When Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, a new term entered the media’s vocabulary: “police brutality.” The concept emerged not merely because officers used force, but because that force was exercised by a centralised, uniformed, bureaucratic institution over which working-class communities felt they had little democratic control.[1]

POLICING BEFORE THE POLICE

To understand why the Metropolitan Police provoked such intense opposition, we need first to look at the system it replaced. Before 1829 the law was enforced by a variety of figures including Parish constables, beadles, watchmen, court leet officers, Bow Street Runners, high bailiffs, and thief-takers operated within overlapping jurisdictions. This older system was messy, unequal, and often violent; it should not be romanticised. Yet it retained one important political feature: at parish or civic level, local communities exercised some influence over who enforced the law. While voting in national elections was restricted to owners of freehold property, at a local parish level the franchise was much wider (in some cases universal) and in many areas could include women as well.

As the office of constable was a parish appointment, men would be selected, by the parish, to serve much as jury members are appointed today: a person would receive a letter stating that he must fulfil his civic duty as a constable for a specified period. Fines would be levied against those who refused to take the oath of constable when they were selected. Alternatively, in other areas, the constables were directly elected by members of the courts leet (who themselves were elected). There was, therefore, a limited form of democratic control over who was appointed as a constable and, most importantly, with it being a parish office, the constable was a member of the local community. Complaints about the constable’s conduct might be directed to the appropriate parochial authority.

The “old” pre-1829 constables were always armed with pistols and swords—after all, the golden age of highway robbery, one could not take a mere truncheon in pursuit of an armed highwayman. If a felon resisted arrest or attempted to escape, the constable was within his rights to beat the felon and make him or her comply with the law. The beatings were an accepted part of the job, written into the law itself and forming part of the advice given to constables in their manuals such as The Office of Constable (1811). If, during the constable’s duties, the felon was killed, the constable would not be prosecuted (however, if you were a constable and you did kill a felon, you had to make sure you had a warrant about and that it was evident to all by-standers that you were acting in an official capacity).

Thus, in the older world of parish governance, violence against offenders was part and parcel of law enforcement. But importantly, the constable was not simply an agent of a distant state. He was, at least theoretically, an officer embedded within a local civic structure. I have not yet, in all my research into eighteenth-century journalism, come across any complaint about a constable’s conduct. One of the few negative portrayals of law-enforcement brutality that I have found in the pre-1829 period appears in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act IV, Scene II):

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her.

King Lear was first performed in 1605, 224 years before the foundation of the Metropolitan Police. Shakespeare endures in the hearts and minds of readers because his writing speaks to questions that remain perpetually alive, and appear to us as strikingly modern. This brief passage suggests that, even in Shakespeare’s own age, violence committed by agents of local authority against women was a moral scandal requiring condemnation.

THE FOUNDING OF THE METROPOLITAN POLICE

The creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 altered this relationship. The brainchild of the then Home Secretary Robert Peel, the “new” police had two aims. The first was to conduct preventive policing to ensure the “security of the person and property and the preservation of public order.” Secondly the police would be “civil and obliging to all people of every rank and class … and cautious not to interfere unnecessarily, in order to make a display of authority.” 

Importantly they would not be armed with pistols or sabres but only with a truncheon. Their authority came, not from the parish or borough council but from the Home Secretary, in the name of the king himself. Every officer—who now likely lived outside the local community—would be assigned a “beat” to patrol and it was hoped that the new centrally organised force would spell the end of the “disorganised” older system which Peel and his co-reformer Edwin Chadwick thought was inefficient.

The New Police were visible, uniformed, salaried, and centrally organised. They patrolled working-class districts as representatives of a modernising state. This was precisely what many radicals found objectionable. The issue was not simply that policemen sometimes struck, arrested, or confined people. Earlier constables and watchmen had done the same. The deeper issue was legitimacy. Who had appointed these men? To whom were they answerable? What redress was available when they abused their power?

HENRY HETHERINGTON’S POOR MAN’S GUARDIAN

Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian was one of the first newspapers to give voice to these concerns and draw attention to the violence perpetrated by the “New” police. It was the first publication to use the term “police brutality.” The Poor Man’s Guardian, selling at one penny, helped to instruct the working classes in radical politics and convince them of the need for universal suffrage in parliamentary elections.

The content consisted of a lead article, usually written by Hetherington; reprints of articles from other radical papers; election coverage; letters from members of the working classes; and short articles on the final pages consisting of coverage of a variety of issues including police brutality. The tone of the paper was melodramatic: evil murderous aristocrats and greedy “shopocrats” (the wealthy middle classes) were, in Hetherington’s view, responsible for all of the nation’s ills. The working classes were almost saintly by comparison (the media scholar Louis James might call Hetherington’s literary mode “social melodrama”).

The phrase “police brutality” first appears in the Poor Man’s Guardian in 1833, in the headline “Another Atrocious Case of Police Brutality.” The word “another” matters. It suggests that brutality had already become a recognisable pattern, not an isolated aberration. In its subsequent pages, the New Police were repeatedly represented as “soldiers,” “blue-coated bullies,” and agents of aristocratic or governmental oppression.

Ultimately (according to Hetherington), the new police were a tool of the establishment’s tyranny, who had tried on multiple occasions to suppress the sale of the Poor Man’s Guardian . Hetherington even spent several short spells in prison himself because of his defiance against the taxes on knowledge. Perhaps it was both his political persuasions and a personal animosity against the police, born of his own experiences in prison cells, which made Hetherington particularly alert to instances of police violence.

The Poor Man’s Guardian’s exposés of police brutality can be broadly categorised as follows:

• street violence;
• political crowd control;
• deaths in custody;
• sexual violence and abuse of authority;
• generalised public complaint.

Hetherington’s paper did not merely report violence. It framed it. It named officers. It supplied badge numbers. It connected individual incidents to broader structures of class power, government centralisation, and the exclusion of working people from political authority.

Several examples illustrate the pattern. In 1831, Charles Sweet, a brewer’s assistant, was struck on the head by a police cutlass during the coronation procession of William IV and later died. In 1833, at Cold Bath Fields, the police were accused of attacking reformers with indiscriminate violence. The Poor Man’s Guardian described men, women, and boys beaten by police staves, presenting the event not simply as public disorder but as state violence against the people. In another case, a waterman was allegedly thrown from a public house by officers, struck his head on the kerbstone, and later died in custody. Hetherington named the officers involved and treated the case as evidence of a wider culture of police violence and elite protection.

The paper also reported deaths in custody, including that of Mary Bradley, a pauper woman who died while confined in the fetid conditions of a St Giles lock-up, and the alleged rape of Ruth Morris by a police inspector. These reports are striking because they connect brutality not only with spectacular street violence but also with the hidden spaces of custody: the lock-up, the watch-house, the police cell. Hetherington’s journalism therefore exposed two kinds of police violence: visible violence in the streets and less visible violence behind institutional doors.

There were several instances of what I call “general complaints”: reports where correspondents made unsubstantiated allegations about several policemen all at once. One such example was a short article in 1832 titled “New Police Nuisance” which complained that

The police-fellows go about breaking heads and laying informations, in both of which accompaniments they are most diabolically indiscriminate … we have no hesitation in declaring our conviction that a more deservedly unpopular body of men never disgraced the name of constable or peace-officer more than these blue-coated bullies … peaceable mechanics cannot take a walk … but these bullies are drawn out armed with sword and bludgeon to block the streets against them, and take the opportunity of splitting heads and cutting out eyes.

Interestingly, Hetherington appears to have had great respect for the “old” constables because he says that the “new” police have “disgraced” the name of constable. At the time, Hetherington’s paper was one of the only papers to shine a light on the New Police’s actions. But of course, the showcasing of accountability rarely led to justice.

At the heart of the issue was the lack of political accountability. Protesters in 1829 complained that, with the foundation of a centrally organised force, democratic control been taken away. An ephemeral publication, titled “Admonitory Letter to Robert Peel,” for instance, complained that the historic right of “appointing guardians [constables] of your own property has been arbitrarily wrested from you and usurped by the secretary of state for the Home Department.” The document, which sprang from a mass protest against the police, demanded that King William IV return Britons’ ancient rights over the “government of our parochial police affairs.”

POLICE BRUTALITY IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

Today, police violence becomes public through a different media ecology: smartphone footage, social media circulation, body-worn video, activist journalism, official statements, counter-clips, and online commentary. The technologies have changed, but the question remains recognisably similar. An act of force becomes “brutality” when it is mediated, narrated, shared, disputed, and attached to a wider argument about the legitimacy of state power. The complaints of the twentieth- and twenty-first century British press follow the same typology that Hetherington followed:

• street violence, such as the 2021 verbal and physical assault by PC Steve Martin on a black teenager.
• political crowd control; during the 2010 student protests in London, for example, the police’s use of then controversial kettling provoked widespread commentary in the press.
• deaths in custody, such as the 1994 death of Richard O’Brien died in Metropolitan Police custody and, though an inquest verdict of unlawful killing was returned, the three officers charged with manslaughter were acquitted.
• sexual violence; the most recent notorious case being the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard by PC Wayne Couzens in 2021.
• generalised public complaint.

Police brutality was mediated and narrativized in Hetherington’s day through print. Hetherington built a specific narrative around the cases that came before him. Today, that mediation occurs through editorial framing, politically charged headlines, and smartphone footage. After mediation, narrativization follows: police brutality becomes evidence, scandal, symbol, and political argument. Isolated instances of police violence progress, through a series of abstractions, mediations, and further narrations, to raise wider questions about government power.

The now-standard body-worn police cameras complicate this picture. They are commonly presented as instruments of transparency and public reassurance. Yet the camera, like the newspaper before it, does not interpret what it records. Footage must be selected, released, edited, contextualised, narrated, and contested. The technology may preserve the moment, but it does not settle its meaning.

CONCLUSION

A policeman may strike a poor man in an alley, and his complaint perish with him; but when the press receives it, adorns it with circumstance, fixes it upon a person, and connects it with the general system of law and governance that prevails, the injury no longer remains solitary. The violent stroke is no longer considered merely as the rashness of an angry officer, but as the arm of government falling upon the subject.

The Poor Man’s Guardian taught its readers to behold the new police’s violence, not as the mere irregularity of a constable’s temper, but as the visible expression of class oppression. Today the smartphone and social media feed perform a similar office: they carry the blow from the street into the public eye and can inflame passions, democratise complaint, or reduce suffering to sensation. Yet beneath these changing instruments lies the same unsettled issue: when state force is felt most sharply by those least able to direct or restrain it, government legitimacy stands upon fragile ground.

Violence was not new in 1829. What was new was the political meaning of violence when committed by a centralised, salaried, uniformed police force. The media’s transformed that violence into a public crisis of state legitimacy. The birth of “police brutality” in the 1830s was therefore not simply the birth of a phrase. It marked the emergence of a modern political problem.

Notes

[1] This is the text of a conference paper I delivered at the CCCU Third Annual Partner Conference: Contemporary Challenges and Innovations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Canterbury Christ Church University. 17–18 June 2026. This paper also won an award for ‘Highly Commended Paper’.

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