Bow Street Runners

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.

The Bow Street Runners are considered the first British police force. Before the force was founded, the law enforcing 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. The enforcement of the law then was mostly up to the private citizens, who had the right and duty to prosecute crimes in which they were involved or in which they were not. At the cry of "murder!" or "stop thief!", everyone was entitled and obliged to join the pursuit. Once the criminal had been apprehended, the parish constables and night watchmen, who were the only public figures provided by the state and who were typically part-time and local, would make the arrest.

As a result, the state set a reward to encourage citizens to arrest and prosecute offenders. The first of such rewards was established in 1692 of the amount of £40 for the conviction of a highwayman and in the following years it was extended to burglars, coiners and other forms of offence. The reward was to be increased in 1720 when, after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and the consequent rise of criminal offences, the government offered £100 for the conviction of a highwayman. Although the offer of such a reward was conceived as an incentive for the victims of an offence to proceed to the prosecution and to bring criminals to justice, the efforts of the government also increased the number of private and unofficial thief-takers, who would solve petty crime for a fee.

Thief-takers became infamously known not so much for what they were supposed to do, catching real criminals and prosecuting them, as for "setting themselves up as intermediaries between victims and their attackers, extracting payments for the return of stolen goods and using the threat of prosecution to keep offenders in thrall". Some of them, such as Jonathan Wild, became infamous at the time for staging robberies in order to receive the reward.

Magistrate Henry Fielding decided to regulate, regularise, formalise and legalise the thief-takers' activity due to high rates of corruption and mistaken or malicious arrests, therefore creating the Bow Street Runners. His Runners were not dissimilar to the thief-takers, but differed from them in their formal attachment to the Bow Street magistrates' office and in being paid by the magistrate with funds from central government. They worked out of Fielding's office and court at No. 4 Bow Street, and did not patrol but served writs and arrested offenders on the authority of the magistrates, travelling nationwide to apprehend criminals.

Henry Fielding's work was carried on by his brother Justice John Fielding, who succeeded him as magistrate in the Bow Street office. Under John Fielding, the institution of the Bow Street Runners gained more and more recognition from the government, although the force was only funded intermittently in the years that followed. It served as the guiding principle for the way that policing developed over the next 80 years. Bow Street was a manifestation of the move towards increasing professionalism, beginning in London.

Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle turned to Henry Fielding for help. Fielding had become a Westminster magistrate in 1748 and in his house in Bow Street, Covent Garden, he had started a kind of magisterial work that was different from anything that had been done before. Taking up the legacy of his predecessor, Sir Thomas de Veil, Fielding turned Bow Street into a court-like setting in which to conduct examinations.

However, his reformed method was not limited to his magisterial activity in Bow Street; it was also extended outside of the magistrate's office. In fact, since 1749–50 Henry Fielding had begun organising a group of men with the task of apprehending offenders and taking them to Bow Street for examination and commitment to trial. Such an organised intervention was needed, according to Fielding, because of the difficulties and reluctance of private citizens to apprehend criminals, especially if those were part of a gang — reluctance largely caused by the fear of retaliation and by the extremely high costs of the prosecution that would have to be paid by the victim of the crime. This activity, however, was very similar to the thief-takers' enterprise and, as such, it could have been considered as corrupt as the latter. Therefore, Fielding wrote a number of pamphlets to justify the activity of thief-taking; he argued that the legitimacy of this activity had been undermined by the actions of a few (see for example Jonathan Wild) and that, in fact, thief-takers performed a public service where the civil authorities were weaker. Another step towards the legitimation of the activity of the Bow Street Runners concerned the lawfulness of an arrest made by an ordinary citizen. Fielding made clear that constables were not the only ones to have the right to make an arrest, but under special circumstances – such as with a warrant issued by a magistrate – also private citizens could act against a suspected criminal and arrest them.