£2,600,000,000 FOR CRIME

Evening Star, Issue 20252, 13 August 1929, Page 9

£2,600,000,000 FOR CRIME

AMERICA'S ANNUAL BILL 12,000 MURDERS A YEAR

NEW YORK, duly 20. Crime costs the United Slates £2,600,000,000 yea r 1 y. Twelve thousand murders arc committed there annually—fifty times the number recorded in Great Britain.

Thirty thousand criminals are at largo m Non- York, and 10,000 in Chicago.

The annual .murder rale in the United States has increased 050 per cent, since 1900.

Tims, while tiro persons in every 100,000 were murdered in 1900, the proportion is now seven in every 100.000.

These facts arc supplied by Air Wade Ellis, former Assistant Attorney-Gen-eral of the United States and a member of the American Bar Association’s crime commission. According to him the chief offenders aro foreign-born citizens and negroes. As to the causes of crime unexampled in the history of civilisation, the report’ cites first America’s tremendous growth in wealth, a growth which commenced thirty years ago and readied its climax after the war. ” Tin's has made for wastefulness, extravagance, and display, and tempted the weak to the acquisition of easy money.” The multiplicity of laws has also increased the sum total of crimes. As examples of inventions which made .crime easier to accomplish and provided greater facilities for escape, Mr Ellis mentions the motor car, the automatic pistol, the machine-gun, life smoke screen, and the aeroplane. In many of America’s larger cities, Air Ellis reports, there is a political and sometimes a financial partnership between the underworld and the very officials who have sworn to protect the lives and property of law-abiding citizens. The long delays in bringing criminals to trial and the technicalities which have grown up round the administration of justice have dogged the courts and made a farce of the punishment of evildoers.

Finally, Mr Ellis declares, the most important of all causes of crime is that the great body of citizens have been so busy in amassing weath and giving their leisure to frivolity that they ‘'have no inclination to consider seriously the dangers threatening the counIrv.”