As was inevitable under our system of law procedure, this meant that the action of the court was apt to be determined by legal technicalities.  It was possible to dismiss a man from the service for quite insufficient reasons, and to provide against the reversal of the sentence, if the technicalities of procedure were observed.  But the worst criminals were apt to be adroit men, against whom it was impossible to get legal evidence which a court could properly consider in a criminal trial (and the mood of the court might be to treat the case as if it were a criminal trial), although it was easy to get evidence which would render it not merely justifiable but necessary for a man to remove them from his private employ—­and surely the public should be as well treated as a private employer.  Accordingly, most of the worst men put out were reinstated by the courts; and when the Mayor attempted to remove one of my colleagues who made it his business to try to nullify the work done by the rest of us, the Governor sided with the recalcitrant Commissioner and refused to permit his removal.

Nevertheless, an astounding quantity of work was done in reforming the force.  We had a good deal of power, anyhow; we exercised it to the full; and we accomplished some things by assuming the appearance of a power which we did not really possess.

The first fight I made was to keep politics absolutely out of the force; and not only politics, but every kind of improper favoritism.  Doubtless in making thousands of appointments and hundreds of promotions there were men who contrived to use influence of which I was ignorant.  But these cases must have been few and far between.  As far as was humanly possible, the appointments and promotions were made without regard to any question except the fitness of the man and the needs of the service.  As Civil Service Commissioner I had been instructing heads of departments and bureaus how to get men appointed without regard to politics, and assuring them that by following our methods they would obtain first-class results.  As Police Commissioner I was able practically to apply my own teachings.

The appointments to the police force were made as I have described in the last chapter.  We paid not the slightest attention to a man’s politics or creed, or where he was born, so long as he was an American citizen; and on an average we obtained far and away the best men that had ever come into the Police Department.  It was of course very difficult at first to convince both the politicians and the people that we really meant what we said, and that every one really would have a fair trial.  There had been in previous years the most widespread and gross corruption in connection with every activity in the Police Department, and there had been a regular tariff for appointments and promotions.  Many powerful politicians and many corrupt outsiders believed that in some way or other it would still be possible to secure appointments by corrupt and improper methods, and many good citizens felt the same conviction.  I endeavored to remove the impression from the minds of both sets of people by giving the widest publicity to what we were doing and how we were doing it, by making the whole process open and aboveboard, and by making it evident that we would probe to the bottom every charge of corruption.