False-positive arrests (true or exaggerated), Chicago, 1905

"Thousands of innocent men are imprisoned every month by the Chicago police without evidence or excuse except 'suspicion.'"

I am woefully ignorant of the history, true, exaggerated, sensationalized, of false-positive arrests, basically of any time period prior to 9/11's raising my heartbeat a little. (And largely ignorant of the past ten years too.) I'm ignorant of the Cold War, I'm ignorant of McCarthy, I'm ignorant of the Palmer Raids .. I would like to be able to use the past as a key to what might happen over the next few decades. But there is way too much, and for any particular incident I find or read about (like this newspaper page from 1905) I don't have a control group, or any sense of proportion, or any other way of knowing if it's an aberration or a trend. Anyway, this page is published on the Barnacle Press website.

It's because of the recent death of the great comics historian Bill Blackbeard that I was on their site looking at scanned newspaper strips and found the 1905 article.