Chapter II

THE POWERS AND THE IMPOTENCE OF THE POLICE.

One of the most pathetic of human fallacies is the assumption that you have only to pass a law in order to extirpate an evil. The touching faith of English-speaking men in the efficacy of statute-made law is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the great cities of the United States. The fact that a statute is only so much good paper inked by a printing-press does not seem to occur to the citizens, even after the repeated demonstrations of its impotence. Nowhere can severer laws be found for the suppression of all manner of vice and crime than in those cities where vice and crime hold high carnival under the patronage of the police. It has been frequently observed that this habit of finding relief for moral indignation by placing a stringent law upon the statute-book is exactly the instinct which leads the private citizen to say “Damn!” There is a great deal of this swearing at large in the passing of rigorous statutes, which are no sooner passed than they appear to be forgotten. Take, for instance, the laws which were passed from time to time to secure the extirpation of vice and crime in the City of New York. They certainly did not err in the direction of leniency. The usual complaint of the police elsewhere is that they are not vested with sufficient power in order to deal with the vicious and criminal classes. This cannot be said with truth of the New York police, as will be seen from the following extract from the proceedings before the Lexow Committee:--

Mr. Moss: We have got a situation here as autocratic as anything than
can be found in St. Petersburg; a law was passed in 1873 for the
purpose of giving the police abundant opportunity to enter such places
for any purpose that they might see fit to enter.

Mr. Goff: Judicial functions have been vested in the Superintendent of
Police, in a policeman of this city, who, on his own motion, can under