I think Negro criminals are more isolated. My experience in the boys' court was with the colored boys who would go out and steal clothes, a new shirt or some socks, or something of that sort that they could pick off the back porch. I found that there was considerable of that, but they are very partial and take from their own people.
Judge Charles M. Thomson, criminal court:
Negro crime is not organized, but individual, I should say, almost without exception.
Judge Kickham Scanlan, criminal court:
In May, 1920, I was assigned to the North Side to try some unbailable murder cases. It was found that there were over 500 homicide cases ... these were nearly all cases in which gangs of young white men confederated together to go out and hold up places, and they made a business of it, and some of these gangs have committed any number of hold-ups, and one member of the gang explained that he had killed as many as twenty victims. The evidence showed that they killed when they didn't have to kill, just recklessly and wantonly. In none of the cases of the character I have talked about were there any colored defendants. They were all white men ... there were some of the most vicious cases I know anything about in my thirty-four years of experience.
I just want to make that one point to this Commission, that never in the history of this community has the white race stood so low from the standpoint of crime as it does at the present time. White young men are banding together in gangs and deliberately going out and holding people up, right and left, and shooting them down. I notice that there are a few colored imitators of the white men, but the bad man of the city of Chicago at the present time is the young white man.
General Leroy T. Steward, former chief of police:
I think generally speaking that the Negro criminals work as individuals. I only recall one instance where there was a gang of colored men that came to my attention, but I know of many white gangs.
Dr. Herman Adler, state criminologist:
You asked a question in regard to gangs—whether there is a combination among Negroes. There are not many. They are more individual, but on the other hand the lower grade of Negroes are likely to be the tools of the others at times; they have been used that way. Where you are dealing with murder, with sex crimes, with certain forms of burglary, larceny, you are usually dealing with individual criminals....