The other witness is Mr. Godkin, the editor of the Evening Post, who, writing in the North American Review seven years back, says of the newly landed immigrant:—
No sooner has he established himself in a tenement-house or a boarding-house than he finds himself face to face with three functionaries who represent to him the government of his new country—the police justice of the district, the police captain of his precinct, and the political “district leader.” These are, to him, the Federal, State and municipal governments rolled into one.... These three men are to him America. Everything else in the national institutions in which Americans pride themselves he only sees through a glass darkly, if he sees it at all.
These dwellers in tenement-houses in New York, to whom the police—of whom there were then 4,000—are judge, executive, and legislature, constitution and town meeting, comprise two-thirds of the population of the city. To the foreign denizen of these districts—say one-half of the whole—the policeman and his masters of the political machine are all of America that he can see or understand.
Now let us see what kind of an America the New York police presented to the eyes of the majority of the population of the city. The Lexow Committee in its final Report, after commenting on the difficulty of obtaining evidence owing to the terrorism practised by the police, said of a typical case:—
This situation was characteristic. A consuming desire to put an end to an outrageous servitude on the one hand, and a dread lest failure might result in a still more galling thraldom on the other! It seemed, in fact, as though every interest, every occupation, almost every citizen, was dominated by an all-controlling and overshadowing dread of the police department.
Those in the humbler walks of life were subjected to appalling outrages which to some extent continued, even to the end of the investigation. They were abused, clubbed and imprisoned, and even convicted of crimes on false testimony by policemen and their accomplices. Men of business were harassed and annoyed in their affairs, so that they too were compelled to bend their necks to the police yoke, in order that they might share that so-called protection which seemed indispensable to the profitable conduct of their affairs. People of all degrees seemed to feel that to antagonize the police was to call down upon themselves the swift judgment and persecution of an invulnerable force, strong in itself, banded together by self-interest and the community of unlawful gain, and so thoroughly entrenched in the municipal government as to defy ordinary assault. Strong men hesitated when required to give evidence of their oppression, and whispered stories; tricks, subterfuges and schemes of all kinds were resorted to to withhold from this committee and its counsel the fact that they had knowledge of acts of corruption or oppression by the police. The uniform belief was that if they spoke against the police, or if the police discovered that they had been instrumental in aiding your Committee, or had given information, their business would be ruined, they would be hounded from the city, and their lives even jeopardised.—Vol. i., pp. 25, 26.
For wrongs inflicted by the police there was no redress. Mr. Goff in the concluding stages of the investigation referred to this phase of the question in the following significant terms:—
A great many innocent people who have been clubbed by the police in our city have thought that the city was responsible for the actions of its employés; but the courts have held time and time again that the city is not responsible; and then from the further fact that nearly every policeman in the city has his property in his wife’s name, it has become a notorious thing that it is useless to bring an action for assault against a policeman.... Mr. Jerome reminds me now of the celebrated case of Mr. Fleming; I think it was a Decoration Day parade. Captain Williams clubbed him in Madison Square, and he got a judgment of $2,500; but the judgment was never collected. We have never been able to get it on the record that a judgment against a police official has been paid.—Vol. v., p. 4,661.
It is not surprising after this to read the answer of a witness, a journalist of standing, who had been nearly murdered by a police captain in the cells of the police-station. He was asked if he had taken proceedings against his assailant. He replied:—
“I never did, sir. It is no use going to law with the Devil, and Court, and Hell!”