TIME TO ACT IN EARNEST.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXII, Issue 2668, 18 December 1928, Page 7

TIME TO ACT IN EARNEST.

That the cities afflicted with this pest can rid themselves of it by compelling their local authorities to act in earnest is the burden of the press comment on the subject. Charging inadequate protection, the New York Telegram has made a survey of killings throughout New York City from January 1, to June 1, 1928. The survey reports 121 homicides in that period, gives the disposition of each case, and asserts that in only 22-eases were the accused killers sent to prison, penitentiary or asylum, and that only two were convicted of murder in the first degree. The Telegram draws the- conclusion from its figures that'the odds are 11 to 2 that a killer will never be sent to prison, and 11 to 4 that no one will be indicted for a killing in New York. And the New York Tribune declares that:

“Even if the present outbreak of violence resulted only in the killing of gangsters, it would be bad enough. But when the lives of innocent people are imperilled by such blood feuds, it is time for the people to take serious thought about their safety, if the police will not.” Philadelphia also is suffering from this “Chicago stuff,” according to the Evening Public Ledger of that city, which says:—

“In Philadelphia there have been several shootings about as hold as anything that has occurred in Chicago. Last Tuesday a racketeer was slain, and a boy, a man, and a woman wounded at 10 o’clock in the morning. The longer this sort of tiling is permitted to go on without the most strenuous efforts being made to stop it, the bolder will the racketeers become.”

Organised gangdom has not only become deeply rooted in the cities, the Manchester Union observes, but its activities “have become open, even honourable,” and such advertising is hound to react harmfully upon public order and good citizenship, especially in its effect upon reckless boys of the gang age. Thus—“O’Bannion’s and Yale’s funerals, with their pomp and pageantry, will go far in the minds of many boys to fake the course of their careers, and make out of them heroes to he emulated. Incidentally also this is bad advertising for us abroad. These incidents are given prominence in the cidents are given prominence in the foreign mind, while the finer aspects of American life are overlooked and America, is rated abroad as the paradise of gangsters.”