Investigate and report on: 

Fire losses in your community in a year.

Causes of fires in your community last year.  Number that were preventable.

Precautions against fire in your home and school.

Fire preventive regulations in your community.

Cost of fire prevention in your community.

Improved means of fire prevention in country districts.

How fire insurance works.

Cooperative fire insurance companies in your state.

Storm insurance in your locality.

POLICE PROTECTION

All states have laws to protect their citizens against the “ill-mannered” who do not respect property rights—­thieves, burglars, highwaymen, vandals, sharpers, and others.  The enforcement of these laws is left largely in the hands of local community officers.  Cities have police departments, with large numbers of patrolmen and detectives whose business it is not only to arrest violators of the law after the violation has taken place, but also by their vigilance to prevent the violation from occurring.

RURAL POLICE PROTECTION

The state laws against the violation of property rights apply to rural communities as well as to cities, and rural communities have officers for their enforcement—­the constable in townships, the sheriff and his deputies in counties.  Where the population is small and widely scattered, as in a rural township or county, about all the officers can do is to arrest law violators after the commission of the unlawful act, if they can be found.  The officers are too few to watch isolated and remote property, and in case of serious disturbance, such as a riot, they are too few to handle the situation effectively.  Rural communities and many small industrial or mining communities do not always have the protection they need against lawlessness.  In such cases the tendency is sometimes for the people to “take the law in their own hands.”  In times of labor trouble mining companies and other industrial corporations have sometimes organized their own police.  Such practice is dangerous, for the enforcement of law should be in the hands of the state, and not in the hands of an interested party.  In early days on the frontier, in mining and lumber camps, “vigilance committees” were common; and even now, in various localities, we hear too frequently of “lynching parties,” which are as lawless as the original offenders against the law, and tend to create a disrespect for law.

And yet disrespect for law may also result from failure on the part of the community to enforce the law through regular agencies, from failure of officers to apprehend offenders promptly, or of courts to mete out justice promptly and impartially.