tted, is best
evidenced by referring to the records of that time, when jails and
prisons were crowded and courts and judges were kept busy trying
offenders against the laws, while the entire police and detective force
was unable and inadequate to successfully reduce the occurrence of the
one or diminish the number of the other. It was at that time
appropriately styled the "Thieves' Paradise," for even after some daring
and expert felon had been captured by the authorities and securely
lodged in jail, the meshes of the law, as it then existed, were so
large, and the manner of administering justice (?) so loose, that the
higher class of criminal, possessed of political influence, or, better
still, of money, invariably escaped the punishment his crime deserved.
The very police themselves were, in many cases, in league with the
thieves and shared in the "swag" of the successful burglar, expert
counterfeiter, adroit pickpocket, villainous sneak and panel thief, or
daring and accomplished forger; hence crime, from being in a measure
"protected," increased, criminals multiplied and prisons were made
necessarily larger.

But this was years ago, and under a far different police system than
that now in vogue, the merits and efficacy of which it will be both a
duty and a pleasure hereafter to fully mention. The collusion between
the police and the criminals, at the times of which we speak, became a
very serious matter, in which the public early began to exhibit its
temper. So late as the year 1850 it was an anxious question whether the
authorities or the lawless classes should secure the upper hand and
possess the city, and this condition of affairs, this triangular strife
of supposed law and order on one side, protection to law-breakers on the
other, and the protests of an indignant, outraged and long-suffering
people on the third, prevailed until the year that Bill Poole was
murdered by Lew Baker on Broadway, which notable event marked an epoch
in the city's history, and to some extent improved the then existing
state of affairs, as it occasioned the dispersal of a notorious gang of
swell roughs, whose power was felt in local politics, and directed the
attention of every lover of peace and justice to the enactment of better
laws and a sterner method of executing them.

About the year 1855, two classes of "toughs," or, as they were dubbed in
those days, "rowdies," appear to have had and maintained some control of
the city, over