A NEW CAREER FOR YOUNG MEN.
Up till the present time the police business in the United States has remained almost exclusively in the hands of a particular class. From Maine to California one finds practically the same type of man patrolling a beat, and there is not much difference among the superior officers of police forces. They all have about the same conceptions of morality, honesty, and good citizenship, and they differ very little in their notions of police policy and methods. The thing to do, the majority of them think, is to keep a city superficially clean, and to keep everything quiet that is likely to arouse the public to an investigation. Nearly all are politicians in one form or another, and they feel that the security of their positions depends on the turn that politics may take. If they have a strict chief, one who tries to be honest according to his best light, they are more on their good behaviour than when governed by an easy-going man, but even under such circumstances there may be found, in large forces, a great deal of concealed disobedience. Their main friends and acquaintances are saloon-keepers, professional politicians, and employees in other departments of the municipal government. In small towns they mix with the citizens more than in large cities, but the best of them acquire in time a caste feeling which impels them to find companionship mainly among their own kind. Not all are dishonest or lazy, but the majority have a code of honour suggested by their life and business. Once in the life, and accustomed to its requirements, it is very difficult for them to change to another. They have learned how to arrest men, to make reports, to keep their eyes open or shut according to necessity, to rest when standing on their feet, and to appreciate the benefits of a regularly drawn salary, and their intelligence and general training correspond with such an existence. A few develop extraordinary ability in ferreting out crime, and become successful detectives, and others keep their records sufficiently clean, or secure enough "pull," to rise to superior posts, and in certain cases these exceptional men would fit into exemplary police organisations. As a general thing, however, they are men who would have received much less responsible positions in other walks of life. This is as true of the commanding officers as of the patrolmen. The captain of a precinct is frequently as poorly educated as the patrolman serving under him, and his gold braid and brass buttons are all that really differentiate him from the men he orders about. The chief, in some instances, is a man of demonstrated ability, but there are chiefs and chiefs, and the way their selection is managed it is largely a matter of luck whether a town gets a good or bad one. Occasionally the citizens of a town will become indignant, and remove from office a disreputable chief, choosing in his place some highly respected citizen who has consented to take the position on a "reform platform" and for awhile the town has a man at the head of its police force who is accepted as an equal in society and is recognised as an influential man in municipal affairs, but before long the professional politicians get hold of the reins of government again, things get back into the old rut, and the conventional chief returns.
It is this precariousness of the life, and the slavery to politicians, that have probably deterred educated young men from making police work their life business. They have seen no chance of holding prominent police positions long, and they have possibly dreaded the companionship which a policeman's life seems to presuppose. The young man just out of college and casting about for a foothold in the world practically never includes the police career in the number of life activities from which he must make a choice. It is the law, medicine, journalism, or railroading which generally attracts him, and he leaves unconsidered one of the most useful callings in the world. There are few men who are given more responsible positions, and who have better opportunities of doing something worth while, than the police officer, and I think that I ought to add, the prison official. In Germany this fact is recognised, and men train for police and prison work as deliberately and diligently as for any other profession; in this country very little training is done, and the result is that comparatively inferior men get the important posts, and our cities are not taken care of as they ought to be, and could be.
There is nothing sufficiently promising as yet in the state of public opinion to justify one in saying that the time is particularly opportune for young men to begin to consider the police career as a possible calling, but I doubt whether there ever will be until the young men take the matter into their own hands and give public notice of their determination to enter the profession. Numerous obstacles will be put in their way, and hundreds will get discouraged, but for those who "stick," a great career will open up. The beginners must necessarily be the pioneers and fight the brunt of the battle, but, the battle once fought, there will be some positions of splendid opportunity.
For the benefit of those who may care to consider seriously the possibilities of the career, it will not be inappropriate, perhaps, to describe the kind of men they may expect to have to associate with while going through their apprenticeship, to explain some of the difficulties that will be encountered, and to make a few suggestions in regard to the training necessary for a successful performance of duty. I can write of these matters only as a beginner, but it is the would-be beginner that I desire to reach.
In all police organisations supported by cities there are two distinct kinds of officers, the uniformed men and the detectives. Among these the beginner will have to pick out his friends, and until he knows well the work of both classes of men he will be in a quandary as to which he desires to ally himself with. There are things in the detective's life which make it more attractive to some men than the policeman's, and vice versa. The two officers have different attitudes toward the criminal world, and the beginner will probably be decided in his choice according to the impression the different attitudes make upon him. The uniformed officer, or "Flatty," as he is called in the thief's jargon, if he remains upright and honest, arrests a successful professional criminal with the same sang-froid and objectivity that are characteristic of him when arresting a "disorderly drunk." It is a perfunctory act with him; the offender must be shut up, no matter who he is, and he is the party paid to do it.
The officer in citizen's clothes, the "Elbow," is a different kind of man. He realises as well as the "Flatty" that it is his business to try to protect the community which employs him, but he handles a prisoner, especially if the latter is a nicely dressed and well known thief, in a different way from the ostentatious manner of arrest characteristic of the ordinary policeman. It almost seems sometimes as if he were showing deference to his prisoner, and the two walk along together like two old acquaintances. The fact of the matter is that a truly successful professional thief is a very interesting man to meet, and he is all the more interesting to the officer if he has been able to catch him unawares and without much trouble. Realising what a big man he has got,—and thieves themselves have no better opinion of their ability than that which the detective has of it,—he likes to ask him about other big men, to get "wise," as the expression is. If it has been a hard chase, he also likes to go over the details of it, and find out who has doubled the most on his tracks. In time, if he keeps steadily at the business and learns to know a number of what are called "good guns" (clever thieves), he develops into a recognised successful thief-catcher; but he has spent so much of his time in fraternising with "guns," in order to learn from them, that he comes to think that his moral responsibility is over after he has located them. Technically, I suppose this is true; it is his business to catch, and the State must prosecute and convict. The point I would bring out, however, is that he is inclined to be lenient with his prisoner. To him the struggle has been merely one of intelligence and shrewdness; he has had to be quick and alert in capturing the "gun," and the latter has exercised all of his ingenuity in trying to escape. Moral issues have not been at stake; the thief has not stolen from the officer, and why should the latter not be friendly when they meet?
In defence of this attitude toward crime it may be said that criminals are much more tractable in the custody of an officer of the kind under consideration than when arrested by some blustering "Flatty," who shows them up in the street as they walk along, and it is natural for a detective to try to do his work with as little friction as possible. The question, however, that I was continually putting to myself as a beginner in the business was, whether I should not eventually drift into a very easy-going policeman if I learned to look upon the thief merely as a whetstone, so to speak, on which my wits were to be sharpened. It seemed to me that to do my full duty it was necessary to have moral ballast as well as shrewd intelligence, really to believe in law, and that lawbreakers must be punished. I would not have it understood that there are no police officers who keep hold of this point, but I am compelled to say that the detective—and he is the man to whom we shall have to go before professional crime in this country can be seriously dealt with—is too much inclined to overlook it.
The beginner in the profession must take sides, one way or another, in regard to this kind of officer, and as he chooses for him or against him he will find himself in favour or not with the class—and it is a large one—to which the man belongs. It is unpleasant to have to begin one's career by immediately antagonising a number of daily companions, and a series of exasperating experiences follow such a policy, but in the case in question I believe it will be found best to nail up one's colours instanter and never to take them down. The officer who does this gets the reputation of being at least consistent even among his enemies, and he is also relieved of being continually approached by criminals with bribes.
Once started on his course, and his policy defined, the worst difficulty that he will encounter for a number of months will be a reluctance, natural to all beginners, to make an arrest. It seems easy enough to walk up to a man, put a hand lightly on his shoulder, and say: "You're my prisoner," but one never realises how hard it is until he tries it. During my experience I had no occasion to make an arrest single-handed, but it did fall to my lot to have a prisoner beg and beseech me to let him go after he had been turned over to my care, and to the beginner this is the hardest appeal to withstand. The majority of persons arrested are justly taken into custody, and the bulk of the "hard luck" stories they tell are fabrications, but it takes a man who has been years in the service to listen to some of their tales of woe without wincing.
This squeamishness conquered, the beginner will have to be careful not to become hard and pessimistic. There is a good deal to be said in excuse of a police officer who develops these traits of character,—the life he leads is itself often hard,—but if they dominate his nature he learns to look upon the world in general merely as a great collection of human beings, any one of whom he may have to arrest some day. He sees so much that is "crooked" that he is in danger of thinking that he sees crime and thieves wherever he turns, and unless he is very cautious he will drift into a philosophy which permits him to be "crooked" also, because, as he thinks, everybody else is.
If the beginner has lived in a society where courtesies and kindnesses, rather than insults and scoldings, have prevailed, he will also find it hard for awhile to appreciate the fact that a police officer is a peacemaker, and not an avenger. Wherever he goes, and no matter what he does, he is a target for the nasty slings of rowdies and a favourite victim of the "roastings" of thieves. In tramp life I have had to take my share of insults, and until I experimented with the police business I thought that as mean things had been said to me as a man ought to stand in an ordinary lifetime, but on no tramp trip have I been berated by criminals as severely as during my recent experience as a railroad police officer, and yet it was my duty not to answer back if a quarrel was in sight.
Not all, however, in the policeman's life is exasperating and discouraging. But few men have so many opportunities of doing good, and of keeping track of people in whom they have taken an interest. Nothing has pleased me more in my relations with the outcast world than the chance I had as a railroad patrolman to help in sending home a penitent runaway boy. He had left Chicago on the "blind baggage" of a passenger train to get away from a tyrannical stepfather, and he fell into our hands as a trespasser and vagrant several hundred miles from his starting-point. It was a pitiful case with which no officer likes to deal according to the requirements of the law, but we had to arrest him to rescue him from the local officers of the town where he had been apprehended; if he had been turned over to them the probability is that he would have been put on the stone-pile with the hardened tramps, and when released would have drifted into tramp life. We took him to headquarters on the train, and the general manager of the railroad gave him a pass home, where he has remained, sending me a number of weekly accounts about himself. I report the incident both to show the opportunities in a policeman's life, and to give a railroad company credit for a kind deed which has probably preserved for the country a bright lad who would otherwise have been an expense and trouble to it as a vagabond and criminal.
A word, before closing this chapter, in regard to how a young man, desirous of following the police career, can best get a start. I chose a railroad police force for my preliminary experience, and I would recommend a similar choice to other beginners if the opportunity is favourable. As long as a man does his work well in a railroad police organisation he is not likely to be disturbed, but under existing conditions the same cannot be said of a municipal force. A railroad officer also has the advantage of being able to travel extensively and to acquaint himself with different communities. If he can rise to the top there is no reason, so far as I can see, why he should not be an eligible candidate for the superintendency of a municipal police force. The chief that I had, if he were able to gather the right men about him, could protect a large city as successfully as he now protects a big railroad system. If it is impossible for a would-be beginner to find lodgment in any police force at the start, my suggestion is that he experiment with the work of a police reporter on a newspaper. It is difficult at present for a police reporter to tell all that he learns, and it is to be hoped that he will some day be able to give the readers of his paper full accounts of his investigations; but the young man who is training for police work can make the reporter's position, in spite of its present discouraging limitations, a stepping-stone to a position in a police organisation. It helps him to get "wise," as the detective says, and it is when he has become "wise" in the full sense of the word that he is most valuable in the police business.
A guard's position in a penitentiary makes a man acquainted with a great many criminals, and is helpful in teaching one in regard to the efficiency of different kinds of punishment. It is, perhaps, to be recommended to the beginner as the next best position to try for, if, after the reporter experience, there is still no opening in a police force. The beginner may not be sure whether he desires to become a police officer or to take part in the management of a prison, and the guard's post helps him to come to a decision.
All three of the recommended preparatory positions will be found useful, if the young man has the patience and time to go through the drudgery which they involve, and he will find that when he finally succeeds in getting into a large police force he has a great advantage over men who have not had his thorough training.