Crime -- United States; Criminal justice, Administration of -- United States; Criminals -- United States
The fact of the matter is, that in dealing with practical conditions,
police methods differ very little in different countries. The
authorities may perhaps keep considerably more detailed "tabs" on people
in Europe than in the United States, but if they are once caught in a
compromising position they experience about the same treatment wherever
they happen to be. In France (and how the apostles of liberty condemn
the iniquity of the administration of criminal justice in that country!)
the suspect or undesirable receives a polite official call or note, in
which he is invited to leave the locality as soon as convenient. In
New York he is arrested by a plainclothes man, yanked down to Mulberry
Street for the night, and next afternoon is thrust down the gangplank
of a just departing Fall River liner. Many an inspector has earned
unstinted praise (even from the New York Evening Post) by "clearing New
York of crooks" or having a sort of "round-up" of suspicious characters
whom, after proper identification, he has ejected from the city by the
shortest and quickest possible route. Yet in the case of every person
thus arrested and driven out of the town he has undoubtedly violated
constitutional rights and taken the law into his own hands.
What redress can a penniless tramp secure against a stout inspector of
police able and willing to spend a considerable sum of money in his own
defence, and with the entire force ready and eager to get at the tramp
and put him out of business? He swallows his pride, if he has any, and
ruefully slinks out of town for a period of enforced abstinence from the
joys of metropolitan existence. Yet who shall say that, in spite of the
fact that it is a theoretic outrage upon liberty, this cleaning out of
the city is not highly desirable? One or two comparatively innocent men
may be caught in the ruck, but they generally manage to intimate to the
police that the latter have "got them wrong" and duly make their
escape. The others resume their tramp from city to city, clothed in the
presumption of their innocence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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