THE POLICE AND THE PUSH.

NZ Truth, Issue 63, 1 September 1906, Page 4

THE POLICE AND THE PUSH.

The pushes of drunken young ruffians who go from bar to bar m this city, boozing and looking for soft .marks to stoush badly want lagging. One gang of overgrown brutes was particularly obnoxious one day last week, and after savagely threatening casual sober customers of several bars, insulting barmaids atrociously, and doing sundry pounds worth of injury to trade, one of them, the biggest and most truculent, whom the others were sooling on to break the jaws of inoffensive people who never said a word, being unable to muster up enough of even Dutch courage to have a lash at a man, put his big red fist through a glass door at a Manners-street hotel, and cleared into the street. It was midday and several people hunted high and low for a policeman, m vain. The Mannersstreet "station was visited, but there was no officer there— there very seldom is, apparently— and, though - a great crowd blocked the roadway for a considerable time, not a copper hove m sight. When one was at length tracked to his lair and drawn forth he seemed to wish he'd been drawn fifth, instead, and was so languid m his movements that the boozy heroes got the office, of his dignified on-com-ing, climbed on a tram and were whirled away, ere he came, displacing the trembling blocks, to the spot. This sort of thing is growing a menace to respectable citizens and unless they can have the police protection they are taxed to provide, the only remedy will be a resort to violence ; to "fight for the sake, of sweet peace," as Pat put it. Publicans suffer more than people m any other trade, from police surveillance'; yet when they require police assistance m their own and their decent customers' interests, it is never available, as •shown m the case recorded above. Always a resort of sailors and firemen, owing to its being m a direct line with the wharves, Cuba-street, from Manners to Ghuznee-street, is frequently lined with groups of reeling ruffians who use language of the filthiest type, and, rolling along m gangs, drive sober citizens into the gutter, and then hurl insults at them, m the hope of inciting to reprisal, when they would enjoy the rapture of the whole mob kicking the features off a singlehanded wayfarer. Drunken wharflaborers and the like, reel Mindly up from the water-front, often even inde* cent as to clothing, or prop themselves, gibbering and slobbering, against the fronts of business places. But never a policeman seems to happen along to shift them or preserve order and decency. On Saturday afternoons this undesirable state of things is particularly apparent m the locality mentioned, and as it is one of the busiest of the retail shopping districts, the shopkeepers and their customers, as well as respectable people who use the thoroughfare, naturally expect and demand police protection. If the nlace is not to be ruined from

a tradesman's point of view then the sooner more police supervision is accorded the better. As for the truculent mobs of young men whose drink appears to so objectionably operate upon their disposition, the cure for them, inside the hotels, will have to be opposition organisations that will give them all they are looking for, and a bit over, to go on with.