MORALS COMMISSION AND POLICE MORALS
GRAHAM TAYLOR
It is as obvious in New York and Chicago as it has been in some other cities that the effort to secure a morals commission for city governments is intended not only to repress and prevent the social evil but also quite as much to protect and improve the morals of the police, which are corrupted under the present conditions.
Indeed, this is directly stated in the Report of the Citizens’ Committee appointed at the Cooper Union meeting held in New York last August, after a commanding officer of the police force had been implicated in the murder of Rosenthal by the “gun men”:
“The corruption is so ingrained that the man of ordinary decent character entering the force and not possessed of extraordinary moral fiber may easily succumb.... Such a system makes for too many of the police an organized school of crime.... We know that the connection between members of the police force and crime, or commercialized vice, is continuous, profitable and so much a matter of course that explicit bargains do not have to be made, both the keeping and breaking of faith being determined by these policemen for their own profit.
“Our recommendations on the excise and prostitution problems are intended to benefit the police situation.... While improvement in the police department will incalculably improve the tone of the city’s morals without any change in the statutory standards, nevertheless we have throughout hewn to the line of police reform and not of vice suppression.”
The Chicago Vice Commission came to a similar conclusion:
“In certain restricted districts the laws and ordinances of the state and city are practically inoperative in suppressing houses of prostitution. Because of this condition certain public officials have given a certain discretion to the police department and have allowed police rules and regulations to take the place of the laws and ordinances of these districts. As a result of this discretion certain members of the police force have become corrupt, and not only failed to strictly obey the rules and regulations in the restricted districts themselves, but have failed adequately to enforce the law and ordinances outside the restricted districts.”
The diagnoses are alike, but the treatments proposed in New York and Chicago differ materially. This should be pointed out, not only to avoid the confusion incident to designating different measures by the same or similar terms, but also to correct the injustice of applying objections which are only pertinent to one measure to defeat the other.
The board of social welfare proposed for New York and the morals commission recommended for Chicago resemble each other in organization, but are radically different in scope and in the means suggested for carrying out their functions. The members of both are to be appointed by the mayor. In New York it is proposed that the members shall serve seven years; in Chicago the term recommended is but two years: and the appointments are to be approved by the city council. No salaries are provided in either city, but the commissioner of health in Chicago is to be one of the members of the commission.
The function of both bodies is to deal with vice, but the jurisdiction of the New York board is broader and corresponds to the statutes relating to prostitution, gambling, and liquor selling. In Chicago the function of the commission is restricted to the social evil. It is “to take all legal steps necessary toward the effective suppression of bawdy and disorderly houses, houses of ill-fame and assignation, to protect, indict and prosecute keepers, inmates and patrons of the same.” This commission and a morals court are both aimed, by the Chicago Vice Commission, at the “constant and persistent repression of prostitution as the immediate method, and absolute annihilation as the ultimate ideal.”
While the morals commission is to be limited to six clerks, attorneys and medical inspectors, together with their helpers, and must depend upon the courts and the regular police force to fulfil its duties, the New York board of social welfare would have under its direct command secret service vice squads. These, it is provided, are to be distinct from the constabulary forces of the police, “so that the regular police shall no longer be responsible for the control of the vices and shall be left to their original function of preserving peace and order.” The suggested bill in New York, creating a department of public morals, provides for a large staff of “public morals” police, including captains, lieutenants, sergeants, doormen, surgeons and policemen. The number would probably be between two and three hundred, all to be exempted from civil service restrictions.
It is against this separation of the control of vice from the regular police force, which the citizens’ committee felt “driven to recommend,” that the committee of the Board of Aldermen in the Curran report present the following objections:
“The morals policemen would lose the information which the regular police could furnish; the contact of the regular force with vice cannot thus be removed, as they must still enter vicious resorts for the detection and arrest of other criminals; friction and collusion between the two police forces would be inevitable and the collection of graft would not be eliminated; the restriction of the morals police to dealing only with vices would tend to low standards of character among the men enlisting in this service only; the exemption from civil service restrictions would still further contribute to lax discipline and demoralization; the division of responsibility between two commissioners of police would lessen the accountability and efficiency of both.”
In Chicago the responsibility has already been divided by the recent ordinance reorganizing the police force. Under this a second deputy superintendent of police has been appointed, on the basis of a competitive civil service examination, which was thrown open to applicants from other states. His qualifications and duties are thus specified:
“He shall not be a member of the active bureau of the department, but shall have supervision of the clerical, mechanical and inspection bureau; and shall be charged with the care and custody of departmental property and the distribution of the same; the supervision of departmental records; the inspection of the personnel of the department and of stations, equipment and departmental properties; the instruction of officers and members of the department; the ascertaining and recording of departmental efficiency, individual and group; the receipt and investigation of all complaints of citizens regarding members of the police force; the supervision of the strict enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals; and the censoring of moving pictures and public performances of all kinds; the furnishing of a card index system to all district commanders in their respective stations, which they shall keep to show, at all times, up to date, the name, description, character, haunts, habits, associates and relatives of every known person of bad character residing in or frequenting such district, including pick-pockets, hold-up men, safe blowers, confidence men, vagrants, pimps, prostitutes and people who are operating or have operated gambling houses. All these functions shall be performed under the direction of the general superintendent of police.”
This second bureau with its second deputy superintendent well discriminates and divides the clerical, inspectional and disciplinary functions of the police department from those of the active force. But to superimpose upon all these well co-ordinated duties the entire responsibility for “supervising the strict enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals” threatens to make impossible either the efficient fulfilment of those routine functions or the effective repression of vice. Yet this measure was evidently preferred by the city administration to the morals commission and was substituted for it, because the ordinance recommended by the Vice Commission to the mayor has never been introduced in the city council.
Against the precedents and preferences of the regular police force for the segregation and regulation of vice, backed by the mayor’s preference for the same policy, what can this lone “second deputy” do to secure “the strict enforcement of these laws and ordinances”? His appointment and helplessness are new arguments for a morals commission to support him both in the enforcement of the law and in publicly placing responsibility for its non-enforcement.
The substitution of this subterfuge in lieu of the morals commission can be explained in the same way that Chief Justice Harry Olson, of the Municipal Court of Chicago, accounts for the unexpected closing of the segregated districts. He traced the sudden change in the attitude of county and city officials toward segregated vice to the decision of the Circuit Court which granted a permanent injunction restraining the use of certain property in the segregated district for immoral purposes. “This order of the Chancery Court was,” he said, “the Appomattox of the war upon openly tolerated vice in Chicago.” For this decision served notice that any citizen, by invoking the aid of the courts, could restrain vice, if the public officials were unable or unwilling to do so. “It was thus the beginning of the end,” he declared.
The morals court, he said, would further act as a check upon the second deputy superintendent of police, because “the records and the statistics of the court will show the names of the owners of such houses, together with their proprietors, inmates and frequenters, and will disclose the business of the promoters of the traffic and others who may profit therefrom.” So if this feature of the reorganized police department was intended by the city administration to effect its escape from the morals commission as one horn of the dilemma presented by the Vice Commission, Justice Olson clearly shows that the morals courts is the other horn. Neither the police of the city administration, nor the state’s attorney of the county, can escape if citizens seek warrants from the morals court or injunctions from the Circuit Court.
The inquiry into the relation of low wages to the demoralization of young girls and women, and the propaganda to correct this tendency by minimum wage laws will bear close watching. It may not only injure the broader movement to secure minimum wage laws based upon just and safe economic grounds, but it may also divert attention from the enactment and enforcement of laws against commercialized vice. For the ensnaring of victims is accomplished through many more devious ways than can be charged up to low wages.