JUVENILE CRIME AND PUBLICITY

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 119, 10 August 1927, Page 16

JUVENILE CRIME AND PUBLICITY

CONDUCT OF COURTS CRITICISM IN HOUSE (THE SUN’S Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, Tuesday. CTRONG criticism of the conduct O of Children’s Courts, with particular reference to Auckland, was made by Mr. H. G. R. Mason, Eden, during the debate in the House of Representatives this afternoon. Mr. Mason took exception to the publicity given cases in which children were before the court for thefts or other offences, and said that newspaper reports should be utterly prohibited, except under the most stringent conditions. Where a report was allowed at all. it should be only by permission of the magistrate, for express reasons. Criminality among children was partly due, said Mr. Mason, to the influence of the cinema, with its power of suggestion and resultant imitation, and to a less extent by newspaper reports of juvenile crimes which led other children to emulate them. Another fault to which Mr. Mason referred was the lack of privacy. There was always the court crowd, shut oft only by a curtain which might as well not be there at all. Policemen attended in uniform, an evil which, Mr. Mason said, had been present in Auckland all along, and which, he believed, Police Commissioner W. B. Mcllveney had attempted to justify. To the small child, the policeman was largely a bogy, and it would be difficult to get a child to believe that a policeman was his best friend, as the Commissioner would like them to think. It made Mr. Mason wonder whether the Commissioner had ever been a boy himself.