That night the New York evening papers published accounts of the crime under great black headlines, and on the following morning every news item of a criminal nature was grouped in the same part of the papers to prove that the city had entered one of its sensational “waves of crime.” And for more than a week the public read criticism and denunciation of the police force.
It was charged that the police had become “demoralized,” and various changes of administrative policy introduced into the department within the past eight months were blindly denounced.
The most important of these changes was that devised by Mayor Gaynor. Eight or ten years ago, every uniformed policeman in New York carried a club, and often used it freely in defending himself while making arrests. Abuses led to the abolition of this means of defense except for officers patrolling the streets at night. There were still undoubted abuses, however, and when Mayor Gaynor came into office, bringing well-thought-out opinions of police administration from his experience as a magistrate on the bench, he took a determined stand for more humane methods of making arrests, and strict holding of every policeman to the letter of the laws. Every case of clubbing was prosecuted, the plain legal rights of citizens or criminals upheld, and the Police Department began teaching its men new ways of defending themselves by skillful holds in wrestling whereby prisoners may be handled effectually and without doing them harm. Sentiment against the use of the club began to grow in the Police Department itself, it being recognized that clubbing was an unskillful means of defense, and that special athletic devices were more workmanlike.
Now, however, the newspapers published every chance opinion of discharged, retired and anonymous police officers who objected to the new regulations. It was alleged that criminals had got out of bounds because policemen no longer dared club them into good behavior, and the editors, without paying much attention to the many good points of the new regulations, or trying to understand the merits of a settled policy applied to an organization of more than ten thousand men, set up a cry for the presumably “good old days” of Inspector So-and-So and Chief This-and-That, when every known criminal was promptly struck over the head on sight and thereby taught to know his place. If the files of New York journals for those days following the robbery are examined they will reveal a curious exhibition of pleading for official lawlessness and autocracy.
GEORGE S. DOUGHERTY
Second Deputy Police Commissioner
Another point of criticism centered on a new method adopted in the distribution of the detective force. This comprises more than five hundred men. For years they were all required to report at Police Headquarters every day, coming from distant precincts, and had an opportunity to see whatever professional criminals were under arrest. Then they went back to different precincts to work. This took too much time, it was found, and the old-fashioned “line-up” of criminals was chiefly a spectacle, the same offenders dropping into the hands of the police with more or less regularity. So detectives were re-distributed on a plan that attaches a proper number of plain-clothes policemen to each precinct, according to its needs, and in those precincts the men live and become acquainted with local criminals. Many of them work in sections where they were born, and detectives speaking foreign languages are assigned to foreign quarters.
The newspapers charged that red-tape had brought the Police Department to such a low state that young detectives had no idea what a real criminal looked like, and urged the restoration of the old system, with its picturesque “line-up.”