THE NEW YORK POLICE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 499, 11 September 1912, Page 3

THE NEW YORK POLICE.

In an interesting article in the London Daily Chronicle. Mr Sydney Brookes attempts to throw some light on a problem which has puzzled many people outside America—the problem of the continued existence in New York of a corrupt police force coincidently with the daily exposure of its corruption by the newspapers. New York, say Mr Brookes, has no "Home Rule" nor anything like it. Its internal government is regulated by the State Legislature at Albany, and the State Legislature, elected for the most part by the farming vote, has its own simple and sufficient notions as to how New York should be run. It has readily agreed to everything the reformers and the "good citizens" could suggest. It has decided that gambling shall cease, that vice shall be stamped out, and that Sunday drinking shall be abjlished. But, according to Mr Brookes, cosmopolitan, pagan, pleasure loving New York has not the slightest intention of obeying these ordinances. Efforts to enforce them have been time and again made, the whole city has been convulsed, convictions have been dealt out wholesale, but in a week the law has been as flargantlv disregarded as ever. The laws are too drastic for the community they are applied to, and their existence merely provides Tammany Hal! with its principal sources of evenuetr. Tammany has converted the police force from a protection of the public against crime to a protection of crim9 against the public. The peculiar conditions of police administration in New York have made this task only too easy. The chief commissioner of police in New York has no fixed tenure of office, and may be removed at any minute by the mayor of the city or the Governor of the State without any assigned reason. The lot of an honest police commissioner is a hard one, so hard as to render his occupancy of the post impossible. Vested interests, the interests of the rich men who live on the profits of vice and c rime, together with their business and political allies, band together for the honest commissioner's overthrow. They bring pressure on the mayor, generally a Tammany nominee, and speedily effect the dismissal of the man who obstructs their path. Honesty being imposible in the master it is trebly impossible in the men. and New York inevitably continues to support the most corrupt police service in the world.