A Short, Fun History of Policing London from American Gaming Channel "Extra Credits"

... in five chapters. While the Government attempts to ban protests that make noise and historians who teach history, here's fifty minutes of stuff I wish I'd been taught:

 

 

 Episode 1 takes us to the beginning of the eighteenth century, a huge boom in personal property, new laws, no prisons, a subsequent boom in death sentences (proving no deterrent), citizen's arrests, bounty hunters, and teflon-coated gang-lord and "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild.

 

 

 Episode 2 sees Wild and his growing Gangland Empire brought down by the popularity of renegade street rat and escape artist Jack "He went that-a-way" Sheppard, who plugged his own biography on the scaffold.
 

 

 Episode 3 sees novelist and banned-playwright-turned-lawyer Henry Fielding rustle up both the country's first state-funded court, open to the public, and the city's first police force, assembled surreptitiously from parish constables bearing batons stuffed with arrest warrants.

 

 

 Episode 4 sees Fielding's Bow Street model of law enforcement become acknowledged – if not adopted – nationwide, Henry's brother John starts to tackle the causes of crime, Elizabeth Fry attempts prison reform, and, facing an age of revolution, Home Secretary Robert Peele considers instituting a force trained to arrest people without killing them.

 

 Finally, despite a strong popular distaste for the very foreign idea of a salaried police force, Episode 5 sees Peele gets his wish in 1829... 

"Parliament was even ready to fund the police force directly through taxes, which was the single largest thing that had held the establishment of a force back. They were also starting to get an inkling that some things could simply not be outsourced or made to pay for themselves – an ethos that had ceated Jonathan Wild. It was that same ethos, by the way, that had led to the colonial taxes that lost Britain the American Colonies, allowed the East India Company to run amok in India, and would later hobble efforts to combat the 'Irish Potato Famine'. A lot of problems in this era arose from British Parliament just flat out not wanting to pay for stuff while still reaping whatever benefits it gave them."

 Imagine being taught that.

 And how is it that, despite an A Level in History, I only heard about the South Sea Bubble from Not The Nine O'Clock News, "The Great Hunger" from The Pogues and the East India Company from a joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, ?

 I mean, I know why.