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[Illustration: JOSIAH FLYNT.]
NOTES OF AN
ITINERANT
POLICEMAN
By
JOSIAH FLYNT
AUTHOR OF "TRAMPING WITH TRAMPS"
[Illustration]
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
_MDCCCC_
_Copyright, 1900_
BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
INSCRIBED
TO
WILLARD ROPES TRASK
NOTE.
A number of the chapters in this book have appeared as separate papers
in the _Independent_, _Harper's Weekly_, the _Critic_, _Munsey's
Magazine_, and in publications connected with McClure's Syndicate; but
much of the material is new, and all of the articles have been revised
before being republished.
INTRODUCTORY.
For a number of years it had been a wish of mine to have an experience
as a police officer, to come in contact with tramps and criminals, as a
representative of the law. Not that I bore these people any personal
grudge, or desired to carry out any pet policy in dealing with them; but
I had learned to know them pretty intimately as companions in
lodging-houses and at camp-fires, and had observed them rather carefully
as prisoners in jails, and I was anxious to supplement this knowledge of
them with an inquiry in regard to the impression they make on the man
whose business it is to keep an official watch over them while they are
in the open. I desired also to learn more concerning the professional
offender than it had been possible for me to find about him in tramp
life. If one has the courage to go and live with professional criminals
as one of them, he can become even more intimate with them than in a
police force, but it is very difficult to associate with their class
long and not be compelled to take an active part in their criminal
enterprises, and my interest in them was not so great that I was
prepared to do this. I merely wanted to know how strong they are as a
class, in which sections of the country they are the most numerous,
whether they have peculiar characteristics differentiating them in
public thoroughfares from other types of outlaws, how they live, and
what is the general attitude toward them of our police and prison
authorities. Partial answers to these questions I had been able to get
in Hoboland, but I was anxious to fill them out and get any new facts
that would throw light on the general situation.
During the spring and summer of last year (1899) it was possible for me
to have a police officer's experience. The chief of a large railroad
police force gave me a position as a patrolman, and, in company of two
other officers, I was put on a "beat" extending over two thousand miles
of railroad property. The work we were given to do was somewhat of an
innovation, but it afforded me an excellent opportunity to secure the
information I desired. For two months and a half, which was the extent
of my connection with the undertaking and with the force, we had to
travel over the property, protecting picnic trains, big excursions,
passengers travelling to and from towns where circuses were exhibiting,
and the ordinary scheduled traffic, whenever there was reason to believe
that pickpockets and other thieves were likely to put in an appearance.
Early in the spring wandering bands of thieves start out on tours of the
railroads. They follow up circuses and picnics, and make it a point to
attend all big gatherings, such as county fairs, races, conclaves, and
congresses. Their main "graft," or business, is pocket-picking, but in a
well-equipped "mob" there are also burglars, sneak-thieves, and
professional gamblers. The pickpockets and gamblers operate, when they
can, on passenger trains, and they have become so numerous and
troublesome in a number of States that railroad companies are compelled
to furnish their own protection for their patrons.
This protection, on the road for which I worked, has generally been
provided for by the stationary members of the force, and more or less
satisfactorily, but last year the chief wanted to experiment with "a
flying squadron" of officers, so to speak, who were to go all over the
property and assist the stationary men as emergency required, and we
three were chosen for this work. In this way it was possible for me to
come in contact with a large variety of offenders, to make comparisons,
and to see how extensively criminals travel. It was also easy for me to
get an insight into the workings of different police organisations along
the line, and to inspect carefully lock-ups, jails, workhouses and
penitentiaries.
In the following chapters I have tried to give an account of my finding
in the police business, to bring out the facts about the man who makes
his living and keeps up a bank account by professional thieving, to tell
the truth in regard to "the unknown thief" in official life who makes it
possible for the known thief to prey upon the public, and to describe
some of the tramps and out-of-works who wander up and down the country
on the railroads. There is much more to be said concerning these matters
than will be found in this little book, but there are a great many
persons who have no means of finding out anything about any one of them,
and it is to such that my remarks are addressed. Until the general
public takes an interest in making police life cleaner and in
eliminating the professional offender and the dishonest public servant
from the problems which crime in this country brings up for solution,
very little can be accomplished by the police reformer or the
penologist.
CHAPTER I.
WHO CONSTITUTE OUR CRIMINAL CLASSES?
The first duty of a policeman, no matter what kind of a police force he
belongs to, is to inform himself in regard to the people in his
bailiwick who are likely to give him trouble. In a municipal force an
officer can only be required to know thoroughly the situation on his
particular beat; if he can inform himself about other districts as well,
he is so much more valuable to the department, but he is not expected to
do much more than get acquainted with the people under his immediate
surveillance. In a railroad police force it is different, and it is
required of the officer that he study carefully the criminal situation
in all the towns and villages on the division on which he is stationed.
Some divisions are longer than others, but the average railroad
policeman's beat is not less than sixty miles, and in some cases nearly
two hundred. Mine, as I have stated, was over two thousand miles long,
and it took in five different States and nearly all the large cities in
the middle West. I was, consequently, in a position to acquaint myself
pretty thoroughly with the criminal classes in one of the most populous
and representative parts of the country. Offenders differ, of course, in
different localities, and one is not justified in drawing sweeping
conclusions concerning all of them from the study of a single type, but
my work was of such a nature that, in the course of my investigations, I
encountered, indoors and out, the most frequent offenders with whom the
policeman and penologist have to deal. It would take a large book merely
to classify and describe the different types, but there is a general
analysis that can be made without any great sacrifice of fact, and it is
this I desire to attempt in this chapter.
There are six distinct categories of offenders in the United States to
which may be assigned, as they are apprehended and classified, the great
majority of our lawbreakers. They are: the occasional or petty offender,
the tramp, the "backwoods" criminal, the professional criminal, the
"unknown" thief, and what, for want of a better name, I call the
diseased or irresponsible criminal. All of these different types are to
be found on the railroads, and the railroad police officer must know
them when he sees them.
The largest class is that of the petty offenders, and it is in this
category that are found the majority of the criminally inclined
foreigners who have emigrated to our shores. It is a popular notion that
Europe has sent us a great many very desperate evil-doers, and we are
inclined to excuse the increase of crime in the country on the ground
that we have neglected to regulate immigration; but the facts are that
we have ourselves evolved as cruel and cunning criminals as any that
Europe may have foisted upon us, and that the foreigners' offences are
generally of a minor character, and, in a number of instances, the
result of a misunderstanding of the requirements of law in this country,
rather than of wilful evil-doing. I hold no brief for the strangers in
our midst in this connection; it would be very consoling, indeed, to
know that we ourselves are so upright and honest that we are incapable
of committing crimes, and, this being proved, a comparatively easy task
to lessen the amount of crime; but there is no evidence to show that
this is the case. The majority of the men, women, and children that I
found in jails, workhouses, and penitentiaries, on my recent travels,
were born and brought up in this country, and they admitted the fact on
being arrested. If the reader desires more particular information
concerning this question, the annual police reports of our large cities
will be found useful; I have examined a number of them, and they
substantiate my own personal finding. In some communities the
proportion of foreign offenders to the general foreign population is
greater than that of native offenders to the general native population,
but I doubt whether this will be found to be the case throughout the
country; and even where it is, I think there is an explanation to be
given which does not necessarily excuse the crimes committed, but, in my
opinion, does tone down a little the reproach of wilfulness. The average
foreigner who comes to the United States looks upon the journey as an
escape; he is henceforth released, he thinks,--and we ourselves have
often helped to make him think so,--from the stiff rule of law and order
in vogue in his own land. He comes to us ignorant of our laws, and with
but little more appreciation of our institutions than that he fancies he
is for evermore "a free man." In a great many cases he interprets "free"
to mean an independence which would be impossible in any civilised
country, and then begins a series of petty offences against our laws
which land him, from time to time, in the lock-up, and, on occasions,
in jail. Theft is a crime in this country as well as elsewhere, and we
can make no distinction in our courts between the foreigner and native,
but I have known foreigners to pilfer things which they thought they
were justified in taking in this "liberal land;" they considered them
common property. Some never get over the false notions they have of our
customs and institutions, and develop into what may be termed occasional
petty thieves; they steal whenever the opportunity seems favourable. It
is this class of offenders, consisting of both natives and foreigners,
that is found most frequently in our police courts and corrective
institutions.
I have put the tramp next to the occasional offender in numerical
importance, and I believe this to be his place in a general census of
the criminal population, but it is thought by some that his class is the
most numerous of all. Doubtless one of the reasons why he is considered
so strong is that he is to be found in every town and village in the
country. It must be remembered, however, that he is continually in
transit, thanks to the railroads, and is now in one town and to-morrow
in another. In both, however, he is considered by the public to
represent two distinct individuals, and is included in the tramp census
of each community. In this way the same man may figure a dozen times, in
the course of a winter, in the enumeration of a town's vagabonds, but as
a member of the tramp population he can rightfully be counted but once.
It is furthermore to be remarked concerning this class that a great many
wanderers are included in it who are not actual vagabonds. The word
tramp in the United States is made to cover practically every traveller
of the road, and yet there are thousands who have no membership in the
real tramp fraternity. Some are genuine seekers of work, others are
adventuresome youths who pay their way as far as food and lodging are
concerned, and still others are simple gipsy folk. The genuine tramp is
a being by himself, known in this country as the "hobo." The experienced
railroad police officer can pick him out of a general gathering of
roadsters nearly every time, and the man himself is equally expert in
discovering amateur roadsters. I will describe one of the first men I
learned to know in Hoboland; he is typical of the majority of the
successful tramps that I met during my experience as a police officer.
His name was "Whitey,"--St. Louis Whitey,--and I fell in with him on the
railroad, as is the case in almost all hobo acquaintances. He was
sitting on a pile of ties when I first saw him. "On the road, Jack?" he
said, in a hoarse, rasping voice, sizing me up with sharp gray eyes in
that all-embracing glance which hoboes so soon acquire. They judge a man
in this one glimpse as well as most people can in a week's
companionship. I smiled and nodded my head. "Bound West?"
"Yes."
"The through freight comes through here pretty soon. I'm goin' West,
too. This is a good place to catch freights." I sat down beside him on
the ties, and we exchanged comments on the weather, the friendliness of
the railroad we were on, the towns we expected to pass through, some of
the tramps we had met, and other "road" matters, taking mental notes of
each other as we talked. I noticed his voice, how he was dressed, where
he seemed to have been, the kind of tramps he spoke most about, how he
judged whether a town was "good" or not, whether he bragged, and other
little things necessary to know in forming an opinion of all such men;
he observed me from the same view-point. This is the hobo's way of
getting acquainted, of finding out if he can "pal" with a man. There are
no letters of introduction explaining these things; each person must
discover them for himself, and a man is accepted entirely on the
impression that he makes. A few men have great names that serve as
recommendations at "hang-outs," but they must make their friends
entirely on their merits.
Merely as a hobo there was nothing very peculiar about "Whitey." He
looked to be about forty years old, and knew American tramp life in all
its phases. His face was weather-beaten and scarred, and his hands were
tattooed. He dressed fairly well, had read considerably, mainly in
jails, wrote a good hand, knew the rudiments of grammar, and almost
always had money in his pockets. He made no pretensions to be anything
but a hobo, but the average person would hardly have taken him for this.
He might have passed in the street as a sailor, and on railroads he was
often taken for a brakeman. I did not learn his history before becoming
a tramp,--it is not considered good form to ask questions about this
part of a man's life,--but from remarks that he dropped from time to
time I inferred that he had once been a mechanic. He was well informed
about the construction of engines, and could talk with machinists like
one of their own kind. He had been a tramp about eight years when I
first met him, and had learned how to make it pay. He begged for a
thing, if it was possible to be begged, until he got it, and he ate his
three meals a day, "set downs" he called them, as regularly as the time
for them came around. I was with him for two weeks, and he lived during
this time as well as a man does with $1,500 a year. His philosophy
declared that what other people eat and wear he could also eat and wear
if he presented himself at the right moment and in the right way, and he
made it his business to study human nature. While I travelled with him
he begged for everything, from a needle to a suit of clothes, and did
not hesitate to ask a theatre manager for free tickets to a play for
both of us, which he got.
What made him a tramp, an inhabitant of Hoboland, was that he had given
up the last shred of hope of ever amounting to anything in decent
society. Every plan that he made to "get on" pertained exclusively to
his narrow tramp world, and I cannot recall hearing him even envy any
one in a respected position. I tried several times to sound him
concerning a possible return to respectable living, and tentatively
suggested work which I thought he could do, but I might as well have
proposed a flying trip. "It's over with me," was his invariable reply.
His fits of drunkenness--they came, he told me, every six weeks or
so--had incapacitated him for steady employment, and he did not intend
to give any more employers the privilege of discharging him. He had no
particular grudge against society, he admitted that he was his own worst
enemy; but, as it was impossible for him to live in society respectably,
he deemed it not unwise to get all he could out of it as a tramp. "I'm
goin' to hell anyhow," he said, "and I might as well go in style as in
rags." Being considerably younger than he, he once barely suggested that
perhaps I would better try to "brace up," but it was in no sense of the
word an earnest appeal. Indeed, he seemed later to regret the remark,
for it is out of order to make such suggestions to tramps. If they want
to reform, the idea is that they can do it by themselves without any
hints from friends.
As a man, separate from his business, "Whitey" was what most persons
would call a good fellow. He was modest, always willing to do a favour,
and everybody seemed to like him. During our companionship we never had
a quarrel, and he helped me through many a strait. I have seen him once
again since the first meeting. He was not quite so well dressed as
formerly, and his health seemed to be breaking up, but he was the same
good fellow. In late years I have not been able to get news of him
beyond the rumour that he was dying of consumption in Mexico.
The menace of the tramp class to the country seems to me to consist
mainly in the example they set to the casual working man,--the man who
is looking around for an excuse to quit work,--and in the fact that they
frequently recruit their ranks with young boys. It is also to be said of
them that they are often in evidence at strikes, and take part in the
most violent demonstrations. As trespassers on railroads they are
notorious; they are a constant source of trouble to the railroad police
officer. Strictly speaking, the majority of them cannot be called
criminals, although a great many of them are discouraged criminals, but
in the chapter dealing with "The Lake Shore Push" it will be seen how
ferocious some of them become.
The next largest class is composed of what I call backwoods criminals.
Scattered over the country, in nearly every State of the Union, are to
be found districts where people live practically without the pale of the
law. These places are not so frequent in the East as in the West, in the
North as in the South, but they exist in New England as well as in
Western States. They are generally situated far away from any railroad,
and the inhabitants seldom come in touch with the outside world. The
offenders are mainly Americans, but of a degenerated type. They resemble
Americans in looks, and have certain American mental characteristics,
but otherwise they are a deteriorated collection of people who commit
the most heinous offences in the criminal calendar without realising
that they are doing anything reprehensible. I have encountered these
miniature "Whitechapels" mainly on my excursions in tramp life, but I
had to be on the lookout for them during the police experience. In one
of the States which my "beat" traversed, I was told by my chief that
there was a number of such communities, and that they turned out more
criminals to the population in a year than the average large city. One
day, while travelling in a "caboose" with a native of the State in
question, I asked him how it came that it tolerated such nests of crime,
but he was too loyal to admit their existence. "We used to have a lot of
them," he explained, "but we've cleaned them up. You see, when we
discovered natural gas, it boomed everything, and we've been building
railroads and schools all over. No; you won't find those eyesores any
more; we're as moral a State to-day as any in the Union." It was a
pardonable pride that the man took in his State, but he was mistaken
about the matter in question. There are communities not over a hundred
and fifty miles from his own town where serious crimes are committed
every day, and no court ever hears of them because they are not
considered crimes by the people who take part in them. Not that these
people are fundamentally deficient in moral attributes, or unequal to
instruction as to the law of Mine and Thine, but they are so out of
touch with the world that they have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew,
that the things they do are criminal.
It is impossible at present to get trustworthy statistics in regard to
this class, because no one knows all of its haunts, but if it were
possible, and the entire story about it were told, there would be less
hue and cry about the evil that the foreigners among us do. I refer to
the class without advancing any statistics, because it came within my
province as a police officer to keep track of it, and because it had
attracted my attention as an observer of tramp life; but it is well
worth the serious consideration of the criminologist.
The professional criminal, or the habitual offender, as he is called by
some, comes next in numerical strength, but first of all, in my opinion,
in importance. I consider him the most important because he frankly
admits that he makes a business of crime, and is prepared to suffer any
consequences that his offences may bring upon him. It is he who makes
crime a constant temptation to the occasional offender, and it is also
he with whom we have the most trouble in our criminal courts; he is
almost as hard to convict as the man with "political influence." On my
"beat" he was more in evidence, in the open at least, than any of the
other offenders mentioned, except the tramp, but, as I stated, the warm
months are the time when he comes out of his hiding-places, and it was
natural that I should see a good deal of him.
My fifth category is made up of what a friend calls "the unknown thief,"
whom he considers the most dangerous and despicable of all. He means, by
the unknown thief, the man in official life, or in any position which
permits of it, who protects, for the sake of compensation, the known
thief. "If you will catch the unknown thief," he has frequently said to
me, "I will contract to apprehend and convict the known," and he
believes that until we make a crusade against the former, the latter is
bound to flourish in spite of all our efforts. He sees no use, for
instance, in spending weeks and sometimes months in trying to capture
some well-known criminal, as long as it is possible for the man to buy
his freedom back again, and it is his firm belief that this kind of
bargaining is going on every day.
Although there was no doubt that the unknown thief was to be located on
any "beat," if looked for, my instructions were not to disturb him
unless he seriously disturbed me, and as he made no effort to interfere
with my work I merely made a note of his case when we met, and doubtless
he also "sized me up" from his point of view. How strong his class is,
compared with the others, must remain a matter of conjecture, but I have
put his class fourth in my description because it is the quality of his
offences, rather than their quantity, which makes his presence in the
criminal world so significant. There are those who believe that he is
to be found in every town and village in the United States, if enough
money is offered him as bait, but I have not sufficient data to prove,
or to make me believe, such a statement. The league between him and the
known thief--the man whose photograph is in the "rogue's gallery"--is so
close, however, that I have devoted special chapters to both offenders.
Of the last category, the man whom I have called the irresponsible
criminal, there is not much of interest or value that I have to report.
While acting as police officer I practically never encountered him in
the open, and the few members of his class that I saw in prisons seemed
to me to have become irresponsible largely during their imprisonment.
Perhaps I take a wrong view of the matter, but I cannot get over the
belief that the majority of offenders, particularly those who are ranked
as "professionals," are _compos mentis_ as far as the law need require.
In every department of the prisons that I visited, men were to be seen
who gave the impression of being at least queer, but they formed but a
very small part of the prison population, and may very possibly have
been shamming the eccentricities which seemed to indicate that they were
on the border line of insanity. For this reason, and, as I say, because
I met none in the open, it has seemed fair to put this class last.
The foregoing classification is naturally not meant as a scientific
description in the sense that the professional criminologist would take
up the matter. I have merely tried to explain how the criminal situation
in the United States seems to the man whose business it is to keep an
official watch over it. I may have overlooked, in my classification,
offenders that some of my brother officers would have included, but it
stands for the general impression I got of the criminal world while in
their company. To attempt to estimate the numerical strength of these
classes as a whole would land one in a bewildering bog of guesses. It is
only recently that we have made any serious effort to keep a record of
offenders shut up in penal institutions, of crimes which have been
detected and of offenders who have been punished, and it is a fact well
known in police circles that there is a great deal of crime which is
never ferreted out. There is consequently very little use in trying to
calculate the number of the entire criminal population. The most that I
can say in regard to the question is that never before has this
population seemed to me to be so large, but I ought to admit that not
until my recent experience have I had such an advantageous point of view
from which to make observations.