Mayor says police force is too small
Oct. 9, 1921: “Crime Wave Perils City; Police Force Inadequate” read the headline in The Times after Mayor George Cryer complained that the city’s police force was too small.
“We have today but 544 patrolmen to guard the city for seven days a week and 24 hours a day, and the area of Los Angeles is 365 square miles, as compared with New York’s 307 square miles, which city has 9,387 patrolmen,” the mayor said.
“Great areas of the residential sections of the city are entirely unprotected simply because we have not sufficient policemen to patrol these districts. In my own neighborhood I have not seen a policeman in the 12 years I have lived there but once, and he was evidently working on a special detail.”
Winter, The Times said, had brought its usual “flood of major and minor criminals flocking to Southern California.”
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