"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/01/18 (police terms: rozzer, peeler, bobby, copper, Scotland Yard)

I have to thank Omar Nour. He e-mailed in to ask about the origin of the term rozzer for a policeman and various other terms for the police, cos they have attracted many epithets over the years,  not all of them, obviously, very pleasant ones. But I'll start with rozzer. It's a bit of a mystery. If you look up in most dictionaries, it eill say, "ethymology unknown". But the most plausible suggestion is that it's the... A take, if you like, on the name of Sir Robert Peel, who of course was Home Secretary when the new Metropolitan Police Act was passed in 1828. Sir Robert Peel was the person who gave us both peeler, as an old term of policeman, and also bobby, a riff on Robbert. A Bow Street runner was a precursor to the modern police officer, and this is a reference to Bow Street in Covent Garden, in London, in which the most famous police magistrates' court was situated. And it's got a really lovely history, because the second magistrate to take a residence there was non other than novelist and the playwright Henry Fielding. And he was appointed, as I say, as magistrate for the City of Westminster, and this was at the time when gin consumption in London was at its absolute height, and Fielding reported that every foorth house in Covent Garden was a gin shop. And as a result of too much gin, there was just a lot of drunkeness about, a lot of lewd, debauched riotous behaviour, and something needed to be done. So Fielding brought together eight relaible constables, he brought together these people, and they were known as Mr. Fielding's people, and then eventually they became Bow Street runners. But I have ro mentioned a copper, as well. That comes from the slang verb cop, which itself is a variant of cap, and all goes all the way back to the Roman times and the word capere, means to seize or take. It's the same root as capture. So a copper is simple somebody who seize a criminal and then take them off to prison, and that's the same copper that you'll find in "it's a fair cop". And finally I'll just mentioned a Scotland Yard, where the name of that comes from. The pople who organised the new police force after Sir Robert Peel introduced his act were Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne. They occupied the place at 4 Whitehall Place, and the back of that opened up onto a courtyard called the Great Scotland Yard, so-called because there was once a medieval palace there which housed Scottish riyalty on their visits to London.