Bow Street Runners
first London police force (1749-1839)
The Bow Street Runners were the law enforcement officers of the Bow Street Magistrates' Court in the City of Westminster. They have been called London's first professional police force. The force originally numbered six men and was founded in 1749 by magistrate Henry Fielding, who was also well known as an author. His assistant, brother, and successor as magistrate, John Fielding, moulded the constables into a professional and effective force. Bow Street Runners was the public's nickname for the officers although the officers did not use the term themselves and considered it derogatory. The group was disbanded in 1839 and its personnel merged with the Metropolitan Police, which had been formed ten years earlier but the London metropolitan detective bureau trace their origins back from there.
The brothers set up
horse patrols in 1753 which made their group much more advanced.
Policing before 1749
The Bow Street Runners are considered the first British police force. Before the force was founded, the law enforcement system was in the hands of private citizens and single individuals with very little intervention from the state. A police force like the Maréchaussée already present in France would have been ill-suited to Britain, which saw examples such as the French one as a threat to their liberty and balanced constitution in favour of an arbitrary and tyrannical government.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bow Street Runners” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.