Nov. 28.
The killing of Constable T. R. Francis and the shooting of Constable Read by two desperate kidnappers on Saturday in broad daylight closed a week in which there were four spectacular encounters between the police and our local outlaws, each of which involved pistol play and one or more deaths. The police have made a remarkably fine showing of both courage and efficiency, but the triumph of the guardians of the law over its enemies has not been complete because, while eight armed Chinese desperadoes have been killed, which ought to have some moral effect, the police themselves have suffered the loss of a good man killed and one very dangerously experience or knowledg>; yet} even the average foreigner, if} caught in a revolver battle, would be much more likely to miss a living target at point] blank range than to hit it. The Chinese who can shoot an adversary through the head in a skirt mish must be, we all know, a trained and seasoned fighter—sither an ex-soldier, an ex-bandit or one of the new school of worker-criminals whom ths Communists have been training since! 1925. It is only too well known that all of these classes are well represented among us.
Shanghai is such a cosmopolitan community, tenements and: labyrinthine leyways, in which the people of all provinces huddle together ind yet know nothing of one another, provide such cover that the prevent detection of crime is more difficult than in any city in China. In an old fashioned Chinese city everyone in each district knows everyone else and the presence of a suspicious] looking stranger ix known to all) within an hour of his arrival.
The whole community is one] great detective force. At an alarm the city gates can be] closed and kept closed until crime is investigated and the: criminal caught. The wards of the city are cut off at night from! one another by heavy barriers—cha lan—and if a crime is reported in any one ward, these barriers are kept closed untie the entire district has been searched.'
It is for these several re that even in a city as big Peking, with its large floating] population, crimes of violence almost invariably result in the prompt capture and execution the criminals and are therefore rare, while such epidemics of robbery and murder as are visited upon us are unheard of, It was only during the period when we had the barbed wire around the Settlement and armed patrols enforcing the curfew, that we were reasonably free from burglaries and armed robberies; that is, only when wel were position to approxi mate the conditions that prevent} cum Since wounded.
We have no thought these measures did " actually, that this will have a depressing Prevent crimes of violence and or discouraging effect upon the police. They will probably a cept their losses as a challenge and display an even more reck-Jess courage in future encounters with the lawbreakers, but if the personnel of these bandit! groups is as well organized as we think it is and the directors, of their activities as determined we have reason to believe they are, the ratio of three casualties to eight cannot be considered a satisfactory one especially when we remember that the number of the police is limited while potential armed bandits in a community like this are legion. The one hopeful feature of several of this past week's encounters Kas been the prompt notice given the police by members of victimized households.
The Chinese, it would seem, are at last beginning to understand that, if the growing inclination towards crime among the riff-raft of Shanghai is to be discouraged, there must be prompt and intelligent ce-operation with the police.
This, however, is not all that is required, in our estimation.
As Saturday's incident showed, law abiding Chinese residents and police are now being warred upon by men who are not only' armed but who are sufficiently experienced and hardened in crime to use their weapons with deadly effect in the heat of a skirmish. This could not possibly be true of untrained amateurs, The average for-since they are always available] to us, we think that the community owes it not only to itself but to the police as well to make! the barbed wire and the curfew! a more or less permanent feature of our landscape. Crime is undoubtedly on the increase while criminals are not only more numerous and bolder, but more efficient. The moral effect of a few lucky killings cannot expected to be lasting nor ought we to expect from the police adequate protection under exist-have not professional criminals, our usual crop of banded or deserting soldiers, our tors and our thousands of idle workmen on strike, but we are also overrun by a horde of persons of the! lower orders from Hankow and other river ports, who have seen much of violence, have witnessed foreign outrages perpetrate ith impunity, who are at a loose end here, and have, moreover, had many opportunities during the ebb and flow armies to procure weapons and ammunition.
'A little while ago it wa estimated that the loot taken in this Settlement by armed criminals amounted to $500,000 a year, but,-according to the Municipal Gazette, the property and money] taken by criminals in October entailed a loss of $238,293, in S51 reported robberies and bur-gla Of this $91,738 was re-cee uy the police, leaving a Reproduced with permis: nett loss to the community of buy quite a lot of barbed wire, Armed robberies, burglaries and the like now average about five 'a day and Shanghai se=ms to be on the point of robbing Chicago] of its laurels. as the world's greatest. criminal centre. To some extent these present conditions may be traceable to the political situation and unrest generally, which have bred throughout South China a contempt for law and restraint; but more specifically they can be traced to the attitude in the past, of the Provisional Court, to the lack of barriers and adequate patrols such as we had during the period of the curfew, and to a a moment he realized what he was going to do and, sobbing bitterly, led the old dog back home. He adds the amazing information that some time afterwards the dog, of its own volition, ended its life in the very canal to which he had taken it some time before. Frankly, if the man were not one of the foremost leaders of religious thought in England we would not believe him but such is his testimony and we pass it on to our reader It would ill become us to criticize the action of a judge and jury who had before them the man against whom the crime of murder was charged. They had a wealth of information large degree, which we have yet] about to compute accurately, to the] which Is of the case lable to us and activities of Soviet agents whol we must recognize the solution have trained masses of the coolie|they accepted as being the class in crime and violence. The] best possible in the circum checks that should be employed] stances; but there are a few are obvious. We need a muniations that leave a doubt cipal court to guarantee that/in one's mind. In the first place, professional criminals xet di couraging sentences, we need barriers and patrols to check their movements, and we need to ket rid of the Soviet Consulate eventually and to extend it adequate "protection" meanwhile, to discourage the further due tion of the rabble in ruthlessness. there is an ineradicable difference between a dog and a human being. Both have life but it is not life that is sacred but personality. The cases are not, parallel, In the second place if the child were 50 near the point of death its conscious suffering must have' been already past. Why the unseemly hurry to terminate the few minutes that
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.