WILD WEST IN NEW YORK.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LX, Issue 143770, 19 April 1912, Page 7

WILD WEST IN NEW YORK.

SHOOTING IN STREETS BY POLICE AND BURGLARS.

The sensational raotor-car hold-up of a New York bank clerk on Thursday, February 15, was followed on Friday night by another equally daring street robbery.

Mr. G. H. Horth, a. well-known diamond merchant, was passing through Thirty-fifth street at 7 p.m., when two men pumped out of a motor-car, knocked him on the head with a life preserver, severely injuring him, oeoured £2ObU worth of diamonds that h,o was carrying, and escaped in the motor-car, leaving, no clue to their identity.

Another hold-up occurred last night in Third Avenue bridge. At 9.30 p.m. four men attacked two women, beat them severely, and took their purses. Though the robbers wore caught, the incident is exploited as indicative of the growing daring of the hold-up men.

A few days before, during the evening rush hour, a. man entered a newspaper delivery office. The man fired a revolver, cowed the delivery clerk into giving him £SO from the cash-box, and escaped. The police department is being furiously criticised by indignant citizens for its inability to check this wave of crime. The police arc said to be demoralised, owing to the attempts to Anglicise their methods by Mayor Gaynor, who is endeavouring to reorganise the department along Loudon linos, by preventing indiscriminate arrests without evidence, stopping the brutal clubbing of prisoners, abolishing the “third degree” (obtaining confessions by threats or torture), and compelling constables to modify long-established autocratic methods.

The police are restless under those restrictions, so new to them, and while New York’s peaceable citizens no longer hold their civic guardians in fear and dread, as they formerly did, Mr. Gaynor’s efforts to compel the police to subdue themselves are also caushiug an abatement of their former crime-pre-venting vigilance. AYhile the public and the newspapers arc condemning tho police, there is a thinly-veiled revolt throughout the department against the Mayor, coupled with demands that the police ho restored to their old absolute powers, in order to enable them to maintain comparative safety in the city.

The ordinary policemen arc growing reckless under the taunts to which they are subjected, and are beginning to use their revolvers with alarming promiscuity. Almost every night man hunts occur in the New York streets, tho burglars fleeing before the police, who fire at them.

A correspondent writes: I was awakened a few nights ago at 3 a.m. by policemen rushing down ray street shooting at a burglar. Six constables were after him. hut he escaped. Bishop Greer, head of the Episcopal —Church of England—diocese of New York, recently related how he was sitting in his library reading one evening when a bullet crashed through a window close to his head. It was fired by a policeman pursuing a robber. These nightly shooting affrays are so common that they are not reported by tho newspapers. A drunken police sergeant terrorised a Brooklyn tramcar by drawing his revolver and chasing an innocent citizen off tho car and about the street, firing three shots at him. Fortunately tho shots went wild. The reserves had to be summoned from the police station before the intoxicated and murderous sergeant could be caught and imprisoned.

New York is being worked up to a pitch of intense bitterness against the police by those and other similar incidents. It is said that Mayor Gaynor, when he returns from the holiday he is now spending at Atlantic City, will be compelled to reorganise the department again from top to bottom.