The records of 1893 mention the arrest and conviction of a leading member of the famous _Sonari Toli_ or Golden Gang of swindlers, which for some time made a lucrative livelihood by fleecing the more credulous section of the public. But in the case of ordinary theft and robbery the police were less successful in recovering stolen property than in previous years, the percentage of recovery for the five years ending in 1894 being only 48 and declining to 35 in 1898. Much of this crime was committed by professional bad characters and members of criminal tribes belonging to the Deccan and other parts of the Bombay Presidency. The prevalence of robbery and theft was viewed with such dissatisfaction by the Bombay Government that in 1894 they urged the Commissioner to make use of the provisions of chapter VIII of the Criminal Procedure Code, which had been applied with much success in up-country districts. Unfortunately the Bombay magistracy required as a rule far more direct evidence of bad livelihood than was procurable by the urban police, and any regular use of that chapter of the Code was therefore declared by the Commissioner to be impracticable.
The court-work of the police under the local Act was indirectly affected by the closing of the opium-dens of the City in 1893. This was one result of the appointment in that year of a Parliamentary Commission to inquire into the extent of opium consumption in India, its effects on the physique of the people, and the suggestion that the sale of the drug should be prohibited except for medicinal purposes. In consequence of the anti-opium agitation in England, the consumption of opium was from that date permitted only on a small scale in one or two “clubs” in the City, frequented by the lower classes. The opponents of the practice did not foresee that opium-smoking cannot be entirely abolished by laws and regulations, and that the stoppage of supplies of the drug merely results in the public seeking other more disastrous forms of self-indulgence. In Bombay the closing of the opium-shops led directly to a great increase of drunkenness,[105] and a few years later to the far more pernicious and degrading habit of cocaine-eating. The experience of most Bombay police-officers is that the smoking of opium does not _per se_ incite men to commit crime, and when practised in moderation it does not prevent a man from performing his daily work. Cocaine on the other hand destroys its victims body and soul, and the confirmed cocaine-eater usually develops into a criminal, even if he was not one previously.