CRIME: Muss ‘Em Up

On a platform in Manhattan one day last week, under glaring spotlights, stood Harry Strauss registering easy contempt. His eyes were slits in a sallow, freshly-shaved face. His nails were well manicured, his thick, black hair sleekly pomaded. Over a blue suit pressed razor-smooth, with blue shirt and tie to match, he wore a Chesterfield overcoat with vel vet collar. His pearl-grey fedora rode jauntily above a sneering smile.

A cinema director might have applauded so accomplished a representation of suave villainy. But New York’s Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine is no cinema director and the sight of Harry Strauss at the police line-up filled him with honest fury. The 25-year-old Brooklynite was there on a charge of beating to death a Negro gasoline station attendant for keeping him waiting overlong. Seventeen times before Harry Strauss had been arrested on such charges as homicide, carrying a revolver, larceny, assault, possessing narcotics and seventeen times before the New York police had been unable to tag him with a court conviction. To 200 assembled detectives Commissioner Valentine repeated his command:

“Look at him ! There is a paid assassin. You men are handicapped when you face men like this. When you meet such men draw quickly and shoot accurately. Look at him! He’s the best-dressed man in this room, yet he’s never worked a day in his life.

“When you meet men like Strauss, don’t be afraid to muss ’em up. Men like him should be mussed up. Blood should be smeared all over that velvet collar! Instead, he looks as if he had just got out of a barber’s chair. I want you to understand you will be supported, no matter what you do, just so you are justified. Make it disagreeable for these men. make them leave the city, make them afraid of arrest! Don’t treat them lightly!”

Behind Commissioner Valentine’s flow of angry words surged the pent-up wrath of 31 years of police experience. He joined New York City’s force at the bottom in 1903, suffered one Tammany slight and setback after another for his persistence in going after politically influential crooks. Big, grim, tough, rigidly honest, he got his chance when the LaGuardia reform administration took office.

However rough the methods they may believe in or practice, few police chiefs dared declare themselves in open agreement with the New York Commissioner. “I suppose,” said Frank J. Loesch, long time head of Chicago’s Crime Commission, “that he is going on the theory that violence is the only law such criminals know. The difficulty with the policy is, however … it is likely to brutalize the police.” In Kansas City, County Prosecutor W. W. Graves Jr. raised the stock objection that courtroom evidence of police brutality usually moves juries to acquit. “No policeman is justified in using brutality simply for brutality.” declared Police Commissioner Theodore J. Roche of San Francisco. “It strikes me,” declared Sheriff Eugene W. Biscailuz of Los Angeles, “as a little bit theatrical to stage a strong-arm act every time you make an arrest.” Only Denver’s Police Chief George Marland would go part way with Commissioner Valentine. “Dead right,” said he of the New Yorker’s dictum that police should shoot first.

From Harvard went the weighty disapproval of famed Law Professor Felix Frankfurter, foe of third-degree methods. Wrote he: “An outburst of lawlessness! . . . Evidently New York’s Police Com missioner deems himself above the Constitution.”

In New York, Mayor LaGuardia sought to temper his aide’s sharp words with some soft ones of interpretation. Said he: “It is just a matter of the men defending themselves when they are attacked—that’s what the Commissioner meant. They are working against a desperate condition. The department has lost six men in the last six months and four more are dying now.”

After two days in jail Harry Strauss appeared in Brooklyn Homicide Court sleek, sneering, nattily dressed as ever. For the eighteenth time he went free, for lack of evidence.