Crime in New York

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 6, 1866

Crime in New York.

WHEN speaking of the annual report of the Metropolitan Police Commissioners in New York City, the editor of the Daily Herald, Jan. 6th, 1866, says:—

“Although prepared for an unusually extensive budget of criminal statistics, we confess that we are astonished and startled at many of the revelations contained in the document. It appears that the number of arrests for offences of all grades, amounted to the enormous number of sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and seventy-three, or about fourteen thousand more than the previous year. Crimes of violence toward the person have increased in a still greater ratio, the total number being nine hundred and ninety-five, against six hundred and twenty-four in 1864. . . .

The report shows that there are twelve hundred “daughters of perdition” in the concert saloons, and that there exists in this city and Brooklyn the fearful number of ten thousand places where intoxicating drinks are sold, over eight thousand of which are unlicensed. The License law and the Excise law are nearly inoperative. . . . Bad and dangerous as the tenement houses are for habitations, it appears there are others which are worse. In one precinct there are sixty places, or dens, where the wretched poor, the criminals and depraved resort to lodge, paying from ten to fifteen cents per night for miserable accommodations. These places are chiefly in cellars, with naked stone or brick walls, damp and decayed floors, without beds or bedding fit for human beings. These dens are filthy beyond description, overflowing with vermin and infested by rats. In these hideous places are packed nightly an average of six hundred persons—men, women and children—white and black sleeping promiscuously together, without regard to family relation, and exhibiting less of the impulses of decency than the brute creation. They consist of drunken wretches, male and female beggars, rag-pickers of the poorer sort, sneak thieves, juvenile pimps, ragged and drunken prostitutes, and others of the same vile class.

In the course of this revolting record of crime, vice and immorality, we observe the statement that certain laws and ordinances are not enforced because the justices are dependent for their places upon the very offenders they are called upon to punish.”