LONDON DETECTIVES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 281, 25 October 1934, Page 8

LONDON DETECTIVES

CLEVER DISGUISES SUCCEED. The sneer that a policeman is never more obvious than when he wears “plain clothes” no longer applies in London. The bright young men who now receive their training at Scotland Yard are definitely not of the “fiatfoot”«type. They are chosen for their intelligence, adaptability, and flair for criminal investigation. Not unusually, they are products of the older universities, and can speak not only impeccable English, but two or three foreign languages. If they are good actors, too, so much the better. In recent times, the various metropolitan police divisions have achieved considerable success in their constant war on the underworld by sending out parties of detectives in disguise. The disguise is not a crude arrangement of false whiskers and grotesque costume. It is complete, mentally and physically. Only the other day, for example, a gang of “knockers-off” • —thieves who make off with the contents of street vans and lorries—was apprehended by detectives posing as “lbafers.” Each officer, in speech and appearance, was a street-corner lounger to the life, and there was a subtle difference in the kind of loafer in each case (says a London commentator). There was the “tough” loafer; the loafer who is always looking for a job; and the loafer who has “come down in the world.” The disguise was so admirable that no suspicion was aroused, and the gang was caught redhanded, lopting vans in three separate districts. On another occasion a well-known detective “got himself up” as a matchseller in order to catch a notorious burglar in one of his haunts. For seven days the “match-seller” stood on the footpath looking with mute appeal at the passers-by. So pathetic was his attitude that kind-hearted persons gave him over £7 in pennies and sixpences without unduly relieving him of his humble stock. His quarry fell into the trap on the seventh day. and is said to have been the most astonished burglar in London. Incidentally, the experience of this officer proved to the authorities that begging can be a very lucrative profession, even when no actual approach is made by the beggar. It certainly suggested that a review of the whole question of mendicancy is necessary in the interests of the public. As to what happened to the £7, it was announced later that the alms so generously pressed upon the “matchseller” would be donated to a police fund.