History of Law Enforcement in Bermuda
Bermuda's first police, from settlement until 1879, had been nine Parish constables (one for each Parish). These positions were filled by men appointed for twelve months, unpaid service, until pay was introduced in the 19th Century. These appointments were compulsory, akin to jury service.
Dissatisfaction with the quality of this part-time Constabulary led to the formation of the Bermuda Police Force under the Police Establishment Act, 1879. The new body consisted of ten full-time constables under Superintendent J. C. B. Clarke. Three of the constables were based in Hamilton, with Clarke, three in St. George's, with Chief Constable H. Dunkley, and two in Somerset, and there were still twenty-one part-time Parish constables.
The size of the police force was trebled in 1901. The first Detective was appointed in 1919, and the Force was reorganised again in 1920, with eighteen constables recruited from the UK raising its strength to forty-six. The size of the force grew steadily over the following decades.
The Bermuda Reserve Constabulary was created in 1951. After the closure of Bermuda's Royal Naval Dockyard and associated military garrison in 1958, Police Headquarters and other elements relocated to Prospect Camp, the former military headquarters. A Womans' Department was established in 1961 with the first five female police officers. A marine section was formed in 1962, its first large boat, the Heron, being built by police officers in their spare time.
Read more about this topic: Bermuda Police Service
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or law:
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)