Mounted Police... Handymen
Of Canada’s Law Enforcement

Policeman, posing as a buyer

of counterfeit money, helps
crack an international bogus-currency
syndicate.

An R.C.M.P. cutter plows through
drift ice to rescue a distressed ship
on the Atlantic. Mountie dogs hunt
down lawbreakers and locate missing
youngsters.

These are a few of the many-faceted
activities of the R.C.M.P., Canada’s
national police force, as told in its
report for the year ended March 31,
1951. The Mounties, operating from
coast to coast and far up into the
Arctic, again were the handymen of
Canada’s law-enforcement bodies.

Many Duties

The cold prose of the report tells
of trailing killers, dope-peddlers, rust-
lers; patrolling the frozen north;
matching wits with smugglers of goods
and money; educating the public in
eood citizenship: helping out in dis-
asters.

With even more than customary
terseness, the report gives no more
than the merest peek into the hush-
hush work of the R.C.M.P.’s “special
branch”—in what it describes as “in-
vestigating subversive, and countering
foreign intelligence, activities.”

But it goes into more detail in such
cases as its foray into the underworld
to trap a counterfeit ring operating
in Toronto and Buffalo, N.Y. The
forgers had run off $500,000 worth of
Canadian $10 bills in addition to
United States currency.

Nab Counterfeiters

“A well-organized criminal syndi-
cate in Toronto controlled the distri-
bution of the Canadian counterfeits
to all points in this country,” the re-
port says. “Prospective ‘pushers’ made
contact with the Toronto underworld
and secured whatever amount of

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counterfeit currency they were able to
pay for.”

Passing himself off as an out-of-
town criminal, a Mountie eventually
managed to buy $25,000 worth of the
bills from the Toronto group. Then
the force closed in, arresting three
men. Meanwhile, U.S. authorities in
co-operation with the R.C.M.P. had
roped in members of the Buffalo or-
ganization.

At the time of writing, the report
said, $325,000 of the bogus bills had
been seized before they could be
passed.

At the opposite end of the crime
scale, in the snow-clad Arctic, the
R.C.M.P. noted a slight decrease in
lawbreaking through the vast area
around the top of the hemisphere pa-
trolled by 124 men.

They patrolled 501,417 miles in the
north, of which 48,475 was by dogsled
and more than 10,000 on foot. The
Mounties had 243 dogs “on strength.”

Police Dogs

Dogs came into play in the rela-
tively well-populated areas, too. The
report tells of their locating lost chil-
dren in Nova Scotia’s Cumberland
County and in the Peace River district
of Alberta. And it was police service
dog Pal from Regina that finally
pounced on Archie Dlugopolsky to
end a four-day hunt for a bank robber
in the countryside near Wolseley,
Sask.

At sea, R.C.M.P. ships carried out
missions of mercy. The MacBrien
sped out from Halifax to pick up the
disabled freighter Federal Trader
April 16, 1950. In another typical
operation, the French carried a
woman down the rugged Newfound-
land coast to hospital at Burin for an
emergency operation.

Talks to Young

The report noted that the R.C-
M.P.’s “Youth and the Police” pro-
gram—aimed at instilling respect for
law and order into the growing gen-
eration—has been embodied in the
everyday duties of the force since its
start five years ago. Mounties have

given 27,605 talks to more than 2,500,-
000 children in all parts of Can-

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