Modern policing got its start.
William Spooner/Wikimedia Commons
William Spooner/Wikimedia Commons
As cities rapidly filled up with an influx of workers, this urbanization led to a rise in crime. The city of London responded by establishing the Metropolitan Police in 1829. This helped lower crime rates, but the early decades of modern policing were full of growing pains.
High-profile criminal cases like Jack the Ripper, along with fictional work like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, highlighted just how difficult it was to solve crimes in the age before modern forensics.