The morality department was formed in 1886, when then Mayor William Holmes Howland appointed ex-Royal Irish Constabulary officer David Archibald to head this special unit of the Toronto Police Service to deal specifically with "vice, sin, and crimes which heavily impacted women and children". Howland had just won Toronto's mayoral race that year by promising to make Toronto a beacon of morality for the world, even going so far as to give Toronto the moniker, "Toronto the Good". The department ran through the 1930s, and was seen as a forerunner to many social assistance programs, such as the Children's Aid Society. It was set up under a social purist pretext of policing people's everyday behaviours so that Toronto might live up to Howland's moniker. Among the offences, though not necessarily crimes, that morality officers policed were gambling, "blue laws" or "Sabbath laws", being an absentee father, drug dealing, interracial relationships, homosexuality, bootlegging and alcoholism, vagrancy, family abuse and prostitution. The people in power who wrote these laws, such as Howland, and created the morality department said that they were there to protect moral and good people from the evils of the city. However, when examining the direct implementation/enforcement of these laws, and the effects they had on civilian life, the larger purpose of the morality department was to prevent working-class people from socializing or coming together, and thereby to keep them in a generally less powerful position.