The Police Force.

Woodville Examiner, Volume XIII, Issue 2373, 31 May 1895, Page 4

The Police Force.

The Wellington Post strongly concerns the condition into which the Police Force is falling and says:— " We have seen men recruited who ludicrously failed to reach the physical standard prescribed by the regulations. There is at least one instance of a man recruited agajnst 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 code, entirely unfit them for the position of guardians of the public morals and tlie public peace, hut men have been recruited who were yhysically unsound, whom the proyer medical officers had declined to pass, who had then succeeded in obtaining some sort of " Open ftesnme " outside, and been returned to the Department with explicit instructions that they were to be t-iken 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 of '• colour " is eminently calculated to cleanse the subject from all his iniquities. It is not only in the P:P. list that this is seen. But while the cancer is growing beneath, there are 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 sondalsin connection with a Wellington artilleryman, which ended in the Terrace Gaol. There are the known facts that the leading Magistrates of the colony are alive to the growing danger and an ever present weakness 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, that in more

than one town of the colony the Inspectors are, owing to heing unable to place reliance on some of their men, unable to secure detection and punishment of breaches' of the licensing law known to exist, and that, while strictly observe its provisions, others can sin with impunity. There are the cases of offences against women on the part of police constables and artillerymen, which have led to more than one dismissal outside of Wellington, and more than one in it. There was the recent notorious case in which a police constable 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.