Under the influence of the impression above referred to a practice has sprung up in the City, and is gradually increasing, of leaving shops and warehouses, stored with goods of great value, entirely untenanted at night, and throughout the whole of Sunday. Numerous buildings are let out in separate rooms to separate tenants, who require them only for purposes of business during the day; the street-door, during business hours, is left open, in order to give ready access to every part of the house; and thus, in the case of houses which are habitually deserted at night, not only have thieves great facilities for entering them, and secreting themselves there by day, but they may do this with the knowledge that they will, almost certainly, be left for many hours at night in the undisturbed possession of the abandoned premises.
These risks are, moreover, greatly aggravated by want of due care in thoroughly searching the house before it is finally closed for the night, by the defective condition, in many instances, of the external fastenings, and by neglect in making even these fastenings secure.
It has, indeed, been supposed by some persons that if, during their absence, they leave lights burning in their shops, and openings in the shutters through which the interior of the shop can be partially inspected, the property within may be safely left to the exclusive guardianship of the police. This practice has never been approved by the head of the force, and is itself open to serious objection, as tending to encourage reliance on a contrivance which is not only untrustworthy, but which may be used by dexterous thieves to further their own plans.
Nor must it be imagined that a policeman who is in charge of a beat can, without manifest neglect of his duty to the householders generally, devote to the shops where the practice in question is followed, the special supervision which seems to be expected from him. If a constable on duty were bound, each time he passed, to make a careful inspection of the interior of shops through the several apertures which individual shopkeepers may please to make in their shutters, he would obviously be unable to complete the circuit of the buildings under his charge within the time appointed for that purpose, and the majority of houses on the beat, as well as passengers in the streets, would be left without that protection which the police should properly afford.