One of the reasons why the police and their commissioner Sir Charles Warren found themselves so unpopular by the time the Jack the Ripper murders began at the end of August, 1888, was their heavy-handed approach to supressing prostitution on the streets of London in the first half of 1887.
This had reached a sort of crescendo in June 1887, when Police Constable Endacott had arrested Mis Maria Cass on Regent Street and accused her of soliciting men for immoral purposes.
Although the magistrate, Mr Newton, had dismissed the case against her, he had rebuked her by telling her that no decent woman would be seen out on Regent Street at that time of night. This led to a huge backlash against the police, and the criticism intensified when a police enquiry into the case found that Endacott had acted within the realms of the law.
PROSTITUTION AND THE POLICE
However, 20 years prior to the Cass case, the newspapers were up in arms when it was announced that the Government were looking to push an act through Parliament that would give individual police constables the right to decide whether a woman out on the street, who was seen talking to a man. was a prostitute or not.
The Paisley Herald and Renfrewshire Advertiser, opined on the proposal in its edition of Saturday, 30th June, 1866:-
JUDGES OF FEMALE MORALITY
We gather from a paragraph which has been circulated in the daily papers, that some very prudish association is about to petition Parliament to pass an Act the effect of which will be make police constables the judges of female morality in London.
As we understand the paragraph, the petitioners ask that policemen shall be empowered to arrest any woman whom they may think they see soliciting men in the streets for the purpose of prostitution.
That such a petition is in circulation we think probable enough, though we have no direct knowledge of it.
But we know enough of the folly and obstinacy of sets and coteries to recognise their capacity to devise even so foolish and short-sighted a scheme as this.
UNIVERSAL RESORT TO THE POLICE
The first thing that strikes us is the universal resort to the police on the part of modern reformers.
Is drunkenness to be suppressed? The police are straightway invoked to enforce sobriety. Is it considered desirable to promote the better observance of the Lord’s Day among the Hebrew rag merchants and costermongers of Whitechapel?
A Bill is framed arming the police with new powers to compel Jews to keep the Christian Sunday as well as their own Sabbath.
And now we hear of a knot of men conspiring to put an end to the great ‘social evil’ of London and all large cities, by investing the police with powers which not one in ten will exercise discreetly, and which one in every twenty will exercise with the grossest injustice.
Let us not for the moment be misunderstood by the most acrid of purists.
LONDON STREETS BY NIGHT
We are ready to join with any one in denouncing the state of the Haymarket and certain other London Streets at night. We regard the midnight promenade which flaunts before the glaring gaslights the one great and emphatic scandal of London.
In no other capital of Europe, in no city of the East, is anything so flagrant and so shameful ever seen.
But the law which is now suggested would not be negative in its results. It would be fruitful of the most positive mischiefs.
THE NATURE OF THE ORDINARY POLICEMAN
To see this, it is only necessary to consider the nature of the ordinary policeman, and of the new duties which it is suggested should be devolved upon him. He is, for the most part, a man of rather narrow ideas, with strong views of his duties and his privileges, very stubborn in the vindication of his authority, and liberal only in the interpretation of rules on the side of that authority.
Imagine such a man invested with the power, first, of judging whether any woman is speaking to any man in the streets for immoral purpose; next, of arresting her on his own suspicion of her guilt.
We are now assuming the case of an ordinarily honest, and not more than ordinarily stupid, policeman.
In such a case, no respectable woman could rely on being able to speak to a man in the streets without the risk of being apprehended and hurried off to a police cell.
VENAL MEN EVERYWHERE
But even this, bad enough as it would be, would be the worst. There probably are venal men in the police force, as there are venal men elsewhere.
It is not difficult to imagine instances of policemen who are not less corrupt than they are hasty or dictatorial.
The prospects of female innocence under their regime would not be particularly auspicious.
Every woman who did not object to paying black-mail might make any advances she chose to any man she chose, while women who did object to bribing the guardians of street morality might not speak to their own brothers with impunity.
A SYSTEM OF MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING
In process of time a system of mutual understanding would be established between women more or less incorrect and the police, far more scandalous than anything we see nowadays, whilst respectable and virtuous women would be exposed to the dangers of legalized oppression.
Prostitution is carried on as a trade, but it is ignored as a trade by magistrates and police.
Nor would the projected bill make any difference in this respect.
The action of the police, under its provisions, would be necessarily arbitrary, capricious, uncertain, guided by no fixed principles, and obnoxious equally to the charges of partial cruelty and partial connivance.
CORRUPT COLLUSION
The women against whom its visitations would be directed would not necessarily be either the worst prostitutes, nor, indeed, prostitutes at all. The most corrupt collusion with the most open immorality might go hand in hand with the most tyrannical invasion of personal liberty.
Any virtuous woman speaking to a man might be taken into custody, while any strumpet plying her trade might go free.
A law which proposes to punish certain offenders must be specific in defining the offenders and the offence.
It is simply because we have no categorial specification of this class of offenders that London is the nightly theatre of scenes which astound and horrify the citizens of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin.
And these scenes and this scandal will continue so long as the subordinate ministers of the law have no guide but their own judgments and inferences by which to estimate the conduct and character of women they see in the public streets.
NO REMEDY FOR THE STATE OF THINGS
There is, so far as we can see, no remedy for this state of things but the subjection of all women plying the trade of prostitutes to the direct action of a special law. Let them be recognised, and let the infraction of the conditions on which they are recognised be followed by definite penalties.
And let those conditions provide equally for the public health and for public decorum.
Let the hours assigned for the appearance of the women in the streets be restricted, and let the mode and character of their appearance be regulated. It is useless to cite the commonplaces of Puritanical prudery against innovation of which the worst that can be said is that it is of foreign origin.
It is the only remedy for the greatest social scandal of the age and country.
The only alternatives to its application are to let things alone, or to admit a capricious, unprincipled, and irregular interference with the liberty of every man and woman, however irreproachable.
EFFORTS TO CRUSH OUT IMMORALITY
It is no valid argument against this plan that it will not suppress the illicit intercourse of the sexes. It cannot do this. It is not intended to do this. No scheme can do this. Every effort to crush out immorality by force recoils with fearful rebound on the heads of its well-intentioned authors. One devil is cast out, only to make way for his return with other devils as bid as himself; to wit, falsehood, fraud, simulation, and corruption.
If an acute and observant man had time to examine all the consequences which have resulted from the suppression of ‘disorderly houses’ in many parts of London, would he not perhaps congratulate himself on the gain which has accrued to private morality or the peace of families?
THE ROLE OF THE POLICE
What is immediately wanted is, not the extirpation of immorality, but the suppression of an insolent indecency.
We do not call in the police to make men and women virtuous, but to make them respect decorum and the feelings of others. We cannot by police regulations cauterise the most subtle of social diseases, but can keep the ulcerous plague-spot from offensively obtruding itself on our senses.
We speak of decency and decorum as the proposed objects of a better law. But, valuable as they are, they are not the only nor even the most urgent objects.
There is, above all, the health of our men and women.
This is far too momentous a question to be dismissed with an affectation of decent horror or respectable disgust. It is’ identified with every question of healthy bodies and healthy minds of more than one generation.
THE HEREDITARY CONTAGION
When one bears in mind the ordinary medical hypotheses respecting the prolonged effects of the subtlest of poisons, when one sees the shifts and straits to which unhappy victims are reduced by the wicked ingenuity of quacks and charlatans, when one reads of the insidious maladies which fear or shyness or shame allows to lurk in the system of the sufferer for years, and transmit an hereditary taint to his posterity – we do think that the time has come when something more efficacious should be done than to preach sermons on moral purity, and invoke the irregular interference of undiscriminating constables.
PARLIAMENT SHOULD LEGISLATE
If people would only recollect that the sufferings entailed by the species of immorality of which we speak are not confined to the unfortunate sinners themselves, but are diffused, in various forms of malady, among their unoffending sons and daughters, and colour the lives of distant generations, they might bring themselves to believe that it would not be such a heinous crime if Parliament were to legislate for London and other large cities as it has legislated for the army and navy, and as it has allowed the Universities to legislate for the protection of their own members.
We have never heard that the wrath Heaven has visited the tardy attempt to save our soldiers and sailors from habitual decimation, or that graduates are more wedded to vice than other men, because they have been specially protected from its physical consequences in their youth.”