MOTOR BANDITS

Hokitika Guardian, 25 October 1932, Page 8

MOTOR BANDITS

AMERICANISED CRIME. THE MENACE OF THE GUNMAN August 30. In his dispatches from Gallipoli General Sir lan Hamilton coined a vivid phrase. He d«.strLed barbed, wire and machine-guns as “those twin inventions of the Devil.” Scotland Yard, in times of a none to ° P‘P* n g peace might, apply exactly the same phraseto the motor-car and the automatic pistol. They are the ready-made tools by which the modern bandit-desperado conducts his cripiinal activit es. And at present by the look of.'things, the forces of law and order are at their wits’ end to grapple wth tl.e. no'j' 1 problem these unholy alliances unciyilsed society. .t- ; Nobody appears to have noted the coincidence that marked the first serious development of car-banditry, gradually followed by its logical denouemmt of highway robbery, in this country. This criminal epidemic started practically at the same time, that the American police authorities decided to adopt drastic measures for what tliey called ‘a clean up” of the New York and Chicago underworld. It may be that higher authority at, Scotland Yafd attached no special importance to these proceedings in America, but subordinate members of its staff predicted promptly what sort' of developments we bright expect as a consequence in this country. London, with its bewildering maze of suburbs, was obviously mapked out at, the city, of refuge. for American gunmtn-cropks who found their own slum haunts - across the Atlantic too hot to hold them.

: FROM .AMERICA. Just, as obviously, was this country, with its unarmed police and strict le£"1 punctilio, destined to be a land ot Promise for these self-exiled criminal emigrants,. Py, no means all the car bandits, whose usually, scathlcss exploits constantly .fill the newspaper columns, and the highwaymen who are. now coining gc prominently into notice, are Americans. Rut it- is the “bad fiats” who cleared out, from America to avoid their own police clean-up who have leavened the lump. Like ;o many others things jjn .post-war England,,our criminal activities have be:n Arneiicanised. And it will ,be very: difficult and risky work to exercise this particular demon.' These baud ts base their energies on sound ■ Napoleonic. theory. They ! believe that the strongest human passion is fear, and that Hercules himself, in. a police uniform and with!the, majesty of the law behind him, is impotent, before a levelled six-shooter with a ruthless finger on the trigger. That the \ return of traffic to our roads, after a century’s diversion to the railways, would, mean the return also of Messrs Claude Duval and company was. certain', The pre-railway Highwayman pf the stage-coach era, relied o,n a flintlock horse pistol and a well-fed moi nt to transact his nefarious business with sure profit and a fair margin of personal safety, The modern practitioner of the art, however, .finds things much better arranged for him than that. He can command the use of an automatic breech-loader with, a hair-trigger, and employ a fast car, the best he cares to steal, .to get aropnd and away in. His potentiaf deadlines® is enormously improved, an l his mobility incalculably extended.. He na s the overwhelming advantage that, whilst the, police must be looking for him everywhere, lie can emerge just where and when he thinks safest. It seems certain he is going to. present. . us with, a problem that will thoroughly test all our. resources to solve.

NO AURA OF ROMANCE. One important thing for. public opinion to remember is. the necessity of not surrounding, the inodprn .high-, wayman with any false aura ot rom<,nce. There may hate been some thing to be said for the Claude Duval contemporaries, though most of them were dastardly . ruffians without, a scintilla of sportsmanship or decency in their composition. It might be possible to make out some sert of case for the able-bodied rogue who waylays citizens and extorts money merely by threat of physical prowess. Years ago I saw n collier, a 1 magnificent fellow physically, who was on trial for robbery with violence. He got drunk, wanted money for more beer, and calmly waited for homeward-bound business men, whom he seized, inverted and shook till their pockets'emptied themselves on the ground. He got the “cat” on top of a stiff sentence to penal servitude. For that hefty collier I felt some slight sympathy. But a ,weevil-eyed squints down the barrel.of an . aytfjr mafic is. utterly beyond ,the palp. „...

He is ■'isimply usurping and prost - tuting. the mechanism invent d by abler jbrairjs, and better men than himself to make a living that he has not the ability, or manhood or industry to seek ly honest methods. Any pigeonlivered wastrel can hold a pistol to somebody’s head ( who would, never da>'e to put. his. fists, up to a grown man. Even when lie uses an matic, lie. gambles on the certainty that the other fellow has not got ono. Ponffici.il, police oritv decrees that our ordinary police patrols must not be nr.mttl.. with revolvers. The theory, is that, the police themselves do not desire it, and also that., if the police were armed, the bandits would invariably nboot.. The Infer argument, reduce 4 to least common

denominator, simply means, that the law accepts the,. - supremacy of the bnndilt prefers to let him carry on, and usually escape, rather than drive him to des'perctic.n.* It. dees not impress me as a very, salutary princip'e. The content'om that, the police do «ot want to be armed is one that, however, pont ficially announced, I find it extremely Hard to„,swallow. A policeman patrolling a lonely ro"d at nistht, in these times,, it not,engaged on a muqh less hazardous duty than the scalier who patrolled No Man ,s Land during the war. . I can imagine what any soldier would have sad, if he had been told he .must go out unarmed except for a- .short piece of stick. We have already had , several instances of bandits actually holding uo policemen, and getting away with, it. Such episodes are far from a good advertisement for the. forces of .law and ord?r. It is said, if the police are armed, we shall get all sorts of Promiscuous shooting. It is far m.o-e lik ly, unless the. policy are placed in a position of equality with the gunmen and manage to cepe with them, we-shall have sDll .more dangerously promiscuous, shooting by all sorts ana condition of armed civilians.

Something inight, ope imagines, he done t‘o check ,tlie .growing' epidemic of banditry, which may shortly, become! as bad hei’e as in Amer ca, by puttin'! a stricter responsibility on motorists rot to allow the r cars to be stolen. In former days people did not leave their horses about in the way motorists do their cars. But the outlook is not entirely gloomy. A brief epidemic of highway robbery will soon effept a marvellous improvement ,in our conges+ed road traffic.' There, will be more room on the King’s highway for those travellers, whether by car or on f r ot, who sti'l cares to risk being “stuck up” by gunmen. And, after all. we mV.at keep our sense of perspective. it will take a lot of very reckless car bandits a>’d gunmen-high-wavmen to cause anything like the daily casualties now' attributable to motov'ng. Tbope are now on a wholesale seal". Even the . loneliest footpaths will still remain much safer, gunmen or no gunmen, than most busy road how one looks at these socio'ogical problems. There may be something to he sabl—"ot ethically nr romantically, but. statistically—for the squint-eyed gunman