ABSTRACT
However, the degree to which individual policemen acknowledged or were cognisant of this fact varied greatly. Country and uniform pcs were the least likely to claim knowledge of any corruption; city, CID and plainclothes police the most - while all readily pointed the finger at the Met as a hotbed of illegality. This pattern probably matches the reality quite closely, since opportunities for crooked deals were much better in the cities and amongst plainclothes and CID. The connection is obvious: corruption could only flourish where there were trades and businesses interested buying police protection or complicity, not in areas too poor or in enterprises too lawful to need or be able to afford such services.2 As discussed in Chapter 9, the police themselves made a distinction between degrees of corruption, and were unlikely to regard things like the publican’s traditional offerings as a serious breach of the rules. They were simply established practice that newcomers had to learn about, as much as they had
to learn the route of their beat. The experience of one recruit here must stand for many:
Nevertheless, even if each individual inducement remained little more than a token, taken together they could make a considerable difference to the individual pc’s standard of living. Given the opportunity and the desire to capitalize on it, situations where money or favours, however small, were offered in return for a blind eye could well escalate to match the scale and profitability of the businesses run by the people the police were dealing with. It depended 011 how far the boundaries for ‘normal’ perks, whether from bookmakers or licensees or others, were maintained. In wealthy areas, where the police operated in the context of a master/servant relationship perks were offered in the form of tips: in the City of London, for instance, aldermen and stockbrokers regarded the police as their ‘babies’, and at Christmas every man in the force got a pipe and tobacco and presents for his children from the Rothchilds.4 Elsewhere, in the vast majority of instances the matter no doubt remained within bounds, with a customary level and flow of such perks acknowledged in most police departments. This put strong pressure on individual policemen to conform to these norms, as Inspector Cooper recounted:
At constable level, the matter probably rested at a free drink or the odd half crown from the bookmaker.6 C.H. Rolph believed that corruption was too grand a name for such transactions, since people such as market traders simply could not have functioned at all had they not been allowed, through the payment of a small sum, to park illegally for a time. Such behaviour was ubiquitous and not worth calling corrupt.7 But as one moved up the police hierarchy, both the power and the stakes became higher, and the payoffs increased accordingly.
