LAWS AND THEIR ENFORCEMENT.

[From the Annual Report of the Police Commissioner, November 30, 1908.]

There are certain offences against law which all persons, even those guilty of them, acknowledge to be criminal. Murder, burglary, robbery, arson and the like may be called natural crimes; and not even a professional criminal will either argue to the contrary or profess to believe that he in particular should be allowed to commit them. He will escape if he can, but he never questions the propriety of the most strenuous action on the part of the police to catch him, to secure his punishment and to prevent others from following his example.

But only a barbarous or a half-civilized people can be content with laws and law enforcement which affect only the "natural" crimes. Civilized life requires very much more. It cannot exist without innumerable laws and ordinances, designed to secure and to promote the comfort, health, safety and morality of the people. Under this head, for example, comes the whole body of license, sanitary and building enactments. The quality of these and similar laws for the public safety and comfort, and the degree to which they are neglected or enforced, offer the surest test of the civilization of a community.

These laws, however, are disputed at every point by persons who know that they could hardly live without them as a whole and yet insist upon their right to break such of them as they find inconvenient. The man who obstructs a fire escape with an ice chest, and feels injured because he is fined, is a firm friend of the law which punishes the reckless driving of an automobile; but the driver, while disgruntled with the automobile

law and with the police who check his course, believes that the man of the ice chest was punished less than he deserved. The owner of a house is angry when a boy's ball breaks a pane of his glass, and demands that the police stop ball playing in the streets, but when a policeman asks him to clear the snow and ice from his sidewalk he considers it an impertinence. The boy, on the other hand, and usually his parents, will regard the matter of the glass as a mere incident to a sport which, law or no law, the policeman has no right to interrupt.

And so it goes, through an infinite variety of clashing private interests and indulgences, with the policeman who is doing his duty standing always between two fires.

The weakness of our people is a lack of respect for law as law. A citizen will demand of the police a defence of the law which they are enforcing at the time, contrary to his interest or pleasure, though as a matter of fact the reason for the law's existence is none of the business of the police. Should a policeman undertake to invent and enforce laws of his own the citizen would regard him as a crazy tyrant, but he is indignant when the policeman refuses to nullify by neglect the laws legally enacted which he is sworn to enforce. The citizen rejoices in moments of exaltation that ours is a government of laws, but when the pinch comes to himself he wishes it to be a government of policemen,— of policemen with eyes shut and ears closed.

When such citizens ask the police commissioner why the police have done certain things, and he answers, "Because it is the law," they act as if insulted. They seem to regard such a reply as a mere quibble on his part, an evasion of the real issue, which in their minds, as commonly expressed by them, is "police interference" with something which they like to do even though contrary to law.

Another form of remonstrance, which might be excused in an agitated woman whose son the police had just saved from having his head broken by coasting under an electric car in a forbidden street, is not too foolish

to be found occasionally on the editorial pages of pretentious newspapers. It runs something like this: "If the police would give less attention to boys coasting" -or to men spitting on sidewalks, or to women throwing slops into the street, or whatever the particular point at the time may be "and more attention to catching thieves and robbers, the people of Boston," etc., etc. Policemen who do their duty in comparatively small matters are all the more likely to do it when large ones come their way. No organized force needs to be stimulated to catch important criminals or to perform acts of conspicuous bravery, for those are the prizes of police work. Attention to small matters of law, moreover, interferes in no respect with the care of large matters. There is no particular time or place at which criminals may be caught. A policeman who looks into an alleyway to see if the fire escape is clear is quite as likely to catch a thief halfway up as he would have been on the next street corner, and a policeman while preventing boys from coasting contrary to law is just as well placed for catching a dangerous runaway as anywhere else on his route.

The record of the Boston police in the past year shows that results in small matters and in large matters can grow side by side; and to those who criticise I say that, without hurrying and yet without halting or turning aside, the work of enforcing all laws and ordinances, while they continue to be an obligation upon the police, will be pushed steadily forward.

LAW THE ONLY TRUE BASIS OF POLICE ACTION.

[From the Annual Report of the Police Commissioner, November 30, 1910.]

Within the year I had occasion to make to the public the following statement:

"The steady purpose of this department is that policemen, above all persons, shall respect the law; and if the time ever comes when, by order or encouragement from their superiors or in response to special agitation,

the police assume authority which the law does not give to them, and thus themselves become law breakers, the people of Boston will be the sufferers. Boston newspapers, as well as those of New York, are constantly praising Mayor Gaynor of that city for his attempts to bring its police back to the solid basis of law; and yet some of the same Boston newspapers, and doubtless many citizens, criticise at this time the police commissioner of Boston as narrow and technical because he has insisted steadily and still insists that the police for whom he is responsible shall follow the law at all times, not their own impulses.'

I regard the strict observance of the laws as the most important lesson to be impressed upon the police of any city. Their authority is no more than that of a private citizen except in so far as such authority is conferred upon them specifically by the laws. Therefore, to the police in their official acts the laws should stand as paramount to all other powers or influences. The temptation to break the laws or to go outside of them for the sake of securing what may appear at the time to be an advantage to the community should always be resisted. If the people of Boston were as well educated on this point as are their police, the police would have fewer calls to "clean out" this or to "suppress" that when neither can lawfully be done. No man without police experience can know the frequency with which citizens demand of policemen action which the laws do not permit them to take. The spirit of "lynch law" seems to be in all classes of citizens, and to manifest itself in individuals whenever their own profits or comforts are jeopardized.

Obedience to law, with the use of none but lawful methods, is the rule of action in the Boston police department; but some of the large cities of the United States have not yet learned that rule. A magazine article lately published describes with praise the lawless practices, for ostensibly useful purposes, of the police of a western city, concerning which it exclaims:—