The law at present is much better than in our day, so far as governing the force is concerned.  There is now a single Commissioner, and the Mayor has complete power over him.  The Mayor, through his Commissioner, now has power to keep the police force on a good level of conduct if with resolution and common sense he insists on absolute honesty within the force and at the same time heartily supports it against the criminal classes.  To weaken the force in its dealings with gangs and toughs and criminals generally is as damaging as to permit dishonesty, and, moreover, works towards dishonesty.  But while under the present law very much improvement can be worked, there is need of change of the law which will make the Police Commissioner a permanent, non-partisan official, holding office so long as he proves thoroughly fit for the job, completely independent of the politicians and privileged interests, and with complete power over the force.  This means that there must be the right law, and the right public opinion back of the law.

The many-sided ethnic character of the force now and then gives rise to, or affords opportunity for, queer happenings.  Occasionally it enables one to meet emergencies in the best possible fashion.  While I was Police Commissioner an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews.  Many of the New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection.  This, I told them, was impossible; and if possible would have been undesirable because it would have made him a martyr.  The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous.  Accordingly I detailed for his protection a Jew sergeant and a score or two of Jew policemen.  He made his harangue against the Jews under the active protection of some forty policemen, every one of them a Jew!  It was the most effective possible answer; and incidentally it was an object-lesson to our people, whose greatest need it is to learn that there must be no division by class hatred, whether this hatred be that of creed against creed, nationality against nationality, section against section, or men of one social or industrial condition against men of another social and industrial condition.  We must ever judge each individual on his own conduct and merits, and not on his membership in any class, whether that class be based on theological, social, or industrial considerations.

Among my political opponents when I was Police Commissioner was the head of a very influential local Democratic organization.  He was a State Senator usually known as Big Tim Sullivan.  Big Tim represented the morals of another era; that is, his principles and actions were very much those of a Norman noble in the years immediately succeeding the Battle of Hastings. (This will seem flattery only to those who are not acquainted with the real histories and antecedents of the Norman nobles of the epoch in question.) His application of these eleventh-century theories to our nineteenth-century municipal democratic conditions brought him into sharp contact with me, and with one of my right-hand men in the Department, Inspector John McCullough.  Under the old dispensation this would have meant that his friends and kinsfolk were under the ban.