Harper's Weekly - August, 1890

POLICE MATRONS
It is a shame to the city that the Police Board should hesitate in appointing matrons at the police stations. We believe that it is owing to Governor Hill that the law authorizing the appointments was made permissive instead of madatory. But it is hard to understand what good reason could have influenced the Executive judgement to such a conclusion. Mrs. Lowell, late Commissioner of Charities, has recently written to the Board of Police, referring to the appeal made to them by a body of most estimable women some months since to make the appointments an appeal based upon the ground that common decency demanded that drunken and degraded women should be removed from the sight and hearing of the men and boys who are held at the station houses.

That consideration alone was enough, but experience revealed another reason which is even more powerful. As Mrs. Lowell now says: "Within two months, however, one of your officers has pleaded guilty, and been sentenced to imprisonment for attempted assault on a girl of 15 while under the protection of your board in one of your station houses." She adds that as the board has had for two years the power to protect such girls by placing them under the care of matrons, it is not unjust to hold responsible for the fearful wrong done to this young girl, as well as for the ruin of the life of the officer who was placed in a position that offered temptations which he could not resist.

Nothing can deepen the force of such an argument. The most innocent women, from sudden illness or other causes, may be at any moment brought to the station houses. Humanity, civilization, common decency, demand that they shall not needlessly be exposed to frightful outrage; nor less shall they require that the same protection be extended to other women, however degraded, in order that the station houses shall not become, in ways which are entirely avoidable, dens and schools of vice.