HUNTING CRIMINALS BY WIRELESS

Evening Star, Issue 18021, 15 July 1922, Page 14

HUNTING CRIMINALS BY WIRELESS

LATEST UNITED STATES POLICE METHODS. Wireless telephony is becoming a now terror for criminals to face, as the result of the enterprise of tho New York and Chicago police departments. Both cities already possess a largo amount of wireless equipment, and maintain research departments for the purpose of studying the adaptation of wireless to tho special needs of police work. Both tho Now York and_ the Chicago police have wireless distributing stations, from which news of crimes of every description is flashed over an area of thousands of square miles every day. Both forces, again, possess highpower motor cars equipped with receiving and transmitting sets, and conversations with police headquarters are easily kept up when tho cars are travelling at a speed of fifty miles an hour. As soon as sufficient equipment can be manufactured every Chicago policeman will be equipped with a miniature receiving set. The earlier pattern of apparatus, which was intended to enable constables to receive spoken messages, proved unsuccessful owing to interference from various causes, particularly because of tho presence of largo numbers of high steel-framed buildings. Tho pattern now in use simply reacts to wireless waves in such a manner as to produce a mild electric shock in tho policeman’s arm. Ho then hurries to one of the special police telephone boxes, which are placed on lamp-posts in all American cities,_ and calls up his station. Wireless receiving sets have been ordered for each of the fifty police stations of Chicago.