Study title

Despite growing understanding of the police regulation of the urban sphere in nineteenth-century Britain, there is limited understanding of how this type of police was delivered in practice. This research examined the evolution and genealogy of ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’, two legal terms that formed a prominent part of the police language of suspicion from the later eighteenth century. This legal language played a critical role in the exercise of police power over urban space. In the period between 1780 and 1850, the legal terms 'lurking' and 'loitering' evoked powerful and formative contemporary anxieties around urban ordering. This aspect of the research specifically located 'lurking' and 'loitering' within their wider lexical context, providing a framework for understanding the exercise of police power over those identified as 'suspicious persons'.My research examines the history of policing, specifically the policing of suspicious persons, and its implications for police practices and their impact on minority communities today. This fellowship will enable me to further examine and disseminate my findings on the contemporary resonances of historical policing practices. My research reveals the impact of policing practices on patterns of arrest and prosecution in London between 1780 and 1850. Scholars have long recognised that the received historical record of crime is a reflection of prosecutions, rather than of criminal activity itself, which is very difficult to quantify in the past. However, my research reshapes our understanding to show that it is also partially a record of policing. I advance the idea of 'proactive policing': the occasions on which policing agents exercised discretion to arrest defendants on suspicion that they had recently, or were about to, commit an offence. Using data collected from court records, including the Old Bailey Proceedings, and police or magistrates' court reports in newspapers, I examine the characteristics of those...