When one has good friends in both forces, the question “Which do you think best?” is to be met with tactful evasions. And the more one thinks it over, the more it becomes clear that there is really little difference at bottom. Both police organizations are made up of good men, following the same trade along the same lines, and dealing with about the same general conditions.
The London “bobby,” however, enjoys excellent leadership, is governed by a definite administrative policy, has the backing of the courts, and therefore comes in for a general public good will which is exceedingly useful to him in the performance of duty.
The New York “cop” rather lacks public good will. Administrative policy has not been well defined in the past. The courts do not always accept his evidence, much less back him up, and he has been made the scapegoat for various shortcomings in leadership.
But to-day the New York policeman is working on an entirely new basis. Before long his public is certain to understand and like him as thoroughly as London does its “bobby.”
The change began with Mayor Gaynor, who insisted that both policeman and citizen have plain legal rights—until the citizen has committed a crime the policeman may not arrest him. The policeman has plain rights—the law empowers him to use all necessary force in making arrests in grave cases. But force must not be used for minor offenses. Confusion existed on these points to such a degree that when the Mayor began insisting upon them, many people thought he was putting into effect some of his personal whims. But they are all in the statute books, and many of them were there before the Mayor was born, because they are constitutional.
The present Police Commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, is not only administering the department along the strict legal line pointed out by the Mayor, but is effecting improvements of organization and method that must favorably alter the whole future of the service.
Commissioner Waldo is a soldier, with a record of service in the United States Army, and the Army’s fine standards to guide him.
In some ways the administration of the New York Police Department is a soldier’s job. If the ten thousand members were mobilized, they would make quite an impressive little standing army, with eight or ten full regiments of patrolmen, a brigade of cavalry, a small transport corps, a little navy, and so forth. As in an army, too, the men are enlisted, and may only be discharged for serious offenses. It is a force scattered over three hundred square miles of territory. The leader must be skillful in laying down regulations, and handling men in the mass rather than by personal contact. He must define duty plainly, hold everybody to it, eliminate departmental politics and abuses. Every man, wherever he is stationed, must feel that the general knows his business, that he lays down regulations for good reasons, and that day by day he is taking the organization somewhere.
For years, every Police Commissioner has asked for more men to keep pace with the growing city. When Waldo took charge he asked, too. While he was waiting, however, he overhauled the organization and got one thousand additional patrolmen by cutting off men detailed for clerical and other special duty. Every large working force tends to create superfluous routine work. The useless routine was eliminated by better accounting methods, and the men sent back to do the street duty for which they originally enlisted.
Then Waldo’s system of “fixed posts” was introduced. Complaints that policemen were hard to find at night had become common. So the platoon on duty from 11 p. m. to 7 a. m. was distributed by a plan under which the men work in pairs, one patrolling a given beat and the other standing on a street intersection. Each hour they change places, or oftener in severe weather. The fixed posts are about a thousand feet apart all over Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. The system has been indiscriminately criticised, but produces its results. Fire losses were cut down the first six months, night crime has decreased, and many notable arrests are due to the fact that policemen stand all over town like checkers through the night. The exposure is no greater than that endured by traffic men. The men have better opportunities to advance themselves by making meritorious arrests, and the Commissioner knows that, as citizens see the police on duty, night after night, and crime decreases, there will be a growing good will for the department.