GRIME IN AMERICA.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4928, 20 January 1926, Page 3

GRIME IN AMERICA.

BOBBERIES AND MURDERS. HIGH PERCENTAGE IN TOWNS. They nave magnificent hotels, in the United States, the hugest and most palatial in the'world, with every convenience laid on, except safety. In the middle of the afternoon, recently, in broad daylight, five bandits held, up one of the biggest and most fashionable hotels in Chicago, 'robbing the ‘till, killing a dork, and starting a mad, movie-like' chase through the crowded s.treets which ended in the capture of two of the robbers and the killing -of two ethers'. The State of lowa, with about two million people, ha.d fifty-six bank robberies’ in 1920 with thv loss of £50',000. Then the. bankers got tired of it and formed vigilance committees, arming their 3876 members with 2289 pistols, 12Q0 riflec, 240 sawed-off shotguns, 712,000 rounds of cartridges. The result was that by 1924 the bank robberies fell to half a dozen, with a Joss of £5OO, and eighty out of eighty-nine wouldbe robbens' were either shot dead or caught and convicted. * The crime wave is not confined to Now York. In Chicago, for instance, it is ccr.imon to* find news, of local, crimes in every column of the chief pa,ges of the newspapers. In all England and W,ales, with 40,000',000 people, there were fewer than 200 killings in 1923 ; in the United States in ■the same year the city of ■ St. Louis, with about a million people, ,di<k better than that without outside help from an? one, and the total for the entire country wa.s considerably in excess, of 10,000 homicides'. The murder rate is running .up, for it 1900 it was five murders per annum per 100,000 populationrand in 1.924 i.t waa ten per 100,000. London has between twenty and forty• burglaries a month, but Chicago has over 200 burglaries at the point of the gun per month.