No wonder, then, that the streets are regarded by the boy as his rightful playground. They are the most constant and vivid part of his life. They provide companionship, invite to recklessness, and offer concealment. Every year their attraction grows stronger, till their lure becomes irresistible and his life is swallowed up in theirs.
But unfortunately for the boy everyone does not agree with him as to his right of possession. The storekeeper, for instance, insists on the incompatibility of a vigorous street ball game with the safety of his plate glass windows. Drivers not unreasonably maintain that the road is for traffic rather than for marbles or stone throwing. Property owner, pedestrian, the hardworking citizen, each has a point of view which does not altogether favor the playground theory. At the very outset of his career, therefore, in attempting to exercise childhood’s inalienable right to play, the boy finds himself colliding with the rights of property; the maintenance of public safety, the enforcement of law and order, and other things equally puzzling and annoying, all apparently united in being inimical to his ideas of amusement. He is too young to understand that in his city’s scheme children were forgotten. No one can explain to him that he has been born in a congested area where lack of play space must be accepted patiently; that life is a process of give and take in which the rights of others demand as much respect as his own. He does not know that his dilemma is the problem which eternally confronts the city child. But he does know that he must play. He has a store of nervous energy and animal spirits which simply must be let loose. Yet when he tries to play under the only conditions possible to him he is hampered and repressed at every turn. Inevitably he revolts; and long before he is old enough to learn why most of his street games are illegal, fun and law-breaking have become to him inseparable, and the policeman his natural enemy.
So far the boy’s attitude is normal. Childish antagonism to arbitrary authority is natural. In any large town it extends to the police. All over New York games are played with one eye on the corner and often with a small scout or two on the watch for the “cop.” But at this point two facts differentiate the Middle West Side from the rest of the city, and make its situation peculiar. On the one hand, the parents and older people of the district, instead of showing the usual indifference or at most a passive antipathy toward the police, openly conspire against and are actively hostile to them. On the other, the police, largely because of this neighborhood feeling, are utterly unable to cope with the lawless conditions which they find around them.
This state of things has been brought about in various ways. The lurid record of criminals in the district has for years necessitated methods of policing which have not made the Irish temper any less excitable. Public sentiment here is almost static, and hatred of the police has become a tradition. No one has a good word for them; everyone’s hand is against them. The boys look on them as spoil-sports and laugh at their authority. The toughs and gangsters are at odds with them perforce. Fathers and mothers, resenting the trivial arrests of their children, consign the “cop,” the “dinny” (detective), and “the Gerrys” to outer darkness together. The better class of residents and property owners, though their own failure to properly support them is partly to blame for the failure of the police to do their duty, frankly distrust them for being so completely incompetent and ineffective. And now perhaps no one would dare to support them. For the toughs of the district have taken the law into their own hands, and with the relentlessness and certainty of a Corsican vendetta every injury received by them is repaid, sooner or later, by some act of pitiless retaliation. Honest or dishonest, successful or otherwise, the policeman certainly has a hard time of it. Wherever he goes he is dangerously unpopular. He cannot be safely active or inactive, and whatever he does seems to add to his difficulties. Hectored on duty, frequently bullied in court, misunderstood and abused by press and public alike, he stands out solitary, the butt and buffer of the neighborhood’s disorder.
It is scarcely remarkable that under these circumstances the guardian of the law is bewildered, and tends to become unreasonably touchy and suspicious. “I tried to start a club in a saloon on Fiftieth Street a while ago,” said a young Irishman of twenty-five. “After we had had the club running one night, a policeman came in and asked me for my license. I told him I didn’t have any. He said he would have to break up the club then. I kicked about this and he pinched me. They brought me up for trial next morning, and the judge told me I would have to close up my club. I asked him why, and said the club was perfectly orderly and was just made up of young fellows in the neighborhood; and he said, ‘Well, your club has a bad reputation, and you’ve got to break it up.’ Now, how could a club have a bad reputation when it had only been running one day? Tell me that? But that’s the way of it. Those cops will give you a bad reputation in five minutes if you never had one before in your life.” “The cops are always arresting us and letting us go again,” said a small West Sider. “I’ve been taken up two or three times for throwing stones and playing ball, but they never took me to the station house yet. You can’t play baseball anywhere around here without the cops getting you.” And so it has come about that relations between police and people in this section of New York are abnormally strained. Provocation is followed by reaction, and reaction by reprisal and a constant aggravation of annoyances, till the tension continually reaches breaking point.
This situation shows very definite results in the boy. Gradually his play becomes more and more mischievous as he finds it easier to evade capture. Boylike, his delight in wanton and malicious destruction is increased by the knowledge that he will probably escape punishment. Six-year-old Dennis opens the door of the Children’s Aid Society school and throws a large stone into the hall full of children. Another youngster of about the same age recently was seen trying for several minutes to break one of the street lamps. He threw stone after stone until finally the huge globe fell with a crash that could have been heard a block. Then he ran off down the street and disappeared around the corner. No one attempted to stop him; no one would tell who he was. Later on, the boy begins to admire and model himself on the perpetrators of picturesque crimes whom he sees walking unarrested in the streets around him. And by the time that he reaches the gang age he is usually a hardened little ruffian whom the safety of numbers encourages to carry his play to intolerable lengths. He robs, steals, gets drunk, carries firearms, and his propensity for fighting with stones and bottles is so marked that for days whole streets have been terrorized by his feuds. Insurance companies either ask prohibitive rates for window glass in this neighborhood or flatly refuse to insure it at all.
Meanwhile the police are not idle. Public opinion and their own records at the station house demand a certain amount of activity, and every week the playground sees its arrests. In the following table we have classified by causes, from our own intimate knowledge of each individual case, the arrests which took place during 1909 among the boys of our 241 families. The court’s legal system of classification has been discarded here in favor of the classification made to show the real nature of each offense. The result illustrates how entirely police intervention has failed to meet the issue in the district, and consequently explains in part why the work of the children’s court with boys from this neighborhood has not proved more effectual.
| Offenses of vagrancy and neglect: | |
| Truancy | 38 |
| Begging | 3 |
| Selling papers at ten | 18 |
| Selling papers without a badge | 5 |
| Run-away | 7 |
| Sleeping in halls and on roofs | 6 |
| Improper guardianship | 12 |
| General incorrigibility | 23 |
| Total | 112 |
| Offenses due to play: | |
| Playing ball | 20 |
| Playing cat | 3 |
| Playing shinny | 2 |
| Pitching craps | 26 |
| Pitching pennies | 9 |
| Throwing stones and other missiles | 44 |
| Building fires in the street | 15 |
| Fighting | 6 |
| Total | 125 |
| Offenses against persons: | |
| Assault | 5 |
| Stabbing | 4 |
| Use of firearms | 3 |
| Immorality | 0 |
| Intoxication | 1 |
| Total | 13 |
| Offenses against property: | |
| Illegal use of transfers | 1 |
| Petty thievery | 58 |
| Serious thievery | 18 |
| Burglary, i. e., breaking into houses and theft | 36 |
| Forgery | 0 |
| Breaking windows | 4 |
| Picking pockets | 2 |
| Total | 119 |
| Offenses of mischief and annoyance: | |
| Upsetting ash cans | 2 |
| Shouting and singing | 6 |
| Breaking arc lights | 3 |
| Loitering, jostling, etc | 12 |
| Stealing rides on cars | 4 |
| Profanity | 1 |
| Total | 28 |
| Unknown | 73 |
| Total | 470 |
| Deducting duplicates | 7 |
| Grand Total | 463 |
[a] For the classification of these arrests according to the court charges see Chapter VI, The Boy and the Court, p. 82.
Not only is this table extraordinarily interesting in itself, but its importance to our investigation is inestimable, because it brings out certain features of the problem with a vividness which could not be equaled in pages of discussion or narrative.