“The morals policemen would lose the information which the regular police could furnish; the contact of the regular force with vice cannot thus be removed, as they must still enter vicious resorts for the detection and arrest of other criminals; friction and collusion between the two police forces would be inevitable and the collection of graft would not be eliminated; the restriction of the morals police to dealing only with vices would tend to low standards of character among the men enlisting in this service only; the exemption from civil service restrictions would still further contribute to lax discipline and demoralization; the division of responsibility between two commissioners of police would lessen the accountability and efficiency of both.”

In Chicago the responsibility has already been divided by the recent ordinance reorganizing the police force. Under this a second deputy superintendent of police has been appointed, on the basis of a competitive civil service examination, which was thrown open to applicants from other states. His qualifications and duties are thus specified:

“He shall not be a member of the active bureau of the department, but shall have supervision of the clerical, mechanical and inspection bureau; and shall be charged with the care and custody of departmental property and the distribution of the same; the supervision of departmental records; the inspection of the personnel of the department and of stations, equipment and departmental properties; the instruction of officers and members of the department; the ascertaining and recording of departmental efficiency, individual and group; the receipt and investigation of all complaints of citizens regarding members of the police force; the supervision of the strict enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals; and the censoring of moving pictures and public performances of all kinds; the furnishing of a card index system to all district commanders in their respective stations, which they shall keep to show, at all times, up to date, the name, description, character, haunts, habits, associates and relatives of every known person of bad character residing in or frequenting such district, including pick-pockets, hold-up men, safe blowers, confidence men, vagrants, pimps, prostitutes and people who are operating or have operated gambling houses. All these functions shall be performed under the direction of the general superintendent of police.”

This second bureau with its second deputy superintendent well discriminates and divides the clerical, inspectional and disciplinary functions of the police department from those of the active force. But to superimpose upon all these well co-ordinated duties the entire responsibility for “supervising the strict enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals” threatens to make impossible either the efficient fulfilment of those routine functions or the effective repression of vice. Yet this measure was evidently preferred by the city administration to the morals commission and was substituted for it, because the ordinance recommended by the Vice Commission to the mayor has never been introduced in the city council.

Against the precedents and preferences of the regular police force for the segregation and regulation of vice, backed by the mayor’s preference for the same policy, what can this lone “second deputy” do to secure “the strict enforcement of these laws and ordinances”? His appointment and helplessness are new arguments for a morals commission to support him both in the enforcement of the law and in publicly placing responsibility for its non-enforcement.

The substitution of this subterfuge in lieu of the morals commission can be explained in the same way that Chief Justice Harry Olson, of the Municipal Court of Chicago, accounts for the unexpected closing of the segregated districts. He traced the sudden change in the attitude of county and city officials toward segregated vice to the decision of the Circuit Court which granted a permanent injunction restraining the use of certain property in the segregated district for immoral purposes. “This order of the Chancery Court was,” he said, “the Appomattox of the war upon openly tolerated vice in Chicago.” For this decision served notice that any citizen, by invoking the aid of the courts, could restrain vice, if the public officials were unable or unwilling to do so. “It was thus the beginning of the end,” he declared.

The morals court, he said, would further act as a check upon the second deputy superintendent of police, because “the records and the statistics of the court will show the names of the owners of such houses, together with their proprietors, inmates and frequenters, and will disclose the business of the promoters of the traffic and others who may profit therefrom.” So if this feature of the reorganized police department was intended by the city administration to effect its escape from the morals commission as one horn of the dilemma presented by the Vice Commission, Justice Olson clearly shows that the morals courts is the other horn. Neither the police of the city administration, nor the state’s attorney of the county, can escape if citizens seek warrants from the morals court or injunctions from the Circuit Court.

The inquiry into the relation of low wages to the demoralization of young girls and women, and the propaganda to correct this tendency by minimum wage laws will bear close watching. It may not only injure the broader movement to secure minimum wage laws based upon just and safe economic grounds, but it may also divert attention from the enactment and enforcement of laws against commercialized vice. For the ensnaring of victims is accomplished through many more devious ways than can be charged up to low wages.

WOMEN POLICE

LOUISE de KOVEN BOWEN