ABSTRACT
This chapter serves to complicate any simplistic notion that police officers routinely associated poverty with criminality, or unquestioningly sided with the propertied, middle classes. James Bent’s memoirs, which he (predictably) claimed would give the reader, ‘a reliable insight into the inner workings of police life’, display many of the usual tropes of the genre. They relate many exciting and, no doubt, exceptional occurrences from his time as a police officer. Other elements of the memoir, however, make clear that police officers’ routine exposure to the harsh realities of daily life for the industrial poor meant that many of them developed a nuanced view of poverty and a high degree of sympathy for those who they believed to be ‘deserving’. Bent was so touched by the plight of the poor during the 1870s that he set up a winter soup kitchen in the drill hall at Old Trafford Police Station.
