There have, sadly, been several recent cases of police officers behaving in a manner that we find both hard to understand and hard to forgive. From the officers who shared images of the murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman via WhatsApp to the heinous murder of Sarah Everard, committed by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, there has been considerable debate about how to ensure the public’s safety when, it seems, police forces employ men as dangerous as those they are supposed to protect us from. The idea that the police includes corrupt and violent elements is nothing new, though. A perusal of historic newspapers and court records shows that although most policemen were no doubt decent and honest men, their force’s reputation could be marred by the activities of a certain few.

One such man was William Collins, who in 1906, aged 32, was charged with stealing cutlery from a London mansion. Although Collins was acquitted of the offence, he was convicted of assault. He had been on his nightly beat when he approached the grand house owned by a Mr and Mrs Schultz. On this night, they had been holding a ball, and he was alleged to have been found in the mansion during the ball, pocketing their cutlery. When caught, there was a violent struggle, and Collins hit a servant with his truncheon before stabbing the Schultzes’ chauffeur with one of their own knives. He was disarmed and grappled to the floor. It turned out that he had been drinking whisky on duty; the following morning, he had no recollection of the night’s events.

Collins had been given an exemplary character reference by his superiors in the police, but it’s clear that there was an element of ‘protecting one of the boys’ about it. Collins had been in the Metropolitan Police for 11 years, but had previously been found drunk on duty in 1898, only three years after joining, so he clearly had an issue with keeping himself occupied on his night shifts. Another officer with an issue was Alfred Monument, a 22-year-old Met officer who used his night beat to set fires. Three had been lit within two nights, all on his beat, and he then applied for alarm money as a result. He was convicted of arson in 1878 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was sent to serve his sentence in Portsmouth, and he died there in 1885, aged only 29.

A year after Monument’s conviction, another Metropolitan Police constable, William Hancock, aged 27, appeared at the Central Criminal Court charged with manslaughter, after a woman named Elizabeth Glover was found dead. He was found guilty and sentenced to just 18 months in prison. Hancock’s offence was the end of a very short career; so short, in fact, that he had been listed as a labourer when he appeared in court – he had only been in the Met’s Y Division for a matter of days, working as a plain clothes officer. The death of Elizabeth Glover occurred when he was leaving the Black Swan pub in Bow, East London, the two getting into a fight. Hancock hit her so hard on the nose that she fell down; he then allegedly dragged her around, pulled her clothes over her head and kicked her. Glover was taken to hospital but died the next day.

Hancock’s sentence was so lenient because ‘the deceased was very much diseased [she had syphilis] and in an unhealthy condition, and would probably not have lived very long’, the blame being placed very much on the victim. In addition, Sergeant James Howlett of K Division CID gave a statement as Hancock’s next door neighbour, saying he had known him 15 years, and had made his application to join the police on his behalf. He said he had ‘never known a more inoffensive man in my life’, and one wonders whether his testimonial, as a respected police sergeant, swayed attitudes towards Hancock.

Both Glover and Hancock – who onlookers thought were husband and wife, although Elizabeth, before she died, said she had never seen Hancock before – had been drunk. This shaped witnesses’ views of them, and was used to explain their inaction when they saw the two on the floor. As they were fighting, two police constables from K Division had been called; but they assumed that Hancock was just a husband trying to get his drunken wife home from the pub, and seem to have done little to help. In fact, in court, the judge criticised the conduct of these two officers, Harding Morgan and Alfred Saunders, and said that the way in which they acted should be inquired into by the authorities. Of course, policemen were only human, and it might be inevitable that when they weren’t on duty, they might get into fights or get drunk. There was certainly more opprobrium towards officers who committed offences while on duty, such as with the case of the arsonist Alfred Monument.

With some cases, it’s not clear whether constables were abusing their positions of authority, or whether there were other reasons for their offending. For example, when PC George Fannell was accused of assaulting an elderly East Ender, George North, in 1895, the circumstances aren’t completely clear. Fannell may have been on duty when he called across to North, who was standing at his door, to ask what he was doing. That sounds a fair request, a constable making sure that an individual is a resident and not a burglar, for example; however, North was old, and Fannell went beyond his duties, putting his hands into North’s pockets to check for suspicious items, calling him a ‘monkey’, and then hitting him so hard that the older man fell into the road and blacked out. It was made clear in court that there was no reason for Fannell’s actions; he was found guilty and fined £4.

It wasn’t just the policemen of London who were committing offences. In Birmingham, a 29-year-old local police constable named Arthur Nicholls was convicted of perjury in 1895. He had been giving evidence in a case where a publican had been accused of selling drink to a person already intoxicated. Nicholls had said that he had made notes in a book that he had left at home. A constable was dispatched to fetch the book, and while he was gone, Arthur sneaked out of court, bought a new book from a nearby shop, and then joined the officer who had been sent to his home.

Perhaps the most upsetting case I’ve come across, though, is one that pitched the local policemen against the homeless community. This case occurred in 1865, when two policemen had been told to move on those who were sleeping rough on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal near Port Dundas, a mile from Glasgow city centre. One of these homeless individuals was a young boy, described as ‘a kind of city Arab’, who usually slept rough with three other boys on the canal bank as it was near coke kilns and therefore offered a bit of warmth. They had been sleeping when the two police officers came across them and started hitting them with their batons. The startled boys got up and ran off, but one of them ran towards the canal. One constable, Robert Sinclair, followed him, crying, ‘You [expletive], I’ll drown you.’ In the darkness, the boy fell into the canal, according to Sinclair, but one of the other street boys insisted that Sinclair had pushed him in with his baton, then knelt on the bank to keep him in the water. The two policemen agreed to keep the matter quiet, and continued walking the same beat for the next three nights – nights that the other boys spent searching for their friend. Finally, one of them told another policeman, and this officer, being a more honest man, immediately reported the matter. The canal was dragged, and the boy’s body found. Although Sinclair was charged at Glasgow with murder, he was found guilty of culpable homicide and manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. One newspaper reported that Sinclair had shown a ‘want of humanity in beating and hunting these poor homeless boys, who were doing no harm’ – however, it too displayed a lack of humanity in never once giving the victim a name.

These cases are just a small sample of those detailed in the 19th and early 20th century press, and they show that policemen could be incompetent, lazy, greedy or downright cruel. They were drawn from the lower sectors of society, with many policemen being former labourers, and used perhaps to a different lifestyle. Being a policeman therefore gave them challenges – undertaking their repetitive foot patrols on their regular beats, expected to be calm and rational and non-violent. For some, they sought short cuts – setting fires so that they got more money or a change in beat – and for others, drinking made their shifts go quicker. The thought of having a position of authority also tempted some to violence, as a means of exerting control over others and showing their power (hence their batons appearing in many stories of violence). Although many policemen were honest and conscientious – and would go on to long, successful careers – it was the minority that appeared in the press to highlight the corrupting influence of power, whereas in reality they merely proved the fallibility of individual policemen.