Colonel Henderson, in his Report on the Metropolitan Police, calls
attention to a very grave fact. Assaults on the police are decidedly on the increase. Putting aside merely trivial assaults, he tells us that no fewer than two thousand nine hundred and forty-one police-officers — that is, about one in every four of the whole force—were assaulted last year. Colonel Henderson is so impressed with the gravity of the evil, that he moots for consideration a proposal which we have always advo- cated, viz., that assaults on the police should be treated as aggra- vated assaults, punishable by a considerable term of imprisonment with hard labour, and not as common assaults. As it is, the law invests the police-officer with certain privileges, and it seems un- reasonable to deny him this protection, which would be more to the purpose than any of the privileges he now possesses. It might be only prudent to weight him with some peculiar disabili- ties ; to say, for example, that any wilful misstatement on the part of a constable in Court should be punished as perjury, whether it was or was not material to the issue. At all events, somehow or other, the London " rough " must be taught that " spoiling " a policeman must not continue to be a cheap popular pastime.
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