JtmJJy Weekly
JL.
JB ill August 28, 1960
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A salesman caught speeding on Chicago's Lake
Shore Drive recently wasn't particularly con
cerned. He folded a $5 bill confidently inside his
driver's license and passed it unhesitatingly to
the arresting officer.
The policeman looked at the money and asked
belligerently: "What's this?"
Puzzled, the salesman answered: "For you. Isn't
that the way it works?"
A few hours later, the salesman was released
after posting bond on a charge of attempted bribery
of a police officer. He was indignant and confused.
He'd been fixing speeding tickets in Chicago this
way for years, he said, and he didn't understand
the sudden show of morality.
This particular salesman hadn't been in Chicago
for six months, nor had he been reading Chicago
newspapers. Otherwise he would have known
better. The lid is on in Chicago; how long it stays
on depends to a very large extent on Chicago's
new superintendent of police a gaunt, incisive
teacher and criminologist named Orlando Wilson,
who was brought in to clean up the police force
after even hardened Chicagoans were forced to
swallow a dose of corruption they couldn't digest.
The event that triggered the current police re
form in Chicago was the arrest of a 23-year-old
burglar named Richard Morrison. Facing a stiff
sentence for a lucrative series of thefts, Morrison
decided to implicate his confederates. They turned
out to be 13 Chicago police officers.
For more than a year, the cops had placed orders
with Morrison for merchandise, then stood guard
outside while he burgled stores the policemen
were supposed to be protecting. He got them tele
vision sets, antifreeze, golf clubs, and shoes
among other things. Much of the loot was re-
By JOSEPH N. BELL
covered from the homes of some of the accused
policemen, where it had been hidden.
Morrison's disclosures encouraged other Chica
goans who had been victimized by cops to come
forward. The inventory of venality grew daily;
cops were accused of planning a kidnap-robbery,
shaking down numerous criminal suspects, looting
warehouses, accepting bribes for perjured testi
mony, fixing tickets, and a broad and imaginative
range of other criminal activities.
The list is still growing.
Reform Movement Begins
Chicago citizens moribund through decades of
growing police corruption demanded action, and
kept the pressure on Mayor Richard Daley to
appoint a new police superintendent. Last spring,
Orlando Wilson who had served as chairman of
the committee selected by Daley to find a new
superintendent severed his ties with the Uni
versity of California, where he was dean of the
school of criminology, and took on the job himself.
Committee members insisted he was the best
qualified man available for the job, and Chicago
citizens are willing to accept this verdict.
What Orlando Wilson found in the first weeks
of his new job, and how he plans to bring order
back into Chicago's chaotic police situation, are
matters of interest to every community through
out the nation.
Why is this true?
"The factors responsible for the moral breakdown
that spread through parts of the Chicago Police
Department are not peculiar to Chicago," says
Superintendent Wilson. "They exist in varying
degrees in many communities."
What kind of moral climate permitted police
corruption to flourish in Chicago and could well
nurture the same disease in your town? Three
rather broad areas of moral blight emerge from
a hindsight examination of the Chicago scandals:
1. The Built-in System.
Here's a rookie policeman, young, eager, reason
ably idealistic, proud of the badge he's wearing.
All his life he's dreamed about being a police
officer. He sees himself on the threshold of an
admirable career in public service, with unlimited
opportunity for advancement if he does his job
well which he intends to do. Then he bumps
headlong into "the system."
He's assigned to an outlying district and paired
with an old-time cop who talks out of the side of
his mouth and wears dirty shirts.
Their conversations turn more and more fre
quently to the plight of the policemen the low
pay in relation to the danger and long years of
unrecognized public service.
One night they curb a drunken driver in a
Cadillac. The old-timer gets in the car with the
drunk and drives him home; the rookie follows in
the squad car.
He sees money exchange hands as the older
cop helps the drunk into his house. When the
old-timer comes out, he slips a $10 bill into the
rookie's hand and says: "This is your cut."
The rookie refuses the money, and the old
timer looks at him pityingly. "Don't fight it," he
says. "It won't do you any good. It's the system.
Everybody does it. It's the only way we've got
of building our pay up to what it should be."
If the rookie does fight it, word gets around and
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Familv Weekly, August IS, I960