The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-12-07
Continued from Page one)

1 of the city were saying that we nev
 CT had his equal as a police coInmls- 1 sioner- Then the degenerate press began to attack him. syInpatf1i2.- ed with him all the more because knew that they attacked him only to attack me. And since that a great tmany of them have been talking at random against Commissioner Waldo, tWaldo that he was before the Rosen- thai murder ; It is true that Becker l was under his immediate orders in the suppression of gambling and oth-
 CT vices, and that he was grossly de- IceiVed by Becker. But that might l have happened to any of us. Many other men have been grossly deceived 1 by employees or subor dinates In the l commercial and banking world it is happening every week. And the uo- 1 ton which some people have of what 1 a police commissioner should be is contemp ptib1e.
 ] "Only last night a gentleman said 1 to me: You must remember, MT. 1 Mayor, that it takes a crook to catch a crook, and what you want as police commissioner is that kind of a man. You want man like the late Byrnes. who was head of the detective force. I acknowledged that he was a graft 1 CT, and that he did not scruple to ] make up perjured cases to convict in- dividuals. But he was efficient. He got the result I listened to him on ] ly with disgust. The result that l Byrnes got was that he went out millionaire and corrupted the whole force other heads of the police force had been doing for years.
 sI came in as Mayor determined to stop all this. And SO I said to this fellow: Sir, if need to put thief or a grafter at the head of the force in order to catch the thieves and criminals of New York. then I shall not catch the thieves and criminals such a. man at the head of the police force. You and others who are talk ing like you, ought to be asha med of
 yourselves.' I have a disgust against all such people. Some clergymen
 even come and talk the same way to me.
 My notion is that I want an ab- solutely honest man and a gentleman at the head of the police force and
 am, going to stick to that notion. Of course, he must be intelligent. Mr.
 Waldo fulfils these conditions. When you know you have an honest man.
 you feel much relieved He may
 make mistakes, but he is honest, and will not corrupt the force. Our
 force is showing better all the time.
 For a generation the heads and lead
 CTS of the force have gone out of of flee mf1nonaires. I can count up several of them now who are still alive and living the lives of million aires with their country houses and their yachts. That is all at end
 There are grafters still left from the old regime. They are being re- tired one after another and every chance we get we dismiss one. But the process of purified ton and educa-4 ton takes some time. We have made much progress in the last three years. And hope by the end of my term to be able to say that all graft has been cut off from the police force.
 tYou ask me what the sources of graft are. Why, the great sources of graft are in the enforcement of the excise. law, the law against gamb- ling. and the law against prostitu- ton. If you turn the police loose on these three things, they will take graft right and left. When came in here as mayor, the thirteen thous and hotels and saloons of this city were paying, the least of them, $25 month for graft, to the police and politicians. Do you perceive that that foots up to $3,900,000 year? am saying this to you; to illustrate how much can be collected in this great city from these. three sources of graft. Each of the other three sour 1 ces can be made to yield nearly as much as the liquor traffic. Tn years past all of these three sources were 1
 made to pay the maximum, and as have said to you, the chief officers in the police department retired one after another rnillionaires.
 fThe excise graft l have cut off absoIutuely. Everyone knows that. IF there can be any graft at all there now, it is some petty theft graftrzby some petty scamp. of a. policeman here or there. There is no general graft paid by the liquor organiza tions l any more, nor by the separate estab- i lishments, nor by the brewers for the l
 liquor trade. I have the thanks Of the brewers and of the liquor organ l izations for having done that thing. l In fact, they asked me to do it. They 1 came to me shortly after I became mayor and opened their hands to me l and showed the way they were be- l ing grafted upon, and l stopped it. 1 Dealing with the other two things we found more difficult. But we adopt i ed j plan. We took away from the l police force as a whole the dealing l prostitution. To leave each captain l and each inspector free in that mat i ter, made grafting possible all along 1 the line. We therefore adopted a i different method. .
 "A police force has two things to i do. First, and most important. is l it's duty to preserve outward order l and decency throughout the city. That i is it's first dIty. and to deal with i the ordinary run of crime. The sec I ond duty is to deal with these three things that I have mentioned. That 1 has to be done largely through se- 1 cret work. We therefore esta b1ish- i ed for that work a squad of 150 men, 1 Three lieuten ants were put over this squad and they and the squad were put under the police commissioner himself. Nobody else could give them an order The inspectors | and captains are required to re-
 port the houses Of il1-fan1e and gam