholic chapels and businesses.
The violence spirals into anti-government fury targeting political officials,
institutions, and especially the justice system.
Rioters storm prisons, freeing the inmates.
They sack courthouses, attack the chief justice, and force open the cells at Newgate,
painting a slogan that the prisoners have been freed by His Majesty, King Mob.
On June 7th, they besiege the Bank of England and the troops finally move in.
400 people died in the riots with a further 300 dead, shot by soldiers taking back control.
In the House of Lords, an Earl makes a 
shocking proposal:
London needs a police force!
[Birth of the People]
They call Sir John Fielding, the blind beak of Bow Street.
Blinded by an accident as a young Navy man,
he conducted his court with the help of sighted clerks. But word had, it he knew over
3,000 criminals just by the sound of their voice.
Over two decades, he took the core of his brother Henry's ideas, a force of
government-funded trained constables, and a court that
communicated with the public through newspapers, and developed them into something that could last.
The Bow Street Runners were no longer a secret, and though at times there were only a half-dozen of them,
they were making major progress in tackling London Street crime.
With this success, he started to receive regular government support for his operation.
He could keep Bow Street open most days and even hire a small staff at night
so crime could be reported at any hour.
He trained his Bow Street Runners in investigative techniques, evidence collection,
and testimony, until they were a detective 
force in all but name.
And in 1763, he received a grant to start the Bow Street Horse Patrol, not as a force to catch specific criminals,
but as a roving patrol to discourage crime, 
the first time he deployed
constables in a preventative capacity. The 
money, however,
ran out after 18 months and the patrol dissolved. His record-keeping, however, would remain a constant.
At Bow Street, Fielding developed the first central database of stolen property and
suspect descriptions in the United Kingdom,
the forerunner of the criminal records office. The most famous item, Fielding's watch book,
cataloged every stolen pocket watch reported at Bow Street,
listing their main features and owner.
He disseminated these descriptions of stolen property to all of London's pawn brokers,
cutting off the most common method for 
fencing stolen goods.
And in 1772, he began publishing The Police Gazette or Hue and Cry, a free newspaper
chronicling cases, detailing unsolved crime, and calling for witnesses to come forward.
But this paper did not simply deal with London.
Rather, it contained dispatches from prisons and courts around the country about
at-large suspects, essentially making it a law-enforcement information system.
He also pushed to address the social issues that helped drive crime.
Both Henry and John fielding had gone into the legal profession
with the belief that London's spike in law-breaking had social causes,
ranging from overcrowding and poverty, to corruption in politics, and the
availability of cheap gin. And he did what he could to break the cycle, founding a girl's orphanage, and
suggesting, whenever possible that young offenders should be sent to the British Navy rather than a prison,
hoping they could gain a career instead of sinking deeper into the criminal underworld.
But while the government loved Sir John Fielding,
the public's reaction to him and his runners was more skeptical.
They saw the runners as a force that crushed individual liberties and his
record-keeping and newspapers as a form of surveillance.
Not to mention the public was very correct in thinking that much of this zeal for
criminal reform came from an irrational fear of the poor.
Many in London still preferred the old medieval model of the hue and cry,
in which ordinary citizens were supposed to drop whatever they were
doing and perform a citizen's arrest if they saw a crime in progress. While it was deeply ineffective
they argued it protected their civil liberties, but the year 1780 marked a turning point.
Sir John Fielding died, handing off his duties to subordinates who carried on his policies.
The Gordon riots made it clear that
London's current policing systems were inadequate
and the American Revolutionary War 
began coming to a close.
See, London's crime rate always soared 
when wars ended.
Unemployed soldiers and sailors would flood the city looking for work
and then turned to robbery to make ends meet.
And it happened right on schedule. Then during the subsequent crime wave
the Bow Street model got adopted into 
parishes across London.
One of its biggest champions was the Home Office, a new government ministry
established after the Gordon riots that focused on Britain's domestic security. And though it
successfully reinstated the horse and foot 
patrols, its big project -
putting all the Bow Street-style private police under central control - failed.
The people just weren't ready for it. And as the crime rate began falling again in the early 1800s,
politicians became less interested in pushing through unpopular solutions.
But as London's force of almost-but-not-quite police stagnated,
another wave of reform swept England: prison reform.
British prisons hadn't changed much since the days of Jonathan Wilde,
much like its policing system and magistrate offices,
British politicians didn't want to raise taxes to pay for its jails and insisted that they pay for themselves.
Wardens and staff were unpaid, expected to live off fees extracted from prisoners.
And prisoners had to pay for everything, 
from food, to water,
to access to medical care. And they could not be released until those debts to the warden were paid.
There was no regulations as to sanitation, 
security, or crowding.
In fact, rather than separate cells, most were thrown in large common rooms
that mixed men and women, children and adults,
and violent offenders with common debtors.
And it's important to note that 60% of prisoners were being held for financial debt, not crimes.
And by 1780, overcrowding reached a crisis point because British prisons were packed with
low-level offenders, such as sex workers, thieves, and debtors, who would have been transported
to the American colonies before that option became...
untenable, because now there were no American colonies. And with transportation frozen during the war
the prisons had been stacking up for a decade.
The temporary solution came from prison hulks, decommissioned vessels, largely naval ships of the line,
that served as floating jails. And as you can imagine, the conditions aboard were predictably very dismal.
But there were voices raising the alarm.
In 1773, a man named John Howard won appointment as the high sheriff of his shire,
and decided to inspect the local jail.
Appalled at what he found,
he gave evidence at the House of Commons and set out on a tour of prisons
throughout the United Kingdom and Europe.
He published his findings in several books,
complete with layout drawings and individual descriptions of cells, helping the public
understand the dire conditions within 
Britain's aging jails.
He recommended better sanitation, morally upright staff, abolishing keeper fees,
clean food and water, and holding each prisoner in a separate cell.
Another later prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, would recommend many of the same things,
apart from the single cell, which she considered cruel.
But she added a new element.
A deeply spiritual Quaker, Fry believed that prisoners could be reformed, and she
advocated for prisons to become more than a holding cell for the condemned,
arguing that they instead could correct and rehabilitate, with the goal of an inmate eventually rejoining society.
Fry would go into jails teaching female inmates needlework and sewing so they could have a trade.
And instead of imposing rules during these sessions,
she let the inmates propose and vote on 
their own codes of behavior.
She also argued for a separation of men and women into different parts of a prison for obvious reasons,
and that women's prisons should have a 
female warden and guards.
And one of Fry's greatest admirers by chance was the head of the Home Office: Secretary Robert Peel.
Yep, that Robert Peel from our potato famine series!
And while I do have some mixed opinions about him, to his credit,
Peel wrote her recommendations into the 
Gaol's Act of 1823,
including the separation of men and women, female staff, paid wardens,
provided visits by chaplains, banned irons and manacles, and also removed the death penalty for 130 offenses.
But it also turned Peel's eye toward justice reform, and six years later, in 1829, he took on another challenge:
convincing the public that London needed and would accept a permanent professional police force.
By this time, there was little opposition in Parliament.
The Bow Street model was a successful prototype, and it was very clear that the army could no longer
police the city in times of crisis,
particularly given what had happened in Manchester a decade before,
when cavalry sent in to break up a 
Parliamentary reform rally
charged with sabres drawn. They killed 18 people and wounded at least 400.
They needed men trained to arrest, not kill, and Peel thought he could build that by force.
Special thanks to our educational tier patrons, Ahmed Turk Joseph Blaim, and Dominic Valenciana.
