CHAIR OF POLICE WORK

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 738, 10 August 1929, Page 36

CHAIR OF POLICE WORK

CHICAGO UNIVERSITY’S LATEST

Indignant at the growth of crime and the smirching of the city’s reputation by the guns of gangsters, Chicago will cradle its own potential deliverer, the super-detective. This creature, heretofore only a myth of fiction, will be made into flesh and blood to replace the policeman whose chief qualification often is only a stout heart, says the “New York Times.” Two of America's leading universities, both in Chicago, have hung up handwriting on the wall for the heretofore undetected murderer, thief, kidnapper and rack leer. Police work will henceforth be a part of the curriculum at Northwestern and Chicago Universities, and racket-ridden Chicago will be their research laboratory. Starting with a Chair of Police Administration, the University of Chicago plans in the near future to loose the ! forces of modern knowledge on crime j through detectives who will be “doc- : tors” instead of “bulls.” who will replace guesswork with exact information. Plans for the Northwestern course have not been completed. August Vollmer, chief of police at Berkeley, Cal., will head the new department at Chicago, and will establish the course at the beginning of the Fall semester next October. Leonard White, professor of administration and chairman of the local community research committee at the university, who worked on the plans with Chief Vollmer, said that while the course would be confined at the outset to the problems of police administration it will become eventually

a major study in which the student may work for a degree. Every avenue of learning that can aid in the tracking down of a criminal will be thrown open to the embryo detectives , Mr. White said. The course eventually will be designed to permit special study of one or two years as well as the full four-year college course for those who wish it. An inter-departmental committee will co-operate with Professor Vollmer to see that his students are wellgrounded in all the sciences necessary to intelligent investigation. The student undertaking the full course will study the chemistry of poisons, criminology, sociology, psychology, physics, and anthropology and learn to apply the studies to the investigation of crime. As an indication of how other departments will co-operate with the department of police administration, Mr. White explained, the medical j school would teach police students how to detect the presence of poisons while the department of anthropology would show them how to determine the race of an unknown person from a strand of hair or spot of blood. In addition the new department plans to publish a series of manuals on standard police practices, ballistics or the science of bullet identification, preparation of criminal cases for prosecution and on the use of hair, dust and blood stains as crime clues. These manuals will be made available to police departments everywhere.