All cabmen are not so honest, however; and now and again the fraudulent cabman gets caught. It was so in the case of a tortoiseshell fan, which was deposited under a wrong description and eventually, after the legal interval, handed over to the cabman who had found it. Soon afterwards a lady turned up to claim it, and as she described it exactly he was ordered to restore it to the lady, whose name was communicated to him. “But she has no right to it,” protested the cabman. “She is a thief. I know the real owner. I have known her from the first. It is Mdlle. ——,” and he named a popular actress, thus confessing his own misconduct. The actress was then summoned, and did in fact identify the fan as the one she had lost. But it was proved satisfactorily that the other lady also had lost a fan that was curiously similar.
The vicissitudes of treasure-trove might be greatly multiplied. The most curious chances happen, the strangest articles are brought to the police authorities. Everything found in the streets and highways, in omnibuses, theatres, cabs, railway stations, is forwarded to the Prefecture. In one case an immigrant who had made his fortune in Canada and carried it in his pocket, in the shape of fifty notes of ten thousand francs each (£20,000), dropped his purse as he climbed on to the outside of an omnibus. The conductor picked it up and restored it; he was rewarded with £500, and richly he deserved it for resisting so great a temptation. Beds, brooches, boots, sheets even, are brought into the Prefecture. A mummy was once among the trouvailles; there are umbrellas without end. Hogier Grisons, a French writer, from whom many of these incidents are taken, says that a friend of his declares that whenever he finds himself without an umbrella he goes straight to the Prefecture, describes some particular one, according to his fancy, with such and such a handle, a certain colour, and so on, when he always has the exact article handed over to him.
So much for the police in uniform. That in plain clothes, en bourgeois, as the French call it, is not so numerous, but it fulfils a higher, or at least a more confidential, mission. Its members are styled inspectors, not agents, and their functions fall under four principal heads. There is, first of all, the service of the Sûreté—in other words, of public safety—the detective department, employed entirely in the pursuit and capture of criminals, of which more anon; next comes the police, now amalgamated with the Sûreté, that watches over the morals of the capital in a fashion that would not be tolerated in this country, and possesses arbitrary powers under the existing laws of France; then there is the brigade de garnis, the police charged with the supervision of all lodging-houses, from the commonest “sleep-sellers’ shop,” as it is called, to the grandest hotels. Last of all there is the brigade for inquiries, whose business it is to act as the eyes and ears of the Prefecture—in plain English, as its spies.
There are many complaints in Paris that the police are short-handed, especially in the streets. The average is sixteen to a quarter inhabited by 30,000 to 40,000 people, so that the beats are long and the patrol work severe, especially at night, though the numbers of the sergents de ville are then doubled. Some say that the streets of Paris are more unsafe in the more remote districts than those of any capital of Europe. The police are much abused, too, by the Radical and Irreconcilable Press. It is not uncommon to read in the daily papers such headlines as the following: “Crimes of the Police,” “Police Thieves,” “Murder by a Sergent de Ville”—generally gross exaggerations, of course. The truth, no doubt, is that the police of Paris, taken as a whole, are a hard-working, devoted, and generally estimable body of public servants.
CHAPTER IX.
MODERN POLICE (continued): NEW YORK.
Greater New York—Despotic Position of the Mayor—Constitution of the Police force—Dr. Parkhurst’s Indictment—The Lexow Commission and its Report—Police Abuses: Blackmail, Brutality, Collusion with Criminals, Electoral Corruption, the Sale of Appointments and Promotions—Excellence of the Detective Bureau—The Black Museum of New York—The Identification Department—Effective Control of Crime.
NEW YORK, by its latest charter of government, takes in the whole of the outlying suburban districts, and has become the second city in the world. It is known now as Greater New York, and its present municipal constitution is curiously at variance with the democratic traditions of a nominally free people. Supreme power, the absolute autocratic authority, is vested in a single individual, elected, it is true, by the popular voice, but, while he holds office, as despotic as any Czar. The only check on the Mayor of Greater New York is that of public opinion, expressed through a vigilant, often outrageously plain-speaking, Press, but a Press at times influenced, even to the point of silence, by party spirit. Holding his mandate on these terms, the head of the municipal executive in New York can, as a matter of fact, do as he pleases. The whole business of municipal administration is absolutely in his hands. He is assisted by eighteen boards, each controlling a separate department, but all of them except one, that of finance, composed of members whom he personally appoints. The first Mayor elected on these lines was Mr. Van Wyck, who, when he took up his office, was said to be as much master of New York as Napoleon III. was of Paris and France when he became President by virtue of the plebiscite.