AMERICAN GUNMEN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 31, 29 April 1927, Page 4

AMERICAN GUNMEN

A TERRIBLE INDICTMENT There is more crime to the square inch in the United States than in any other country in the world. The latest statistics culled from American crime insurance and police records show that in New York the average citizen has 32 chances of being held up by yeggs if he walks a mile alone after midnight. He is likely to be murdered about one and one-tenth times a year—which seems putting it rather low. And his apartment is due to be robbed any time he goes out and many times when he’s at home. Chicago, one of the biggest cities on the civilised portion of the globe, leads all the others in the matter of violent crimes. The list of statistics on Chicago wobbles a good deal, but even Chicagoans admit that since the bandits took over the machine-gun your chance of living unscathed for months in the Windy City is about equivalent to your chance for an equal length of time in a front trench during a world war. London, the second largest city in the world, has a yearly average of fewer than 30 murders; while Philadelphia and Boston alone have more murders annually than are committed in the whole of the United Kingdom.

London, on the other hand, has a yearly record of nearly 100 per cent, convictions and executions of murderers, and only a slightly lower record of convictions and imprisonment of other criminals. I®. New York the criminal has about 13 chances of escaping conviction, and, even after he is sentenced for murder, he has a two-to-one chance of evading the full punishment. If the murderer happens, as is often the case, to be a woman, she has in the United States around one chance in five of being convicted, and hardly any chance at all of being executed. In England, if the murderer is a woman, she is in just as much danger of conviction and of execution as if she were a man, the English still clinging to tKe theory that anyone murdered by a woman is exactly as dead as if a man had done it.