Bill Brogan's Boys

In San Antonio's South Side, near where the middle-class residential district shades off into slums, a juvenile gang fight raged. The "Harlandale Gang" had run afoul of the "South Sans." A band of "Tex-Mexes" (boys of Mexican ancestry) poured in from the West Side to join the battle. The police alarm was serious. In war-booming San Antonio juvenile crimes had rocketed in a single year from 10% to 50% of the cases on the police docket, and there had been three juvenile murders. When the battle was over property had been damaged and no less than 75 boys had been cut and bruised by sticks, stones, knives.

But the fight, which took place one night last June, turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to San Antonio. For it inspired a 62-year-old criminal investigator in the sheriff's office to a brilliantly simple solution of the city's juvenile delinquency: he turned the juvenile gangsters into cops.

Investigator William F. ("Bill") Brogan, tall, lean ex-rancher and newspaperman, well remembers the look of the adolescents who were hauled in after the three-sided gang-fight. "They were mighty rough kids. Under the usual procedure, I would have . . . placed them in the county jail. . . but I herded the 14 boys into the chief's office and locked myself up in there with them, removed my pistol and coat. In the bunch I had two rough gang leaders. They had attained leadership with their fists and could have torn me to pieces. One was of Mexican descent. The other was Anglo-American. Both were manly kids but plenty bad--and they hated each other."

Bill Brogan told them that their gangs were fighting for Tojo and Hitler. "Boys," he said, "let's fight this war, not each other." He made the rival gang leaders shake hands. "We are going to get into one big mob," he said.

The "one big mob" became San Antonio's now-flourishing "Junior Deputies of America," a law-abiding & law-enforcing corps of more than 800 kids aged 14 to 18. Brogan developed his first leaders from the rival gang captains, reconciled at the first meeting to each other and to the law. The first chief is now at an Army Air Corps gunners' school, his successor in the Navy at San Diego. From their office in Bexar County court house, the Junior Deputies have:

P:Cleaned up twelve juvenile gangs, adding to Junior Deputy ranks many a kid who was breaking boxcar seals, stealing motorcycles, robbing service stations.

P:Cracked cases that baffled county law-enforcement officers: car-robberies, bicycle thefts--even a horse-rustling.

P:Drastically reduced the city's fights between "Tex-Mex" boys and others.

P:In six months, halved the number of San Antonio's juvenile crimes.

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