MAKING BETS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 194, 18 August 1933, Page 5

MAKING BETS.

METHODS OF POLICE.

CRITICISED BY COUNSEL

JUDGE COMMENTS ON UVW. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) NEW PLYMOUTH, this day. Before a jury in the Supreme Court acquitted Dominik Sisarich on a charge of bookmaking at Stratford, counsel (Mr. A. Coleman) attacked the methods of the police in seeking evidence against bookmakers by making bets with them. He commented particularly on the part played by Constables Groombridge and Hodge. He pointed out that the former !was a probationer constable and suggested that temptation was there to ! regard this work as a means towards [promotion.

Counsel said he did not mean that policemen were deliberately dishonest, but the fact remained that many persons did not consider that the methods they followed were fair. At least they were not the methods one would trust in everyday business. It was a vicious method of crime detection, and there was temptation for young probationer constables to get results at all costs. It would bo idle for him to discuss with the jury whether it approved of the law, said Mr. Justice Ostler, in summing up. The fact was that the law had" been in force since 1920. If the public did not like it, its remedy was to elect representatives to Parliament who would change it, but until that was done it was the duty of all law-abiding citizens to observe it, and he presumed the jurymen were all law-abiding citizens. Constable Groombridge's methods had been criticised, but his evidence was uncontradicted. It had been found that it was practically impossible to detect certain kinds of crime without the use of these methods, and commissions on the police force in England had approved them. In Great Britain and in the Dominions these methods were used for the detection of certain crimes.