Law, Crime and History (2012) 1 STREET DISORDER IN THE METROPOLIS, 1905-39 Stefan Slater1 Abstract This article uses insights from sociology, criminology and anthropology to establish patterns of disorder in early-to-mid twentieth century London. As criminal statistics are shown to be the products of both behavioural and institutional practices, this discussion opens with an examination of police culture to comprehend the range of variables influencing decision making on the beat. The second section develops this occupational model further to interpret the trends shown by the statistics. With this appreciation of policing in practice, the third part argues that integrating Taylor‟s supply-side approach with a street-level understanding of the relationship between police and policed, while considering the broader socio-economic context, allows for measured inferences about social changes to be drawn from prosecution records. Keywords: Metropolitan Police, interwar London, public disorder, street betting, prostitution, drunkenness, vagrancy Introduction That the recorded incidence of violence is on the increase may show not that society is falling apart but rather that we live in an increasingly orderly society that tolerates criminal injury far less than in the uncivilized past.2 When all is said and done, our perceptions of violence do indeed depend on where we look. That, if nothing else, should alert us to the possibility that, in our eagerness to dispel the myth of a conflict-free golden age, we may be exaggerating the tensions of [earlier societies] while overlooking the reality of violence in our own times.3 Elucidating the experience of crime befuddles both historian and sociologist. During the 1920s, however, contemporaries were not plagued by the same angst which taxed the minds of early 1 Stefan Slater has published a number of peer-reviewed articles on crime and policing in interwar London, he currently works in a public house and may be contacted at [email protected]. A version of this article was presented as a paper at the LSE Criminology Seminar on 2 March 2010. Thanks to Janet Clark, Penelope Corfield, Dick Hobbs, Hannes Kleineke, Bob Morris, Simon Parkes and John Carter Wood for reading a draft of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Katherine Watson and two anonymous referees at Law Crime and History for helping me to sharpen the final version; any errors in fact or interpretation, however, remain the sole responsibility of the author. 2 Geoffrey Pearson, „The Roots of Violence‟, British Medical Journal, 297 (26 Nov. 1988), pp.1352-53, at p.1353. 3 J.S. Cockburn, „Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent 1560-1985‟, Past and Present, 130 (1991), pp. 70-106, at p.106. 59 Law, Crime and History (2012) 1 Victorian and twenty-first century commentators.4 In a study for the London School of Economics, former Home Office permanent under-secretary Sir Edward Troup observed that between 1893 and 1928 recorded crime had fallen significantly. Troup felt confident enough to remark in 1930: „there is clearly a substantial reduction in crimes of violence to the person known to the police‟.5 This fall, up until the late 1920s, continued a trend of falling crime rates in London from the mid-to-late nineteenth century.6 A number of studies have observed that the experience of falling crime rates attests to Norbert Elias‟ concept of the „civilizing process‟.7 Pieter Spierenburg, however, prefers the term „process of civilization‟, and that the former phrase „suggests that a person or group out there is actively civilizing others, which, in its turn, might suggest that social processes come about because someone directs them. This is never the case. Long-term processes, also that of civilization, are largely “blind”.‟ These behavioural changes are „not merely due to the offensives of courts and moral entrepreneurs, but were facilitated by social and economic transformations. Both the imitation-and-refinement mechanism and that of conscious inculcation of norms in their turn formed part of overall blind changes.‟8 More recently, Steven Pinker has used his expertise in evolutionary psychology to interpret this cultural process.9 John Carter Wood points to a „growing historical consensus that overall rates of interpersonal violence in Europe declined significantly between the late-medieval period and the middle of the twentieth century.‟10 4 Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in Twentieth-Century England (Harlow: Pearson, 2011); David J.V. Jones, Crime and Policing in the Twentieth Century: The South Wales Experience (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), p.53. 5 E. Troup, „Crime‟, in H.L. Smith (ed.), The New Survey of London Life and Labour, Vol. 1: Forty Years of Change (London: P.S. King & Son Ltd., 1930), pp.391-92. 6 David Jones, „Crime in London: The Evidence of the Metropolitan Police, 1831-92‟, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp.117- 43; V.A.C. Gatrell, „The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England‟, in V.A.C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa, 1980), pp.238-337. 7 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 8 Pieter Spierenburg, „Violence and the Civilizing Process: Does it Work?‟ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, 5, 2 (2001), pp.87-105, at p.98. 9 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011). 10 John Carter Wood, „The Limits of Culture? Society, Evolutionary Psychology and the History of Violence‟, Cultural and Social History, 4, 1 (March 2007), pp.95-114, at p.106. See also idem, „Self- Policing and the Policing of the Self: Violence, Protection and the Civilizing Bargain in Britain‟, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History and Societies, 7, 1 (2003), pp.109-28. 60 Law, Crime and History (2012) 1 For the benefit of non-historians the people of early twentieth-century Britain experienced falling death and infant mortality rates, improved educational opportunities, political enfranchisement, shorter working hours, and rising real incomes which facilitated the availability of funds, albeit still limited, for discretionary consumer spending on a wider array of pursuits. In 1890, the average life expectancy of a British man was 44 years; by 1930 a man could expect to live up to the age of 59 with much of the shift being accounted for by the substantial decline in mortality rates between birth and five years of age in those years.11 Other European countries which experienced similar socio-economic changes also witnessed falling recorded crime rates between the wars.12 It may appear churlish to remind the reader that crime serves as a catch-all term for a variety of behaviours ranging from murder to drink driving. In the case of London recorded crimes, known as indictable offences, formed fewer than 10 per cent of infractions listed as „crimes‟ in the official statistics.13 Details of those petty infractions, known as non-indictable offences, may be gleaned from the London County Council‟s annual abstract London Statistics, a comprehensive collection of trials held in the Administrative County of London, the City and Greater London.14 In this article, offences viewed as „disorderly behaviour‟ are examined to both complement and add a neglected dimension to the „processes of civilization‟ hypothesis. Disorder is an equally nebulous term, applying to an array of public actions veering from riots associated with public protest to children playing football in the street.15 As late as 1925, three youths aged between 17 and 19 years were summoned before the bench at North London 11 Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994); Eric Hopkins, The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes, 1918-1990: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991). 12 Pieter Spierenburg, A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge, 2008), pp.199-201. According to official data, public order improved in Stockholm and Sydney both through the 1920s and 1930s: Ted R. Gurr, „Contemporary Crime in Historical Perspective: A Comparative Study of London, Stockholm, and Sydney‟, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 434 (1977), pp.114-36, at p.118. 13 S.K. Ruck, „Crime‟, in H.L. Smith (ed.), The New Survey of London Life and Labour, Vol. 9: Life and Leisure (London: P.S. King & Son Ltd., 1935), pp.346-90, at p.347. 14 Figures for the Metropolitan Police District for the offences considered below are available for the period 1905-35, discounting gaps in the data for 1914-18, 1920 and 1923. No data exists for the later 1930s for the outbreak of the Second World War led to the temporary discontinuation of the publication of the London Statistics. These raw figures must be weighted to account for population change, thus all the figures below, unless stated otherwise, refer to a ratio per 100,000 of the population. 15 An excellent analysis of disorder stemming from industrial unrest remains Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 61 Law, Crime and History (2012) 1 Police Court for playing football in Roads Place, Holloway. The presiding magistrate, Mr Pope, remarked: I think it is about time that the police, who are paid for more important duties, should not be called upon to restrain a number of foolish boys when their parents ought to do it.