The efforts of the Commissioners to secure the return of the children to their distracted mother were for a time thwarted by the provisions of the law which is so hidebound and imperative in its terms that no judge would venture to interfere with the commitment of the police magistrate. Mr. Goff called attention to the fact that “the condition of the law in New York City is that, upon the ipse dixit of one man, children can be taken from their protectors, fathers and mothers, and secreted away in some institution, and there is no power invested in any court or in any official to compel him to reveal where the children are or to restore them.” The sensation occasioned by this case was so great that the Commission were able towards the close of their sittings to announce the gratifying intelligence that they had at last succeeded in securing the release of the children, who were then, after more than eighteen months, handed over to their mother. The opinion of the Commissioners on the case was embodied in the following terms, which I quote from their Report:—
Oppression of the lowly and unfortunate, the coinage of money out of the miseries of life, is one of the noteworthy abuses into which the department has fallen....
The evidence of many witnesses shows the existence of a wonderful conspiracy in the neighbourhood of Essex Market police-court, headed by politicians, including criminals, professional bondsmen, professional thieves, police, and those who lay plots against the unwary, and lead them into habits of law-breaking, or surround them with a network of false evidence, and then demand money as the price of salvation, and if they do not receive it, drag their victims into court and prison, and often to a convict’s cell....
In another case, Mrs. Urchittel, a humble Russian Jewess, ignorant of our tongue, an honest and impoverished widow with three small children, whom she was striving to support, was falsely accused by a precinct detective of keeping a disorderly house in the back room of her little store where she and her little children slept, and he demanded a sum of money which she could not pay, whereupon he took her from her home, dragged her through the streets until three o’clock in the morning, pulled down and searched her stockings for money, until she in despair produced all that she had saved for her month’s rent. This being insufficient, he gave her a short time to obtain the balance, and she tried to sell her store, but failed, and then he arrested her again, lodged a false and infamous charge against her, fastened it upon her by the testimony of miserable tools whom he had employed for the purpose, and secured her conviction. Her children passed into the hands of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Her fine was paid by selling her store, and she was released, only to fall into a severe and lingering illness. When she recovered her home was gone, her children were gone, and she was penniless.
Many cases of similar oppression are found on the record.—Vol. i., pp. 43, 44.
Is it any wonder that the Lexow Committee reported under the head of “Brutality,” as it existed in the police force:—
This condition has grown to such an extent that even in the eyes of our foreign-born residents our institutions have been degraded, and those who have fled from oppression abroad have come here to be doubly oppressed in a professedly free and liberal country.—Vol. i., p. 30.
This is how “Liberty enlightens the world” from her eyrie in the Island of Manhattan.
