excerpt
“Chief,” Spear said, “you heard Mr. Brown say that the Great
Northern wants to cooperate with your department in dealing with
hobos. Has that been your experience?”
“In the few cases when it was necessary, yes, sir, but it hasn’t
come up very often.”
“What were whose cases?”
“Most of the times we’ve been asked by the railroad to make
arrests, it was when the Great Northern detectives caught people
stealing cargo, sometimes merchandise, but mostly grain.”
“Grain, chief? Hobos were stealing grain?
“Not hobos. Professional thieves drill holes in the floors of boxcars
loaded with wheat and fill sacks with it. They’ve been known
to haul away pickup loads of wheat. It happens every now and then.
The railroad detectives turn them over to us.”
“And,” Spear asked, “does the railroad also turn vagrants over to
you?”
“In the past year, we have arrested six men you’d call hobos, two
of them for trespassing on railroad property and four for being
drunk in public. We found them sleeping it off on sidewalks or in
the park.”
“Were they interfering with citizens?”
“Mr. Spear, they were passed out. Interference was the last thing
on their minds, if anything was.”
Spear laughed with the audience.
“Chief, you’ve heard previous testimony that hobos are a danger
to the community, that women and children are not safe from
them. Tell us about complaints to the police about hobos.”
“I had a check run on that this morning. Last April, we got a call
from a woman over on Ferry Street who said a man came to her
back door asking to do odd jobs. She ran him off. She said he was
wearing smelly old clothes and wanted the police to arrest him.”
A ripple of laughter ran through the crowd.
“The desk didn’t think that was against the law, but sent a
patrol car to the neighborhood to investigate.
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