150000 U.S.A MURDERERS FREE

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 June 1936, Page 2

150000 U.S.A MURDERERS FREE

ARMY OF CRIMINALS

WASHINGTON, April 24

About 150,000 murderers are roaming the United States, according to Mr. Edgar Hoover, head of the special force of G-Men organised by the Government to fight the gangster menace.

“Walking the streets of the towns ol America,” he declared in an address here to-night, “are 300,000 citizens unaware that* they are doomed to die at the hands of murderers.” He asserted that one out of 25 persons in the United States was inclined to criminality. If the criminal world were to marshal its forces, he continued, they would “tramp ceaselessly past, hour upon hour, in daylight and darkflness, and back to daylight and darkness again, 10 or 20 abreast. “An army of criminals could be collected before which America would fall in a few hours.”

Urging all citizens to declare war on crime, Mr. Hoover declared that the enforcement of law was prevented by those politicians who had criminal associates. Citizens paid a personal tax of £24 a year for the privilege of living in a country which each year saw 12,000 murders; 47,000 criminal assaults; 280,000 larcenies; and 300,000 motor-car thefts. In every large city there were numerous lawyers who made their living by defending men they knew to be guilty.