Police violence and judicial bias in the age of mass democracy: Glasgow, 1933-1935

Abstract

Using the example of an impoverished, so-called ‘slum’ district in Glasgow, this article argues that poorer, workingclass people were subjected to aggressive and frequently violent policing along with systematic hostility from the judiciary and the press in Britain during the 1930s. In Glasgow, attempts to challenge police methods and police officers’ courtroom testimonies met with a highly punitive response from the city’s legal establishment. Despite enjoying the rights of citizenship, working-class people found it difficult to find politicians to take up their complaints about police incivility and brutality, embodied in the conduct of a police constable known locally as ‘Hitler’. Those few politicians willing to do so, whether in Glasgow Corporation or in the House of Commons, found themselves marginalized as mainstream politicians of all parties refused to accept that the British police were capable of inflicting ‘terror’ on civilians. Press sympathy extended only to those workingclass women jailed for perjury and separated from their children in the wake of trials of ‘rioters’ at Glasgow Sheriff Court. Human-interest coverage of the plight of their families gave working-class people a voice as victims of misfortune. They were not permitted to speak as victims of miscarriages of justice.