Good Looks and Bobbed Hair Unlucky Charms in Brooklyn
Police Stock of Useless Information Increased by Unsolicited Census of Clipped Ones, While Girl Bandit Makes Embattled “Cops” Look Foolish
“There’s a good-looking, bob-haired girl living in our apartment house she’s got a fur coat, and I saw her come in late last night. I think she’s the bandit.”
Brooklyn Police Headquarters is struggling through a pile of correspondence as deep as screen star’s mash notes, each letter of which contains something similar to the quotation above. There isn’t a clipped girl in the borough with the slightest claim to pulchritude who is safe from neighborly surveillance if she stays out after 9 o’clock at night. Detectives are spending their days and nights checking up the bob-haired census that is being furnished by those communications.
But they can’t spot the girl.
Indignation in headquarters is immeasurable. The policemen and detectives have stooped to begging their spies and “squeals” for help. That is something no policeman enjoys, but it becomes especially distasteful when the humiliation of official dignity is wasted. Such is the case with the attractive bit of femininity who has operated for three months without even a close scrape, who has kept her promise to return and rob a store a second time, who has written unseemly missives attacking in the most frank fashion the quality of Brooklyn’s police force.
Every available spy has been grilled, pleaded with and wept over. Not one of them knows who the bob-haired bandit can be. The police are convinced that she is without criminal record; that she does not associate with criminals other than the six-footer who chaperones her; that she is of gentle behavior and respectable family except when the spirit of banditry gets into her blood at night.
The order to shoot on sight still holds good. The police reserves who ordinarily wait around the station house each night from 8 to 12 now get into civilian clothes and distribute themselves in stores, waiting to shoot. In some drug stores they hide behind the prescription counter though which a hole has been bored for observation and gunfire. Detectives from the Manhattan school have been added to the force.
Always though, the police are wary. She is a “two-gun gal,” and not to be trifled with.
[New York Tribune, March 8, 1924]
“There’s a good-looking, bob-haired girl living in our apartment house she’s got a fur coat, and I saw her come in late last night. I think she’s the bandit.”
Brooklyn Police Headquarters is struggling through a pile of correspondence as deep as screen star’s mash notes, each letter of which contains something similar to the quotation above. There isn’t a clipped girl in the borough with the slightest claim to pulchritude who is safe from neighborly surveillance if she stays out after 9 o’clock at night. Detectives are spending their days and nights checking up the bob-haired census that is being furnished by those communications.
But they can’t spot the girl.
Indignation in headquarters is immeasurable. The policemen and detectives have stooped to begging their spies and “squeals” for help. That is something no policeman enjoys, but it becomes especially distasteful when the humiliation of official dignity is wasted. Such is the case with the attractive bit of femininity who has operated for three months without even a close scrape, who has kept her promise to return and rob a store a second time, who has written unseemly missives attacking in the most frank fashion the quality of Brooklyn’s police force.
Every available spy has been grilled, pleaded with and wept over. Not one of them knows who the bob-haired bandit can be. The police are convinced that she is without criminal record; that she does not associate with criminals other than the six-footer who chaperones her; that she is of gentle behavior and respectable family except when the spirit of banditry gets into her blood at night.
The order to shoot on sight still holds good. The police reserves who ordinarily wait around the station house each night from 8 to 12 now get into civilian clothes and distribute themselves in stores, waiting to shoot. In some drug stores they hide behind the prescription counter though which a hole has been bored for observation and gunfire. Detectives from the Manhattan school have been added to the force.
Always though, the police are wary. She is a “two-gun gal,” and not to be trifled with.
[New York Tribune, March 8, 1924]
posted by A. Mattson at 2:13 PM
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