THE EXPOSURE OF BIG CRIMES.
As the newspapers are greatly responsible for the finding of children, so they are the mind and pushing power behind the police department in the exposure of big crimes, particularly murders, and the punishment of criminals.
Criminals are brought to justice every day, men are sent to the penitentiary, not through the police department working as a thinking body but through the efforts of newspapers, expressed in the tireless energies of newspaper reporters.
The police department as a body has been clearly shown up as a body of inefficient, unthinking and unscrupulous men.
One of the shining examples of inefficiency is to be found in a famous murder case which stirred Chicago to its depths several years ago.
A Bohemian living on the Southwest side murdered a mother, a father and four children.
The police when the case was first brought to their attention as one worthy of investigation, it then being considered a strange havoc wrought by sudden deaths, laughed at the sincere efforts of a newspaper man.
They told him he was a dreamer and “hard up” for a story. The newspaper man after gathering all the circumstances and facts, all suspicious, went to the Coroner, over the heads of the police, and placed the case before him. The Coroner saw that all clews pointed to a horrible series of murders. He began an investigation, assured himself that he was right, and then “called” the police in and ordered the arrest of the murderer. The man was later found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He escaped the gallows through a strange popular sentiment and was sent to the penitentiary for a life term.
That is a standard example of police inefficiency.
Another case that gives evidence of the lack of initiative in the police department came to light recently.
It occurred on the South side.
Two small children disappeared from their home on the South side. The mother was frantic with grief and sorrow and the father dogged the police day after day trying to arouse them from their lethargy to search for his two children. He received no encouragement.
In desperation he went to a newspaper office and stated the case. He told how the police had failed to make any strenuous efforts to find his children. A reporter was sent out who “stirred” the police to activity. Every possible clew was followed but to no effect. A physician declared that unless news of the discovery of the children, alive or dead, was soon forthcoming the mother would succumb to her grief.
A newspaper reporter suggested that the waters in the slip at Thirty-ninth street and the lake where the children were accustomed to play, be dynamited. It occurred to him and not to the police, that the two children might have fallen into the water. The lake was dynamited at that place by the police and the bodies found.
The police when compelled by the pressure of public opinion are obliged to resort to the bolstering of a case.
Judging from later developments innocent men have been arrested on serious charges, thrown into filthy and unsanitary cells, dragged to the Criminal court and subjected to the most shameful and humiliating treatment, in order that the police force may purge itself temporarily from the stigma of being inefficient.
It is only a matter of inference, but it seems probable that hundreds of confessions of crimes are wrung from innocent victims by the brutal “third degree” methods. That these confessions are in many instances false, is proven by the fact that when presented in a court of law they are thrown out as valueless. However, they have served their purpose. The public indignation over the crime in question is given an opiate and the police can once more turn their energies to the protection of the business and properties of the vice lords. That is the police department today.