The Metropolitan Police

Going into more depth with researching the history of the metropolitan police to get the concept of my 19th century London both accurate and with a stylized edge to suit the narrative, I will be covering how the police started; what their duties were back then, their equipment and uniform and also how the public felt towards them.

In 1829, Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police; hence the nicknames 'Peelers' and 'Bobbies'; they were restricted to the metropolitan areas of London, so the city of London and the other provinces in the area were unaffected by this law enforcement. The police worked under the directions of the Home Secretary, their headquarters located at Scotland Yard. Recruits were trained and chosen by the commisioners, so the demand to be a policeman required prior experience from training.
The description of their job entails the detection and prevention of crime, however the police also maintained the street lamps; calling the time and looking out for fires. (Possibly due to the great fire of London, it was considerably difficult to control fire back then and with how cramped the city was becoming, it would have spread very quickly.)

Initially the publics attutide towards the police was cold, they deemed it an "Infringement on English social and political life." However even with this the Metropolitan police rapidly grew to sucess, but even with this it took a further 30 years for the police forces to establish in other areas. Due to their restriction of their authority it appeared that crime in areas they had no control over increased, in conjunction the metropolitan part of London did see and improvement in order.

Uniform and equipment.

This part of the research I found the most important as I would be directly referencing it for my ideas, wheras the above research was to get a better grounding as to what the police entailed so I wont end up getting facts completely wrong if mentioned.

Equipment.

http://gallery.e2bn.org/image69122-vcp.html



From the image above it can be seen that they were equipped with a baton, a one handed sword, a whistle and finally handcuffs. With the exeption of the sword, I had already known what the Victorian police had on their persons; the style in which I want my idea to be like, the equipment will stay the same, possibly the exeption of the protagonist- I'm personally not sure if I want the protagonist weilding a sword. I want them to be forceful but with the plot I don't want to rely on combat; as my inital idea for the narrative was that it was to be somewhat like a point and click sort of game, so the focus would be working out the cases.


The uniform is something I'm not sure on, I have sketched up some uniform designs based off of the actual clothes, but the main character isn't going to be wear official uniform anyway; they'll be an officer, but massively reluctant to wear the official police attire.
Either way I looked at varieties of Victorian police uniform.


http://www.cartoonstock.com/vintage/directory/m/metropolitan_police.asp

http://www.art.co.uk/products/p4173249980-sa-i4803805/posters.htm