Chicago’s Crime is Unabated

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 136, 30 August 1927, Page 9

Chicago’s Crime is Unabated

“Big Bill’s” Promise Unfulfilled CITY OF . DAILY MURDER When William Hale Thompson, better known to his familiars and the electorate as “Big Bill,” was conducting his Alayoralty campaign in Chicago this spring, he interspersed his vilification of everything British with promises that if elected to the chief magistracy of the second city in the United States he would put an end to the wave of crime that has besmirched Chicago’s name and has been something of a nightmare to its 3,000,000 or more citizens (writes the Chicago correspondent of the “Daily Mail” last month). It was largely because of this promise of Thompson, together with his jocular statement that there would be no more “fanning of mattresses and frisking of pantries for pints of whisky” by his police force, that he succeeded in winning the election. But Thompson has now occupied the Mayor’s chair for several months and Chicago, unhappily, remains the most notoriously crime-infested city in the United states. It still maintains its average of approximately one murder each 24 hours. Mayor Thompson pledged his word to remedy this criminal situation the moment he assumed office. Instead, he went on a cruise down the Alississippi to New Orleans to recuperate from the arduous duties of his political campaign. About the only action he has taken to end crime in Chicago has been to force the resignation of the former chief of police and appoint in his stead one Alichael Hughes, a chief of detectives out of favour during the previous administration. Hughes, having shifted his men around, addressed a series of orders to the city’s police captains. He told them: — „ , _. Stop kicking in doors of homes, softdrink parlours, and poolrooms and go after the criminals. The policeman s job is to catch thieves and thugs. It isn’t how many people you arrest that counts, but the kind you arrest. A committee of the Board of Education is now taking evidence to determine the truth of Thompson’s charge that the text books in use in the Chicago schools are pro-British in tenor and falsify historical facts regarding the American revolution. Alavor Thompson still insists that treason has been insidiously injected, thus bringing about disloyalty in the Chicago schools, and that “the schools are in the hands of a bunch of highbrow pro-Britishers who are teaching the kiddies that the King was our best friend.” ■