'Lurking' and 'loitering': Historic Approaches to Policing Suspicious Behaviour in Britain and their Contemporary Resonances
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leeds
Department Name: Law
Abstract
My research examines the history of policing, specifically the policing of suspicious persons, and its implications for police practices and their impact on minority communities today. This fellowship will enable me to further examine and disseminate my findings on the contemporary resonances of historical policing practices.
My research reveals the impact of policing practices on patterns of arrest and prosecution in London between 1780 and 1850. Scholars have long recognised that the received historical record of crime is a reflection of prosecutions, rather than of criminal activity itself, which is very difficult to quantify in the past. However, my research reshapes our understanding to show that it is also partially a record of policing. I advance the idea of 'proactive policing': the occasions on which policing agents exercised discretion to arrest defendants on suspicion that they had recently, or were about to, commit an offence. Using data collected from court records, including the Old Bailey Proceedings, and police or magistrates' court reports in newspapers, I examine the characteristics of those targeted by policing agents, and the reasons that policing agents gave for their arrests. This evidence demonstrates that individual police officers made active choices using their discretion, and their actions shaped patterns of arrests and prosecutions.
By examining the period between 1780 and 1850, my research highlights continuities and changes in policing practices before and after the establishment of the Metropolitan Police force in 1829. I examine the expectations placed on the wide variety of different officials responsible for law enforcement on the streets of London. This was an era of concern over policing provision, debate over criminal justice administration and fears of growing criminality.
I contend that policing practices, and proactive policing agents themselves, contributed to the prevalence of criminal stereotypes. These criminal stereotypes were closely related to the emerging fears that there was a 'criminal class', believed to be responsible for the majority of criminal activity. While my research so far has focussed on historical sources, I will explore in greater detail the implications of my findings for present-day policing through this fellowship. In particular, there are parallels between historical policing practices and present day police stop and search powers. While the characteristics of those targeted and stereotyped by police have evolved over time, there are clear continuities in the implications of these practices for the policed society.
Through this fellowship, I will disseminate my research to the academic community, police practitioners and policy makers. I will organise a workshop to engage with police practitioners about issues of police profiling and criminal stereotyping, write a policy paper on the historical roots of contemporary police profiling and explore further avenues for practitioner-focussed dissemination. I will also prepare my research for publication as a monograph, and a journal article.
As part of the fellowship, I will attend major international criminology conferences to build networks and cultivate my rising research profile in the social sciences. In particular, I will visit the Griffith Criminology Institute in Queensland, Australia, to forge connections with Australian criminologists and develop a future research project which will examine policing suspicious persons in Britain and Australia.
I will also undertake training in social science skills and methods, and in policy engagement and research communication to support my impact activities. These activities, and the networks that I cultivate, will enhance my ability to pursue an interdisciplinary historical social science career.
My research reveals the impact of policing practices on patterns of arrest and prosecution in London between 1780 and 1850. Scholars have long recognised that the received historical record of crime is a reflection of prosecutions, rather than of criminal activity itself, which is very difficult to quantify in the past. However, my research reshapes our understanding to show that it is also partially a record of policing. I advance the idea of 'proactive policing': the occasions on which policing agents exercised discretion to arrest defendants on suspicion that they had recently, or were about to, commit an offence. Using data collected from court records, including the Old Bailey Proceedings, and police or magistrates' court reports in newspapers, I examine the characteristics of those targeted by policing agents, and the reasons that policing agents gave for their arrests. This evidence demonstrates that individual police officers made active choices using their discretion, and their actions shaped patterns of arrests and prosecutions.
By examining the period between 1780 and 1850, my research highlights continuities and changes in policing practices before and after the establishment of the Metropolitan Police force in 1829. I examine the expectations placed on the wide variety of different officials responsible for law enforcement on the streets of London. This was an era of concern over policing provision, debate over criminal justice administration and fears of growing criminality.
I contend that policing practices, and proactive policing agents themselves, contributed to the prevalence of criminal stereotypes. These criminal stereotypes were closely related to the emerging fears that there was a 'criminal class', believed to be responsible for the majority of criminal activity. While my research so far has focussed on historical sources, I will explore in greater detail the implications of my findings for present-day policing through this fellowship. In particular, there are parallels between historical policing practices and present day police stop and search powers. While the characteristics of those targeted and stereotyped by police have evolved over time, there are clear continuities in the implications of these practices for the policed society.
Through this fellowship, I will disseminate my research to the academic community, police practitioners and policy makers. I will organise a workshop to engage with police practitioners about issues of police profiling and criminal stereotyping, write a policy paper on the historical roots of contemporary police profiling and explore further avenues for practitioner-focussed dissemination. I will also prepare my research for publication as a monograph, and a journal article.
As part of the fellowship, I will attend major international criminology conferences to build networks and cultivate my rising research profile in the social sciences. In particular, I will visit the Griffith Criminology Institute in Queensland, Australia, to forge connections with Australian criminologists and develop a future research project which will examine policing suspicious persons in Britain and Australia.
I will also undertake training in social science skills and methods, and in policy engagement and research communication to support my impact activities. These activities, and the networks that I cultivate, will enhance my ability to pursue an interdisciplinary historical social science career.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Eleanor Bland (Principal Investigator / Fellow) |
Publications
Bland E
(2021)
'Lurking' and 'loitering': the genealogy of languages of police suspicion in Britain
in Policing and Society
Bland E
(2021)
'Flash houses': Public houses and geographies of moral contagion in 19th-century London
in History of the Human Sciences
| Description | Overall, this fellowship provided an opportunity for formative and valuable career development. For after the end of the fellowship, I secured a post as Lecturer in Criminology. This is a culmination of the skills and experience acquired during the fellowship, including practical skills in teaching criminology and research impact plans, the experience of developing a detailed future research plan and more widely the immersion in the field of criminology. This academic environment, alongside the specific skills and experience gained, has been vital in facilitating the transition from my PhD, which was completed in a history department, to a developing career in criminology. Original research: I conducted my planned further research into the language used by police officers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London to justify arrests based on suspicion. This included a qualitative examination of the contexts and wider lexical uses of the terms 'lurking' and 'loitering', and an extensive scholarship review to situate my findings within criminological and historical context. This research formed the basis of a research article that was published in 2021 in Policing and Society. Dissemination: In line with my plans, I published a monograph based on my thesis entitled 'Policing Suspicion: Proactive Policing in London, 1780-1850' with Routledge, which came out in autumn 2021. I published two research articles; one detailed above, and an additional research article not referenced in the original fellowship objectives, which is was published in History of the Human Sciences in 2021. Impact activities: I made plans for a workshop to reflect on issues of profiling in the policing of suspicious persons, including scoping interest and refining ideas through discussion with police practitioners at West Yorkshire Police, researchers at the College of Policing and colleagues in the N8 Policing Research Partnership. I targeted the N8 PRP Conference, due to be held in June 2020, as the host event to ensure a large audience of scholars and police practitioners, but it was cancelled. The planning was a formative learning experience, and I will look to deliver the event in the future at a different event, or convert it to an online format. I have also discussed plans for a policy paper with History and Policy, and will complete this alongside the book project. Fellowship application and research scoping: I developed a well-crafted proposal for a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which was submitted with full institutional support. The project, entitled 'Agents of Colonial Rule: the Enduring Impacts of Historical Policing', entails an examination of the policing of suspect communities in Australia in historical context, and an innovative study of the legacies of these practices. As part of the scoping for the proposal, I visited the Griffith Criminology Institute at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, in December 2019, where I discussed my research plans with eminent scholars and visited the Queensland State Archives to scope archival sources. I also presented a paper at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference in December 2019, where I shared ideas and met colleagues working in the field through the Historical Criminology Network, and met with scholars at the University of Western Australia, Perth, and the Western Australia Public Record Office. While the outcome of the fellowship application was unsuccessful, the proposal provides a valuable and detailed plan for future research, and I plan to redevelop it into a different grant application, such as an ESRC New Investigator Grant, when appropriate. Training: I have undertaken training in impact and engagement activities and research dissemination through the Leeds Social Sciences Institute and the university's Organisational Development and Professional Learning department to support my fellowship objectives, with courses on 'Identifying Impact Goals', 'Communicating Research Beyond Academia' and 'How to publish your PhD thesis'. I have attended courses on co-production in 2021 to facilitate my future research development plans. My mentors and I undertook regular evaluations of my training needs to ensure that these were met, and I am very grateful to them for their advice and assistance throughout the fellowship. Teaching: I devised and delivered lectures and seminars at undergraduate and postgraduate level, for modules on 'Policing', 'Crime, Law and Social Change' and 'Rethinking Policing' and successfully supervised two undergraduate criminology dissertation students. |
| Exploitation Route | I did not complete a Pathways to Impact statement as part of the application - this was an early career fellowship without significant research or impact components. |
| Sectors | Government, Democracy and Justice,Security and Diplomacy |
| Title | Historic approaches to policing suspicious behaviour in Britain and their contemporary resonances, 1780-1850 |
| Description | Despite growing understanding of the police regulation of the urban sphere in nineteenth-century Britain, there is limited understanding of how this type of police was delivered in practice. This research examined the evolution and genealogy of 'lurking' and 'loitering', two legal terms that formed a prominent part of the police language of suspicion from the later eighteenth century. This legal language played a critical role in the exercise of police power over urban space. In the period between 1780 and 1850, the legal terms 'lurking' and 'loitering' evoked powerful and formative contemporary anxieties around urban ordering. This aspect of the research specifically located 'lurking' and 'loitering' within their wider lexical context, providing a framework for understanding the exercise of police power over those identified as 'suspicious persons'. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This spreadsheet contains contextual references to 'lurking' and 'loitering' in monographs and newspapers from 1780 and 1850, identified through keyword searching of online databases. These were: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gale Primary Sources Monographs and Gale Primary Sources Newspapers. The data was identified through keyword searching for 'lurking' and 'loitering', and sampling the first 20 results from 1780 and 1850, adding details of the context for the usage of the term and the origin of the reference to the spreadsheet. |