Preventive police

Preventive police is that aspect of law enforcement intended to act as a deterrent to the commission of crime. Preventive policing is considered a defining characteristic of the modern police, typically associated with Robert Peel's London Metropolitan Police, established in 1829.

In the century following 1688, severe punishment was the legal mechanism in England for preventing crime, which included the designations of hundreds of crimes as capital crimes, punishable by death. Public executions were part of the formula, designed to deter criminals by demonstrating the brutal consequences of crime if apprehended.

Reformers argued that this method of prevention was ineffective, advocating instead punishments that, in the mind of the criminal, fit the crime.

Police Magistrate John Fielding, head of the Bow Street Runners, believed that "It is much better to prevent even one man from being a rogue than apprehending and bringing forty to justice." Fielding's Bow Street "thief takers," however, were a stipendiary force, and were primarily relegated to policing crime after it was committed. Despite the introduction of the Bow Street Runners and other paid professionals, private citizens were still overwhelmingly responsible for initiating criminal charges against culprits. Research suggests this reliance on the public to exercise Judicial discretion may have put immigrant groups such as the Irish at a disadvantage.

The practical application of the concept in the English policing system is attributed to Patrick Colquhoun, who presented his ideas in A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1797). Colquhoun founded the Thames River Police to counter the significant losses from the theft of cargo being shipped in and out of the Port of London on the River Thames.

In contrast to the Bow Street Runners, the river police acted as a deterrent by their continual presence on the riverfront, in addition to being able to intervene if they spotted a crime in progress. The Thames River Police and the Bow Street Runners were absorbed into the Metropolitan Police in 1839.

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