Who was the first police detective?
First POLICE DETECTIVE
The first POLICE DETECTIVE was Eugene Francois Vidocq, who became the first head of the French Surete in 1812. His early years held little promise of their later fulfilment. Born at Arras in 1775, he was apprehended for stealing his father’s plate while still a schoolboy and suffered his first spell of imprisonment in a wretched prison called the `Banders’, which also served as a madhouse. Subsequently he joined the French Army, deserted, and enlisted in the enemy Austrian forces. After deserting again, he found himself arrested on a charge of forging a release for a prisoner in Lille Gaol, and was sentenced to the galleys at Brest.
Vidocq escaped from Brest three times; twice he was brought back in chains. The third time that he was caught, he approached M. Henry, the Chief of the 2nd Division of the Paris Police, with an offer to serve as an informer provided he was not returned to the galleys. Henry recognized the advantages of this proposal. for few men could equal Vidocq’s intimate knowledge of the criminal underworld. Accordingly, he gave orders for the prisoner to be removed to La Force Gaol, and it was here that Vidocq served the remainder of his sentence, reporting incriminating conversations and plans for further villainy. On his release he continued to work clandestinely for the police, though unlike most police spies of the time, who rendered their services in exchange for a blind eye to their own illegal activities, Vidocq was scrupulously careful to maintain a clean record and established an unusual reputation for personal integrity.
At last Vidocq was suspected by his underworld associates as a spy and could no longer go among them with impunity. M. Henry was not prepared to lose such a valuable lieutenant, and in 1812 he took the bold step of forming a special branch devoted to crime detection and prevention, notwithstanding the bitter opposition of those who considered the only requirement for an effective policeman was brute force. The new department was called the Surete and Vidocq was appointed to its command.
Vidocq himself made another notable contribution to the history of detection after his retirement from the Surete by establishing the world’s first private detective agency. In his later years he declined into obscurity and died a pauper in 1855.
In Britain the first police officer to be assigned special duties outside his own division was Sgt James Otway of the Metropolitan Police, who was sent to Uxbridge on detachment from ‘A’ Division in February 1837 to investigate the murder of a boy called James Brill, whose body had been found in a wood.
The first regularly constituted detective force in Britain was formed on 15 August 1842 under the joint command of Insp. Pearce and Insp. John Haynes. One of the original six Detective-Sergeants was Sgt Whicher, believed to have been the model for Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, the first of the great detectives of English fiction. Punch showed its customary disrespect for authority by dubbing them the ‘Defectives’.
