CRIME IN NEW YORK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19626, 3 May 1927, Page 9

CRIME IN NEW YORK.

A COMMISSION'S INQUIRIES. "HABITUAL CRIMINAL" AREAS. RED HOOK'S BAD RECORD. [FROM OUR OWN' CORRESPONDENT. ] SAN FRANCISCO. April 6. In a year or so, it is anticipated that the community will be startled by the findings of the New \ork State Crime Commission, owing to the extraordinary nature of its investigation. It went through Canada to find out why there was so little criminality there, and the nature of its questioning of witnesses —high officials and judges of Canada, for the most part—left no room for doubt that it would recommend that British criminal code and practice should be engrafted on to the American model as much as practicable. Now the commission has practically declared districts "habitually criminal" for the purposes of its investigations. The most notorious of such districts is Red Hook, a Brooklyn waterfront area, made up of Italian, Irish, Brazilian, Syrian and other foreign commurities, with a lea.vening of Anglo-Saxon stock. The attention of the commission was drawn to it by the remarkably high percentage of juvenile criminals it produced. Red Hook has a juvenile population of 50.020. One out of 20 of its boys lias a criminal record Lefore reaching the age of 16. The commission finds that wretched housing conditions, poor home life, lurid moving pictures, racial prejudice and lack of supervised recreation are the underlying causes. It found no fewer than 39 gangs of more or less looselyorganised associations of young "toughs," many of them headed for the penitentiary. These gangs chiefly consist in Little Italy, and are inspired by Neapolitan rather than by American traditions, concerning the relations which should exist between good citizens and the police. To test the effect of "coloured" crime narratives on newspaper readers, two men were employed to beard subway trains in New York and select readers at random, Of 50 readers of the report of a trial that appeared in a certain tabloid newspaper, 88 per cent, expressed the opinion that the accused was guilty, 6 per cent, that he was not guilty, and 6 per cent, were doubtful. Of readers of an established Conservative paper 7 per cent, thought the accused guilty, 35 per cent, that he was not guilty, and 53 per cent, expressed doubt. TJie Conservative newspaper had a three times longer report of the trial than the tabloid journal.