POLICE AND CRIME

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 August 1912, Page 5

POLICE AND CRIME

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THE POLICE AS CRIMINALS. THE WAR AGAINST VICE. [PUR press ASSOCIATION’—COPYRIGHT,] NEW YORK, Aukust 8. Mr John D. Rockefeller and his son are interesting themselves in the ■ war against vice as revealed by the Rosenthal murder. Young Rockefeller has been conducting a resort in Tenderloin District to obtain evidence of the corruption of the police'. MORAL CESSPOOLS. LAWLESSNESS IN AMERICA’S GREAT CITIES.

“In three of our largest cities there has been, in the last few weeks . (said “Current Literature” in May, 1911) an opening of moral cesspools that makes the ordinary work of the magazine muckraker seem tamo by comparison. In New York City the man to perform the disagreeable job of taking off the lid was Police Magistrate Corrigan, in Pittsburg, the president of the Voters’ League, A. Leo Weil, did the work, and in Chicago a Vice Commission appointed by the Mayor undertook the duty. The revelations are local in their character, and the discussion that has ensued has been chiefly of a local sort; but in the midst of it comes Mr S. S. McClure, the magazine publisher, who has been for years collecting facts concerning the lawlessness of the American people, and the local revelations assume a national significance in the light of his sweeping indictnßent. “There are; ten times as many murders,” so runs one of his statements” made in an address in Now York City, “in the United States per million inhabitants as in any other country,” He added; “The number of murders in this country in thirteen years, makes as great a death list as that of those of the Union army, who died on the Southern battlefields in the Civil War. Last year saw twenty-nine murders in Detroit and two in Toronto. Our civilisation has not broken down all at once under this advancing lawlessness. It has taken time. In 1881 there wore twentyfour murders for every million of population. In the next fifteen years the murder rate grew six times faster than the population, till to-day we read with indifference newspaper headlines in any paper such as, if that appeared in any European paper, would cause a downfall of the form of government.” “I have in my posession at this moment,” said Magistrate Corrigan, “a list of 312 criminals, all of them out-of-towners, who have come to Nevr York since the beginning of the year.” Thepe names, he said, were given to. him by one police officer and one store detective. “I could give you,” ho continued, “the names of a lot of confidence men you can see around Broadway and Forty-second Street any afternoon,” or fifty-four badger women plying their trade, or forty-six burglars, and all of those 1 got in two or three minutes from a policeman.” Not content with figures, the magistrate named a few of these shady characters and told of the haunts which they frequent. The very names are picturesque : Fog O’Day, Knock-out-Sheehan, Yeddo November, Kid Twist, Denny Slyfox. Ho told where Monk Eastman, just out of the penitentiary, had started an opium joint; where Jerry Layton was running four stuss games without even paying for police protection; where Canfield's old resort had been re-opened, and where, in “ a certain downtown district,” were 800 unlicensed places in which liquor was being sold. He told of “the carbarn gang” and their dead-line for policemen, and of the “riot of vice” found in Coney Island last summer by the then acting-mayor, Mr Mitchell, and of “the most wonderful procession that has ever occurred in the history of a civilised community,” caused bv Mitchell’s efforts :

"“’Mitchell gave the word to close, and then all the human rats that infested the place got together; the ygot a brass band and marched down Surf Avenue, headed by the brass band, and, SCO strong, dancing and singing between two lines of cops the painted women in tights, the thugs and pickpockets and panders and moral degenerates, all of them walked down there between two police lines, jibbing and jeering, and took the train for New York. That is what Mitchell did, and did that in two weeks 1 time.”

O’Brien, tho inspector for tho Coney Island district, was put on trial for the condition he had permitted to exist. The evidence was all received. The law in tho case was simple. But decision has been reserved by the commissioner, and, asserted Corrigan, it always will be reserved, because O’Brien knows too much. “I challenge the commissioner,” said Corrigan, “to decide the case of Inspector O’Brien, and I say to you that until be does that, his department rests under the deep suspicion of the public.”