ABSTRACT
Part of the conventional schematization of the origins of the Metropolitan Police Act depends on the existence of a growing public demand for a major government intervention in the policing of London. The unarmed, preventive police would replace what Lord Shelburne, one of Peel's predecessors at the Home Office, had dismissed nearly fifty years earlier as "An imperfect, inadequate and wretched system." Popular legend, fostered very largely by the proponents of Peel's police bill, would have us believe that the watch forces of London were fragmented, badly organized, and incompetent, being staffed largely by elderly and infirm individuals unable to earn a living in any other way. Patrols could be increased, decreased, or completely redeployed virtually overnight in a way that would no longer be possible once the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Home Office and of the Metropolitan Police had intervened between people and police.
