Look to the Cause

Since crime prevention is the principal police function an effort should be made to thoroughly inform ourselves regarding the causes of delinquency before we can hope to reduce the number of crimes and criminals. Merely arresting offenders and sending them to jail is a useless expenditure of time, energy and money. We must begin farther up the stream to accomplish our purpose. Human beings are not exempt from biological laws, and the increase in insanity, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, prostitution, criminality and other forms of degeneracy suggest a polluted blood stream. Extreme measures may be necessary to prevent further pollution. Otherwise the Jukes, Kallikaks and Namms will preponderate and furnish fertile soil for national decadence.

Criminologists believe that crime prevention should begin with the child. Children with habitually bad imaginary trends, those of irregular habits, neurotic children, and even the superior child may develop criminalistic tendencies, and excessive mental or emotional strains during the formative period may result disastrously to the child in after years. Some children are born defective and have only a partial capacity to adjust themselves to a normal environment. These are doomed to failure, but there are others of normal capacity whose behavior fails to conform with accepted standards where the single factor responsible for their deliquency is a demoralizing environmental condition. A nagging parent, lack of opportunity for self-expression, unwise repressive measures, absence of companionship between the child and parents, immoral or defective home conditions may contribute to the child's waywardness. Even gifted children have found expression in many forms of vice, and because of their disgust with traditional home and school methods have resorted to crime.

Environment Counts

From the foregoing it is clear, that the police efforts to prevent delinquency are hopeless without aid from the home, school and behavior clinics. To prevent potential delinquents from becoming habitual offenders, much depends upon our ability to change their surroundings and provide opportunities to create new interests for the child. When they are young and plastic in their attitudes, dispositions, tastes, sentiments, habits, conscience, ideals and virtues may be formed. After they grow older this is more difficult to manage and often, especially by the time they reach the Police Department, they have gone beyond redemption. Society habitually forgets that delinquency is its own product. This lack of forethought by the public in dealing with delinquency is obvious to every student of behavior. We continue to deal with the problem at the wrong end, and as indicated by national census statistics, our accomplishments are nil.

Child welfare clinics should be established in sufficient numbers to care for the problem. In these clinics specialists in human behavior would protect the children from future failures and furnish helpful information to parents. They serve as a crime preventive agency by giving advice to and extending and coordinating the activities of existing agencies including the school, health center, welfare bureau, day nursery, nursing unit and police, recreation and health departments. The anxious parents would here receive advice regarding not only the limitations but the possibilities of their offspring and would also receive scientific direction in their efforts to rear law-abiding and useful citizens.

The potentiality of a child clinic would be limitless if the personnel were carefully selected. It would place in the hands of the police facts and not fancies regarding juvenile delinquency and afford them an opportunity to center upon any individual problem all of the character-building forces in the community, supported by the power of the state. Here in the field of pre-delinquency is the golden opportunity for the women of this land to do more constructive work for the betterment of humankind than in any other line of endeavor. Delinquency is based upon mental, physical and moral defects and the sooner these defects are recognized and corrected the better it will be for the child and community. Here in this undeveloped branch of police service we may hope for larger returns than in any other for the amount of energy expended, and may I add that inherent qualities possessed by women only peculiarly fit them for service among the pre-delinquents. Obviously, in addition to native endowments, which by the way must include personal charm, the policewoman, in order that she may function efficiently, should have adequate training. An untrained worker may do more harm than good in many cases, for be it remembered that the human mind is a very delicate piece of machinery and irreparable injury may be done to the child by an ignorant tinkerer who attempts to make adjustment without scientific preparation. But the policewoman, who is trained for the profession, can render invaluable service by correcting bad habits, changing the disposition when this is necessary, developing the right sort of attitudes, cultivating wholesome tastes, strengthening the conscience, and inculcating personal, social and religious ideals, creating desirable virtues and sentiments.

In the Front Line

Let us hasten the day when the policewoman shall be placed on the front line of police intrenchments in the battle against vice and crime as an active industrial, social and child welfare worker; the police representative to whom parents may appeal for assistance in guiding their problem, children; enemy and eradicator of vice and crime, friendly counselor of the needy, teacher of morals, policeman's strongest ally and defender and foremost among the character builders in the community.