Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Watchmen were organised groups of men, usually authorised by a state, government, city, or society, to deter criminal activity and provide law enforcement as well as traditionally perform the services of public safety, fire watch, crime prevention, crime detection, and recovery of stolen goods.
The term was coined by Ferdinand Lassalle and derived from the watchman system used by various European cities starting in the medieval period. The voluntary militia functioned as a city guard for internal policing and against external aggression.
Victorian Police Officer with itinerant circa 1900 - recreation. The officer is pictured wearing a duty armband on his left wrist. London in the early 1800s had a population of nearly a million and a half people but was policed by only 450 constables and 4,500 night watchmen.
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral ... Crime had been handled on an ad-hoc basis by poorly organized local parish constables and private watchmen ...
The force of eight would provide twenty-four-hour patrols (supplementing the Police Watchmen who were on static points throughout the night) to prevent crime and detect offenders. The policemen they envisaged would not be mere watchmen and what they had written down was the concept of "Preventive Policing", 40 years before Sir Robert Peel ...
The Statute of Winchester of 1285 (13 Edw. 1.St. 2; Latin: Statutum Wynton̄), also known as the Statute of Winton, was a statute enacted by King Edward I of England that reformed the system of Watch and Ward of the Assize of Arms of 1252, and revived the jurisdiction of the local courts.
The inability of the authorities to apprehend the offender caused complaints about the ineffectiveness of London's watchmen, and prompted vigilante patrols in the affected areas. Two men were captured and imprisoned for the attacks, one of whom was a local haberdasher .
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.