NEW YORK POLICE METHODS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 6 May 1912, Page 2

NEW YORK POLICE METHODS.

In the height of a crime wave New York must be a good city to live out of. Writing in the middle of February, when such a wave was passing over the city, the correspondent of the Standard described an extraordinary state of .affairs. Daring "holdups" were of almost daily occurrence, the police were becoming demoralised, and the public was growing furious at their inability to cope with the criminals. For instance, a well-known diamond merchant, while walking along a thoroughfare at seven in tbe evening, was suddenly attacked by two men who had jumped out of a motor-car. They hit him on the head, seized his bag containing £2000 worth of diamonds, and escaped in the car. A man entered a newspaper delivery office in one of the busiest parts of the city, and, by firing a revolver, cowed a clerk into giving him, £50 from the till, and then escaped. The police were growing reckless under the taunts to which they were subjected, and had begun to use their revolvers with alarming freedom. Almost every night "man hunts" occurred in New York streets, the burglars fleeing before the police, who fired at them as they ran. The correspondent was awakened one night by the police rushing down his street shooting at a burglar. Six constables were after him, but he escaped in spite of them. Bishop Greer, of New York, recently related that he was sitting reading in his library in the evening, when a bullet crashed through the window close to his head. It had been fired by a policeman in pursuit of a robber. These shooting affrays at night had become so common that the newspapers were not reporting them. And, as if the criminals were not bad enough, a drunken police sergeant drew a revolver on a tram-car one day, chased an unoffending citizen off the car, and fired three shots at him. The police were said to be demoralised owing to attempts by Mr Gaynor, the Mayor, to reorganise the department on London lines by preventing indiscriminate arrests without evidence, stopping the .brutal clubbing of prisoners, abolishing the notorious "third degree" examinations, and compelling the constables to abate their long-established autocratic methods. There was an agitation for the restoration of the old methods, and perhaps by this time it has been successful .