Maybe this is New York

STANLEY WALKER

A timely review of Commissioner Mulrooney's epic of life and death: the annual New York City police report

ANNUAL REPORT, By Edward P. Mulrooney, Published by the Police Department of the City of New York, Illustrated with handsome photographs, 221 pages.

Here is a hook which has everything! Part novel, part anthology, part treatise on sociology, it suggests Zola, Gorky, Hemingway and the Sears-Roebuck Catalogue. The action takes place in the New York of 1930—a fabulous town and, to those who can remember it, one hell of a year.

One might suppose that this monumental work would be too closely circumscribed by time and place. Not at all. It runs the gamut. Across its cold, terse, heartbreaking pages march the thousands of New Yorkers, and a few visitors, who in one way or another have bumped up against a member of the police force which has come to be known and honored as "The Finest."

Contemporary in all its material, the Report deals with ageless passions; it discusses the wages of sin, which are sometimes death but oftener a suspended sentence; it charts with hard and nervous lines the ebb and flow of the tides of human depravity.

Mr. Mulrooney ("Mul" to his friends) is to be congratulated on turning out a "first book" of such tremendous power, such consummate mastery of situation, such admirable and telling restraint, such gorgeous patterning of detail, such eloquent appeal to the idealism of the race, and such sureness of touch in depicting the quaint customs and outrageous skullduggery of his time.

Annual Report is a difficult volume to classify. Essentially it pretends to be a dispassionate study of the attempts of the cops to keep everything in New York on the up and up—a duty which ranges from arresting axe-murderers to helping crippled old ladies across the street. It is not quite a novel, because the author has created a story without a plot; and he drops his characters suddenly just when they have begun to be interesting.

That is part of his charm. There is little in the way of an underlying philosophy permeating the book. It has the strength and the weakness of something which might be called How a Great City Behaves, and which might have been written by Theodore Dreiser in collaboration with a public accountant.

Mulrooney is no preacher; the reader must pore over many lists of figures, pages of charts of trends, to find out just what he is driving at. He does no ranting, but his findings on the state of civilization in the largest city in America are appalling in their sweep and in their disturbing implications.

It is apparent, for example, that gangsters are not relatively the sinister menace which the press has made them out to be. They are responsible for many killings, but theirs is not the main blame for the increase in bumping-offs. The fault (here Mulrooney has put his finger on something which many thoughtful men have suspected but have never dared suggest) lies with those two hallowed and kindred institutions, love and the family. Gangster disputes were charged with only forty-six homicides in 1930, but "family or love" get credit for 107, or 23 per cent of the total killings in the city.

These figures show with unmistakable clarity that the sociologists, the penologists and the reformers have been yodeling up the wrong canyon. The armed racketeer, the mobster and the gun-moll are less than half as dangerous as the family man or the manor woman in the throes of a passion. Obviously what the city needs, and what the crime prevention experts should attempt to do, is to stamp out the crime passionnel. Let a boy join a gang, if he must, or let him carry a gun or be a henchman of a prominent racketeer; but keep him away from family entanglements and don't let him fall in love. The Police Department, far more than it needs a vice squad, a Broadway squad or a bomb squad, needs a squad which will put down the manifestations of that tender and homicidal passion, that fickle thing called love.

Moreover, it is a sobering thought that as we go further along in the machine age, killings are carried out more efficiently. Until last year Chicago's citizens dispatched each other in more business-like fashion, but in New York, for whatever reason, many attempted slayings failed to come off, or were sadly messed up. Savants give two reasons for New York's backwardness in competent homicide: (1) many of those marked for death, such as "Legs" Diamond, are immune to bullets, and one might spray them all day long and get nothing for one's pains except a calloused trigger finger; (2) the Perpendicular Theory of Murder as opposed to the Horizontal—that is, New York has so many tall skyscrapers that assassins are stumped when they seek to persuade an intended victim to come down and go for a ride. Even if they did get him out of the building, they couldn't very well take him for a ride because of traffic congestion; the best the killers could hope for was that he would die of natural causes, waiting for the red lights to change.

Well, there has been a change for the better. Although all crimes of violence (cutting, biting, kicking in the face, etc.) have decreased four per cent, murders and manslaughters have increased eighteen per cent. This means either that the Chicago experts have moved into New York or that the New Yorker is wielding the gat, the knife and hatchet with much more precision than ever before. The trend is a heartening one, for the ineptitude of New Yorkers at murder was getting a little bit embarrassing. One minor factor in the improvement, it may be, lies in Mr. Mulrooney's statement that he has found the proprietors of shooting galleries eager to cooperate with the police in keeping out children. With the kiddies shooed away from the targets, more room is left for adults, who do most of the murders, to improve their marksmanship. Thus the New Yorker becomes steadily more and more of a straight shooter; instead of missing his man, or merely winging him, he now gives him the works.

The problems raised by the big buildings also have been partly solved. As late as 1929, when five arrests for such crimes were made, it was considered feasible to kill a man by burning him or throwing a bomb at him. The practice, noisy and disorderly at best, was discontinued in 1930, and there was substituted for it the method of throwing people out of windows—a sport for which New York is the most beautifully equipped of all cities. Four such cases were reported in 1930. With improvements in technique, the future of window-tossing as a form of murder is unlimited; if developed along sound lines, it will make machine-gunning as obsolete as cyanide and coffee. Moreover, it will be spectacular enough to attract new talent, and provide a lot of fun.

No one must get the impression that Mr. Mulrooney is too drearily pre-occupied with the study of murder. Far from it. He is interested in man from the cradle to the crematory; he is fascinated by the feel and tempo of the city, the surge and pull of conflicting emotions and the clash of races in cosmopolitan New York. The city as he has found it is, in many respects, remarkably clean. There were, for example, no arrests in 1930 for anarchy, treason, horse-poisoning, for violating the state anti-loafing law or for stealing baby carriages. There also appears to be a wholesome tendency for the New Yorker to get a room of his own; only 73 men were arrested in 1930 for living in houses of prostitution, as against 114 in 1929.

What is happening to the New York woman? It is here that Mr. Mulrooney is at his best, giving us a portrait of a fantastic, cockeyed female, a loud-mouthed virago, which is at the same time convincing and perplexing. Without overdoing either whimsy or invective, he tells us that although intoxication and disorderly conduct in men showed a decrease in 1930 from the previous year, 253 women were arrested on this charge in 1930 as against only 227 in 1929.

Continued on page 86

Continued from page 34

Even on charges of plain intoxication (nothing disorderly about it) women held their own pretty well, while the men sobered up considerably, 4832 in 1930 to 6167 in 1929. One woman stole a bicycle in 1930, whereas nothing of the sort happened in 1929.

About the only good thing that Mr. Mulrooney has to say about the New York woman is to point out in his dry way, without comment, that she won't steal horses and wagons. Women, it seems, are not content to raise hell with a man's emotions, boosting the homicide rate, but they insist on drinking all the liquor as well. Mulrooney has no cure to suggest; nobody has. But his findings are not to be laughed off as the fulminations of an anti-feminist; when he says that 120 women were arrested for profanity and 19 for making unnecessary noise, you can be sure he knows what he is talking about.

The bitterest passage of all, however, is that in which Mr. Mulrooney finds the real villain and goes at him with lefts and rights, hammer and tong. Contrary to popular impression, which has somehow regarded the youth of from seventeen to around twentythree as the most dangerous citizen, the blackest New Yorker, by all odds, is in the age-group of from 26 to 30 years. Anyone who thought a man was getting ready to settle down and behave when he was 25 years old was mistaken; that is when the pulses leap and your man starts a five-year orgy.

The carryings-on of the age-group of from 26 to 30, inclusive, are so shocking that one wonders if it would not be a good idea to incarcerate all men during that period, when they are incurably anti-social. What revolting people Mulrooney makes them out to be! They lead all other ages in so many varieties of crime that it staggers the imagination. They are far ahead of all the others in homicides by shooting, felonious assault, making unnecessary noises, violating the Sullivan law (against possession of weapons), crap-shooting, flouting the unmuzzled dog ordinances, and expectorating in public places. They are, indeed, only one behind (291 to 292) the 36-40 age group in that foolish misdeed of the middle years, smoking in the subway.

What is the explanation? Mr. Mulrooney, who is not a soothsayer, but only the teller of an unadorned narrative, has none to offer. And yet, recalling what he said about women, isn't it possible that he means to imply that the young New Yorker, who is married before he is 26, realizes at that age the enormity and the hopelessness of the problem he has embraced, and, as a means of escape from a wasteful and gin-drinking vixen, oils Old Betsy, gets out his dice, his brass knuckles and his unmuzzled dog and simply runs wild? For five years the fire rages, and then, tired and washed out, he comes back to whatever home he has, and from then on until the grave, his offenses against the laws of society are fewer and fewer. Time, the Great Heel, bleaches the soul.

At the age of forty, Mr. Mulrooney points out, a man has rid himself of whatever urge he may have had to steal horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Also, no man over forty was arrested in 1930 for maiming anyone. It is well known that the maiming instinct lasts a long time, but the natural good sense of the New Yorker of forty tells him it is in bad taste. Men past sixty are the purest of all. If we may ignore a few old scoundrels who have been arrested for elfin misdemeanors, which probably were caused more by absent-mindedness than by viciousness, this age group is far superior to any other in town. Only six of them were arrested for smoking in the subway. And it cannot be said that any man past sixty was arrested in New York in 1930 for "soliciting," abduction, breaking windows, or living in a brothel.

Charming as these law-abiding valetudinarians may be, Mr. Mulrooney does not fawn on them too much. Some of the best parts of his book deal with the children. In the Kiddie Korner he tells of the many outings up the Hudson which the police arranged for mothers and children. The idea back of these excursions is to convince the little one that the cop is his friend, not his persecutor, so that he won't grow up into a nixie (slang for cop-fighter). If the scheme succeeds, the cop of tomorrow will be spared a lot of punishment.

The Bureau of Crime Prevention, to which Mr. Mulrooney has devoted much attention, dealt with 5,215 cases during the year. This bureau takes the problem child ("Goddamed Little Hyena"), who is showing signs of being a potential yegg, gunman, badger-game impresario, floating crapshooter, creep-game specialist or throat-slitter, and turns his boundless energy into modelling with clay or playing handball.

Mr. Mulrooney is peculiarly effective in his sudden flashes of humor and pathos. In his description of relief work, he points out that gloves were distributed to 62 men in the Borough of Manhattan, 46 in Brooklyn, 98 in Queens and only five in the Bronx. The author lives in the Bronx. Pistol permits were issued to 34,658 persons and 212 masque balls were approved, while only 397 religious permits were issued. The nameless dead numbered 979, and out of that total 840 finally were identified; the rest sleep in potter's field. The city is quieter since traffic policemen were ordered to stop blowing their whistles. Courtesy is on the upgrade; 27,449 letters were sent out asking motorists to be good. People may be getting brighter; in 1930, reversing the old figures, more persons stole horses drawing loaded wagons than horses drawing empty wagons.

The picture is of a city of constant change and unpredictable moods—a New York armed to the teeth, which is deadlier, quieter, more gentlemanly, with more well-mannered policemen and more bibulous women, than ever before in its history. The most obscqpe, glorious and in some ways the most corrupt city in America, it had no inhabitant in the whole year who was arrested for cruelty to family or selling liquor to a child.