WOMEN POLICE
LOUISE de KOVEN BOWEN
In all our large cities thousands of young people, weary from their monotonous work in shop or factory, seek the streets in the evening imperiously asserting their right to pleasure. Business enterprise has taken advantage of this natural desire for recreation, and commercialized amusements have sprung up on all sides ready to cater to every taste of this childish multitude. Penny arcades, slot machines, moving picture shows, cheap theaters, amusements parks and dance halls are all attempting to lure children with every device known to modern advertising. Young people are thus without protection and exposed to temptation at the very moment when they are least able to withstand it.
Many students of municipal affairs believe that every large city should have morals police, of whom a certain number should be women, if it would properly protect young girls for whose unwary feet so many pitfalls are spread, and if it would deal adequately with prostitution—that grave menace to health and morals.
We need women police in the theaters of every city to watch the girls who attend these entertainments and accept the invitations of young men offered with disreputable intentions. In the majority of cheap theaters the moving pictures are shown in a dim light and the danger to young people has been shifted from the stage to the auditorium. The darkened room affords opportunity for familiarity, and there should be women police to see that conventionalities and decencies are observed.
There should be women police in our dance halls—the happy hunting ground of the white slave trader—to watch the girls and also the boys, to warn the girls when they are seen taking too much liquor and to watch that if intoxicated they are not accompanied from the hall by young men who have plied them with liquor for illicit purposes. They should also see that young unsophisticated boys are not victimized by professional prostitutes who take advantage of inexperienced youths who come to the city for the first time and visit the dance halls to “see the sights.”
Women police should be stationed on pleasure boats and at bathing beaches and should ever be on the alert for conditions which demoralize children. We need women police in our amusement parks to mingle with the crowds at the gates and to save young girls from accepting invitations from men who hope to be repaid later in the evening. We need women police in such places to follow girls who are seen going to lonely parts of the parks accompanied by young men. In fact, we need women police to “mother” the girls in all public places where the danger to young people is great.
In our station houses we should have women police in whose charge girls should be placed. Women police could accompany the girls to trial and be with them when they are subjected to harassing questions so often put to them by attorneys, and women police should accompany girls to the institutions to which they are committed by the court. The work of the woman police officer would not be very different from that of the woman probation officer. The Juvenile Court officers investigate homes and neighborhoods, watch their wards to see that they attend school or are at work, and take charge of children after they have become delinquent. It would be only one more step, but one urgently needed, to have women police who would lessen the work of the probation officers by carefully watching for those causes which lead children into the courts, by reporting these conditions to the proper authorities and by carefully supervising all places of amusement.
Women truant officers attached to the compulsory education department, the women adult probation officers connected with the municipal courts, the women factory inspectors, the women sanitary inspectors of the health department, the women school nurses, the women supplied by the Travelers’ Aid Association, the officers of the Juvenile Protective Association and all other officers paid by private organizations are doing valiant work for the young people of our cities. But we especially need the police power which the city might vest in women trained for the work and which would give them the necessary authority to cope with certain dangerous situations with which private organizations have tried in vain to deal.
Women police are not needed to handle crowds, to regulate street traffic, to arrest drunkards and criminals, but they are sorely needed in order that they may adequately protect the thousands of children and young people who every day are exposed to the dangers of unsupervised and disreputable places of amusement and for whose safety and welfare the city is responsible.