Crime Boom

Few weeks ago London's famed Bow Street Police Court had its first day in living memory without a single charge booked. It may have been due to the accident that all the crooks were temporarily quarantined in bomb shelters. But there was unquestionably some connection between London's high wartime morale and London's unprecedented crimelessness.

Lately reports on morale have been less enthusiastic. In grim, off-the-record speeches, British correspondents have warned Americans that it's all very well to cheer undoubted British heroism, but that the British can't be expected to take it forever.

Last week, tagging along like a sinister shadow, came corresponding reports that crime as well as bomb fire was booming in London. The crimes were integrally tied up with the war.* Looting, which involved 140 people in September, rose in October to 250 cases, was still climbing, outnumbering other crimes five-to-one.

The national record was held by a boy laborer in an East Coast town who admitted 63 separate thefts. Police doubled anti-looting squads sent nightly to prowl in freshly bombed districts; magistrates doubled penalties, sometimes gave the twelvemonth maximum. More looters were held over for the Old Bailey, where sentences could be as high as death or imprisonment for life.

Typical cases last week: Ralph Ellmore of Essex got six months for stealing a washing wringer from a bombed house; two soldiers, William Hart, 19, and James MacDonald, 20, got a total haul of a cigaret lighter, cigaret case and cigarets, drew one day's sentence but were detained a fortnight. The loot was often trifling, but the principle was bad. Warned the News Chronicle: "If the looting went unchecked it would swiftly pave the way for social breakdown and anarchy . . ."; the Sunday Dispatch in an editorial titled "Forward the Gallows" snapped: "Someone should be hanged--quickly." Military and civil defense services were often involved. Most shocking case was that of four members of the heroic time-bomb disposal squad that saved St. Paul's (TIME, Nov. 4). Last week's bag of looted and sneak-stolen cigarets was estimated at 150,000. Most were wholesale-warehouse jobs, but even street-vending machines were not safe.

Nor was the war's effect limited to looting. London's crime-of-the-week was a strange mercy murder: A. R. P. Worker James Miller, 45, garroted his mother, Mrs. Ann Elizabeth Miller, 74, to spare her further misery in sleeping crouched on tube steps. He explained: "I did it to save her being dragged around to the shelters. She was suffering." While food-profiteering also rose, a new racket appeared, as nifty as it was heartless. Early in the day, racketeers' stooges plant bundles of rags to simulate blanket rolls along 20 or more sleeping spaces in tube stations, patrol them till the evening rush. Likely prospects are then approached with a whispered "I was keeping this place for a pal of mine, lydy, but you can 'ave it--for a bob." Prices range from sixpence in crowded stations to two-and-six in deeper, cleaner stations. Average net take: two pounds a night.

London's anti-looting squad numbers 300; there are 21,000 police. In addition, the British Government has devised 2,854 new Defense Regulations, to regulate, regiment and protect from each other its 47-odd million subjects. In the minds of Americans who remember the Prohibition experiment, it remained to be seen whether any number of formal regulations would do the trick if usually law-abiding Britons began to disrespect rules.

*During the last war only crime boom was in bigamy. From 1914 to 1918 serious offenses fell 55%. Best guess as to cause, made in 1915, was that 1,100 habitual criminals were in the armed forces.

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