THE FATE OF THE HONEST POLICEMAN.
It has been stated that this chapter is not an attack on the hundreds of honest policemen who day and night at the risk of their own lives, battle for public welfare, clean morals and the eradication of the vicious elements of the community.
There are many honest policemen. But, we must say that these men, kept in the dark by the corrupt because they cannot be corrupted are usually “blackballed,” in some mysterious way by the powers that be, and the majority of them never achieve any rank in the department. Of course there have been a few exceptions to this condition.
The “transfer” system, which is nothing more than police railroading, is the most active medium of getting an honest and incorruptible policeman out of the way. If a man shows an inclination to balk at the commands of his superior who is but the agent of the great Vice Trust, he is speedily transferred to a harmless post where he is forgotten and remembered only when paid his monthly salary.
An incident of how the honest policemen suffer is the following:
Six unsophisticated policemen, anxious to show their mettle and overzealous in the performance of their duty, discovered a hilarious and richly paying crap game running at Lake and Carpenter streets. They decided it was their duty to raid it. They did so. They thought they would be commended by their superior officers for their conduct.
Instead of commendation they were told they were inefficient and material that would never make good policemen.
Two days later they were transferred to South Chicago. That meant that they were obliged to travel thirty-two miles each day from their homes on the West side to their posts on the far South side.
Is it necessary to say why?
Simply because in doing their duty in raiding the crap game, they spoiled the profits of the Vice Trust. The game was run by a man who paid an enormous amount of monthly protection money to these men’s masters. They had “tread on somebody’s feet.”
Investigation of records of transfers in the department showed that thirty per cent of the transfers were caused for such reasons. The record sheets of men showed, in many instances, that a few days before their transfers they had antagonized the great Vice Trust by attempting to do their duty to the public which entrusted them to enforce the laws.
As an instance of how the “transfer game” may be worked with telling effect even on a police official who refuses to give his powers to the protection of gambling, the following suits the purpose.
A prominent political leader, anxious to gather spoils, went to a certain police lieutenant on the North side, and said to him:
“Well, we’re going to start something up this way.”
“Not unless it’s on the order books and the captain stands for it,” answered the police officer carefully.
Result:—
The next day that lieutenant was transferred by the powers of the Vice Trust. One hour and a half after his successor took his place, the new commander was seen watching a street faro game in progress. He stood across from it and watched the gambling combine’s agent skin the “pikers” and he never moved to stop it.
Certain policemen in Chicago who are compelled to arrest certain well known criminal characters, cheat justice even after the arrests are made. They send the criminals to certain corrupt criminal lawyers. Then when the case comes to trial, the policemen lose their memories and do not remember the incriminating circumstances under which their prisoners were taken. These policemen receive a percentage, amounting to about fifty per cent, on the cases which they give to this class of shysters.
Could Chicago have a deeper blot of shame, dishonor and disgrace on her escutcheon than the present police department?
Can the condition be remedied?
Is there hope that some day criminals may be locked behind barred doors that gold cannot pick?
There is always hope while honest men and women live and struggle to build up a city to rear their children unsullied. The police department is only one part of a great slave system. The evil is back at the ballot box. It is the old and only solution here as elsewhere, in the conditions that make Chicago the “wickedest city in the world.”
That solution is the annihilation AT THE BALLOT BOX of the powers of vice, graft and sin,—the Vice Trust with its Directorate of Ten.
The civic conscience will arouse itself from its lethargy and some day purge out the evils that have thrived so prosperously for so many years.
CHAPTER X.
What Are You Going To Do About It?
The Cause of the Great Evils—A Warning—The Duty of Parents—Conclusion.
Christ, prostrate at Gethsemane and hanging in his death agony upon the cross, prayed for a dying, decaying world’s redemption.
Chicago was included in the divine plan of things since the beginning.
Chicago has not been forgotten.
Though her sins are as scarlet, they shall be washed as white as snow.
There is within the community a slowly awakening civic conscience. It shall arouse itself to deathless activity and wrest the Windy City from the forces that prey upon it. That is our prophecy.
The religious thought, the religious mind, the religious heart are ready to do battle for the God of righteousness.
Behind the telling of this story of Vice, Graft and Political Corruption has been but one predominating idea, the revelation of the truth about Chicago today.
There has been but one hope:—the arousing of Chicagoans to the fight against corruption by revealing the terrible evils thriving about them and the delivering of a warning to those in and out of the great metropolis who, innocent and unsuspecting, might be trapped in the lures of sin, evil and shame.
On the great white, festering ulcer of Chicago’s world of crime and vice, we have turned the burning searchlight of truth. Into all the dark corners, the pitfalls, the covered abysses and the paths that lure and lead to Hell, has the light, blinding in its intensity, been thrown.
In the beginning we started out to demonstrate the theory that vice and crime as they exist and flourish today are so, because infamous and degraded men have commercialized them.
It has been shown that thousands of innocent girls and women are hurled into the bottomless pits of Hell annually, not because of a social viciousness that has no palliative, but because a coterie of Godless creatures value their bodies and souls at so many dollars and cents.
It has been shown that back of all the wickedness and evil of Chicago is the monumental and gigantic Vice Trust. The body, composed of a directorate of ten men who for years have fattened off the sins of fallen women and the crimes of inhuman men, has been vivisected and analyzed in all its component parts.
Truly, we have painted Chicago as the wickedest city in the world.
We have not held it up and cried “Shame” for the sake of sensation.
We have sought to teach a lesson and utter a warning of vital import.
If the reading of this book turns the thousands of women who yearly stand on the brink of destruction, and saves them as an honor to the motherhood of the race, then this book will have been of infinite value.