SCIENCE AND CRIME.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 June 1921, Page 11

SCIENCE AND CRIME.

FOE OR ALLY OF ORDER,Many men whose names are familiar to readers of newspapers in connection with the investigation' of crime were | members of the audience at the Society of Arts,. London, when, Mr. Charles Ainsworth Mitchell read a paper on “Science and the Investigation of crime.” Lord Justice Atkin presided. Mr. Ainsworth Mitchell showed how the development of science and its many branches had narrowed down the criminal’s chances of escape since the early days of last century, when anyone who committed a secret crime had an even, chance of evading capture. Mistakes of 1 identity, he suggested, had been a more fruitful source of miscarriage of justice than all other causes put together. The world contained some 1,409,000,000 of people, and notwithstanding. the infinite variety of human features, there was hardly anybody alive to-day who could not be mistaken -for somebody else. The lecturer showed by means' of lantern slides how the finger-print and. poisontest 4 methods were conducted,.. and .how the microscope was brought in to'assist justice in the comparison of hairs, human and animal, and of paper. No one, he concluded, could hope to keep in touch with all the branches of science, and what was wanted ‘was a certain degree of co-ordination among scientific workers so that new methods most suitable to any particular problem might be immediately applied. Lord Justice Atkin said the first essential for the detection of crime was that members of society as a whole should play their part in helping the authorities to put it down. It was unnecessary to point that moral by referring to what was taking place not far from this country at the present, time. He was not sure whether the advance of science had favored crime or the authorities. It had assisted the forger, the coiner, the burglar, and the murderer, but its most effective help had been in improving the criminal means of transport. He was not sure the finger-print system was used quite so often in the detection of crime as might be supposed when reading detective stories and novels. Identification was one o f the points on which proof might most easily break and he was glad to say there were few cases where juries were inclined to convict merely on evidence of I identification.

Sir Basil Thompson said that for the five years 1903 to 1908 there were in Paris (population 2,500,000) 737 murders, in London 106 murders, and in Oiicago (2,000,000 population) 693. The comparison -was striking, and a curious thing -was that the number, of arrests in respect of these crimes was nearly the same in each case—viz* 60 per cent. Murder, however, was not regarded by the policeman as his serious business in life; there was not enough of that. (Laughter.) There was still a large body of professional criminals. He once offered to find a pickpocket at Dartmoor a job at 30a a week. The man replied scornfully, “Why, I used to make £3O a day at Bournemouth races.” (Laughter.) It was the gambler’s life that appealed. They aimed at training the intelligence of the detective rather than trying to make him into a scientific investigator. The greater part of successful crime-detec-tion depended on hard work.