A NEW CAREER FOR YOUNG MEN.
Up till the present time the police business in the United States has
remained almost exclusively in the hands of a particular class. From
Maine to California one finds practically the same type of man
patrolling a beat, and there is not much difference among the superior
officers of police forces. They all have about the same conceptions of
morality, honesty, and good citizenship, and they differ very little in
their notions of police policy and methods. The thing to do, the
majority of them think, is to keep a city superficially clean, and to
keep everything quiet that is likely to arouse the public to an
investigation. Nearly all are politicians in one form or another, and
they feel that the security of their positions depends on the turn that
politics may take. If they have a strict chief, one who tries to be
honest according to his best light, they are more on their good
behaviour than when governed by an easy-going man, but even under such
circumstances there may be found, in large forces, a great deal of
concealed disobedience. Their main friends and acquaintances are
saloon-keepers, professional politicians, and employees in other
departments of the municipal government. In small towns they mix with
the citizens more than in large cities, but the best of them acquire in
time a caste feeling which impels them to find companionship mainly
among their own kind. Not all are dishonest or lazy, but the majority
have a code of honour suggested by their life and business. Once in the
life, and accustomed to its requirements, it is very difficult for them
to change to another. They have learned how to arrest men, to make
reports, to keep their eyes open or shut according to necessity, to rest
when standing on their feet, and to appreciate the benefits of a
regularly drawn salary, and their intelligence and general training
correspond with such an existence. A few develop extraordinary ability
in ferreting out crime, and become successful detectives, and others
keep their records sufficiently clean, or secure enough "pull," to rise
to superior posts, and in certain cases these exceptional men would fit
into exemplary police organisations. As a general thing, however, they
are men who would have received much less responsible positions in other
walks of life. This is as true of the commanding officers as of the
patrolmen. The captain of a precinct is frequently as poorly educated as
the patrolman serving under him, and his gold braid and brass buttons
are all that really differentiate him from the men he orders about. The
chief, in some instances, is a man of demonstrated ability, but there
are chiefs and chiefs, and the way their selection is managed it is
largely a matter of luck whether a town gets a good or bad one.
Occasionally the citizens of a town will become indignant, and remove
from office a disreputable chief, choosing in his place some highly
respected citizen who has consented to take the position on a "reform
platform" and for awhile the town has a man at the head of its police
force who is accepted as an equal in society and is recognised as an
influential man in municipal affairs, but before long the professional
politicians get hold of the reins of government again, things get back
into the old rut, and the conventional chief returns.
It is this precariousness of the life, and the slavery to politicians,
that have probably deterred educated young men from making police work
their life business. They have seen no chance of holding prominent
police positions long, and they have possibly dreaded the companionship
which a policeman's life seems to presuppose. The young man just out of
college and casting about for a foothold in the world practically never
includes the police career in the number of life activities from which
he must make a choice. It is the law, medicine, journalism, or
railroading which generally attracts him, and he leaves unconsidered
one of the most useful callings in the world. There are few men who are
given more responsible positions, and who have better opportunities of
doing something worth while, than the police officer, and I think that I
ought to add, the prison official. In Germany this fact is recognised,
and men train for police and prison work as deliberately and diligently
as for any other profession; in this country very little training is
done, and the result is that comparatively inferior men get the
important posts, and our cities are not taken care of as they ought to
be, and could be.
There is nothing sufficiently promising as yet in the state of public
opinion to justify one in saying that the time is particularly opportune
for young men to begin to consider the police career as a possible
calling, but I doubt whether there ever will be until the young men take
the matter into their own hands and give public notice of their
determination to enter the profession. Numerous obstacles will be put in
their way, and hundreds will get discouraged, but for those who
"stick," a great career will open up. The beginners must necessarily be
the pioneers and fight the brunt of the battle, but, the battle once
fought, there will be some positions of splendid opportunity.
For the benefit of those who may care to consider seriously the
possibilities of the career, it will not be inappropriate, perhaps, to
describe the kind of men they may expect to have to associate with while
going through their apprenticeship, to explain some of the difficulties
that will be encountered, and to make a few suggestions in regard to the
training necessary for a successful performance of duty. I can write of
these matters only as a beginner, but it is the would-be beginner that I
desire to reach.
In all police organisations supported by cities there are two distinct
kinds of officers, the uniformed men and the detectives. Among these the
beginner will have to pick out his friends, and until he knows well the
work of both classes of men he will be in a quandary as to which he
desires to ally himself with. There are things in the detective's life
which make it more attractive to some men than the policeman's, and
_vice versa_. The two officers have different attitudes toward the
criminal world, and the beginner will probably be decided in his choice
according to the impression the different attitudes make upon him. The
uniformed officer, or "Flatty," as he is called in the thief's jargon,
if he remains upright and honest, arrests a successful professional
criminal with the same _sang-froid_ and objectivity that are
characteristic of him when arresting a "disorderly drunk." It is a
perfunctory act with him; the offender must be shut up, no matter who he
is, and he is the party paid to do it.
The officer in citizen's clothes, the "Elbow," is a different kind of
man. He realises as well as the "Flatty" that it is his business to try
to protect the community which employs him, but he handles a prisoner,
especially if the latter is a nicely dressed and well known thief, in a
different way from the ostentatious manner of arrest characteristic of
the ordinary policeman. It almost seems sometimes as if he were showing
deference to his prisoner, and the two walk along together like two old
acquaintances. The fact of the matter is that a truly successful
professional thief is a very interesting man to meet, and he is all the
more interesting to the officer if he has been able to catch him
unawares and without much trouble. Realising what a big man he has
got,--and thieves themselves have no better opinion of their ability
than that which the detective has of it,--he likes to ask him about
other big men, to get "wise," as the expression is. If it has been a
hard chase, he also likes to go over the details of it, and find out who
has doubled the most on his tracks. In time, if he keeps steadily at the
business and learns to know a number of what are called "good guns"
(clever thieves), he develops into a recognised successful
thief-catcher; but he has spent so much of his time in fraternising with
"guns," in order to learn from them, that he comes to think that his
moral responsibility is over after he has located them. Technically, I
suppose this is true; it is his business to catch, and the State must
prosecute and convict. The point I would bring out, however, is that he
is inclined to be lenient with his prisoner. To him the struggle has
been merely one of intelligence and shrewdness; he has had to be quick
and alert in capturing the "gun," and the latter has exercised all of
his ingenuity in trying to escape. Moral issues have not been at stake;
the thief has not stolen from the officer, and why should the latter not
be friendly when they meet?
In defence of this attitude toward crime it may be said that criminals
are much more tractable in the custody of an officer of the kind under
consideration than when arrested by some blustering "Flatty," who shows
them up in the street as they walk along, and it is natural for a
detective to try to do his work with as little friction as possible. The
question, however, that I was continually putting to myself as a
beginner in the business was, whether I should not eventually drift
into a very easy-going policeman if I learned to look upon the thief
merely as a whetstone, so to speak, on which my wits were to be
sharpened. It seemed to me that to do my full duty it was necessary to
have moral ballast as well as shrewd intelligence, really to believe in
law, and that lawbreakers must be punished. I would not have it
understood that there are no police officers who keep hold of this
point, but I am compelled to say that the detective--and he is the man
to whom we shall have to go before professional crime in this country
can be seriously dealt with--is too much inclined to overlook it.
The beginner in the profession must take sides, one way or another, in
regard to this kind of officer, and as he chooses for him or against him
he will find himself in favour or not with the class--and it is a large
one--to which the man belongs. It is unpleasant to have to begin one's
career by immediately antagonising a number of daily companions, and a
series of exasperating experiences follow such a policy, but in the
case in question I believe it will be found best to nail up one's
colours instanter and never to take them down. The officer who does this
gets the reputation of being at least consistent even among his enemies,
and he is also relieved of being continually approached by criminals
with bribes.
Once started on his course, and his policy defined, the worst difficulty
that he will encounter for a number of months will be a reluctance,
natural to all beginners, to make an arrest. It seems easy enough to
walk up to a man, put a hand lightly on his shoulder, and say: "You're
my prisoner," but one never realises how hard it is until he tries it.
During my experience I had no occasion to make an arrest single-handed,
but it did fall to my lot to have a prisoner beg and beseech me to let
him go after he had been turned over to my care, and to the beginner
this is the hardest appeal to withstand. The majority of persons
arrested are justly taken into custody, and the bulk of the "hard luck"
stories they tell are fabrications, but it takes a man who has been
years in the service to listen to some of their tales of woe without
wincing.
This squeamishness conquered, the beginner will have to be careful not
to become hard and pessimistic. There is a good deal to be said in
excuse of a police officer who develops these traits of character,--the
life he leads is itself often hard,--but if they dominate his nature he
learns to look upon the world in general merely as a great collection of
human beings, any one of whom he may have to arrest some day. He sees so
much that is "crooked" that he is in danger of thinking that he sees
crime and thieves wherever he turns, and unless he is very cautious he
will drift into a philosophy which permits him to be "crooked" also,
because, as he thinks, everybody else is.
If the beginner has lived in a society where courtesies and kindnesses,
rather than insults and scoldings, have prevailed, he will also find it
hard for awhile to appreciate the fact that a police officer is a
peacemaker, and not an avenger. Wherever he goes, and no matter what he
does, he is a target for the nasty slings of rowdies and a favourite
victim of the "roastings" of thieves. In tramp life I have had to take
my share of insults, and until I experimented with the police business I
thought that as mean things had been said to me as a man ought to stand
in an ordinary lifetime, but on no tramp trip have I been berated by
criminals as severely as during my recent experience as a railroad
police officer, and yet it was my duty not to answer back if a quarrel
was in sight.
Not all, however, in the policeman's life is exasperating and
discouraging. But few men have so many opportunities of doing good, and
of keeping track of people in whom they have taken an interest. Nothing
has pleased me more in my relations with the outcast world than the
chance I had as a railroad patrolman to help in sending home a penitent
runaway boy. He had left Chicago on the "blind baggage" of a passenger
train to get away from a tyrannical stepfather, and he fell into our
hands as a trespasser and vagrant several hundred miles from his
starting-point. It was a pitiful case with which no officer likes to
deal according to the requirements of the law, but we had to arrest him
to rescue him from the local officers of the town where he had been
apprehended; if he had been turned over to them the probability is that
he would have been put on the stone-pile with the hardened tramps, and
when released would have drifted into tramp life. We took him to
headquarters on the train, and the general manager of the railroad gave
him a pass home, where he has remained, sending me a number of weekly
accounts about himself. I report the incident both to show the
opportunities in a policeman's life, and to give a railroad company
credit for a kind deed which has probably preserved for the country a
bright lad who would otherwise have been an expense and trouble to it as
a vagabond and criminal.
A word, before closing this chapter, in regard to how a young man,
desirous of following the police career, can best get a start. I chose a
railroad police force for my preliminary experience, and I would
recommend a similar choice to other beginners if the opportunity is
favourable. As long as a man does his work well in a railroad police
organisation he is not likely to be disturbed, but under existing
conditions the same cannot be said of a municipal force. A railroad
officer also has the advantage of being able to travel extensively and
to acquaint himself with different communities. If he can rise to the
top there is no reason, so far as I can see, why he should not be an
eligible candidate for the superintendency of a municipal police force.
The chief that I had, if he were able to gather the right men about him,
could protect a large city as successfully as he now protects a big
railroad system. If it is impossible for a would-be beginner to find
lodgment in any police force at the start, my suggestion is that he
experiment with the work of a police reporter on a newspaper. It is
difficult at present for a police reporter to tell all that he learns,
and it is to be hoped that he will some day be able to give the readers
of his paper full accounts of his investigations; but the young man who
is training for police work can make the reporter's position, in spite
of its present discouraging limitations, a stepping-stone to a position
in a police organisation. It helps him to get "wise," as the detective
says, and it is when he has become "wise" in the full sense of the word
that he is most valuable in the police business.
A guard's position in a penitentiary makes a man acquainted with a great
many criminals, and is helpful in teaching one in regard to the
efficiency of different kinds of punishment. It is, perhaps, to be
recommended to the beginner as the next best position to try for, if,
after the reporter experience, there is still no opening in a police
force. The beginner may not be sure whether he desires to become a
police officer or to take part in the management of a prison, and the
guard's post helps him to come to a decision.
All three of the recommended preparatory positions will be found useful,
if the young man has the patience and time to go through the drudgery
which they involve, and he will find that when he finally succeeds in
getting into a large police force he has a great advantage over men who
have not had his thorough training.