On September 29, 1829, the first two divisions of the Metropolitan Police paraded at the Foundling Hospital and marched to their stations, and London had a police force for the first time. There were about 1,000 men, and they were unarmed, paid 21 shillings a week, and dressed in blue tailcoats and top hats so that they would not look like soldiers. Their headquarters was at 4 Whitehall Place, with an entrance on a courtyard called Great Scotland Yard.
The reform had been 40 years in the making and had been blocked for all of them. London in 1829 had about 1.5 million people and no police at all: there were seven parish watchmen systems that were a joke, a mounted patrol, the Bow Street Runners, who were paid by results and were corrupt, and an army of about 12,000 constables and beadles who did nothing. Crime was policed by the courts and the gallows, which hanged people for about 200 offences and hanged children.
Robert Peel, who was home secretary, had tried since 1812 and had got a select committee to look at it in 1822, which recommended doing nothing. What changed was the political arithmetic: the death penalty was being reduced, the Treasury wanted to cut prison costs, and the government needed a way of keeping order that did not require troops after Peterloo. The Metropolitan Police Act passed in June 1829 with almost no debate.
The design was deliberate. The officers were to be a body distinct from the public and from the army, with a uniform, a rank structure, a wage and a pension, and above all with the job of preventing crime rather than detecting it. Peel's instructions said the police existed to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to repressing it by military force, and that the test of their efficiency was the absence of crime rather than the number of arrests.
They were hated at first. The first commissioners were Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, and the men were called peelers, raw lobsters and blue devils, and were attacked in the streets and dismissed from pubs. One officer was killed in 1830, and his killer was acquitted. The Metropolitan Police did not win the argument for about twenty years.
The model spread from it. Boston set up a force on the London pattern in 1838, New York in 1845. The nine principles that Peel is said to have written were formulated by later writers rather than by him, but the design was his and it is the one most of the world's police forces are built on. There are now about 43,000 officers in the Metropolitan Police.