A corps of expert photographers, equipped with the latest appliances, is attached to the department, and their services are in constant requisition by the C.I.D. for many purposes other than those of finger-prints. One room is entirely devoted to a powerful lantern apparatus by which every photograph may be thrown up to a hundred times its normal size for the purpose of minute study. This has often proved useful in detecting forgeries as well as aiding the work of the Finger-print Department.
I have said that the primary purpose of the department is not the detection of crime. Nevertheless, it has played no small part in the solution of mysteries where other clues have failed. There was the case of the Stratton brothers, for instance, where the print on a cash-box led to arrest, although other evidence aided the conviction.
Perhaps the most interesting case is that which first focussed the public attention on the value of the system. It occurred in 1898, shortly after the present Commissioner initiated the system in India. He himself tells the story.
The manager of a tea-garden was found murdered, and a safe and despatch-box robbed of several hundred rupees. Suspicion was at first divided among the coolies and cook, the relatives of a woman with whom the dead man had carried on an intrigue, a wandering gang of Kabulis, and an ex-servant whom he had prosecuted for theft--a wide enough field, in all conscience.
But the police were unexpectedly helped in their investigation by the discovery in the despatch-box of a small light-blue book, a calendar in Bengali characters. On the cover were two indistinct smudges. Under a magnifying-glass these proved to be the impressions of a blood-stained finger.
Search was made in the records of the Bengal police, and it was found that the finger-print was that of the right thumb of the ex-servant.
He was arrested some hundreds of miles away, and charged with murder and robbery. On the ground that it would be unsafe to convict him of murder, as no one saw him do it, he was acquitted on that charge, but was convicted of theft.
It would be possible to write largely on cases where finger-prints have afforded culminating proof of a person's guilt. One that has a grim touch of humour may be recalled.
A constable pacing his beat in Clerkenwell noticed a human finger on one of the spikes of the gate of a warehouse. Closer investigation showed that the place had been broken into, and that the marauder had been disturbed and taken to flight in panic. In scaling the gates he had caught the little finger of his right hand on the spikes, and it had been torn away.
It was sent to the Finger-print Department and identified as that of a man well-known to the police, and the word was passed round the C.I.D.
to keep a bright look-out for him. Time went on. The finger, carefully kept in spirits, remained at Scotland Yard.
Then one day a detective arrested a man for picking pockets near the Elephant and Castle. One hand was bandaged, but the prisoner was unwilling to say what was the matter with it. Soon the reason of his reluctance was disclosed.
The Finger-print Department held his missing finger.
But if the Finger-print Department makes it hard for the guilty, it often helps the innocent. Such a case as that of Adolph Beck would now be impossible. There are two criminals alive to-day who are said to be so much alike that the difference can only be told by their finger-prints.
One hears often that the police will bolster each other up when a mistake is made. That is, of course, preposterously false throughout the service. There have been cases where police officers have been prepared, quite honestly, to swear to a man as an old offender, and the department has stepped in in time to prevent the error.
It should be understood that the fact of finger-prints being found at or near the scene of a crime does not mean that they are of any use in solving a mystery, unless facsimiles are in the records--that is to say, a criminal has been convicted before. This rarely happens in the case of murder, for the reason that a murderer is unlikely, in an official sense, to be an habitual criminal. Of course, if a person is suspected and arrested it is easy to compare his finger-prints with those found where the crime was committed.
In the system the human liability to err is almost completely eliminated. A prisoner's prints are registered automatically, and, to prevent any chance of mistake, are examined and checked by a series of officials, each of whom signs the record.
Nor do those engaged in this business have an idle time. Between 70,000 and 80,000 sets of prints are dealt with every year. The following list shows the number of recognitions effected since the system came into being at Scotland Yard. It must, of course, be remembered that they have increased as the number of records has grown:--
1902 1,722 1903 3,642 1904 5,155 1905 6,186 1906 6,776 1907 7,701 1908 9,446 1909 9,960 1910 10,848 1911 10,400 1912 10,677 1913 10,607
That, in itself, is a record which justifies the faith now placed in the system.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SCHOOL OF POLICE.
In the long chain forged for the preservation of law and order in the metropolis the constable is the chief and, in some ways, the most important link. The heads of Scotland Yard have to make it certain that at moments of unexpected strain or heavy stress no link will fail. To that end every candidate for the Metropolitan Force is rigorously tested and prepared, physically, morally, and mentally, before he becomes an accredited member of the service.
For, to vary the simile, the constable is the foundation on which all the rest is built. Every man in grades right up to the superintendent has begun at the bottom of the ladder. You will have seen the constable, placid and unemotional, pacing the streets at the regulation beat of two and a half miles an hour--do you know how much he has to know before he is trusted alone on his duty?
He has to be ready to act decisively and firmly at an instant's notice, to solve on the spur of the moment some intricate problem of public order, to know the law, so that he may arrest a person on one occasion, and let him go on another, to act as guide or consultant to the public, to aid at a fire, or capture a burglar.
He must know everything out of the common that comes in his sphere of duty, enter the particulars fully in his note-book, and be prepared to swear to the accuracy of his notes at any time. It would be easy for a man less carefully selected and trained to make a slip of judgment, to succumb to a temptation.
It would be futile to pretend that there are twenty thousand plaster saints in the Metropolitan Police--there are not. Yet, man for man, in efficiency, in honesty, there is not their equal in the world in any profession.
The Metropolitan Police is a business body, controlled by business men, and run on business methods. But it is a specialist business, and so it has to train its recruits, making sure, first of all, that they are of the right material.
Before Sir Edward Henry's time a candidate had only to fulfil a medical qualification and a test of character, and then, after a few weeks'
drill at Wellington Barracks and a few days' watching the procedure in a police court, he was turned out into the street to get on as best he could. A veteran detective officer told me how he was treated twenty years ago.
"I was pretty raw," he said. "I came straight out of a Bedfordshire village, and was boarded out at a sergeant's house. He put fourteen of us in a back room with a tiny window, and charged us 14s. 9d. a week out of our pay of 15s. The food! I should smile. In case we overdid our eating, meals were never placed on the table until just before we had to parade at Wellington Barracks for drill.
"Then we were sent to the old Worship Street Court. We were glad enough at last to get out on the streets for a breath of air with all our troubles before us. The very first day, I was called on to arrest one of a gang of men in Whitechapel. His friends had knives, and they threatened to 'lay me out' if I touched him. I didn't know whether I was justified, but I drew my truncheon and swore I'd brain the first man who came near me. But I was in a cold sweat all the time. They didn't coddle us in those days."
That was the old system. The wonder is that the police did so well. But now all that is changed. A policeman is prepared for his responsibilities by a thorough course of training, as scientific in its way as that of a doctor, a lawyer, or a school teacher.
Instead of going on his beat redolent of the plough, with a thousand pitfalls before him, the young constable now has a thorough theoretical acquaintance with his duties before ever he dons a helmet. More than that, he has been shrewdly observed for weeks to see whether his temperament is fitted to his calling. If it is not, be he ever so able in other respects, he is of no use as a police officer.
In a big building, hidden away in a back street at Westminster, the embryo policeman learns the first principles of his trade. Peel House, as this school of police is called, was established by the present Commissioner a few years ago, and since then has trained thousands of men.
Always there will be found two or three hundred young men gathered together from the remote corners of the British Isles, being gradually moulded into shape by a corps of instructors under Superintendent Gooding.
They have two characteristics in common--a character without flaw, and a good physique. For the rest, there are all types, with the agricultural labourer predominating--a country-house footman, an Irishman from some tiny village near Kilkenny, a sailor, a clerk, a provincial constable hoping to better himself, and, more raw than the rawest, men from Devonshire, Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland.
It is said that a _good_ Irishman makes the best officer, while perhaps the least teachable is the Londoner. A countryman is fresh clay to the potter's hands, the Londoner has much to unlearn before he can be taught.
While these men are undergoing their training, they are not uncomfortable. Peel House has all the comforts and conveniences of a big hotel and club. Each man has his own cubicle; there are a billiard-room, a library, gymnasium, shooting gallery, scrupulously kept dining-rooms and kitchens, and, for the primary purpose of the school, a number of class-rooms.
Mr. Gooding holds no light responsibility. His duty is to see that no man leaves the school to be attached to a division who is in the faintest degree lacking in all that goes to make an officer of the Metropolitan Police.
Tactful and sympathetic, a shrewd judge of character, able to discriminate between nervousness and stupidity, a disciplinarian, with a gift of lucid exposition, an organiser, and a man with a fixed belief in the honourable nature of his calling. That is Superintendent Gooding, and his characteristics are reflected in his staff.
As the _corps d'elite_ of the police services of the world, the Metropolitan Police is careful in the selection of its men. Before a candidate is admitted to Peel House he must prove that he is of unblemished good character, be over twenty and under twenty-seven years of age, stand at least 5 ft. 9 ins. in his bare feet, and be of a strong constitution, free from any bodily complaint.
Then he is passed on to the school, which will be his home for at least eight weeks--unless before that time he is shown to be obviously unfit for the service. There he will work from nine in the morning till half-past seven at night, learning the thousand and one laws, written and unwritten, that a policeman has to obey. In cold black and white the curriculum, of which even a summary would occupy many thousand words, looks formidable. But so minutely, so lucidly is everything taught that a man of average intelligence finds no difficulty in grasping it.
Every contingency that a constable may have to face, from dealing with insecure cellar flaps to the best method of stopping a runaway horse, to action in cases of riot, and the privileges of Ambassadors is gone into.
Nothing is omitted. And day after day the instructors insist: "Remember, the honour of the service is in your hands; you are to serve, not to harass, the public."
That is dwelt upon and reiterated until it is indelibly impressed upon the memory of the most dull student.
A candidate begins in the fifth class. He is supplied with an official pocket-book and a thin paper-covered book called "Duty Hints" wherein is set forth, carefully indexed, a mass of concise information as to laws, regulations, addresses of hospitals, and so on. Should he ever, when a fully-fledged constable, be in a difficulty he has but to refer to his "Duty Hints" to have his course made clear. It is, in fact, a _precis_ of the "Instruction Book," which deals with everything a police officer should know and be.
He is told the difference between a beat and a fixed point. He is shown how to make a report, and warned of the perils of making erasures or tearing leaves from his pocket-book. The unobtrusive marks to be placed on windows, doors, walls, shutters, and padlocks so that he shall know if they have been disturbed are made clear to him. He is told what to do should there be a sudden death in the street, should the roadway subside, should a street collision occur, should a gas explosion occur, should he be assaulted. He is initiated into the mysteries of the Dogs Act, the Highways Act, the Vagrancy Act, the Aliens Act, the Lottery Act, the Licensing Act, the Larceny Act, the Motor-Car Acts, the Locomotive Acts, the Children's Act, and others.
Nor is he merely crammed with these things. He has to know them, to be able to make a plain report, to answer an unexpected question.