Policing Morals

This is the first full scholarly study of the Metropolitan Police in the period 1870-1914, the time when it was transformed into a recognizably modern professional police force. Stefan Petrow focuses on what moral reformers claimed were serious threats to social order in late Victorian and Edwardian London - habitual criminality, prostitution, drunkenness, and betting - and examines the Metropolitan force's policing of these contentious areas.