TO LOP OFF MANY
TWENTY-FIVE POLICE HEADS TO
FALL ON FOLK'S ORDER.
NEW COMMISSIONER NAMED
ELLIOT JONES APPOINTED
AFTER VISIT TO GOVERNOR.
Declares He Is Not Pledged to Oust
Hayes -- Rozzelle Exposes Folk
Pretensions -- Governor Avers
He Will Keep the Police
Free From Politics.
It isn't very reassuring news that comes from Jefferson City.
Police Commissioner F. F. Rozzelle has been removed from office because of his refusal to aid Folk in turning the police force into a Shannon-Folk machine.
Police Chief Hayes is to be ousted for a more pliable, and probably less efficient, person.
And now the threat comes from the state house that at least twenty-five other members of the force, including a number of high officers who have given years of their service to the department, are to be summarily dismissed.
The police department is to be torn wide open.
The work of constructing of the Shannon-Folk machine will begin at the top and move downward.
Elliot H. Jones, a former college classmate of Folk, has been appointed to succeed Commissioner Rozzelle. Before Folk appointed him he was called to Jefferson City for a midnight conference with the governor that was so satisfactory his appointment was announced yesterday morning.
The friends of Governor Folk are amazed over his self-exposure and in all Kansas City yesterday not a reputable citizen -- without an ax to grind -- volunteered to defend him for his course in destroying the present efficient police force.
Governor Folk's unwarranted slander on the police department was ably answered by Mayor H. M. Beardsley and ex-Commissioner Rozzelle.
No well informed person, unprejudiced, pretends to believe that Folk wrote the statement signed by him or that the statement even is true.
Folk's before-election pledges of "home rule" for Kansas City have proved idle chatter. His promises to keep the police out of politics were made for political effect. No governor of Missouri in recent years has gone deeper into the mire of police politics than Folk.
