THE POLICE FORCE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 4214, 19 June 1895, Page 4

THE POLICE FORCE.

The Wellington "Post" strongly condema the condition into which the Police forca is falUni? and says :— " We have scon men recruited who ludicrously failed to reach the physical standard prescribed by the regulations. There is at least one instance of a man recruited against whom stood two previous convictions in the Criminal Courts of the colony, and it is freely alleged that not only were and are men recruited whose character should, by any rational c >do, entirely unfit them for the position of guardians of the public morals aud the public peace, but men have been recruited who were physically unsound, whom the proper medical officers had declined to pass, who had then succeeded in obtaining some sort of " Open Sesame" outside, and had been returned to tho Department with explicit instructions that they were to be taken on with all their moral blemishes and all their physical imperfections on their heads— for in the New Zealand code politics covers a multitude of sins, and a change lof "colour" is eminently calculated to cleanse the subject from all his inquiries. It is not only in the P.P. list that this is seen. But while the cancer is growing beneath, there were and there are — many more than the sober city imagines — eruptions on the surface which indicate the condition of things within. There were the notorious scandals in connection with a Wellington artilleryman, which ended in the Terrace Goal. There are the known facts that the leading magistrates of the colony are alive to the growino: danger and an ever present weakuess which exists in their Courts, and that the chief officers of police in the colony have had their confidence in their men severely tried and sorely shaken many , times. It is freely alleged, for instance 1 , that in more than one town of the colony the Inspectors are, owing to being unable to place reliance on some of their men,unable to seoure detection and punishment of breaches of the licensing law known to exist, and that, while reputable hotels strictly observe its provisions, others can Bin with impunity. There are thec^sesof offences against women on the part of the police constables and artillerymen, which have led to more than one dismissal outside Wellington, and more than one in it. There was the recent notorious case in which a policeman boasted at Wellington police camps of the seduction of a girl, and then, through a long and extraordinary trial in both the Magistrate's Court and the Supreme Court, perjured himself day by day with regard to it, till he brought down upon his head the stern reproof of a Judge of the higher Court.