International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice

International Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice

The event will be held in The Library (Rooms 1 & 2) at Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, and the first paper will begin at 11:00. Tea and coffee will be served on arrival from 10:30 and lunch is included in the booking fee. Papers will last around 45 minutes followed by questions for c.15 minutes. It is expected that the event will finish by 16:00.

To reserve a place, please complete the booking form below and return by 20 November 2015, together with payment of £15 (or £5 for doctoral students).

Travel directions can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/about/main/faculties-centres/milton-keynes-campus. For further information please contact Marie-Claire Leroux (Email: Marie-Claire.Leroux@open.ac.uk, Tel: 01908 653179).

Yours sincerely
Paul Lawrence
To book a place please complete and return this slip (together with cheque for £15 – reduced to £5 for doctoral students - made payable to ‘The Open University’) to Marie-Claire Leroux, Faculty of Arts, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA by 20 November 2015 at the latest.

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□ Please tick here if you require a vegetarian lunch, or give details if you have any other dietary requirements

□ Please tick here, and give details, if you have any other special requirements

11.00 – 12.00 Kenneth Duggan (King’s College London) ‘Self-Policing with Accountability in Pre-Modern England’

12.00 – 13.00 Paul Lawrence (Open University) ‘SUS! Pre-Emptive Policing and the Vagrancy Act of 1824’

13.00 – 13.45 Lunch

13.45 – 14.45 Kallum Dhillon (UCL) ‘Crime in the Archive: Researching the Geography of Criminal Activity in Edwardian London’

14.45 – 15.45 Goncalo Gonçalves (Lisbon University Institute) ‘Police Reform and Political Change in Interwar Portugal’

15:45-16:00: Closing discussion
Abstracts

Kenneth Duggan (King’s College London), ‘Self-Policing with Accountability in Pre-Modern England’

This paper examines the changing role of local unpaid individuals in communal policing in thirteenth-century England. In particular, it illustrates the state's attempts to persuade individuals to apprehend suspected criminals, and the importance of both the office of the coroner in these developments, as well as the periodic visitations of royal justices to localities to hear all crown pleas.

This paper traces the historical genesis of the power to arrest and convict on justified suspicion of intent, and demonstrates its consistent use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how this preventive power was fiercely defended by police authorities, particularly during the rise of the ‘civil liberties’ agenda during the 1930s, only losing ground when use of these powers became entangled with debates about race relations in the 1970s. Overall, it argues that ‘pre-emptive’ arrest and conviction on suspicion of intent have been a significant component of UK police powers since the later eighteenth-century.

This paper discusses the challenges associated with conducting archival research on the geography of crime in early 20th Century London; but explains how these difficulties may be overcome by using a combination of archival sources to reconstruct lost historical geographic information. The paper will demonstrate how this geographic information may be mapped to allow the spatial patterns of criminal activity within a given area to be examined. In doing so, it will highlight the overall crime trends as well as uncovering the movements made by criminals. The final part of the paper will present a study of a specific street that experienced relatively high levels of crime.

Police reform is often seen as directly linked to political change, with the transition between political regimes involving the reshaping of police institutions. In Portugal, it is normally assumed that the political changes in the interwar period were ‘naturally’ reflected in the process of police reform, with the inefficient and partisan First Republic police giving way to the centralized, militarized and more violent police system of the New State. Drawing on the career of Agostinho Lourenço (Director of the Political Police, and eventual head of Interpol), this paper will challenge this traditional chronology, arguing that police reform had been under discussion since at least 1910, and that key police personnel were involved the policing of both the Republic and the subsequent dictatorship.