The City of Glasgow Police

2. Who Was Actually First

The interesting thing about the “first police force” question is that there are four defensible answers, and each is first at something different.

• Paris, 1667. Louis XIV created the office of lieutenant général de police, first held by Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, by royal edict registered 15 March 1667. This is the oldest centrally organised, uniformed police force — but it belongs to an absolutist, state-security genealogy that Anglo-American writers of the period explicitly regarded as a threat to liberty. Glasgow cannot claim to be first in the world.
• Dublin, 1786. The Dublin Police Act created a professional, uniformed, armed, centralised force of 40 horse police and 400 constables — the earliest statutory city police in the British Isles. Per Britannica it was “perceived to be patterned after the French Gendarmerie Nationale—and, in fact, it was”. It was politically unpopular and had effectively collapsed by 1795.
• Thames/Marine Police, 1798. Founded by Patrick Colquhoun and John Harriott, first patrols 2 July 1798, initially privately funded by the West India Committee to combat cargo theft. Britannica calls it “the first regular professional police force in London” and notes two unique features: “it used visible, preventive patrols” and “officers were salaried rather than stipendiary, and they were prohibited from taking fees”. It became a public body via the Depredations on the Thames Act, royal assent 28 July 1800 — about four weeks after Glasgow’s Act. Its remit was narrow: river and dock cargo, not a whole city. UNESCO recognises it as the oldest continuously serving police force in the world; it survives as the Met’s Marine Policing Unit.
• Glasgow, 1800. The first city-wide, rate-funded, general-purpose municipal preventive force with an elected civilian board. The peer-reviewed formulation, from a 2024 Policing and Society article, is that “more considered histories cite the City of Glasgow Police, established in 1800, as being the first modern territorial police force”.
• London Metropolitan Police, 1829. Peel’s force: not first, but the first large, centralised, full-time force for a metropolis, and the model the world copied.

One further complication belongs here rather than in a footnote. The early Glasgow officers also fought fires, “called the hours” and swept the streets, much like the watchmen they partly replaced — so even the word “modern” needs care. The historian David G. Barrie titled his doctoral thesis on the subject “Britain’s oldest police?”, question mark included, resisting the trophy narrative. And Scottish burghs had watchmen and unpaid constables long before 1800: Glasgow’s achievement was professionalisation and stable funding, not the invention of civic order-keeping from nothing.

3. Structure and Innovations

The intellectual groundwork was laid before the Act. The 1788 committee led by Lord Provost John Campbell recommended a preventive force whose officers would wear uniforms with numbered badges inscribed “Police”, provide 24-hour patrols, and lodge a £50 bond for good conduct. The Glasgow Police Museum describes these as “preventative policing” some forty years before Peel — a framing that is promotional rather than academic, and is reported here as tradition.

Later developments and claimed firsts, sorted by how well they hold up:

• 1819: Lieutenant Peter McKinlay appointed “Criminal Officer” — Glasgow’s first detective — with a Criminal Department following by 1821. The appointment is documented; the museum’s comparative claim that it predated the Met’s detective branch by roughly two decades is traditional.
• 1846: merger with the Gorbals, Calton and Anderston burgh police; four divisions, 360 officers.
• 1861: electric telegraph adopted. 1878: horse-drawn prisoner van.
• 1891: the first UK police signal boxes — cast-iron, with a signal lamp — installed in Glasgow. Telephone police boxes had appeared earlier in the United States, in Albany in 1877.
• 1900: 1,355 officers. 1904: first Chief Inspector of Detectives.
• 1910: among the first British forces to use police dogs — Airedale terriers trained at Carnoustie by Lt Col Edwin H. Richardson.
• 1915: Emily Miller appointed the force’s first policewoman, initially as a statement-taker or “lady assistant” attached to CID, gaining powers of arrest only in 1924. Scotland’s first paid, uniformed policewoman was Jean Thomson in Dundee in 1918.

4. Peel, Colquhoun and the Principles

Two myths meet here, one Scottish and one English, and the honest treatment corrects both.

The Scottish one is that Peel copied Glasgow. There is no documented evidence that Peel or his advisors studied the Glasgow force specifically. Britannica ties his practical model to his Irish and Dublin experience and to Colquhoun’s writings. What is documented is the intellectual channel, and it is genuinely Scottish. Patrick Colquhoun was a Glasgow merchant who founded the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and served as Lord Provost of Glasgow, 1782–84, before moving to London, where his A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1796) is called by Britannica the theoretical foundation of modern policing — Colquhoun being “rightly considered the architect of modern policing”. Barrie argues, from Glasgow City Archives minutes of 1788–89 including the Town Council Minute Book of 10 December 1788 and the Trades’ House Minutes of 13 July 1789, that the preventive-policing ideas in the Treatise had counterparts being debated and tried in Glasgow before he left. Scotland contributed materially to the intellectual foundations of modern policing. That is the claim; it is enough.

The English myth is the “Peelian principles”. The nine principles of policing by consent were neither written nor conceived by Peel. The Home Office and historians attribute the 1829 “General Instructions” to the first commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, and the famous nine-point list was codified by the historian Charles Reith around 1948 — analysed by Lentz and Chaires in the Journal of Criminal Justice in 2007. Flagging that matters here, because a card that corrected only the Glasgow overclaim while leaving the London one standing would not be telling the truth; it would be picking a side.

5. Slater, Moorov, Sillitoe

The force’s most historically significant case is its worst. In the Oscar Slater affair of 1908–09, Slater — born Oskar Josef Leschziner, a German-Jewish immigrant — was wrongly convicted of the murder of Marion Gilchrist, an 82-year-old woman bludgeoned to death shortly after 7pm on 21 December 1908 at 15 Queens Terrace, West Princes Street, after her maid Helen Lambie went out on errands. Widely described as Scotland’s worst miscarriage of justice, his conviction — initially a death sentence, commuted — was quashed at the Court of Criminal Appeal on 20 July 1928, nineteen and a half years after his first arrest, on the ground that the trial judge, Lord Guthrie, had misdirected the jury. He received £6,000 in compensation. The campaign to clear him was driven by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and by Detective Lieutenant John Thomson Trench of this force, who was dismissed for his stance.

Glasgow also produced the Moorov doctrine (1930), a still-current principle of Scots corroboration law, arising from a Glasgow case investigated with the help of policewomen.

And from 1931 to 1943 the force was run by Chief Constable Percy Sillitoe, who reorganised it, broke the razor gangs — the Billy Boys and others, made infamous by the novel No Mean City — introduced radio patrol cars, operational from May 1936, set up a modern fingerprint laboratory under Bertie Hammond, and gave the world the black-and-white diced cap band now universally called the Sillitoe tartan. Trialled by the Mounted Branch and ordered force-wide by August 1932, it stayed distinctively Scottish for four decades: first adopted outside Scotland by South Australia Police in 1961, spreading across the rest of the UK’s forces from the early 1970s. It is now used by every police force in Great Britain and by emergency services worldwide — a Glasgow invention visible on almost every continent.

6. Strathclyde and After

The City of Glasgow Police was dissolved on 16 May 1975 and merged into Strathclyde Police, the largest of the eight new Scottish regional forces created under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 — formed from the City of Glasgow Police plus the Lanarkshire, Renfrew and Bute, Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Ayrshire constabularies and part of Stirling and Clackmannan. The same reorganisation abolished the burghs themselves, and with them the Convention of Royal Burghs that had once championed burgh police powers.

7. Police Scotland, 2013

The Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 merged Scotland’s eight regional forces and the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency into a single national Police Service of Scotland with effect from 1 April 2013. It was a genuinely distinctive reform: one national force for the whole country, against the 43 separate territorial forces England and Wales retain. Police Scotland describes itself as “the second largest force in the UK after the Metropolitan Police”, with “a workforce of 23,000 officers and staff” and 13 local policing divisions; sworn-officer strength stood at 16,427 full-time equivalent on 30 September 2024. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill told the Scottish Parliament the reform would “save an overall £1.7bn over 15 years” — a projection, not a realised outcome. Oversight passed to a new Scottish Police Authority.

Centralisation was contentious from the outset. The first Chief Constable, Sir Stephen House, previously head of Strathclyde, presided over what critics dubbed “Strathclydisation”. Two flashpoints stand out. The routine deployment of armed officers on ordinary patrols across Scotland, including rural areas such as Inverness, was introduced without full consultation and later scaled back after political outcry. And mass “consensual” stop-and-search, including of children, was largely dismantled after scrutiny — one University of Edinburgh study found the 2012/13 search rate in the former Strathclyde area was more than four times New York’s stop-and-frisk rate. Governance and accountability weaknesses, the M9 crash deaths of Lamara Bell and John Yuill, and a death in custody fuelled further criticism; both House and the SPA’s first chair, Vic Emery, departed amid the strife. Academic and journalistic commentators, in the British Journal of Criminology and Crime Prevention and Community Safety, noted the merger’s “compressed timeframe” and a “democratic deficit” in police governance.

There is a long arc in that. The 1800 Act put a Glasgow police force under nine locally elected commissioners. Two hundred and thirteen years later, its successor answered to a single national authority, and the argument that followed was about exactly the thing the 1800 Act had got right.

Timeline

1. 1667

   Paris

   Louis XIV creates the lieutenant général de police — the oldest centrally organised force, and an absolutist one

2. 1779–81

   First Glasgow attempt

   James Buchanan appointed Inspector with eight officers; collapses in 1781 for lack of finance

3. 1786

   Dublin Police Act

   The earliest statutory city police in the British Isles — armed, centralised, modelled on the French gendarmerie

4. 1788–90

   Second Glasgow attempt

   Master of Police Richard Marshall; fails again in 1790, again over money

5. 1788–89

   The Campbell committee's proposals

   Uniforms with numbered “Police” badges, 24-hour patrols, a £50 good-conduct bond

6. 1796

   Colquhoun's Treatise

   A former Lord Provost of Glasgow publishes the theoretical foundation of modern policing

7. 2 Jul 1798

   Thames/Marine Police begin patrols

   Colquhoun and Harriott; salaried, preventive, but a narrow river and dock remit

8. 30 Jun 1800

   Glasgow Police Act receives royal assent

   A rate on houses and businesses funds the force

9. 29 Sep 1800

   John Stenhouse appointed Master of Police

   He recruits three sergeants and six officers

10. 15 Nov 1800

    The force first musters

    In the Session House of the Laigh Kirk, Trongate

11. 28 Jul 1800

    Depredations on the Thames Act

    Makes the Marine Police a public body — four weeks after Glasgow's Act

12. 1819

    Glasgow's first detective

    Lieutenant Peter McKinlay appointed “Criminal Officer”; a Criminal Department follows by 1821

13. 1829

    London Metropolitan Police

    Peel's force — the global model, and popularly but wrongly called Britain's first

14. 1846

    Merger with Gorbals, Calton and Anderston

    Four divisions, 360 officers

15. 1861 & 1878

    Electric telegraph; horse-drawn prisoner van

16. 1891

    First UK police signal boxes

    Cast-iron, with signal lamps; telephone boxes had appeared in Albany, New York, in 1877

17. 1908–09

    The Oscar Slater case

    A wrongful conviction, quashed only on 20 July 1928

18. 1910

    Among the first British forces to use police dogs

    Airedale terriers trained at Carnoustie by Lt Col Edwin H. Richardson

19. 1915

    Emily Miller appointed

    The force's first policewoman; powers of arrest only from 1924

20. Aug 1932

    The Sillitoe tartan ordered force-wide

    The black-and-white diced cap band, now used worldwide

21. May 1936

    Radio patrol cars operational

    Part of Percy Sillitoe's modernisation

22. 16 May 1975

    Dissolution into Strathclyde Police

    The largest of the eight new Scottish regional forces

23. 1 Apr 2013

    Police Scotland

    Eight forces plus the SCDEA merged into one national service

Did You Know?

• Glasgow tried to found a police force twice before 1800, and both attempts ran out of money.
• The 1800 force's first officers also fought fires, swept streets and called out the hours.
• The Thames Marine Police became a public body four weeks after Glasgow's Act — and is recognised by UNESCO as the oldest continuously serving force in the world.
• After Advertising Standards Authority action, the Metropolitan Police gave a written undertaking never again to call itself Britain's first police force.
• The nine “Peelian principles” were compiled by a historian around 1948, not by Robert Peel.
• The black-and-white diced band on police caps worldwide is a Glasgow invention of 1932, named after Chief Constable Percy Sillitoe.
• It was first adopted outside Scotland not in England but in South Australia, in 1961.
• Glasgow appointed a detective in 1819, and installed Britain's first police signal boxes in 1891.
• The detective who fought to clear Oscar Slater was sacked by his own force for doing so.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spent nearly two decades campaigning for a real prisoner's release, and won in 1928.
• Police Scotland's 2013 creation left England and Wales with 43 territorial forces and Scotland with one.

Honest Caveats

• Museum sources are knowledgeable but promotional. Much of the granular institutional detail comes from the Glasgow Police Museum and allied heritage sites, and their comparative claims — “40 years before Peel”, a detective branch “21 years before the Met” — are treated here as traditional unless corroborated academically.
• “Modern” is doing a lot of work in the priority claim, and the early officers’ firefighting and street-sweeping duties are a genuine complication rather than a footnote.
• Emily Miller’s status in 1915 was contested. She began as a statement-taker or “lady assistant” and gained powers of arrest only in 1924; Scotland’s first paid, uniformed policewoman was Jean Thomson in Dundee in 1918.
• The Sillitoe tartan’s UK adoption date differs by source — 1972 per Wikipedia, 1974 per the Glasgow Police Museum. A minor documented discrepancy.
• Police Scotland figures fluctuate. The roughly 23,000 total is officers plus staff, on Police Scotland’s own current figure; sworn-officer FTE was 16,427 on 30 September 2024 and has been declining since a 2020 peak. Date any figure quoted.
• The “£1.7bn over 15 years” saving was a government projection, not an outcome; Audit Scotland later cited a lower expected figure.
• If primary evidence emerged that Peel or Rowan and Mayne consulted Glasgow records — not merely Colquhoun’s Treatise — the influence claim here would be upgraded from intellectual to documented.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Cards

• The Procurator Fiscal

  Who decides whether a Scottish police investigation becomes a prosecution.

• Scotland's Supreme Courts

  Where Slater's conviction was finally quashed in 1928.

• The Sheriff Court

  The court most Glasgow cases actually reached.

• Convention of Royal Burghs

  Burgh police powers, and who paid the rates.

• University of Glasgow

  The Enlightenment city that produced Patrick Colquhoun.

• The Scottish Office

  Law and order as a department of the British state.

• NHS Scotland

  The other great 20th-century Scottish public service.

• The Keepers of Scotland

  Where the force's surviving records are held.