While the Joplin city council had by 1904 agreed to the necessity of a police matron due to popular demand, a year later, no matron had yet been appointed.\u00a0 As a response, the Joplin Globe ran an article offering proof to the need of the city to hire a matron.\u00a0 The headline read, “PROOF THAT JOPLIN NEEDS A POLICE MATRON,” and the paper argued the following:<\/p>\n
“The police records show the arrest of eighty women during the month of May.\u00a0 Eighty women are supposed to have been locked up in the Joplin city jail in the last month without the care of counsel of a police matron.\u00a0 There was none but the regular police force to listen to the appeals of, or to advise these erring women charges of the city.\u00a0 True, most of them were doubtless hardened and seemingly deserving of little better than they got, but who can say?<\/p>\n
Who can say to what depths each separate individual has fallen to what extent any one was irreclaimable?\u00a0 The charges as a result were in the cat-purse of blanket charges, if the term may be so used.\u00a0 Twenty-nine of these eighty women were charged with prostitution, twenty-one with lewd conduct, thirteen with street walking, thirteen with disturbing the peace, and one each with drunkenness, petty larceny, interfering with an officer, and being suspected of robbery.\u00a0 Hard charges, those, yet many cried when locked up.\u00a0 Some were not really bad.\u00a0 Surely one or two, at least, might be prevailed upon to repent and change her ways.\u00a0 Certainly enough soul remained to cry out through the tears of those eighty bad women to justify the attention of a good and worthy police matron.<\/p>\n
The records prove that one, anyhow, might have been saved from death, if not also from deeper depths of sin, for one of these eighty was Lucy Scott, the young, fair, but wayward girl who took her own life as she confessed, because nobody would come and talk to her about going to a reform school.\u00a0 A police matron could have saved one life last month.\u00a0 Who knows, how many wrecks could have been averted?”<\/p>\n