Rough Justice: Policing, Crime, and the Origins of the Newfoundland Constabulary, 1729–1871 by Keith Mercer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rough Justice: Policing, Crime, and the Origins of the Newfoundland Constabulary, 1729–1871 by Keith Mercer Jonathan Swainger Mercer, Keith–Rough Justice: Policing, Crime, and the Origins of the Newfoundland Constabulary, 1729–1871. St. John’s: Flanker Press Limited, 2021. 518 p. Boasting an exhaustive archival research effort that will profit future scholars, Keith Mercer’s Rough Justice is a weighty book exploring the deep origins of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, detailing over two centuries of the evolution, challenges, achievements, and failures of governance on the island before 1871. Although the book’s purported chronology extends from the dual governorship of Commodore Vere Beauclerk and Captain Henry Osborne of HMS Squirrel in 1729–1730 to the establishment of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) in [End Page 225] the spring of 1871, in truth the book begins in the sixteenth century with an argument that “policing evolved slowly over time—as a custom of the country, and arms of municipal administration—rather than from political or constitutional milestones, at least until reform was forced upon the island suddenly during the 1870s, after decades of local resistance” (p. 7). Seeing the title, readers looking for a history of the force may grumble since the current volume concentrates on the preamble and historical context of island policing en route to the RNC. It is not that the late sixteenth century to 1871 is without interest or that Mercer’s treatment is without insight, but the volume feels like an accounting of everything that he found on the way to a history of the RNC. This criticism may be ungenerous. Still, one suspects that hard editorial choices would have produced a more tightly centred final product, especially since the book’s origin was as a commissioned history of the RNC. Divided into an introduction, seven lengthy chapters, and a conclusion, the book reflects Mercer’s emphasis on the average constable’s job—what filled his working day. The result is an examination of the varied tasks that constables performed and that labour’s relationship to the working of the legal system. Fair enough. Mercer’s work nonetheless raises a mercurial chicken-or-egg interpretive question. Was this police work because these men were identified as constables performed it or was this “police work” thanks to abstract and evolving notions of what policing—as a distinct form of labour—was to entail? The question is an important one, especially given contemporary debates about the range and appropriateness of tasks performed by the police. Did the public in the past have in mind specific functions that policing included and how have these notions evolved? After all, Mercer’s research demonstrates that for much of the pre-1871 era, the idea of policing in Newfoundland had a broad and often ill-defined remit. And further, as the nineteenth century wore on, this remit narrowed as the form and function of representative colonial governance emerged. Thus, one does wonder what Mercer might have argued had the enterprise begun with an overt research question centred on what Newfoundland’s police history might tell us about the important themes in the island’s history. This would have allowed a treatment exploring the changing nature of being a constable and placed that squarely within a sense of the island’s evolution. Thus, rather than produce a detailed catalogue of activities, the latter approach potentially could have revealed a great deal about the community, its fault lines, and its cultures as a conscious interpretative core. For as much as Mercer argues that the constabulary was crucial to the operation of the justice system and, in many ways, represented the very idea of “government,” he does not explain how islanders’ expectations of a justice system evolved as their community changed from a scattered collection of individuals tied to the migratory fishery to functioning, year-round communities. Indeed, while the term “culture” appears on a handful of occasions in the book, Mercer does not ask about islanders’ legal culture and the practices and methods they imported from their varied homes. We are left to wonder what this public thought of the law, legal remedy, the sense of bringing a dispute to...